Hill Street Blues

The day was January 15, 1981, about six months after my college graduation. As a struggling young freelance writer on cinema and other cultural topics, I was living at home in New Jersey. My mother told me that she had heard that there was to be a premiere of a police drama on NBC that night that was said to be very unusual -- and unusually good. I bit, and sat down that evening to watch the pilot episode of Hill Street Blues. I got up an hour later and said to myself, "That was the best hour of television I've ever seen."

And it is still mighty good. I have been watching the first season of Hill Street Blues on DVD, and confirming that not only is it as absorbing as ever, but also that I remember it extremely well. Lines of dialogue, bits of camera business, actors' body language, once I start an episode I anticipate most of what's coming up -- and I haven't seen most of these hours in 25 years.

Hill Street Blues brought the techniques that Robert Altman had been pushing in the movies to television -- the overlapping dialogue, the complex cast of characters, the multiple and intertwined storylines. In that sense it couldn't be more "Nashville," and I loved it for that. But what gave the show distinction beyond the mere importation of technique was its rueful, melancholy tone (which the title hints at). It wasn't just the most "cinematic" American television show up to that point; it was almost certainly the saddest. Nothing ever really got better in the unnamed city (which everyone rightly takes as Chicago) -- not the situation on the streets, not the characters' lives. The vein of black comedy at Hill Street Station was also very pronounced, which viewers could be grateful for; the show was most entertaining in its blend of tones (as The Sopranos and Six Feet Under would notably be many years later; Hill Street Blues made most of the good American television that came after it possible). But the world it depicted, fraught with anxiety and bitter outcomes, was not ever a world I was seduced to want to be a part of -- only to watch.