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.
Showing posts with label Barney Miller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barney Miller. Show all posts
16 September 2011
11 March 2011
Atlas Shrugged
That title will boost my hits.
Next month the first movie in a projected trilogy, dramatizing Ayn Rand's notoriously ponderous novel, hits screens near you.
Since the movie is a 21st century event, it has its own webpage here.
Anyway, here is a link to a Slate review of that name.
The review is not especially enthusiastic. I like this line: "Anyone who's seen a SyFy Channel original movie in which a mutated insect battles a mutated amphibian will be comfortable with the production quality."
In general, regular readers will know what are my views on Objectivism. They are, roughly, the views that Murray Rothbard expressed even while Ayn Rand was still formulating this as a philosophy. Any recognition of the supposed need for any sovereign is too much of a concession to the myth of sovereignty.
Further (and this is a related point) the case for freedom is best made not through painfully abstract or conceptualist arguments but through practical demonstrations of how freedom works, and how central planning fails. Hence the title of this blog: Pragmatism Refreshed.
As for the novel, it is almost painfully bad. It was written by someone who could never say anything in a single sentence if a 20-page speech would do the job.
Finally, a guess about the movie: it might be better than a lot of what reaches theatres these days. The Fountainhead was a good movie, after all, and even made for a decent episode of Barney Miller.
Next month the first movie in a projected trilogy, dramatizing Ayn Rand's notoriously ponderous novel, hits screens near you.
Since the movie is a 21st century event, it has its own webpage here.
Anyway, here is a link to a Slate review of that name.
The review is not especially enthusiastic. I like this line: "Anyone who's seen a SyFy Channel original movie in which a mutated insect battles a mutated amphibian will be comfortable with the production quality."
In general, regular readers will know what are my views on Objectivism. They are, roughly, the views that Murray Rothbard expressed even while Ayn Rand was still formulating this as a philosophy. Any recognition of the supposed need for any sovereign is too much of a concession to the myth of sovereignty.
Further (and this is a related point) the case for freedom is best made not through painfully abstract or conceptualist arguments but through practical demonstrations of how freedom works, and how central planning fails. Hence the title of this blog: Pragmatism Refreshed.
As for the novel, it is almost painfully bad. It was written by someone who could never say anything in a single sentence if a 20-page speech would do the job.
Finally, a guess about the movie: it might be better than a lot of what reaches theatres these days. The Fountainhead was a good movie, after all, and even made for a decent episode of Barney Miller.
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