Hill Street Moonlighting

 The Beloved Spouse™ and I recently opened the Hulu vaults for a couple of shows we loved when they were first aired, Hill Street Blues and Moonlighting. We did not last long with either.

 

Hill Street was first. Few programs have broken as much fertile ground as well as Steven Bochco’s premiere effort. The enormous ensemble cast, showing the cops’ lives beyond the station, the stresses no one thought about in the early 1980s. The list of what Bochco showed first could fill a blog post of its own.

 

That’s why I feel half guilty about cutting out near the end of Season 2. Bochco broke the ground, but a lot of people have since planted crops that flourished there. The Wire. The Shield. Even Bochco’s and David Milch’s NYPD Blue. All took the baton from Hill Street and ran with it, pushing the envelope ever farther. While they might not be here if not for Hill Street, Hill Street cannot compete.

 

Again, much of that is due to changing standards in television. Hill Street was among the first shows – and, I believe, the first cop show – to extend stories beyond one episode. This has become such a common thing it is now typical for crime series to invest an entire season in one primary line and hang lesser plots from that tentpole. Think of how clearly all five seasons of The Wire focused on a primary story while retaining others to flesh it out, sometimes going back all the way to the show’s origin.

 

Networks and streaming services now understand viewers have adequate attention spans to handle such programming; Bochco had to teach them. Watching several of the three-to-four-episode arcs we could not help but think that some stories deserved more time to breathe. Looking back forty years, Hill Street’s moves in that direction seem tentative. We’re past that now. Bochco’s genius was in many ways hoist on its own petard.

 

(Full disclosure: Hill Street left Hulu about the time we finished Season 1. We found it on Amazon, but after another handful of episodes they started charging $1.99 an episode, which adds up if you intend to watch them all. TBS found it on the Internet Archive, but that was more trouble than we wanted to take for a show we weren’t sure how long we wanted to stick with.)

 

Then there is Moonlighting. Both of us loved that show when it originally aired, but it fell flat with us after a few episodes on the re-viewing. What was wrong?

 

Personally, I remembered it as being funnier. I wondered why I didn’t think so this time – it’s not like my sense of humor has become any more elevated* – until TBS mentioned one evening how Bruce Willis’s irresponsible smart-ass act has been done to death. We were tired of it.

 

Again, it’s not Bruce Willis’s fault that he helped to create such a lasting trope. That still doesn’t make it any fresher after all this time. Each episode seemed like something we’d seen before, and done better.

 

(Even fuller disclosure: It also did not help that I have since learned Cybill Shepherd was a pluperfect bitch on the show. This is why it’s never good to know too much about performers’ backgrounds.)

 

I feel badly that two shows I loved when they were fresh and new no longer entertain me. It’s a little like seeing an old flame years later and expecting him or her to look the same. Even if their personalities haven’t changed – and certainly Hill Street’s and Moonlighting’s have not; I mean, they’re on videotape – they look and feel old.

 

So do I. That means I don’t have the time to stick with something because I might like it down the road; I don’t have as much road left as I used to, and it’s a dead end. I might watch Hill Street Blues again on my own sometime as research for a book, but probably not. There are far more timely and incisive examples today.

 

Thank you, Steven Bochco and Glen Gordon Caron, as well as everyone involved with each of your projects, for not only providing the younger me with wonderful and memorable entertainment, but also for raising my standards in such a manner your programs have lost much of their appeal, though not their luster.

 

(* - We watched both Cheers and Frazier start to finish a couple of years ago and loved them. All in the Family also holds up well.)