Hill Street Blues

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Hill Street Blues

First airing on January 15, 1981 and ending its broadcast television run on May 12, 1987, Hill Street Blues broke new ground to become one of the most critically acclaimed television dramas ever, and won 26 Emmy Awards for NBC. Police dramas had been a staple, if not a cliché, since the beginning of prime time television broadcasting, with shows such as California Highway Patrol and Dragnet setting the standard from the 1950s onwards. These series featured straight-laced, tight-lipped cops upholding the law in a black-and-white world where every crime was solved within 30 minutes. The focus changed radically when NBC President Fred Silverman, his network mired in third place, gave Steven Bochco free rein to create and produce a show that would reinvent television police drama. As Robert J. Thompson, Director of the Center for the study of Popular Television at Syracuse University summarized it, "What Bochco did in 1981 was change the television cop show by making it more realistic."

Steven Bochco had chosen television over work in film, and both he and the medium benefited. After graduating from Carnegie Tech, Bochco had a film script produced at Universal Studios in 1971. By the time Silent Running (a knockoff of 2001: A Space Odyssey, starring Bruce Dern) was released, he had decided to leave film for television. Bochco told British ITV's distinguished South Bank Show presenter Melvyn Bragg, "In a week and a half I wrote a script…. It was a shocking experience for me. It was so devalued by the actors involved, and … it made me determine somehow to get more control over the things I wrote." Seeking that control in television, Bochco wrote several scripts for NBC's Sunday Mystery Movie, Columbo (also produced at Universal Studios), between 1971 and 1973 and, with these writing credits to back him up, he created or produced several television pilots and series for NBC, including The Invisible Man (1975), Delvecchio (1976), and Paris (1979). With his television apprenticeship behind him and NBC's Nielsen ratings in the doldrums in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bochco got his opportunity. The result was Hill Street Blues.

Much of the show's style derived from police documentary films, particularly Susan and Alan Raymond's Police Tapes (1977) and Frederick Wiseman's Law and Order (1969). The cinema verite style adopted for Hill Street Blues had previously been seen on television only in the news, and it lent a startling immediacy and realism to prime time drama. Hill Street employed shaky, hand-held cameras and grainy film stock that appeared to be the result of pre-exposing, or "flashing," the stock. The result was a low-contrast, shadowy, and claustrophobic world, well suited to the characters and story lines. Interior shots were particularly tight, busy with supporting cast members and extras going about police business in the background while close shots of the main characters filled the foreground. This heightened realism had a profound influence on the genre, and altered the style of successive series, which were quick to apply the new gritty, hard-edged approach of Hill Street.

In addition to its landmark style, Hill Street's plot lines and subject matter were also new to prime time network dramas. Law and order was negotiated in interrogation rooms and courtrooms, and the lines between criminal and cop were often blurred. The serial nature of Hill Street was also critical to this more naturalistic treatment of the criminal justice system. While prime time soap operas like Dallas had serial plots, the impulse of most police dramas was to present a self-contained story in a closed 30-minute format or, as Bochco had learned with Columbo, a two-hour movie slot. But the plots and the characters that filled Hill Street were too complex for quick resolution.

The characters, too, were innovative, exhibiting human dimensions of weakness as well as strength that came to dictate character-driven cop series such as the contemporaneous Cagney and Lacey and, notably, of course, Bochco's later NYPD Blue. Bochco, rather curiously, described his characters in a 1997 New York Times inter-view as "broad-brushed, almost comedic…." Foremost among the ensemble cast was Precinct Captain Frank Furillo, played by Daniel J. Travanti. Furillo is an unwaveringly ethical leader, a recovering alcoholic (as was Travanti) married to sane and professional Public Defender Joyce Davenport, played by Veronica Hamel. Other characters are more idiosyncratic: Frank's shrill ex-wife (played by Bochco's wife Barbara Bosson) is arrested for marijuana possession in one episode; Sergeant Phil Esterhaus (Michael Conrad) died of a heart attack in medias coitus ; and Detective Mick Belker (Bruce Weitz) was not above biting suspects to subdue them. Other cast members included Charles Haid, Michael Warren, Taurean Blacque, Kiel Martin, Ed Marinaro, Joe Spano, Rene Enriquez, James B. Sikking, and Dennis Franz as Detective Norman Buntz. Franz's relationship with Bochco crossed over into NYPD Blue.

Hill Street Blues, along with the sitcom Cheers, made NBC's Thursday lineup unbeatable and helped the network climb back into the Nielsen ratings race by the mid-1980s. Mike Post's theme music became a hit on radio, just as his theme for The Rockford Files had done in the 1970s. By the end of the decade Hill Street had spawned innumerable imitators, including St. Elsewhere (often called " Hill Street in a hospital") by Bochco protégé David E. Kelley. Bochco continued experimenting with the form, creating a show about minor league ball players called Bay City Blues, but he was not infallible. The 1990 musical drama Cop Rock, in which characters launched into song in the middle of an arrest or a court proceeding, was a bizarre and unfortunate mistake. NYPD Blue, Bochco's series for ABC, first aired in October of 1994 and continued to push the envelope where content was concerned, airing mild nudity that caused some affiliates to cancel or pre-empt the show. The furor died down after the first season, and NYPD Blue became a huge and ongoing critical and ratings success. Bochco then broke new ground yet again with Murder One (1995), a one-season serial that followed one murder trial to its conclusion, and carried unmistakable resonances of the O. J. Simpson case.

In a 1995 interview in the New York Times, Bochco, referring to Murder One, clarified his vision for television drama. "What we're trying to do," he said, "is create a long term impact. One which requires its viewership to defer gratification for a while, to control that impulse in anticipation of a more complex and fully satisfying closure down the road. It's the same commitment you make when you open up to the first page of a novel." And Daniel J. Travanti reminisced in a 1997 interview in The Washington Post, "It's nice to know that in a minor key, we are legendary." Unlike most such legends, however, Hill Street Blues indubitably impacted on American cultural expectations of the genre, and the successful series that have followed in its wake stand on its shoulders.

—Tim Arnold