Hill Street Blues creator grew up without a TV
Steven Bochco, who has died aged 74, never intended to create the genre-changing police drama Hill Street
Blues. Invited by Fred Silverman, chief executive of NBC, to pitch some ideas for a TV series, his suggestions ranged far and wide. All were rejected. ‘‘No,’’ Silverman told him. ‘‘I want a cop show.’’
At the time, the last thing Bochco wanted was to write another police series. He had just done one for CBS called Paris, which had flopped and been cancelled. ‘‘We were kind of bored with the genre,’’ he admitted.
However, in the cut-throat world of American television you do not turn down a commission from a big network, and so Bochco and his writing partner Mike Kozoll set about creating a police drama with a difference, ‘‘a show about people who happen to be cops, as opposed to cops who, in some small corner of their lives, happen to be people’’. They wrote the first script for
Hill Street Blues in 10 days in pencil on a yellow legal pad. By the time the series ended its seven-season run in 1987, it had won 26 Emmy awards.
The series was groundbreaking in numerous ways, using handheld cameras to heighten the immediacy of the action, dealing with issues that made the networks nervous such as police brutality, racism and inner-city decay, and stretching storylines over multiple episodes like a soap opera.
Above all, his misfit cast of uniformed cops and detectives were palpably human. Like the bad guys they were pursuing, they were flawed, and drank and swore and had messy personal lives. ‘‘The idea of almost every other cop show was that the private lives of these folks was what happened the other 23 hours of the day that you weren’t watching them,’’ Bochco said. ‘‘And we turned that inside out.’’
Hill Street Blues was also hugely influential in TV drama. Robert
Thompson, professor of pop culture at Syracuse University, suggested that the producers of The Sopranos,
Breaking Bad and Mad Men ‘‘ought to wake up every morning and send a ‘thank you’ note to Hill Street
Blues’’.
Bochco went on to write and produce a host of other hugely successful TV series, including LA
Law and NYPD Blue .Itwasa career that was all the more remarkable for his having grown up in what he joked must have been the only American family in the 1950s who didn’t own a television set.
He was born Steven Ronald Bochco in 1943 in New York City. His father, Rudolph Bochco, was a Polish-born Jew who arrived in America in 1904 and became a famous concert violinist. His mother, Mimi, was a painter and his high-minded parents had ‘‘zero interest’’ in television, a medium that they regarded as shallow and superficial. Eventually, a group of friends and neighbours clubbed together to buy a television for Steven and his older sister, Joanna Frank, who became an actress.
He had his first notable success writing the first episode of the TV detective series Columbo, directed by the 24-year-old unknown Steven Spielberg, still four years away from making Jaws. The two men remained lifelong friends.
He also worked on other TV police and crime series including
Ironside and McMillan & Wife, which held him in good stead when he was asked to create Hill Street
Blues, starring his second wife, Barbara Bosson, who played the former wife of the precinct captain, Frank Furillo. They had been at college together, married in 1970 and had two children: Jesse, who is a television director, and Melissa, an entrepreneur. Both made youthful on-screen appearances alongside their mother in Hill
Street Blues. ‘‘Bochco is Polish for nepotism,’’ he joked.
His 28-year marriage to Bosson ended in divorce in 1998 and two years later he married the TV executive Dayna Kalins, becoming stepfather to her son, Sean Flanagan. Dayna and his children survive him.
He freely admitted that he could be ‘‘difficult’’ when dealing with authority and would probably not have argued with the assessment of Grant Ticker, the chairman of NBC, that he liked to ‘‘rock the boat as a hobby’’.
Yet he was usually proved right. ‘‘I’m not afraid of failing, but I am afraid of doing bad work,’’ he once said. ‘‘It’s not so much that I want to top myself. It’s how do I maintain the standard?’’