Video: Too Good for Television?

Hill Street Blues has everything going for it—except ratings

ROLL CALL, 7:07 a.m. The Hill Street precinct comes to disorder. Detectives, patrolmen and patrolwomen, officers and desk jockeys shuffle through the squad room, find seats, swallow some coffee and try to ignore the day ahead. Sergeant Phillip Freemason Esterhaus (Michael Conrad), a mountain of meat and gristle with a smile that could crack ice, is briefing his charges on the new day’s agenda. “I’d like to interject a personal observation,” he announces. “It seems that we’ve reached a new low, graffiti-wise, in both the men’s and women’s lavatories. Now, in an organization of mature men and women, I suggest that we clean up our act . . . our vocabulary . . . at the very least our spelling. To the anonymous bathroom poet, breast is generally spelled breAst. All right. And one more thing. Let’s be careful out there. ”

The critics were ecstatic. The mail has been heavy and enthusiastic. The network—NBC—loves and supports the show. And when the Emmy Awards are broadcast next week, Hill Street Blues’ name will be called 21 times, a record for a prime-time series.

None of this really matters. The critics have no power; letters are written by the few who feel very deeply, pro or con; NBC cannot buy ratings with Emmys. Since its debut last January, the MTM production has resided in the bottom third of the Nielsens. Its hold on life is secure for the next few months; a new season of shows begins Thursday, Oct. 29 at 10 p.m. But no one knows if the Emmy Awards will signify a gold star or a silver bullet.

Maybe the problem is that the show’s creators did not follow Sergeant Esterhaus’ advice: they weren’t careful out there. Writers-Producers Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll, Producer Gregory Hoblit and Director Robert Butler devised a “cop show” with no screaming car chases, no shining superheroes or disposable villains, no instant solutions to a ghetto full of predators and wary prey. Each episode tracks a day in the life of the policemen, the “blues,” of an inner-city precinct. And at the end of each show, plot strands and predicaments are left hanging to be tied up next week or never. Hand-held cameras on dingily lighted sets catch life on the run; overlapping conversations lend Hill Street the texture of a Robert Altman locker room. The tone can explode from mellow to melodrama within a single sequence. This is an urban M*A*S*H, a ferociously intelligent Dallas—and very much its own show.

For all its deft balancing of slum tensions and ethnic sensibilities, Hill Street Blues is most endearing for its raucous wit, used not to leaven but to spice the mix. Consider, for example, the Patton-jawed Lieut. Howard Hunter (James B. Sikking), who sees the ghetto as one more Vietnamese village to destroy, and is forever taking a SWAT at the enemy—those “sawed-off Hispanics,” “Third World mutants,” “geeks with the wild hair.” One week, Howard tried to recruit Officer Lucy Bates (Betty Thomas), who is shy, sharp-faced and, by her lights, feloniously tall. Though the macho cracker Andy Renko (Charles Haid) tells her she has “a rare understanding of the male hormonal imperative,” Lucy frets that her blind dates won’t measure: “Do you have any boots with Cuban heels?”

Part of the Hill Street kick comes from watching good writers and actors get away with this sort of thing on the prude tube. But Bochco and Kozoll, cop-show veterans who were persuaded in 1979 by then NBC President Fred Silverman to try the genre one more time, won unusually free rein. “We demanded total artistic freedom—and got it,” recalls Bochco. In network television, total artistic freedom means that if you threaten to hold your breath till your face turns blue, maybe you can insinuate some sizzling badinage between Phil and the lickerish Grace Gardner (Barbara Babcock). “There’s a wonderful madness to writing this show,” says Kozoll. “With 13 major characters and so much going on, you can drag anything in.” As a decade of R-rated movies has shown, freedom does not guarantee quality. Talent and ambition, pumping at high octane, can achieve it.

“Recently,” says Director Butler, “we were sitting here wondering, ‘Where did we go right?’ ” No one goes right in prime time without a 30% share of the viewing audience, and right now Hill Street hangs precariously in the mid-20s. “What’s wrong with 12 million viewers?” asks Daniel J. Travanti, who as Captain Frank Furillo runs the station house with high ideals and good sense. Veronica Hamel, who plays Furillo’s elegant girlfriend, Joyce, accuses NBC of having played “Russian roulette” with the program by scheduling it in five different time slots within its first three months. “My family couldn’t find it and there were times when I couldn’t find it,” Hamel says. “I don’t think the Nielsen families ever found it.”

Ironically, Silverman’s successor as NBC chairman is Grant Tinker, the former head of MTM. Tinker is expected to leave decisions on the future of Hill Street to NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff, who promises that “NBC will stay with the show. It is a loss leader that attracts certain viewers back to network TV.” Bochco would rather attract the regular TV audience. But he is pessimistic:

“The vast number of viewers go to the television as a medicine cabinet. They need something to shut them down. But we grab the viewer by the throat and say, ‘You can’t be passive.’ ” Perhaps the exposure of Hill Street Blues on the Emmy show will persuade the mass audience that it might enjoy being a little less careful out there in TV land. —By Richard Corliss.

Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles