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.
Knowledge is warranted belief -- it is the body of belief that we build up because, while living in this world, we've developed good reasons for believing it. What we know, then, is what works -- and it is, necessarily, what has worked for us, each of us individually, as a first approximation. For my other blog, on the struggles for control in the corporate suites, see www.proxypartisans.blogspot.com.
Knowledge is warranted belief -- it is the body of belief that we build up because, while living in this world, we've developed good reasons for believing it. What we know, then, is what works -- and it is, necessarily, what has worked for us, each of us individually, as a first approximation. For my other blog, on the struggles for control in the corporate suites, see www.proxypartisans.blogspot.com.
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