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freedom to sneakily achieve something far richer.
    In this case, NBC got its police show but also something quite different. The pilot, then called
Hill Street Station
, in many ways owed more to MTM sitcoms than to the cop genre. It portrayed the workplace as surrogate family. It married comedy and drama. Its multiple, character-driven story lines took on social and political issues. (The unglamorous look of its station house was inspired by another sitcom:
Barney Miller
.)
Meanwhile, the show’s visual style—gritty and hyperrealistic, with a restless camera and overlapping sound track—showed the marks of the decade of new American filmmaking that had just passed.
    Even now, the first moments of the
Hill Street
pilot, which aired January 15, 1981, feel shockingly modern. As would be the convention for much of its run, the show opened as the cops of Hill Street station, located in an unnamed city that resembled New York, gathered for morning roll call. The handheld camera roved over a vast assemblage of characters, with no conventional cues as to which deserved more of the viewer’s attention than the others. It was an unkempt, sleepy-eyed group, black and white, male and female. The muddy din of dialogue could have been lifted from a Robert Altman film. Finally, the duty sergeant, played by Michael Conrad, calls the gathering to order with a rundown of the previous night’s news and today’s advisories. The mood seesaws giddily from hoots (over a drag queen purse snatcher) to grave silence (news of two gang killings and probable reprisals). Finally, Conrad announces a new dictate from district command, barring the carrying of “bizarre and unauthorized weapons by the officers of this precinct.” With much grumbling, the cops shuffle forward to surrender their arsenal—switchblades, clubs, nunchucks, and guns of every possible variety—until it becomes a sight gag worthy of the Marx Brothers.
    “Okay, let’s roll,” says Conrad, setting up the show’s most famous recurring line: “Hey, let’s be careful out there.” Whereupon the cops matter-of-factly collect their weapons and begin their day.
    Little in the scene would seem out of place on an episode of
The Wire
or
The Shield.
Likewise the rest of the episode, which includes the
Mad Men
–like coy reveal of the police captain’s ongoing affair with the public defender and the possibly fatal shooting of two cops who, until that moment, have appeared to be around primarily for comic relief.
    Unsurprisingly, NBC was perturbed. An internal memo from May 1980 provided a neat accounting of their concerns. It cited focus group testing: “The most prevalent audience reaction indicated that the program was depressing, violent and confusing. . . .” “Too much was crammed into this story. . . .” “The main characters were perceived as being not capable and having flawed personalities. Professionally, they were never completely successful in doing their jobs and personally their lives were in a mess. . . .” “Audiences found the ending unsatisfying. There are too many loose ends. . . .”
    In other words, it was an entirely unwitting blueprint not only for what made
Hill Street Blues
such a historic program, but for all the shows that make up the Third Golden Age.
    • • •
    B ochco was never shy about invoking his autonomy, often threatening to walk rather than follow a network note. That the creation of a television show is largely a state of outright scorched-earth warfare with the very people paying for said creation was an item of faith for Bochco, and he pursued it with the zest of Sun Tzu.
    “I probably did come off as an arrogant asshole,” he said. “But you
had
to be. We were bucking a system. And the reason I slept fine at night, despite having all these terrible wars and knowing how resentful they must have been, was that it was in the show’s best interest and, ultimately, the network’s best interest. I always felt that