Steven Bochco RIP

Growing up, I'll admit, I probably watched too much TV -- but that's because TV had some good stuff on it. And, in retrospect, it was changing. 

As a kid, I enjoyed watching all those 80s and 90's shows that appealed to adolescent minds -- The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Growing Pains, Cheers, Seinfeld, etc -- but there were also other shows, usually dramas, that were darker and morally complex, which featured flawed characters who sometimes made bad decisions, very often because they were living under immense personal and professional pressure. 

Very often those shows had been created or co-created by a man named Steven Bochco.  He died yesterday at the age of 74.

His big hits in the closing decades of the 20th century were Hill Street Blues, LA Law, Doogie Howser MD, and NYPD Blue. These were brilliantly written, very moving, and often very funny shows that showed the complexity of people living their lives in intense professional environments. In many ways, those shows gave me insights into what it would be like to be a grown up, what the worlds of love and friendship and work might be like, how things could erupt at any moment that might upend people's lives -- and how we weren't always guaranteed happy endings. The plots of episodes would build on each other in the manner of soap operas (but without the cheesiness) and sometimes characters, characters who we had come to love and adore, would -- GASP! -- die. Like, you know, in real life.  

Today we live in "The Golden Age of Television" (TV is the only things in our society that seems to be getting better instead of worse) but it wouldn't have been possible if Bochco hadn't paved the way more than thirty years earlier. To this, we owe him a huge debt.

And Steven Bochco was a NYC boy, a graduate of the High School of Performing Arts. RIP.

P.S. I remember an episode of LA Law that I saw when I was a kid, where the sleazy lawyer Arnie is trying to convince his hapless secretary Roxanne to help him defect to another law firm. She's torn, excited by the opportunity but saying that she doesn't want to leave the old firm because it's her "home" and the people who work there are her "family." Arnie then reminds Roxanne of a couple of times (from previous seasons) when she almost got fired and was also denied a raise. He tells her that, despite her feelings, this firm isn't really her home and the people there aren't really her family. 

That, right there, was what made that show and others by Bochco so great: a mostly unsympathetic character like Arnie offering an underling some very good, brutally honest advice, based on events that had happened earlier in the season. It also taught me, a kid who had never had a job at that point, what the working world was really like. I never forgot that lesson and have remembered well into my long working life. 

Thanks again, Mr Bochco.

Hill Street Blues, LA Law, Doogie Howser MD, and NYPD Blue also had the best opening credits and themes of any TV shows at the time. I can't find one of them but here are the other two: