A TV PIONEER
Hill Street Blues creator Steven Bochco reflects on a half-century in television,
NEW YORK— For viewers who rejoice in TV’s artistic upsurge, one virtuoso perhaps more than anyone can be credited for elevating the medium.
Steven Bochco flinches at the mention of his half-century writing and producing TV. Could it really be that long? But his credits document his legacy. Consider: the breakthrough hits L.A. Law and NYPD Blue, the pioneering half-hour dramedy Doogie Howser, MD and the groundbreaking Murder One, which dared to delve into a single complex case throughout the season.
Yet for Bochco, the TV revolutionary, Hill Street Blues came first. And it pretty much changed everything.
In his self-published memoir, Truth Is a Total Defence: My Fifty Years in Television, Bochco takes the reader through his prolific career, which began at 22 as a story editor on popular NBC drama The Name of the Game and continues with his latest creation, Murder in the First on TNT.
His book recalls his great collaborations and battles royal with actors, studio heads and network execs, along with the flops that made the triumphs even sweeter.
But along the way, he expounds on something even more: at age 72, he’s still alive.
“Everything is fine,” he reports, and looks it. He says he’s coming up on two years since the bone-marrow transplant he received in his battle with leukemia.
“The thing I like most about the book was the juxtaposition of a career that had a pretty great arc to it with the fight for my life.
“Most of us live our lives being afraid of death, and when it was actually on my doorstep I was terrified,” he says. “The biggest lesson I learned very quickly was to embrace the uncertainty of my circumstances and, when I did, a lot of that fear fell away.” His crash course in how there’s more to life than hit shows; it’s covered in the book, too.
Bochco grew up in Manhattan, the son of a painter and a concert violinist (Rudolph Bochco fiddles away on the “vanity card” that identifies each Steven Bochco production).
On arriving in Los Angeles after college, he wrote for several series at Universal Studios. Then he got a big break: writing the screenplay for the 1972 sci-fi film Silent Running.
It wasn’t the paltry $1,500 fee that soured him on his fling with the big screen. It was the disrespect he confronted as the writer: “Once you’ve delivered the screenplay, they don’t want you around, because you’re gonna get in the way of someone else’s vision.”
Bochco stuck with television. He knew the strict schedule of an episode a week demanded “an informing voice, a central creative driver.” In TV, the writer’s vision was likely to prevail.
After leaving Universal, he was invited to MTM Enterprises, a creative hotbed, to cook up a new kind of cop drama.
Teamed with Michael Kozoll (“I was never a one-man band,” Bochco says) he was game, with one proviso: he and Kozoll would have creative control over the script.
The series they wrote redefined TV drama. From The Sopranos to Lost, from Game of Thrones to Mad Men, TV’s latter-day Golden Age stems from Hill Street Blues, where writers had licence to be trailblazers.
Hill Street Blues had engaging yet flawed characters, a zippy pace and layers of dialogue (all scripted, Bochco says), shot in a documentary style.
But what set the show apart were the multiple narratives that interlaced each episode with those before and after. With the exception of the few prime-time soaps, almost every series up to that time made each episode free-standing, with a reset button for the next.
Bochco recalls a fan telling him that Hill Street Blues was the first TV series with a memory.
“That’s what I always thought of myself doing in the context of TV: craft a show that over time would have a memory,” he says. “I sensed that very early in my career. It just took me another 10 or 12 years to get to the point where I earned the right to take a shot at it.”
Premiering in January 1981, Hill Street Blues challenged, even confounded the meagre audience that sampled it. Then, on a wave of critical acclaim, the series began to click, scoring a history-making 27 Emmy nominations its first year.
During its seven-season run, it won 26 Emmys and launched Bochco toward dozens of series,10 Emmys and four Peabody awards.
Bochco’s new project draws from the past: a reinvention of his slick legal drama L.A. Law.
“What would it be, 30 years later?” he muses. To suss that out, he has re-teamed with writer-producer William Finkelstein, whose credits include the original series. They’re hoping 20th Century Fox will sign on for a pilot to pitch to a network next spring.
“They ordered a script,” says Bochco, who rewrote TV’s rules and lived to tell about it, “and we’ll get ’em a script.”