Hill Street Blues

Thirty years ago this week, the rookie television drama Hill Street Blues won eight Emmy awards. This was at the time a debut-season record, although West Wing has since topped it.
HSB was great television. It was respectful of policemen and -women, yet it was not worshipful in the manner of Dragnet, it treated them all as fallible and foible-filled human beings.
In some respects it was analogous to Barney Miller, although with the humor/drama balance shifted toward the latter.
The visual style was very different from Barney Miller, though. It was quasi-documentary long before that had become a cliche -- hand-held cameras and unexpected points-of-view, with crucial bits of dialog spoken outside the visual frame. It was also crowded.  People everywhere. That was addictive -- your mind, watching, became accustomed to making some sense out of this surface chaos.

There's a website put together by a British fan, here.