Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.
The entertainment world, television, movies, social media, YouTube stuff, we're so bombarded with so much imagery and such a great sense of inhumanity, and there is a coarseness, a coarsening of interaction.
I'd always thought that 'NYPD Blue' really would open those doors. While I think it created a much broader template for cable, I don't think it really did that much for network television.
I think the best work flows out of a collaborative environment.
Imagery is like music.
I tend not to spend a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror. If you say, 'Oh, I did 'Hill Street Blues' or 'L.A. Law' and everything I do has to measure up to some preconceived notion of that,' it would paralyze you.
Privately, we always called 'Hill Street' 'Cop Soap.'
Hill Street Blues gave me an opportunity to work with an ensemble cast of people whose work I admired.
Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.
One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they're good.
Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images.
Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.
You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.
Casting is sort of like looking at paintings. You don't know what you'll like, but you recognize it when you see it.
Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.
'Hill Street,' because of the wacky nature of many of our characters, really allowed us to indulge a kind of cheek-to-jowl juxtaposition of high drama with very low humor.
I remember practically every joke I've ever heard in my life.
Cop shows are by definition melodramatic; they're larger than life. They create very stark contrasts and conflicts emotionally. They're provocative, assuming they grapple with - to the extent that cop shows are mirrors of the culture.
The thing that always interests me from a storytelling point of view is how that moment of trauma, whatever the trauma is, even divorce, your dog dies, whatever it is, the consequence, in terms of people's emotional lives and the way it resonates behaviorally for a long time, is really the stuff that interests me.
When you look at Mark Zuckerberg and Snapchat and all these twentysomething billionaires, it's really kind of fascinating; a classic tale of the haves and have-nots.
