An awful lot of today's "prestige television" can trace itself back to three shows from the 1980s and 1990s, all of which came in large part from the mind of Steven Bochco. Many of the writers, creators, directors and showrunners of today's top-quality television began their careers working on one of these: Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law or NYPD Blue. Or they began their careers working for the people who began theirs on one of them.
Bochco started in television as a writer and story editor for Universal, where he worked on well-received shows like Ironside and Columbo. In 1978 he moved to MTM Enterprises, the studio started by Mary Tyler Moore and run by her then-husband Grant Tinker. His first show for MTM, Paris, featured James Earl Jones and drew good reviews, but had a horrible time slot and lasted only 11 episodes. Unusually for police dramas of the time, Paris spent a lot of story on the lead character's home and off-duty life -- something that Bochco would bring forward into his later series. The show also starred Michael Warren, an actor that Bochco would bring to Hill Street as well. He wouldn't bring co-star Cecilia Hart, but he signed her then-husband Bruce Weitz for the later show. Hart and Weitz would split not long after Paris was canceled, and she then married Jones. Hollywood is weird.
"We have a 9-11, armed robbery in progress. See surplus store corner Peebles Drive and 124th Street..."
Bochco's second outing with MTM went to NBC and started airing five days before Ronald Reagan took office, cementing its connection with a new decade. Although a lot of its features and characters retained a kind of 70s sensibility -- especially Daniel J. Travanti's Capt. Frank Furillo -- Hill Street was very certainly something that television hadn't seen before. It featured an ensemble cast often partitioned into separate, if related, storylines that would stretch across several episodes. Bochco's then-wife Barbara Bosson, cast as the ex-wife of precinct captain Furillo, had suggested the latter idea to him, pointing out how successful it was on daytime soap operas. Handheld cameras allowed filming in a much more confined precinct office set, and the knights in blue who worked the Hill Street Precinct sported some pretty tarnished armor.
Hill Street regularly addressed issues not often touched in crime drama shows, such as the corrosive effects of poverty on an area and its social fabric. It frequently confronted racial issues, both between cops and the citizenry and between cops themselves, with a candor that no 2017 show would dare to try. Patrol officers Bobby Hill (Warren) and Andy Renko (Charles Haid) will have each other's back until the last trump sounds but frequently rub up against each other when Hill's urban African-American context clashes with Renko's rural redneckism. Hill doesn't dismiss Renko because of his prejudice; he tries to persuade him. And Renko doesn't pretend to be something he's not in order to make Hill feel better; he accepts his partner as he is and trusts Hill enough to show his own real self instead of a diversity-coated facade. Both men grow over the first four seasons of the show -- Renko in seeing the people around him as people rather than melanin and Hill in understanding how his own success at escaping his background might make him even more judgmental of those who didn't than his friend is.
All of these swirling narratives wouldn't work nearly so well were they not acted by one of the better ensemble casts ever assembled on a small screen. Travanti, Warren, Haid and Bosson are already mentioned, but Veronica Hamel as public defender and Furillo lover Joyce Davenport, the late Michael Conrad as Sgt. Phil Esterhaus, Betty Thomas as Officer Lucy Bates, the late Kiel Martin as Det. J. D. LaRue and Taurean Blacque as his partner Det. Neal Washington and a raft of others made real the great scripts and scenes written for them. LaRue's season-long descent as his alcoholism sinks it talons into him during the show's first year is one of its more under-rated performances, but only because so much of the rest is so good.
Hill Street also flashed the often strange and frequently macabre sense of humor Bochco liked. During the first season, for example, Michael Conrad's Phil Esterhaus was dating two women -- Grace Gardner (Barbara Babcock), the widow of a former detective and Cindy Spooner, a high school athlete. During the episode featuring his interrupted marriage to Cindy, the 50-something Esterhaus regularly addressed his prospective father-in-law as "Dad" even though they were quite obviously contemporaries. Although the rigid SWAT team commander Sgt. Howard Hunter (James B. Sikking) was too often more caricature than character, his obsession with weaponry and overwhelming response was ready-made for comedy whenever it came into contact with the real world.
Conrad's death in 1984 left Hill Street with a bigger gap than might have been first realized, and its fourth season was probably its peak. The first full season without Conrad, #5, veered much more towards soap-operatic angsty plotlines than before. Season 6 saw several longtime cast members leave to be inadequately replaced by new writers' attempts to remake their characters, and when Travanti announced that Season 7 would be his last NBC decided the show should end then. Bochco had been fired at the end of season 5 and was focusing on his new series, L.A. Law, which would debut in September 1986.
"I've got dibs on his office."
And thus we met Arnie Becker, a partner at McKenzie, Brackman and Chaney (later with Kuzak), as he responds to the sight of one of the firm's senior partners dead at his desk, in the opening episode of L.A. Law. Becker, played by Corbin Bernsen, was the firm's specialist in divorce law and generally carried the load when storylines called for a sleazy lothario or a tawdry and sometimes comical divorce case. Harry Hamlin as Mike Kuzak and Jimmy Smits as Victor Sifuentes rounded out the male half of the narrative leads, while Jill Eikenberry as Ann Kelsey and later Susan Dey as Grace Van Owen carried the major storylines for the women. Dey was also Kuzak's love interest, so she would sometimes play supporting roles in his arcs and he sometimes in hers.
Law is the most dated of Bochco's shows when watched today. Obviously the fashions and hairstyles are straight from the 1980s but also the pastel-heavy look and cinematography look weirdly flat when compared with more modern shows. Bochco used the legal system as a backdrop for a wide range of social issue commentary and pushed the envelope of risqué behavior even more than he had on Hill Street. Often the different cases taken on by members of the law firm highlighted the plight of people being pushed around by corporate interests or other bullies. Its attorneys rarely, if ever, represented guilty people -- or if they were guilty it was of some minor offense.
Acting-wise, Boccho again assembled a talented cast of folks who had for the most part never made it onto the radar of larger productions. His character actors gave the leads solid foundations from which to work, whether it was the snideness of Alan Rachins as Douglas Brackman, the solid decency and gravitas of Richard Dysart as Leland Mackenzie or the keep-plugging-along befuddlement of Michael Tucker as Stuart Markowitz. Hamlin and Dey as the central romantic couple didn't really manage the chemistry of Travanti and Hamel, leaving Law with a much less strongly beating heart than Hill Street.
Law suffered from an expanding cast that started diluting storylines and a quick slide into sanctimony. Alfre Woodard won an Emmy as a rape victim in the pilot episode, marrying her skill to an excellently-written part that brought out the real tragedy she suffered. But later clients devolved into a real Victim of the Week rotation, rarely sticking around long enough for viewers to actually get to know them before one of our Heroic Attorneys delivered the Powerful Closing Argument that would lead the jury into Doing the Right Thing. Sometimes, of course, they didn't, which allowed for the Anguished Questioning of the System and a comeback with a Renewed Resolve to Make Everything Right. Lawyer shows offer a great temptation for speechifying self-righteousness, and L.A. Law succumbed all too often, especially once Bochco left the producer's chair after season three.
David E. Kelley helmed the show in seasons four and five (and decided to pin the sanctimony meter to the wall with his own lawyer show, The Practice). Bochco came back for the sixth season and then left; the show would sputter for another two seasons before ending in 1994. A reunion movie in 2002 did little for the show's legacy and highlighted how much a product of its time L.A. Law really was.
"This is America. I'd a beat you, rich or poor."
The saying summed up a great deal of the philosophy of one New York City Police Detecive Andy Sipowicz, played by Dennis Franz, in Bochco's third great drama, NYPD Blue. Sipowicz says the line to a man who claims he was bullied into a confession because he was a poor immigrant.
Franz was initially paired with David Caruso as Detective John Kelly, the two top cops in the 15th Precinct's detective squadroom. Bochco co-created the show with David Milch, who was inspired by retired NYPD detective Bill Clark. Clark was also one of NYPD Blue's producers.
Blue was the target of boycotts and public pressure when it began airing in 1992 for its boundary-busting language and nudity. Network television had never shown or said some of the things that Blue's cast offered up, but of course compared even with regular cable today it's pretty tame, and matched against premium cable shows it's positively quaint.
The first season opens with an arc that has Sipowicz gravely wounded by a vengeful mobster and Kelly leading the charge to find and arrest the shooter. He also juggles feelings for his ex-wife Laura Michaels, played by Sherry Stringfield, with a developing attraction to Patrolwoman Janice Licalsi, played by Amy Brenneman. Laura's role as an assistant district attorney allows for plenty of path-crossing to show us that sparks haven't gone away, and of course Janice is around the station while Kelly is.
NYPD Blue is almost two shows, as Caruso left after only one season to pursue a movie career that did not go well. That season is interesting to watch knowing that he will be out the door, as well as watching Franz's originally more supporting role take more and more of the meat of the narrative and screen time. Sipowicz was just too good of a character and Franz too good of an actor to stay in any shadow. His interactions with Lieutenant Arthur Fancy (James McDaniel) were definitely some of the acting highlights of a show that regularly offered up great characters, scenes and performances. When season two brought Jimmy Smits in to play Bobby Simone, he melded more into an ensemble with Franz at the center.
Blue also allowed a Bochco show to partially correct some of the missteps it had begun with; things that plagued all his shows in large or small ways. Initially, the women of Blue are all the love interest or potential love interest of one male character or another. Stringfield and Brenneman both left when Caruso did; the writers didn't know what to do with them without him around. They might have some narrative of their own, but the majority of their plots played out in reaction to their relationship to a male character. But Justine Miceli as Adrienne Lesniak and Amanda Thompson as Jill Kirkendall drove their own character lines, and even though Kim Delaney's Diane Russell was in a relationship with Bobby Simone she had a lot of her own arc as well.
The early seasons were the strongest, even though after the opening arc the series quickly settled into a crime of the week pattern. A second crime often occupied the B-team detectives and frequently featured some comic element. The acting and characters could sustain viewer interest but when Smits left the show after season six the pattern wore thin quickly. A bewildering carousel of departures and tryouts made it hard to link to any of the new personnel, and the show finally ended after 12 seasons with Sipowicz now the squad commander and mentor to the crew of young detectives.
Legacy
It's almost impossible to imagine what some folks see as the current Golden Age of Television without Steven Bochco and his work. Some shows had relied on flawed characters, some worked with large ensemble casts, some had multi-episode story arcs. He combined them all in ways that interwove them so each characteristic strengthened the others, offering viewers stories that seemed much realer even though they often involved outlandish characters or situations. Bochco began an era in which the usual assumption that the best actors were on the stage or the big screen didn't apply. Even though he was producing television, he brought a movie-level feel and atmosphere into his shows that was nothing like what their competition offered.
Sure, he had some stinkers. Cop Rock is justly maligned as not just weird -- a cop drama with musical numbers in the middle -- but badly done. And as mentioned above, he had a blind spot when it came to bringing female characters into his shows in arcs of their own rather than ones that placed them in more reactive roles. And there is no doubt that he sometimes lacks vision for where to take his shows once they had established themselves, leaving them in the hands of lesser talents who kept them creaking along long past their prime.
But if you watch drama on television today, you're seeing his influence. Sometimes fainter and sometimes louder but in almost all of them you're going to be hearing a Bochco echo.
