Nowadays, TV cops with emotional baggage are the norm: an excessive fondness for drink? Tick. Failing personal relationships? Tick. A few skeletons in the closet? Likely. Solving crimes can be a messy business, more shades of grey than black-and-white, often exacting a hefty emotional price.
It was not always like this but it became so thanks largely to one man, writer-producer extraordinaire Steven Bochco. Bochco, who has died aged 74, revolutionised what was a successful but tired formula by adopting a totally different approach to storytelling. Gone were the freestanding episodes with neatly wrapped up endings; instead in came complex stories that resonated with the issues of the day. The repercussions of events would be felt across not just one episode but the next, and the one after.
The show that made Bochco’s name — and best encapsulated that watershed moment — was Hill Street Blues, co-created with Michael Kozoll, which ran for 144 episodes on NBC from 1981 to 1987. Its setting, Hill Street, was a police station in an unnamed city, “east of Mississippi”, staffed by normal, flawed people light years away from the clever, all-knowing, clean-living cops that had dominated the small screen until then.
As in a documentary, the camera seemed to follow the characters everywhere, showing them at home as well as on duty, creating the impression that what people were watching on TV was in fact happening for real. Like voyeurs, viewers saw the characters’ lives unfold, they got to know the people behind the cops as home and work become entangled.
Steven Bochco was the son of émigré Jews: his father Rudolph, was a Polish-born concert violinist and a former child prodigy. His mother, Mimi Nathanson, was a painter who had arrived in the US from Lithuania at 14. Neither parent was keen on television so Steven and his sister Joanna had no TV at home until friends and neighbours clubbed together to buy one for them.
Bochco attended first the Manhattan High School of Music and Art but after a year transferred to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh where he graduated in Theatre in 1966. Afterwards, he moved to LA and worked as a writer and story editor for Universal Pictures, cutting his teeth on various shows including Ironside and Columbo (for which he wrote the first episode, directed by a rookie called Steven Spielberg).
But it was his move to MTM Enterprises (named after its co-creator Mary Tyler Moore) in 1978 that got his creative juices flowing. As an independent company, MTM took a more daring approach and, given the freedom to be producer as well as writer, Bochco set about shaking up what had become a rather lazy, formulaic genre.
His first show for MTM, Paris, ran for only 13 episodes between 1979 and 1980, but key elements — the interest in the main character’s personal life, for example — hinted at a new approach, which would be fully developed in Bochco’s next show, the celebrated Hill Street Blues.
As a fan once remarked to Bochco, Hill Street Blues was the first TV series with a memory: there was no reset button at the end of an episode. It was revolutionary and audiences didn’t take to it straight away but following critical acclaim and a whopping 21 Emmy nominations for its first season (it eventually won eight), even the viewing public was won over.
By the fifth series, Bochco, under pressure to reduce his budget, had left for 20th Century Fox where, with Terry Louise Fisher, he would create another iconic series, LA Law. Adopting the same blueprint that had been so successful with Hill Street, the show injected a dose of realism and newsworthiness to the legal drama, tackling issues such as the death penalty and Aids. The show was such a hit that it took the Hill Street Blues slot on TV.
But Bochco had moved on again, this time to ABC, enticed by a lucrative deal to create ten new TV series. The result was a mixed bag: some successful like Doogie Howser, MD (1989-93) about a whiz-kid teenage doctor, some forgettable like Hooperman (1987) and one spectacular failure, Cop Rock (1990), a singing and dancing police drama.
Bochco, however, had not lost his mojo, or his ability to stir up controversy. And in 1993, together with David Milch, he created NYPD Blue. If this sounds like Hill Street Blues transported to New York, in a way it was, but NYPD Blue broke yet more boundaries with its use of raw, coarse language and sexual content.
It was deemed so shocking at the time that many advertisers boycotted the first episode and 57 ABC affiliates (out of 225) refused to broadcast it. It also featured, in Andy Sipowicz — played by Dennis Franz — one of the first anti-heroes, a complex, racist cop who doesn’t always play by the rules and is seen by many as the forerunner of Breaking Bad’s Walter White and the anti-hero par excellence, Tony Soprano.
Steven Bochco was married three times: his first two marriages, to Gabrielle Levin and Barbara Bosson, ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, Dayna Kalins; his sister Joanna; and three children: a son, Sean, from his first marriage, a daughter, Melissa, and a son, Jesse, from his second.
Julie Carbonara
Steven Bochco, born December 16, 1943. Died April 1, 2018
