Bocho rewrote TV rules, lived to tell it

‘The One Man’ heartfelt and compelling

NEW YORK, Aug 24, (AP): For viewers who rejoice in TV’s artistic upsurge, one virtuoso perhaps more than anyone can be credited for elevating the medium from its bygone “boob tube” status.

Steven Bochco flinches at the mention of his half-century writing and producing TV. Could it really be that long? But his list of credits documents his legacy. Consider: the breakthrough hits “LA Law” and “NYPD Blue,” the pioneering half-hour dramedy “Doogie Howser, MD” and the groundbreaking legal drama “Murder One,” which, instead of a self-contained case every week, dared to delve into a complex single 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 Defense: My Fifty Years in Television “(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; $16.99), Bochco takes the reader through his prolific career, which he began at 22 as a story editor on a popular NBC drama, “The Name of the Game,” and continues today with his latest creation, “Murder in the First,” in its third season on TNT.

In his book, Bochco recalls his great collaborations and his battles royal with actors, studio heads and network execs, along with his courageous flops (“Bay City Blues”! “Cop Rock”!) that made the triumphs even sweeter.

But along the way, he expounds on something even more important to him: How, at age 72, he’s still alive.

“Everything is fine,” he reports, and looks it, as he greets a reporter at his office in Santa Monica, California. He says he’s coming up on two years since the bone-marrow transplant he underwent during 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.

Break

Bochco grew up in Manhattan, the son of a painter and a concert violinist (viewers see Rudolph Bochco fiddling 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 $1500 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 resolved to stick with television, despite what, then, was its second-class standing. He knew the strict schedule of completing an episode a week demands “an informing voice, a central creative driver.” In TV, the writer’s vision was likely to prevail.

Nowhere was the writer’s vision more revered than at MTM Enterprises, a creative hotbed where, after leaving Universal, he was invited to cook up a new kind of cop drama.

Teamed with Michael Kozoll (“I was never a one-man band,” Bochco says of his career) he was game for such an opportunity, with one proviso: He and Kozoll would have creative control over the script.

The pilot script they wrote, and the series that resulted, redefined TV drama. From “The Sopranos” to “The Shield” and “Lost,” from “Game of Thrones” to “Mad Men” and “Orange Is the New Black,” the fruits of TV’s latter-day Golden Age stem from “Hill Street Blues,” which gave TV writers license to be TV trailblazers.

“Hill Street Blues” had a sprawling universe of engaging yet flawed characters, a zippy pace and layers of overlapping dialogue (all scripted, Bochco says), shot in a documentary style.

But what really set the show apart were the multiple narratives that interlaced each episode with those that came before and after. With the rare exception of the few prime-time soaps, almost every series up to that time — whether comedy or drama — made each episode freestanding, with a reset button for the one that came 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.”

Acclaim

Premiering in January 1981, “Hill Street Blues” challenged, even confounded the meager audience that sampled it. Then, on a wave of critical acclaim, the series began to click with viewers, while scoring a history-making 27 Emmy nominations its first year.

During its seven-season run, it would win 26 Emmys and launch Bochco on a course that has led to dozens of series and earned him 10 Emmys and four Peabody awards.

(Minotaur), by Andrew Gross

Andrew Gross, known for his contemporary thrillers, takes the reader back to World War II and the brutality that Jews faced in the concentration camps in his novel, “The One Man.”

The dilemma Nathan Blum faces is determining how much one life is worth. Blum has escaped a Polish ghetto and made his way to the United States. He lost his entire family to the Nazis, and he has decided to help the US government by becoming an intelligence officer.

Alfred Mendl is a physics professor who has been torn apart from his family and thrown into Auschwitz. His entire life’s work was burned in front of his eyes, and he spends each painful day struggling to stay alive so he can see his family reunited. He meets a teenager named Leo who has the ability to do complex mathematics and remember vast amounts of data without using paper or a calculator. Mendl begins tutoring Leo in physics.

Blum receives an assignment that he knows is a suicide mission. His superiors tell him they need Mendl’s expertise to assist them with a topsecret plan to design a special bomb to end the war and beat the Germans in the design of this weapon. Though they aren’t sure if Mendl is alive, he was last seen at Auschwitz. They want Blum to sneak into the camp and rescue Mendl. He will have 72 hours to achieve his mission.

NEW YORK:

A visit to Hawaii for most people is relaxing and fun — but not for Amy Schumer.

The comedian says she was hospitalized this summer with bronchitis while shooting a film with Goldie Hawn in Hawaii.

As a guest Monday night on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” Schumer said she had difficulty speaking, was bedridden and coughed so much that she fractured some ribs.

“Hawaii — it didn’t totally agree with me,” Schumer joked.

The comedian, who is publicizing her book “The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo,” is taking a break from her sketch-comedy series “Inside Amy Schumer” so she can tour and focus on writing. (AP)

CHICAGO:

The real-life inspiration for the “Little Red-Haired Girl,” the Peanuts comic strip character who infatuated Charlie Brown, has died at age 87.

Donna Wold, a red-haired young woman who captivated Peanuts creator Charles Schulz and formed the basis for the beloved cartoon character, died earlier this month, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported over the weekend.

Just as the Little Red-Haired Girl was the one who got away for Charlie Brown, so too did Wold from Schulz. (AFP)