Hill Street Blues

What with shows like "Green Acres" and "Gilligan's Island" being released on DVD, I wondered for longest time if not just silly 60s shows were ever going to be released but if great shows like "L.A. Law" would get their turn.

Back a few years a cable channel ran "Hill Street Blues" but ony the last 2 years of the series. I had always wondered what it might have been like when it began.

This spring Seasons 1 and 2 were released. I watched them all.

Have you ever seen a movie and you wanted to see it so badly and you built up expectations so high that you were disappointed when you saw it?

Einstein said that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stanger than we can imagine.

Seasons 1 and 2 o f HSB was better than I could have imagined.

It started in 1981 and while the content of the shows is old hat by now, and nothing seems new to us in 2006, it did many things for the first time. I was still going to be in high school for more than a year in January 1981, that's how far back that is.

These days for a drama there is at least one recovering alcoholic. Captain Furillo was the first alcoholic to not only be treated like a real person, he was in fact the star of the show. One of his detectives, LaRue, is following the same path. In the 70s and before, on TV drunks were clowns like Foster Brooks, or in the movies like Dudley Moore. They didn't live next door or work with us.

A few things have changed since 1981. Bobby Hill, a black uniform, is subject to comments by people that may have seemed harmless at the time (nobody is burning crosses on his lawn) but which read as pure racism in 2006. Hill is in a funeral parlour where the director shows him the top of the line casket and says "This is the cadillac of caskets , especially popular among your people".

Your people.

Michael Conrad, Sgt Esterhaus, was one of the main characters but Conrad died in 1983 so I had never seen him before. I still remember him as Meathead's Uncle Stan on "All in the Family".

The cascade of actors that passed through the show, and I am doing this off of the top of my head, not searching IMDB: Dennis Franz, Barbara Babcock, Francis McDormand, Jon Cypher, Michael Tucker, Peter Jurasick, Danny Glover, C C H Pounder, David Caruso...

Like good drama, say Shakespeare, and good TV, say Six Feet Under, even though the drive of the show is serious, it is also FUNNY.

Oh, yeah I like the show.

P.S. In Spanish the show is "Capitiane Furillo" I guess the Enlgish title does not translate very well.


TF