Canción triste de Hill Street

Each episode of the critically acclaimed series begins with another morning at the office at the Chicago Police Department's Hill Street precinct.

Overworked, underpaid, understaffed and under equipped the boys and girls in blue do their best to put on a decent show of fighting crime whilst under continual threat of violence from many of the craziest criminals on earth.

The guy in charge of this circus is less of a ringmaster and more of a lion-tamer. His name is Captain Frank Furillo (Daniel J.Travanti). Soft-spoken and diplomatic he, at first, doesn't strike the viewer as having the intestinal fortitude to be a cop let alone one in charge of a precinct.

Brow-beaten by public defender Joyce Davenport (Veronica Hamel) then by his crazy ex-wife Fay (Barbara Bosson) Furillo looks even less formidable and his very manhood is called into question by his psycho SWAT team commander Lt. Howard Hunter (James B.Sikking).

After seeing him stare down the barrel of a gun during a hostage crisis then shield a couple of kids with his body so they don't get hit by machine gun fire we are able to formulate a more balanced assessment of Furillo. This is the most genuine kind of hero. He exemplifies the best qualities of the men and women who serve under his command and leads by example.

It is evident that both cops and criminals coming through Hill Street precinct are there due to varying degrees of insanity. Furillo's own psychosis is perhaps the same as that of the public defender - he thinks that he is making a difference for the better. After what we have seen him do it is difficult to argue that he is wrong.

This was a cop show unlike any other that people had seen before. Part comedy and part soap opera set against the back-drop of an environment viewers were used to seeing simplistic good vs evil narratives and dispassionate procedurals got something of greater complexity.

With sombre strokes of piano keys the understated yet resilient tone of the title theme better matches the continuing narratives of this series than that of most other shows though the mixture of mellotron and orchestra may seem a tad pretentious.

During an era of cop shows where the main characters were often portrayed as superheroes or as charicatures, this priceless classic was born. For the first time since the days of Jack Webb and Joseph Wambaugh, we finally had a show that showed police as real people with all the faults and failings that all people had. You had Furillo, who was a recovering alcoholic, Renko and Hill, who were dealing with their own fears, Hunter, the reactionary head of the S.W.A.T. team, Bates, who just wanted to prove that she was a good police officer as well as a woman, Belker, the maniacal undercover cop, and of course the fatherly Sgt. Phil Esterhaus, the father figure for the whole squad. This show definitely set the stage for shows like N.Y.P.D. Blue and the Law and Order franchise and will always be a classic.

In the days of E.R and NYPD Blue, it's hard to remember just how ground-breaking a show HSB was. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. The quality of the acting and writing, the documentary look and feel, the seedy broken down environment, the brutally frank situations and language (for the time), the fact that the "bad" guys got away with it as often as not, the huge ensemble cast, the long one-take scenes, the unhappy endings etc. etc.

Needless to say, the American people wanted nothing to do with such quality at first - until it won a record number of Emmys and they couldn't ignore it anymore. If nothing else, this series proved to the networks that quality can sell soap after all.

If you like your E.R. think a kind thought for Hill Street Blues - the series that made it all possible.

I remember coming home from swimming in the evening, waiting to see Hill Street Blues. My mum would hold my hand as I walked down the street, just as the lady did at the begining of HSB when the police car is driving in the snow the camera picks up on a lady and her child walking down the street, reminds me of me and my mum. The programme was ace, just too dam good. Television today has a lot to learn. One thing I will always remember about that show was the music, it was so sad, but lovely to hear. p.s I wonder where that boy and mother are now?

This TV series is a testament to Brandon Tartikoff, who was then head of Entertainment at NBC, who championed this show and stayed with it because he knew that this was a groundbreaking show.

I remember watching the pilot for this show way back in high school. It was unlike anything I had ever seen on television. I remember the episode when the characters Renko and Bobby Hill were shot and lying in the hallway, and you had no idea if they were alive or dead. I remember gasping out loud. Stuff like that just wasn't on TV at the time.

Ensemble casts, story lines that continued for weeks at a time, and truly compelling, realistic writing. Television was pretty much a wasteland back in 1981 -- and unfortunately, has gotten far, far worse -- and this show, which took a year to find a permanent spot on NBC's lineup and introduced the whole concept of the landmark Thursday night at 10 pm drama on NBC.

Another testament to this show is that in one year every single Emmy nomination for the outstanding supporting actor in a drama series category was for a cast member from Hill Street Blues. That was, and still is, unprecedented stuff. I had the pleasure of taping the show as it came on late night on one of the local channels here in NYC several years ago. Brilliant, and still holds up well. What I would give for something similar to blanket the vapid horizon that is network television today.