Eventually his affair with defence attorney Joyce Davenport turned into marriage even though, professionally, they remained adversaries. The staff at Hill Street included Captain Frank Furillo, the quietly spoken but firm commander whose own private life was in a state of turmoil as he struggled to cope with his ex-wife and her alimony demands. Hill Street was a very noisy station in a very realistically noisy city.
Bochco's use of sound was also as forceful and unconventional.
#Bluex on tv series#
The belief that an audience found it impossible to follow more than one or two main plot lines at a time within an average episode also fell by the wayside, as the series presented its audience with six or eight in a single episode, deftly overlapping plots and drawing other story strands across the course of multiple episodes in mini story arcs. Swimming against the tide of accepted wisdom, the show blasted the tenet that the average viewer was unable to keep up with more than half a dozen characters in any one episode, by blithely presenting at various times more than two dozen core and recurring characters. television story-telling techniques far beyond what had until then been perceived as "viewer friendly", to astonishingly successful effect.
From this somewhat less than auspicious start, the series remarkably went on to 145 episodes and seven seasons of innovative, quality, ground-breaking police action.Įmploying one of the largest and most talented casts ever assembled for a single series at the time, Bochco and his team of writers wove a richly complex tapestry which pushed the accepted envelope of traditional U.S. The series premiered on the NBC network on 15 January 1981 to a critical reaction which ranged from the indifferent to the outright hostile, and then proceeded during its initial year to both narrowly avoid cancellation and gain the dubious honour of being the lowest-rated prime-time show (a lowly sixty-six out of a possible sixty-nine in the all powerful Nielsen rankings), ever to be renewed. However, in spite of becoming arguably the most influential 'Cop Show' of the 80's, Hill Street Blues was not an instant hit with the viewing public.
#Bluex on tv professional#
Created by talented producer/writer Steven Bochco in tandem with Michael Kozoll, the series chronicled the busy, eventful and often outright dangerous professional and private lives of the officers who worked out of the aging, dilapidated, Hill Street Stationhouse in a run down district of an unnamed eastern city of the United States (exterior scenes were shot in Chicago).