38 Hill Street Blues

NBC 1981-87

This ensemble cop series blended pieces of several seemingly incompatible genres — the serial storytelling of daytime soaps, the raw camerawork of documentary films, the social consciousness and twisted sense of humor of Seventies independent movies — into something that felt wholly new. Throw in a squad room full of memorable characters, including sensitive captain Frank Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti), his public-defender sparring partner — and secret lover — Joyce Davenport (Veronica Hamel), perp-biting undercover officer Mick Belker (Bruce Weitz), troublemaking alcoholic J.D. LaRue (Kiel Martin), and bruising detective Norm Buntz (Dennis Franz), and you had the blueprint for most of the dramas that followed it in TV’s second golden age of the Eighties and Nineties, including some, like L.A. Law and NYPD Blue, that came from Hill Street co-creator Steven Bochco.