Monday, January 30, 2006
The first season will be available on DVD Tuesday.
By ROBERT THOMPSON
WASHINGTON POST
Twenty-five years ago this month, "Hill Street Blues" debuted on NBC. It launched a second golden age of television drama: The model it established inspired a long string of literate dramas, including "St. Elsewhere," "thirtysomething" and "Moonlighting." Alumni from the show went on to produce "L.A. Law," "Miami Vice," "Law & amp; Order," "Twin Peaks," "NYPD Blue" and "Deadwood."
For those who missed the groundbreaking show or who want to see it again, a three-disc DVD set with all 17 episodes from the first season is available Tuesday (20th Century Fox, DVD, $39.98).
With so much good drama on TV today, it's hard to remember what the medium was like a quarter-century ago. When "Hill Street Blues" premiered, the highest-rated police drama on the air was "CHiPS," while "The Love Boat" and "The Dukes of Hazzard" were still going strong. TV was amusing enough back then, but it was seldom accused of being "art."
"Hill Street Blues" changed that. It looked like a movie and unfolded like a novel. Its enormous cast, pseudo-documentary style and overlapping dialogue defied the conventional wisdom that a TV show had to be understood by those who were half-asleep.
Art form
"It took the soap opera and elevated it to an art form," said Mark Tinker, executive producer and director of the recently concluded "NYPD Blue" and the upcoming season of "Deadwood."
"With the multiple storylines and recurring characters, they took storytelling for the masses and made it into something sophisticated, intelligent and emotionally complicated," Tinker said.
"Hill Street Blues" was a high-brow show in a mostly low-brow medium. The writers and producers of the series had resumes you'd expect to see in an English department, not a cop show. As a matter of fact, three of them had once been writing teachers at such places as Harvard and Yale.
In a TV Guide cover story on June 1, 1985, novelist Joyce Carol Oates said "Hill Street Blues" was "one of the few television programs watched by a fair percentage of my Princeton colleagues, arguably because it is one of the few current television programs that is as intellectually and emotionally provocative as a good book."
In that first season, critics raved about the show, and it received a record-breaking 21 Emmy nominations, winning eight. Though it ended the year in 83rd place out of 97 shows, executives at NBC liked all the good reviews, and, as a third-place network, they had lots of holes in their schedule.
NBC renewed "Hill Street Blues," its ratings climbed in the second season, and by the third it had cracked the Top 25, helping to launch the network's 20-year dominance on "must-see" Thursday night.
Bochco's effect
Originally, NBC President Fred Silverman got the ball rolling on the idea that eventually would become "Hill Street Blues." But it was co-creator Steven Bochco who would become the soul of the show.
Bochco already had written for and/or produced eight crime series when NBC asked him and Michael Kozoll to do another one. He was sick of cop shows and refused the offer, which seemed to make NBC want him even more. This proved significant, because before Bochco and Kozoll agreed to do the show, they extracted unprecedented concessions from the network. NBC offered -- though it didn't always honor -- an unheard-of promise to stay out of the creative process.
Kozoll stepped down as co-executive producer of "Hill Street" after the first season, but Bochco would spend five years using the show to chip away at the boundaries that had kept sophisticated "adult" content off the airwaves since the heyday of network radio.
Subsequent producers and shows would settle the territory that Bochco had cleared. Within a few years, network executives realized how successfully more mature shows could compete in the emerging cable era.
The unique mutation that Bochco introduced to the medium would be passed on to another quarter-century of serious television drama. That Bochco had been tired of the cop show when he created "Hill Street Blues" proved important in another way. After working on eight formulaic crime series, he knew the mold well enough to break it in interesting ways.
"Hill Street Blues" started a run of quality television that continues today. No single series, with the possible exception of "All in the Family," has had as significant an impact on the art of entertainment TV.