Reviewing Movies

Back in 1981 TV Shows still ran to twenty-some episodes a season, the audio was in mono, even if the picture was in colour. Hill Street Blues survived and ran for seven seasons because a TV Executive liked it and needed a one-hour show to fill his schedule and ran with it despite rock bottom ratings. Ground-breaking in the portrayal of real-life human beings who happened to be cops rather than bodies who wore uniforms, performed chase scenes and caught bad guys. The show has a large ensemble cast all of whom are fully developed characters. They have lives outside their work as police officers and they perform their duties despite their weaknesses and conflicts on and off the job. The people they deal with live in a disadvantaged neighbourhood and are not portrayed in black and white terms but as human beings faced with difficult circumstances who make bad choices. The actors were given latitude to improvise beyond the lines they were given and the opportunity to influence the arc of their character's storyline to fit their own personalities. The degree to which this show influenced the way later shows were written, shot, and edited for TV cannot be over-stated.

Alas only 2 seasons of the show have come to DVD to date but after marathon sessions glued to the show I discovered the fifty-minute retrospective on the back of disk 3 which shows surviving members of the cast decades later fondly discussing the show and the characters they portrayed intercut with snippets of the scenes they describe which among other things refreshes our memory so that we can match the mature individuals with the youthful actors on screen. This is a show that demands that its viewers pay attention and digest what they are watching. It is not like so many summer blockbusters that show endless actions sequences strung together by a weak plot; here the violence hits home because we get to see how it affects the people involved. Real men do break down and cry. It fully deserves the 10 out of 10 ratings it almost universally receives today.