Television: Midwinter Night's Dreams

• Share

Three new shows to lighten the cold-weather blues

HILL STREET BLUES (NBC) Being the network of Real People has its disadvantages. For the past few years, viewers have shown less interest in the exploits of the characters in NBC series than they have in the perils of its president Fred Silverman. While Silverman's face adorned the front pages, the network's ratings and profits plummeted. Now, though, as NBC finally unveils its new fare, Silverman may have something to crow about. Two shows—Flamingo Road, a sultrier Dallas, and Harper Valley P. T.A., featuring Barbara Eden in a smile and a wet T shirt—have already buoyed the network's ratings. A third show, which is being tested at 10 p.m. on Thursdays and Saturdays, offers even more. It is a comedy-drama called Hill Street Blues, and it is the best new series since Taxi.

In the '70s, TV opened its cyclops eye wide enough to recognize that Americans don't spend all of their time on the Ponderosa spread or in suburban kitchens. Some people actually work for a living, and those people became the focus for some of TV's finest series: Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi, Lou Grant, WKRP in Cincinnati (all by craftsmen who worked for, or had graduated from, MTM Enterprises). In Hill Street Blues (written for MTM by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll, and directed by Robert Butler), all is motion and commotion; for Hill Street is part of a nameless inner city, and the Blues are the men and women of the local police precinct. Each episode traces a day in the life of the precinct, as the Blues try to defuse street crime, play social worker at knife point, slip out of an octopus stranglehold of red tape, keep their private lives from ending in a singles bar or the divorce court.

Sometimes their allies are teenage gang lords who come on like Geronimo crossed with the Blues Brothers; sometimes their toughest adversaries are officers whose tensions threaten to explode in a one-man apocalypse. The show treats those on both sides of the law with respect for their crotchets and obsessions.

Sergeant Phil Esterhaus (Michael Conrad) is a ham-hock-faced man in his 50s with a gentle disposition, a teenage girlfriend and an absurdist's command of the bureaucratic vocabulary—"Be reminded: female officers will, according to policy, perform all in-depth searches of female suspects." Howard Hunter (James Sikking) is a SWAT man with a Patton complex; he shoots his way into liquor stores and out of toilet stalls, and warns his boss that "you wouldn't want to be accused of having a bunch of daisies where your cinch belt ought to be." Detective Mick Belker

(Bruce Weitz) thinks he's Serpico; everybody else thinks he's psycho. In charge of the carnage and chaos is Captain Francis Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti), a good, strong man breeding an ulcer while trying to do a tough job. At the end of every crisis-strewn day, each superb show, Furillo struggles home in an uneasy truce with his job, his willful woman (Veronica Hamel) and himself. Doubtless, he feels very much like Fred Silverman. Viewers will do him and themselves a favor by visiting Hill Street as often as possible.

—Richard Corliss