Hill Street Blues - Overview

Overview

MTM Enterprises developed the series on behalf of NBC, appointing Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll as series writers. The writers were allowed considerable creative freedom, and created a series which brought together, for the first time, a number of emerging ideas in TV drama.

• Each episode features a number of intertwined storylines, some of which are resolved within the episode, with others developing over a number of episodes throughout a season.
• Much play is made of the conflicts between the work lives and private lives of the individual characters. In the workplace, there is also a strong focus on the struggle between doing "what is right" and "what works" in situations.
• The camera is held close in and action cut rapidly between stories, and there is much use of overheard or off-screen dialogue, giving a "documentary" feel to the action.
• Rather than studio (floor) cameras, hand-held Arriflexes are used to add to the "documentary" feel.
• The show deals with real-life issues, and employs commonly used language and slang to a greater extent than had been seen before.
• Almost every episode begins with a pre-credit sequence consisting of (mission) briefing and roll call at the beginning of the day shift. From season three, it experimented with a "Previously on..." montage of clips of up to six previous episodes before the roll call. Many episodes are written to take place over the course of a single day.
• Many episodes concluded with Captain Frank Furillo and public defender Joyce Davenport in a domestic situation, often in bed, discussing how their respective days went.

Although filmed in Los Angeles (both on location and at CBS Studio Center in Studio City), the series is set in a generic unnamed inner-city location with a feel of a US urban center in the Midwest or Northeast such as Chicago or Detroit. The police cars shown in the series were painted in a manner very similar to Chicago police cars of the period, using the phrase "Metro Police" in the same style and size as "Chicago Police" on that city's cars. Also, many second-unit establishing shots used recognizable locations in Chicago, including freeway entrances with Interstate Highway shields with route numbers which enter the city. Other shots include aerials of bi-level commuter trains entering and leaving the Chicago and North Western Railway's Chicago passenger terminal. The C&NW's green-and-yellow colors (and in later seasons, the colors of Chicago's Metra commuter rail system) are evident.

The program's focus on failure and those at the bottom of the social scale is pronounced (very much in contrast to Bochco's later project, L.A. Law). Inspired by police procedural detective novels such as Ed McBain's 1956 Cop Hater, it has been described as Barney Miller out of doors; the focus on the bitter realities of 1980s urban living was revolutionary for its time. Later seasons were accused of becoming formulaic (a shift that some believe to have begun after the death of Michael Conrad midway through season four, which led to the replacement of the beloved Sergeant Esterhaus by Sergeant Stan Jablonski, played by Robert Prosky); thus, the series that broke the established rules of television ultimately failed to break its own rules. Nonetheless it is a landmark piece of television programming, the influence of which was seen in such series as NYPD Blue and ER. In 1982, St. Elsewhere was hyped as Hill Street Blues in a hospital. The quality work done by MTM led to the appointment of Grant Tinker as NBC chairman in 1982.

In season seven, producers received scripts from acclaimed writers outside of television: Bob Woodward and David Mamet.

There is also a short-lived Dennis Franz spinoff called Beverly Hills Buntz, in which Franz's dismissed Lt. Buntz character moves from the Hill to Los Angeles to become a private eye, taking along "Sid the Snitch" Thurston (Peter Jurasik) as his sidekick.