Hill Street Blues

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.

An American cop show - who'd have thought an American cop show of all things could exemplify the best of television. From the land that gave us the pits of tv (have you seen Donahue?) there comes, once in a while, a beacon of greatness. The last episode of M*A*S*H, and the whole of HSB make the invention of television worthwhile.

Hill Street Blues was an unconventional cop show for the '80s, and even today. Why? Because it was real. Well as real as you can get with a TV show, without taking some liberties ofcourse. Unlike Miami Vice, T.J. Hooker or Hunter, HSB had a lot of detail and accuracy.

Sure Miami Vice was an entertaining show, but only for being stylish and hip for it's time. HSB didn't try to be cool, it tried to be accurate. Miami Vice and all the other cop shows and cop movies of the '80s, '90s and today are extremely fake in the way they present themselves, going more for a target demographic then bothering to portray how things operate in our world. In the real world, cops in America aren't wearing Armani suits and constantly trying to bust Columbian drug dealers and their shipment of cocaine while spitting out mile a minute obscure metaphors and similies that take us a few seconds to figure out. If you want to see the way REAL COPS in America speak, act and carry themselves through real crime cases, then watch HSB. You won't be dissapointed.

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.