HILL STREET BLUES Hill Street Blues

SEASON 5 EPISODE 16: “Washington Deceased”
Written by: Frank South
Directed by: Mark Frost
Airdate: February 7, 1985

Frost becomes the first and only writer during the run of Hill Street to direct an episode (unless we count Greg Hoblit, who was never a regular member of the writing staff but did cowrite one episode before starting his directing career). Frost had directing experience in theater, and had also directed the 1979 PBS documentary The Road Back about boxer and Minnesota native Jim Beattie (which sadly appears to be lost media), but this was his first time directing a filmed scripted work. Bochco was encouraging of Frost’s ambition to branch out, and allowed him to spend time on set, and ultimately, gave him the opportunity to direct this episode, with guidance and support from Hoblit.

The direction of the episode is very much in the Hill Street house style, with no real showy camera angles or editing or anything (in contrast to some of the more gonzo stuff he did in Episode 7 of Twin Peaks, or the American Chronicles pilot). It very much blends in and feels like the work of any of the seasoned TV directors who regularly worked on the show, which is a compliment in and of itself for a first-time director. Frost has said that, while he ultimately decided he preferred the more solitary pursuit of writing, what he really enjoyed about directing was working with actors. Indeed, if there’s one thing that makes this episode stand out, it’s the fact that it is very focused on the characters and relationships as opposed to procedural stuff, and the performances feel particularly vibrant. Also, in many scenes, the actors seem to be having a lot of fun. There’s some serious subject matter in this one, but there’s also a fair bit of camaraderie and camp, which I think made it a good fit for Frost: both because he later showed an affinity for such material on Twin Peaks, and because he knew the cast, likely making the atmosphere on set more collegial and easygoing.

Writer Frank South presumably got the gig due to a pair of one-act plays he penned, Precious Blood and Rattlesnake in a Cooler, which were directed by Robert Altman in L.A. and off-Broadway, and later filmed by Altman for PBS in 1982. After writing this one episode of Hill Street, his first TV gig, South went on to work on staff at Fame, Cagney & Lacey, and Melrose Place (where he rose to the rank of executive producer), as well as co-executive producing the final season of Baywatch. In the 21st century, he seems to have been mostly focused on literature, including writing a memoir about his experiences living with ADHD as well as authoring a children’s book.

Right from the outset, Furillo is uncharacteristically angry, albeit justifiably so, providing a nice little emotional arc for Dan Travanti to play throughout the episode. In the cold open alone, he’s furious about new demoralizing nickel-and-dime measures from accounting, requiring his officers to pay for personal calls and damage to units; he’s initially not thrilled with Mayo refusing to go out on yet another hooker detail, although being sensitive to her charms (as well as impliedly feeling he owes her one for the dental undercover), he quickly becomes sympathetic; and for a moment, he seems as if he’s seconds from getting into a fist fight with a racist and disgruntled lieutenant on loan from Polk Ave.

The major storyline of the episode revolves around the pursuit of a killer who’s decapitating prostitutes (first briefly mentioned in the prior episode’s roll call), although the actual investigation is just a springboard to highlight the fallout of Mayo and Daniels’s date. Patsy receives her most central role yet in an episode, and this is probably also the most heavily Daniels has ever been featured in a single episode. The progression of the situation is well written (mostly—I’ll come back to that in a bit). Daniels, his ego wounded from Mayo’s rejection, engages in classic retaliation tactics: publicly cornering her over her refusal to go out on the hooker undercover op, implying in front of all her colleagues that she’s a coward, and then firing her once he finally goads her into being sort-of insubordinate (although, as Furillo later points out, Daniels in his emotional state fucks even this up, as he prematurely fires her before she actually has an opportunity to refuse his order). It’s a very effective portrayal for the era of the type of harassment that results from the combination of a power imbalance and a man’s hurt pride; obviously still an incredibly relevant topic today. Daniels’s dialogue has some doozies, but the best is, “I want you out on the street, Detective Mayo. Dressed like a whore.” Oof. Heavy-handed, yes, but effective.

To be blunt, I don’t think either Mimi Kuzyk or Jon Cypher is a particularly good actor (although Cypher is certainly good at playing the one smug note that is generally required of him in most Daniels scenes). It’s Travanti who really carries this storyline for me, as Furillo tries to navigate this very touchy situation, deploying his outrage at Daniels in a tactical and constructive way. Unfortunately, as with the dentist storyline, instead of the show dealing with the perpetrator of harassment in a more serious manner, Daniels is instead turned into a comedically pathetic figure, as he realizes the error of his ways and breaks down in crocodile tears. From a writing standpoint, this feels totally unearned, and undermines the strong material that came before. Accepting the scene for what it is, though, from a directorial and performance standpoint, it’s pretty fun. Cypher’s atonement isn’t remotely naturalistic, but it’s great in a campy/soapy over-the-top way that anticipates some Twin Peaks performances, and is a side of Daniels we’ve never seen before. Travanti is a really great straight man through all this stuff, as Frank’s anger at Daniels melts away into pity and then just discomfort. After praising Frank for being a good man, and unexpectedly hugging him and saying “Bless you,” Daniels then bounds out into the hallway and also—for no reason at all—hugs and kisses (!) Ray (who as we know hates Daniels). It’s all delightfully goofy. That’s not quite the end, though, as Daniels does give a somewhat sincere apology to Mayo, although he is again unable at the very last to avoid calling her “damn sexy.”

The other major storyline in the episode involves a sting operation targeting public health inspectors on the take. Incidentally, the DOH inspector they arrest is played by Troy Evans, a.k.a. Principal George Wolchezk in the Twin Peaks pilot. I wonder what if any role Frost played in Evans’s casting on Peaks, having previously directed him. It’s also worth noting that Evans had played an identical role in Hill Street Season 2, as a public health inspector taking bribes who gets busted, except that the character had a different name. Yet another instance of the producers finding a very specific niche that they liked an actor for.

Once again, as in the A-plot, the actual investigative element of the sting operation is almost incidental, an excuse to highlight the characters and relationships. LaRue pranks surly Lieutenant Taber with a fake severed head (it’s said that J.D. is moonlighting on the set of an indie horror film called Hacksaws from Hell), and Taber has a heart attack. Terrified of the consequences, J.D. is ambivalent about the idea of Taber regaining consciousness, but when he does, it turns out he never even saw the head. Instead of counting his blessings, a gleeful LaRue decides to pull the stunt again on Coffey. Kiel Martin and Taurean Blacque are clearly having a great time with this stuff.

The climax of this storyline is very fun, as Neal and the other officers turn the tables by scaring the shit out of J.D. when an enraged Coffey whips out his gun and seemingly kills Washington. This is the third time we’ve seen LaRue and/or Washington stage a prank where one or the other of them dies, but it’s fun seeing LaRue as the target of the con this time. My only complaint is that it should be as obvious to J.D. as it is to the audience that Coffey would never get this hysterical, and that it’s clearly a prank. Once the con is revealed, the guys sloppily sing a few bars of the 1969 soul hit “Backfield in Motion,” clearly really enjoying themselves. (Although I question Renko knowing this song, as he’s previously implied a disdain for R&B.)

The C-plot revolves around the grim new edicts from accounting, and initially centers mainly on Renko and Hill: in light of the requirement that officers pay for damage to units, the two inevitably continue their unlucky streak with vehicles going all the way back to the pilot. You can tell that Frost and Haid were just having a ball here. This is also the only place in the episode where Frost gets to direct a tiny bit of action. As fatass Renko is gleefully stuffing his face, a speeding car whips by and takes the door off their unit. Later, they get a new unit, which turns out to have no brakes and crashes them straight through a newsstand, in the midst of a bewildered Goldblume trying to Mirandize the hooker killer.

The scene where Furillo finally gets to confront departmental bureaucrat Albert Desjardin is a delight. We first met Desjardin last season, when he busted Leo for stealing envelopes. I can’t help but see Frank and his defiant attitude as a surrogate for Steve Bochco, and Desjardin’s petty bean-counter efforts, cutting the legs out from under those doing the real work, as a stand-in for MTM exec Arthur Price. Travanti is great when he decides to make a long-distance call to his Uncle Tomasso Feltrinelli in Turin, right in front of Desjardins. This type of petty noncompliance is exactly the sort of thing I could see Bochco doing, based on some of the stories he tells in his autobiography (making his eventual firing not particularly surprising). Furillo (Bochco?) does display some self-awareness in the epilogue, realizing that his egotistical display brought him a bit too close to Chief Daniels territory for comfort (although obviously, Frank wasn’t sexually harassing anyone, and in fact, his displays of petulance throughout this episode, while perhaps partially ego-driven, are always on behalf of protecting his people’s interests).

Other thoughts:

One demonstration of the goofy attitude on set: as Jablonski is enthusiastically hyping up the bowling league in roll call, Renko sets up a bunch of orange juice containers like pins and knocks them down with a cruller, to the amusement of all around him except for one annoyed extra. I’m guessing this was an improvisation by Frost’s crony Charlie Haid.

Lieutenant Mel Taber is played by Dana Elcar, best known for playing law enforcement superiors of one type or another on Dark Shadows, Baretta, and MacGyver. Baretta, of course, starred Robert Blake, who still appears in every Hill Street episode in a photo in Furillo’s office which is actually the poster for Electra Glide in Blue. Elcar’s successor as Baretta’s boss after he left at the end of the first season was Edward Grover, who appears in Hill Street’s “Gung Ho” episode as FBI Agent Davis. Chino “Fats” Williams, who regularly appeared as a detective on Baretta, later played the small but memorable role of strip club barker Theotis Washington in Storyville. And, finally, Dana Elcar’s body double on MacGyver was one Don S. Davis.

Frost gets some good moments from the always-reliable Betty Thomas, showing a nice mix of terror and courage when a pimp holds Bates at knifepoint, and vindictiveness later when she interrogates the guy.

Fay has a very minor but amusing bit in this episode where she keeps trying to get people to notice that her braces are off. My favorite is when Henry guesses that she’s wearing a new blouse, and she angrily says that she wore it on their first date. Henry pissily says, “That’s a long way to go to take a cheap shot, Fay.”

When Furillo confronts Daniels, Frank’s description of Mayo and Daniels’s date is FAR more detailed than what Patsy told him in the earlier scene. I guess we can assume that Furillo and Mayo had a second conversation offscreen, but realistically, this is probably an instance of shows during that era assuming people weren’t paying that much attention, and not really counting on VCR culture yet to allow viewers to go back and check things.

Although he doesn’t have much of a role in this episode, it’s Belker’s thirty-seventh birthday. In the final scene of the episode (in which it’s snowing, a nice bit of atmosphere we don’t see often on the L.A.-based show), Tataglia has broken into the RV (it’s not entirely clear how she even knew he was living there), and wants to reunite with him. It’s not a particularly satisfying closing to the episode, as these break-up-and-get-back-together storylines are such a predictable, boring engine for drama on TV shows.

Beginning with this episode, there’s a really bizarre phenomenon in the cast credits. For the rest of the season, Robert Hirschfeld (Leo) is credited twice on every episode: as a “starring” regular in the main titles, and again in the end credits as “also starring.” I don’t know if this reflects some change in his contractual status or is just a weird accident, but I can’t recall any other instance of this happening on a series that I’m aware of, especially for eight episodes straight! I will say that his promotion to series regular has really been a giant nothing-burger; other than the brief storyline about him reuniting with his wife, it seems like he’s actually had a smaller role this season than ever before, generally just having a line or two per episode. Very strange.
 
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SEASON 5 EPISODES 17-21

As with the prior batch of episodes, the procedural/investigative storylines continue to be almost entirely episodic, while the ongoing character arcs provide an element of serialization.

“A Passage to Libya” returns to the gangster storyline from two episodes back, with Jennifer Tilly’s Gina Srignoli being enlisted to wear a wire at Al DiPiano’s joint. This climaxes in a shootout wherein Goldblume saves Gina’s life, leading to an improbable love affair between the two that continues for the next several episodes. There’s also a storyline where Fay tries to help a woman in an abusive relationship. The focus is again on Fay’s frustration at how hamstrung she is in her ability to actually aid victims—especially when the victim is ambivalent about even wanting help, a situation sadly familiar to anyone who’s worked with victims of domestic violence.

There’s also another in the long line of humorous/heartwarming Belker C-plots, wherein he has repeated run-ins with the whimsically-named Sturgeon Musel, a one-man-band who’s blocking the sidewalk. This type of Belker storyline feels pretty well-worn at this point, but the show gets some good mileage out of Musel’s amusing ardor for the one-man-band’s proud heritage, as well as his melancholy that the art is fading away with the dawn of the digital age, when a whole band can be created instantaneously on a computer. Musel is played by former folk singer Hamilton Camp (whom I know best as the voice of Gizmoduck on the original 1980s DuckTales). The producers obviously liked Camp in the role of cantankerous underdog; back in Season 2, he played Grace Gardner’s neighbor and former lover Buck Mullins in some amusing scenes with Esterhaus, and he’ll return again in yet another role in Season 7. Musel provides a sweet grace note to the episode—literally and metaphorically—when he plays under Tataglia’s window as Mick moves into Robin’s place, feeling a mixture of contentment and fear.

I really like “El Capitan,” which unlike many of the other episodes this season, feels like the show trying something different, and experimenting a bit with the formula. It’s a very character-based episode with almost no policework, aside from one significant storyline, which I’ll get to in a moment. The episode deals with Furillo attending a mandatory retreat, with Chief Daniels, Deputy Chief Warren Briscoe, and the captains from the city’s other precincts. The “retreat” is actually an “encounter” session, with the intention of giving everyone an opportunity to air grievances in a safe environment, rather than letting them fester below the surface. Things start off in delightful fashion, with everyone sandbagging Chief Daniels over his hypocrisy: the obsession with image above all else which has defined his character for the entire show. The oblivious blowhard somehow didn’t anticipate that for once, in that room, no one has to put up with his self-aggrandizing bullshit. He responds by alternatively sulking and lashing out, demonstrating once and for all what an absolutely shit boss he is, somehow bringing morale even lower than it was to begin with, and finally driving one disillusioned captain to quit.

As someone who regularly attends A.A. meetings, Furillo is certainly used to this type of group-sharing dynamic, but he’s noticeably silent for most of the episode (except for two instances where he joins in criticizing Daniels). He just sits there looking more and more miserable and disheveled as the day progresses, his posture uncharacteristically slouchy. Finally, very reluctantly, he’s prodded into discussing why he needs to keep himself reined in so tightly at all times: “I’m an alcoholic. I’m capable of things that are monstrous.” He then nearly gets into a fist fight with Briscoe after a (relatively harmless) crack about Joyce. Our man Furillo looks to be unravelling, although in the following few episodes he seems on the surface to be back to himself.

Meanwhile, back at the precinct, Calletano is Acting Captain, and taking himself way too seriously; as we’ve seen before, Ray is much more interested in the prestige and the trappings of being captain than in actually being competent to do the job. This leads to some amusing, but of course horribly racist, instances of LaRue and Renko impersonating Ray’s accent. The storyline reaches its punchline when it turns out that the tea Ray brought in (from his wife’s cousin in Ecuador) has marijuana in it, and Ray ends up with several stoned cops…most hilariously, Renko and Hill, who conduct a delightfully surreal car stop while totally baked.

The one major, actual cop-show setpiece in “El Capitan” improbably also acts as the grand conclusion to the five-episode saga about Howard Hunter owning an RV. After Howard naively let a potential buyer drive off with it in the prior episode, the RV ends up at the center of a hostage situation, with a lady cop held captive inside. It turns out that the guy who stole the RV in the prior episode had kidnapped his son from the mother, and the two have been living the father-and-son fugitive lifestyle ever since, crisscrossing the country in a series of stolen vehicles. The show has done these hostage situations many, many times before, going back to the pilot, but this one is unexpectedly poignant. The dad’s not truly a violent guy, and while he maybe hasn’t set the best example for his son, the kid has had a genuinely great time traveling the country and living an outlaw fantasy with his father. There’s a lovely line when the dad finally decides to give himself up; he tells the boy, “You just remember all of it, alright? When they tell you what it was and what it wasn’t, you remember all of it.”

The Goldblume-Gina romance, which continues in this episode and several subsequent ones, doesn’t make a ton of sense on paper. She’s materialistic and opportunistic, and yet, she seems to be genuinely drawn to Henry’s humanity and kindness, traits that she perhaps hasn’t experienced in a long time, if ever. It makes more sense from Henry’s side: it’s textbook midlife crisis, and everyone around him clearly thinks he looks foolish, even the people who are happy that he’s happy (such as Furillo). I mean, I get it…she’s rich, she looks like Jennifer Tilly…who needs emotional depth? She also fits the rather immature vision of Henry’s fantasy woman that we saw him longing for last season, when he was infatuated with the Kay Lenz prostitute character: she’s kind of dangerous, an outlaw, manipulative, and is obsessed with sex. Real teenage fantasy stuff.

The whirlwind romance between Goldblume and the widow Srignoli ruffles two people’s feathers: Garibaldi, who essentially feels like he called dibs on Gina (gross); and Fay, who is jealous and disgusted with Henry’s shallowness. This eventually leads to Fay and Harry going out, in a sort of spite-dating revenge against Goldblume. While I’ve come around on Fay somewhat over the past couple of seasons, these are still two of the least interesting characters on the show, and putting them together in a three-minutes-plus scene at a Chinese restaurant is…not exactly riveting television.

A subplot in “Passage to Libya” and “El Capitan” deals with the fallout between Jablonski and Belker, now that Mick is back together with Robin, and Stan feels abandoned. Belker, who’s never had a real friend before, is touched by and grateful for the way Stosh reached out to him when he was down, and equally hurt by the way he’s now acting. But Mick deals with it in an emotionally mature way, and eventually the two sweetly reach an understanding (in the men’s room, of course…after briefly being interrupted by a stoned and snoring Fay sleeping in a stall).

“The Life and Time of Dominic Florio Jr.” (which has Frost as one of the credited writers, along with Lewis, Milch, and Epstein) is the abortion episode, and while not a bad episode by any stretch, it feels “issue-driven” in a slightly forced way, whereas the show usually incorporates topical subject matter in a more natural plot/character-driven manner. I imagine that’s at least in part due to how divisive the issue was (is). The history of abortion storylines on American network television is a fascination of mine, so forgive me for going on a tangent in the next few paragraphs; but I think it is important to contextualize this episode by understanding what had come before on other series.

In the 1970s, Norman Lear initiated a new era of scripted TV confronting serious issues and trumpeting liberal progressive values, and that trend continued into the 1980s, with Hill Street certainly as a major example. While Hill Street addressed difficult topics like racial inequality, class inequality, rape, domestic abuse, substance abuse, mental health, homosexuality, etc., other shows like St. Elsewhere were featuring storylines about the AIDS epidemic, euthanasia, and nuclear warfare. But throughout the 1980s and 1990s, abortion seemed to always be the one major issue that, if it was addressed at all, had to be handled in a very specific way, with the transparently obvious goal of minimizing any fallout from religious viewers that could cost a network precious advertising dollars.

Thanks to Mad Men, we all know that the first abortion storyline on American network television was a 1962 episode of legal drama The Defenders entitled “The Benefactor,” an aggressively pro-abortion episode about the lead characters defending a doctor. Mad Men’s fictionalization of the circumstances surrounding the episode takes some creative liberties, but gets the main thrust correct: all the series’ usual advertisers pulled out (pun intended, I guess). CBS’s Bill Paley insisted that the episode would air, sponsor or no; they eventually found a manufacturer of watchbands that was willing to be associated with the episode. Several major CBS affiliates refused to air the episode, but the public response was actually overwhelmingly positive.

Daytime soaps seemed to have a slightly easier time with abortion storylines, perhaps because advertisers figured that religious housewives wouldn’t be watching such racy shows to begin with. The first series regular on American television to have an abortion was early in the run of Another World, in 1964. The character Pat Matthews has an abortion that leaves her sterile; then, in anguish, she shoots her boyfriend. In true soap opera fashion, she’s eventually acquitted of murder and marries her defense attorney, then has “corrective surgery,” allowing the loving couple to have twins! Based on this summary, it’s probably fair to say that this portrayal was not exactly pro-abortion. Probably the most famous soap opera abortion was on All My Children in 1973, when love-to-hate-her bad girl Erica Kane aborts her husband’s child, simply because she doesn’t want to end her modeling career. The choice of the villainous Erica as the subject of this storyline was reportedly made so that there wouldn’t be the semblance of the producers endorsing her decision. In one of the most despised soap opera twists of all time, the show infamously unaborted the child in 2005 when it was absurdly revealed that the doctor had secretly transplanted the embryo into his own wife’s uterus!

And then there’s Maude. Almost inarguably THE defining abortion storyline on TV is the 1972 two-parter “Maude’s Dilemma” wherein, after much discussion and consideration, Bea Arthur’s married lead character goes through with the procedure, because she feels she’s too old for a pregnancy. The episodes were written by Susan Harris, who would go on to create The Golden Girls and Soap. The episodes attracted a large number of negative letters, and many affiliates refused to rerun them.

Following Maude, it seems the topic was more or less ignored on primetime scripted series for the next decade (ironically, the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling may have made networks even more skittish about the issue, given the fervor the ruling created in the religious right). Then, in the span of just a few weeks in October and November 1982, three series improbably addressed the rarely-seen topic: The always-saccharine and preachy The Facts of Life featured a one-time-only guest high school student who had an abortion; Dallas’s Lucy Ewing undergoes the procedure following a rape, and suffers a serious depressive episode afterward; and St. Elsewhere, in the first episode of television ever written by Oz creator Tom Fontana, featured a couple whose unborn child has Down’s Syndrome…after much deliberation, they choose to terminate the pregnancy. There was also a two-part 1984 storyline on the Emmy-nominated sitcom Buffalo Bill involving series co-lead Joanna Cassidy’s character having an abortion, which according to the show’s co-creator triggered piles of intense hate mail, and ultimately contributed to the show’s cancelation.

While I’m probably leaving out some more minor examples, as far as I can gather, that was just about it for shows dealing with the topic prior to this Hill Street episode. After this episode, it seems like the floodgates opened a bit, with both Cagney & Lacey and St. Elsewhere doing episodes the following season that focused on family planning clinics being bombed, and other shows throughout the late 1980s and 1990s following suit in addressing the topic with somewhat more regularity. What seemed to be true during that 1980s-1990s era, though, is that abortion storylines could only be handled in three ways on primetime network TV: (1) The woman ultimately has a miscarriage, freeing her from the culpability of making the choice either way (and removing her agency); (2) The woman chooses to go through with the pregnancy (Motherhood is awesome!); (3) The conciliatory “equal time” approach, showing that people on both sides of the issue make some great points! Somewhat impressively, Hill Street actually manages to take all three of these approaches over the course of this episode.

The main plot involves an anti-abortion protester accidentally knocking a pregnant woman down a flight of stairs at a clinic, causing her to give birth to a one-pound premature infant that dies within hours. I can appreciate the rich irony of the scenario, but it’s a little too clever by half in how contrived it is. The protester’s existential and moral anguish at having done the exact thing he was passionately protesting against is given a lot of screentime, and he’s portrayed as sympathetic (if a little nuts). The would-be mom, Ann Florio, is played by Patricia Wettig, real-life wife of Ken “Harry Garibaldi” Olin; she came to be best known for her Emmy-winning role on thirtysomething, where she also costarred with her husband. Ann is also extremely sympathetic; in fact, the cards are ridiculously stacked to make the audience feel bad for her. She has an unemployed (but decent and supportive) husband, and multiple children to support including one who is developmentally disabled. Her rationale for going to the clinic: “I was just so tired. I was so tired that I didn’t think I had the strength.” But, true to form for this era of TV, she had already decided against having an abortion before she left the clinic, so now she feels like God is punishing her for having even inquired for basic information.

Pretty quickly, it becomes clear that the only bad guy in this scenario is Frances McDormand’s (pro-abortion) public defender Connie Chapman, whose character begins to come into clearer focus. She’s bitter, self-centered, condescending, and has an extremely low opinion of her clients. While Joyce has always had an element of entitled white privilege, she also was always deeply invested in upholding her clients’ rights. Chapman, on the other hand, seems to believe that all her clients are guilty, just wants to dispose of cases as quickly as possible, and—in this episode—takes gleeful joy in the fact that she’s going to get to humiliate and scandalize her client by arguing a defense that’s diametrically opposed to his morals. “Here’s this guy, thinks life begins with the first randy thought,” she cackles to a disgusted Davenport. “His defense is gonna be the fetus wasn’t life!”

In terms of our main characters’ views, we already know from a prior storyline that Fay is anti-abortion. We know that LaRue has paid for abortions in the past. Catholic Furillo, who was pragmatic about Fay getting an abortion in the earlier storyline, refuses to voice his opinion here when asked: as usual, keeping his personal views close to his (well-tailored) vest. Furillo uses the neutral phrase “anti-abortion,” whereas Jablonski says “right to life” and calls the clinic an “abortion mill.” Renko is anti-abortion. Most conflicted is Davenport (possibly because of her own inability to conceive). Near the end of the episode, she gives our only clue to her position on the issue, when she says, “I hate that man’s position,” implying that she is (predictably, given her left-leaning politics) pro-abortion. She adamantly wants to charge the protester with murder, while Furillo and Bernstein both feel at best they could maybe get involuntary manslaughter on the facts. (The question of whether it’s consistent to consider a fetus a person for purposes of a murder charge, when it’s not considered a person if the mother chooses abortion, is a bit of deep water that I’m not going to wade into for obvious reasons.) Joyce gets her murder charge, but she begins to develop sympathy for the defendant after seeing how he’s being represented by Chapman. After saying that she hates the man’s position, Joyce continues, adding that he still deserves “his consistency and his sincerity.” Which I guess is an admirable sentiment, but from a writing standpoint, whatever point the episode is trying to make is becoming awfully murky. This is that “everybody on both sides is great” approach that I was talking about before.

The episode closes on two monologues that muddy the waters even further. First, in a scene that could be played at a pro-life event, Bates heartbreakingly describes to a completely silent Coffey the feeling of having an abortion, in a way that possibly implies that she had one at some point in the past (“...the feeling you got in your belly. They’re gonna tell you what it means. You know what it means. You know what you’re doin’. You know what you did. And you know what’s gone. And you gotta forgive yourself”). Betty Thomas is wonderful here, Emmy-worthy, but placing this scene so close to the end, almost as a summing-up of the episode, really makes it clear how terrified the show’s liberal writers are of even remotely appearing to take a pro-choice stance. Then, in the usual Davenport-Furillo closing bedroom scene, Joyce pontificates in absurdly heavy-handed fashion about how the poor protester’s suffering is comparable to the woman who just lost her child! I don’t think anyone on either side of the divide would agree with that; again, it feels like the writers bending over backwards to make the anti-abortion guy sympathetic.

The B-plot in this episode—which continues into the next one—involves the first black family to move into an all-white housing project, leading to racial tensions. In this episode, this storyline mainly serves to highlight a growing divide between Renko and Hill. Andy is a family man now, even more in favor of the status quo than ever, chattering endlessly about money and realty, and bitching about these blacks trying to rock the boat. Finally, Bobby can’t take it anymore and calls Renko a redneck, just before they wade into a dangerous situation where Andy fails to back him up in a timely fashion.

Continued in next post due to character limit.
 
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CONTINUED FROM PRIOR POST

Bringing a little levity are two comic relief subplots. Jablonski has bowled a perfect 300 game, but due to over-oiling of the lane, the bowling association won’t sanction it as official. LaRue records a promotional film for a prospective private security service, but his acting skills leave much to be desired, and the producer (played by a delightfully smarmy Brent Spiner) propositions him about turning the existing footage into a porno instead. To be continued…

“G.Q.” continues the prior episode’s storyline about the racial unrest surrounding black residents moving into a housing development. The housing cops try to frame a black kid, claiming that he was breaking into a car. Everyone except Davenport wants to plead the case out (including Bernstein, Furillo, and the guy’s awful lawyer Connie Chapman), but Joyce sees through the bullshit and conducts her own investigation. The show unfortunately hasn’t done a whole lot with the premise of Joyce working as a prosecutor: out of the prior five episodes, she’s only had a remotely important role in two. Joyce quits the D.A.’s office at the end of this episode, so the whole thing feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity; but at least this episode finally gives me the thing I wanted to see: Joyce having to deal with prosecuting someone she believes is innocent. Of course, Joyce is a superhero, so she does the jobs of Connie Chapman and the police, and exonerates the guy. But the D.A. is not happy, because railroading the guy into a guilty plea would have been far more politically convenient, regardless of his innocence. I’d love to say that this is a purely fictional, overblown Hollywood liberal take, but no…this is, unfortunately, how business is done. Optics over truth and justice. Davenport says fuck this, I’m out, and good for her.

The B-plot revolves around Coffey and Bates preparing Gerry Goff, a homeless guy, to testify at trial. We previously saw the gag of homeless guys (Buck Naked!) testifying at trial last season, but here, the writers sort of take the opposite approach from the earlier episode, as Goff actually does a great job. As our Blues shuffle the guy around all day—bathing him, getting him clothes and a haircut—he comes out of his years-long alcohol haze and transforms into a human being again, delivering lucid and decisive testimony. It’s a cute concept, and well-acted by Ed Marinaro as Joe and Jeffrey DeMunn (Chuck Senior on Billions) as Goff; but the progress this guy makes over the course of a few hours is absurdly unrealistic. Naturally, this being Hill Street, Goff vows to let Joe bring him to rehab…and promptly gets himself stabbed to death by someone trying to steal the fancy new clothes Joe and Lucy bought for him.

The LaRue porno plot from last episode concludes, as Vice hands Furillo a VHS appearing to show J.D. getting it on. The storyline is initially played seriously, and Neal has some terrific lines: “The guys have invented a thousand ways how to blow this job, J.D. My man, you own the top five.” And, when asked by LaRue what he did with the tape, Neal jokingly responds, “I gave it to Patsy Mayo,” comeuppance for J.D.’s shitty behavior with her dentist tape. The storyline ends with LaRue’s comedic exoneration, as he shows a very uncomfortable Furillo his tattoo-less ass, proving that the tape was deceptively edited with a body double. Washington gets one last great line, when he wanders in on this tableau and asks, “The Captain spank your bottom, Babe?”

Jablonski’s “perfect 300” storyline reaches a sweet conclusion, as Stosh finds himself an arson suspect in a fire at the bowling alley, and Belker once again proves his friendship to the Sarge by going above and beyond to exonerate him.

“Queen for a Day” (which has Frost as one of the credited writers, along with Milch, Epstein, and Katz) centers on Belker being saddled with a temporarily-plainclothes Renko on an undercover drug buy, which goes horribly wrong due to a comedy of errors that climaxes in Hunter unexpectedly taking the location with a modified WWII tank. All the elements of this storyline feel like they’re reheated leftovers from prior seasons, but at least the footage of the tank seemingly crashing through a real Los Angeles storefront is pretty impressive-looking for 1985 television. (I wonder if Bochco, possibly knowing by this point that he was being fired, had stopped giving any fucks about budget.)

The B-plot involves yet another hooker undercover op, a premise that someone on the show clearly REALLY loves. This one does put a somewhat decent twist on the material, with Coffey posing as a male prostitute, and his former high school coach trying to pick him up. It’s actually not nearly as sleazy as it sounds. The coach—played very likably by James Tolkan (Principal Strickland in the Back to the Future franchise)—seems like a decent guy, and Joe feels terrible about busting this guy he looked up to. Ultimately, Stan talks Joe out of “losing the paperwork,” unless he’s 100% sure what the guy is capable of. It’s a sad ending, made even worse by the fact that the guy is still really nice to Coffey even after he refuses to help him. (We also get Jablonski abhorrently implying a correlation between homosexuality and pedophilia, which is sadly realistic for the era, especially for a character of Stan’s age.)

Connie Chapman’s career comes to a sad end—as does Frances McDormand’s run on the show—as she’s fired for her cocaine habit (something Furillo had speculated about last episode, based on her behavior). Furillo and Chapman share a good scene, where he goes above and beyond in trying to get through to her, and manages to talk her into contacting a rehab facility to begin putting her life back together. The show could have just let Chapman go down in flames, but the unlikely moment of connection between her and Frank, and the possibility of redemption for her, add a welcome element of humanism to the episode.

The Renko-Hill material in the prior episode and this one is undeniably repetitive of early Season 1, with Furillo even making specific reference to the similarity when he once again declares them “divorced.” There are still some good scenes that add value, though. In “G.Q.,” Andy confesses to Furillo that, now that he has a family, he’s finding himself paralyzed by fear when on the beat. Later in the same episode, finding that all his fellow officers are refusing to partner with him, Renko gets comfort from Jablonski, who offers to do a shift with Andy to send a message (Charlie Haid’s appreciative smile is adorable). This episode has a nice reconciliation scene, where Bobby admits his jealousy of Renko’s home life, and gives some insight into his character when he confesses that the anger inside of him causes him to ruin his relationships: “I don’t know how to forgive people. I’m too hard on ’em.”

The episode ends with a nice, wholesome dinner scene instigated by Goldblume, wherein Henry, Harry, Fay, and Gina all air out their differences and become good friends again, with Fay even starting to like Gina. Which of course inevitably means that Gina is murdered before they can even order dessert.

Other stuff:

Usually, I can figure out what the episode titles refer to, but I’m at a loss with “Passage to Libya.” It’s obviously a reference to A Passage to India, but I have zero clue what Libya has to do with anything in the episode.

“Passage to Libya” is the third and final appearance of FBI Agent Ramsey, played by the late Stanley Kamel, who is probably best remembered for his role on Monk, but Lynch fans will know him as circus performer Koz Kakawski in INLAND EMPIRE.

The “captains’ retreat” has many recognizable character actors:
  • Mike, the moderator/mediator, is played by Lane Smith, probably best known as prosecutor Jim Trotter in My Cousin Vinny, and also for playing Perry White on Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
  • Joe Daley, the captain of South Ferry, is played by Steve Kahan, Captain Ed Murphy in the Lethal Weapon films. Daley is the cop who really lays into Chief Daniels the hardest, and eventually quits after Daniels repeatedly responds with petty insults and threats instead of constructive discourse.
  • Gene Scapizzi is played by Marc Alaimo, a.k.a. Dukat on Deep Space Nine. He has a good monologue about his wife cheating on him.
  • The sole black captain present, identified only as Pete, is played by Ron O’Neal, the Cuban army colonel in Red Dawn (Lane Smith, who plays the moderator, also appeared in Red Dawn). Pete seems to have an oral fixation, likely as a stress reaction; he’s either eating or smoking throughout the retreat. He discusses his daughter’s drug problem, his difficulty being a black man in this world, and the way he lets his frustrations undermine him.
  • Playing an unnamed captain (who will be named in a future appearance as Captain Leder, perhaps named for script supervisor Mimi Leder) is Charles Cyphers: Sheriff Leigh Brackett in Halloween. He seems to be mostly a supportive, even-keel voice in the group. We don’t really see him open up.
  • Rounding out the cast is a smartass named McCormick, played by an actor named Jess Doran, who seems to have mainly done TV guest work and a few feature bit parts (e.g., A Beautiful Mind). McCormick pisses off Deputy Chief Briscoe with his wisecracks, but he and Briscoe are the two who go at Furillo for being an altar boy and seeming to look down on the rest of them.
  • It’s also worth noting that Deputy Chief Warren Briscoe, whom we first met last season (and who really hates the retreat), is played by Andy Romano, who had earlier played Captain MacPherson of the Midtown precinct (he was on the panel with Furillo and Fuchs for the disciplinary hearing on Captain Lou Hogan in Season 3).
Henry G. Sanders (Killer of the Sheep) makes his third and final appearance on the Hill, this time as the driver Hill and Renko pull over in “El Capitan.”

During the retreat discussion about departmental corruption, Stan Mizell (Robert Davi) and Tony Marino (from Season 4) get name-checked, as does Jerry Fuchs.

At 27:31 in “El Capitan,” a “Los Angeles Mission” sign can be blatantly seen behind Lucy.

Renko’s wife Daryl Ann (played by Charlie Haid’s wife) puts in her sole appearance this season in “G.Q.,” in a very brief scene where she shows up at the station and he shoos her off.

A VERY deep callback: In “G.Q.,” Leo offers alcoholic Gerry Goff a snort from the bottle of peppermint schnapps he keeps in his locker. Way back in Season 1’s “Fecund Hand Rose,” Leo offered the bottle to a shell-shocked Goldblume, who shared a drink with a panicked Esterhaus. This leads me to wonder: has Leo had the same bottle in there for four years, or does he keep restocking? If the latter, his commitment to peppermint schnapps is certainly a bold choice!

“Queen for a Day” has a bunch of fun appearances by character actors in small roles. Brent Jennings (Ernie on Lodge 49) plays Belker’s twitchy snitch/intermediary Teddy. Felton Perry (Harry Callahan’s partner Early in Magnum Force) is coke supplier Alonzo, and J. E. Freeman (Marcello Santos in Wild at Heart) plays Alonzo’s unnamed muscle. (Strangely, IMDb credits Freeman as playing the Teddy role, despite the fairly obvious fact that Teddy is black and Freeman is not.) Barry Dennen (Pontius Pilate in Jesus Christ Superstar) plays a jewelry salesman, in a small subplot about Frank forgetting his anniversary with Joyce. Finally, Richard Green plays the very small role of Chief Daniels’s chauffeur; Green was the Magician in Mulholland Drive, and was also a friend of Jack Nance’s from the San Francisco theater scene. Green served as a producer on the I Don’t Know Jack documentary, and is currently supposedly working on the long-overdue Catherine Coulson film.

Ernie Sabella makes his second appearance as Paulie Shoellkopf, a loopy ’Nam vet who seems to have endless access to assault vehicles. We previously met him as J.D.’s junior high buddy, but this time he’s supplying a tank to Hunter. The writers obviously liked this guy, so we’ll see even more of him in subsequent seasons.

Incidentally, “Queen for a Day” is the 100th episode of the show.
 
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SEASON 5 EPISODES 22-23: “You’re in Alice’s” and “Grin and Bear It”

After having moved towards a more episodic model for the past twelve or so episodes, the show returns to a heavily-serialized format for these final two hours of the season, with several story threads that have arisen throughout the season being brought back. These are also the final episodes that Steve Bochco was involved with. Incidentally, I believe these were written after a short break in the writers’ room due to the fourteen-day WGA strike in March 1985. One gets the sense of Bochco saying goodbye to these characters he co-created, as these episodes are very busy, and he seems to be trying to give (almost) everyone a significant story arc. Bochco’s imminent exit may also have something to do with this being the longest season of the show, as one gets the sense that he realized he had more to say than could fit into one final episode.

The season finale, “Grin and Bear It,” directed by Co-Executive Producer Greg Hoblit, is also Hoblit’s final episode on the show. It’s also Mark Frost’s final episode. Frost shares teleplay credit on the finale with Lewis, Milch, and Katz.

“You’re in Alice’s” (say it out loud) starts off with a precinct-wide random drug test. This freaks out Garibaldi, who toked with a stewardess last night; he mounts a legal challenge, which in the following episode prevails. (Although, truthfully, I think the testing is completely constitutional, especially if the officers’ union AGREED to it in the last contract negotiation…another fuckup by Calletano as PBA rep! As an aside, the NYPD began randomized drug testing a few years after this episode, in 1989, and the practice continues to this day, I believe.) The pee test scenario gives the writers an excuse for some amusing bathroom humor, mostly centering on poor Coffey, who has performance anxiety. The writers also get a good amount of drama out of the test results. Following Harry’s victory, the department issues instructions for captains to use the test results only for counseling purposes, but Furillo goes rogue and threatens Garibaldi with a transfer, and says he can’t trust a cop who smokes reefer, betraying his own insecurities about substance use (although, to be fair, I think we’ve all about had it with Harry’s shit). The second he walks out of Furillo’s office, the whiny little bitch immediately calls Division to complain.

Washington gets more sympathy from Frank, when it comes to light that he’s been taking codeine—with a legal script, but behind the department’s back. This goes back to the first episode Jeffrey Lewis wrote, “Fruits of the Poisonous Tree” in early Season 2, when it was revealed that Neal has a bad knee due to a college football injury. In that episode, Wash expressed his concern that he may be forced to retire; so, rather than be put on a desk, he’s been medicating the pain and downplaying the injury for the past eighteen months. It seems that his work is all he really has in his life, and he’s terrified of losing it. In a nice callback, Furillo references Neal shooting the storekeeper in Season 3, and points out the questions that would have been raised if he’d been secretly using drugs then. Neal’s storyline gets a somewhat O. Henry-style ending, when Washington gets shot in the arm later in the episode, and is prescribed codeine at the hospital, buying him some time to figure out what to do.

The most surprising result of the urinalysis storyline is that Furillo tests positive for a trace amount of alcohol. It turns out that our man has been sneaking drinks unbeknownst to us. The encounter session several episodes earlier, when Deputy Chief Briscoe accused him of substituting meetings for booze (trading one crutch for another, as Frank puts it) really got under his skin, and he began drinking—in moderation, but from a bottle hidden in his glove compartment, which obviously isn’t exactly healthy. It’s a really good portrayal of a relapse, precisely because of how undramatic and seemingly innocuous it is. No big event set him off, and there’s no huge spiraling or bottoming-out. He just got too complacent in his sobriety. Ironically, the same person who triggered his relapse, Warren Briscoe, also inspires Frank to go back on the wagon, albeit completely unintentionally, when Briscoe attempts to blackmail Furillo with the urinalysis results. Frank stands his ground, willing to take ownership of his behavior, and the moment serves as a wakeup call to him about how he’s compromised his values. It’s interesting that, as someone who said he’d never had substance abuse issues, Steve Bochco devoted a lot of screentime during his five seasons on the show to the topic. Here, he ends his run on the show with an A.A. scene, which is moving in its simplicity, as Furillo (with J.D. present) declares his two-day sobriety to applause.

A major storyline over these two episodes naturally deals with Goldblume’s reaction to Gina’s murder. As the show is sometimes wont to do (for instance, following the pilot), it skips over the immediate aftermath of a major cliffhanger, and leaps ahead three weeks. So, in “You’re in Alice’s,” we get a Goldblume who’s over the initial shock, and is now just furious, harassing the Midtown detective handling the case and going on his own vigilante crusade. Henry’s primary character trait is to be the ostensibly sensitive, nice guy; but for the past few seasons, every time a major storyline focuses on him, it seems like he becomes bitter and mean. It’s not a very flattering characterization at this point, but it’s believable: it’s easy to be a bleeding-heart who cares about others and believes in the rule of justice, until something happens to you personally. Joe Spano gets to play some good moments when Henry, hurt, realizes that it’s been Furillo’s call to keep him out of the loop on the investigation. Bates, who doesn’t get much to do in these two episodes, has a good scene where, speaking for the rest of the precinct, she confronts Henry in the men’s locker room about his shitty attitude.

Henry’s storyline in “Grin and Bear It” is much less compelling, as he grapples with the difficulties of being the executor of Gina’s estate, becoming increasingly angry at the Srignolis’ sleazy family attorney. Near the end of the episode, he learns that he’s to inherit a million bucks due to a newly-discovered codicil to her will, and he STILL finds a reason to be a whiny dick. I’m not really sure why Bochco chose to spend screentime on this particular narrative in his final hour on the show.

Renko and Hill are the only characters who have a standalone story in each episode, as opposed to a continuing storyline across both episodes. In “You’re in Alice’s,” the two arrest Pablo Jackson (played by Kene Holiday, who previously appeared on the show in a three-episode run in Season 2 as one of the founders of the Black Officers’ Coalition). Pablo’s wife and four kids live in a homeless camp under the railroad trestles in a freight yard, and Bobby and Andy undertake a personal crusade to help the poor family. The whole thing feels a little too saccharine. Pablo and his family are presented in the most positive possible light, eliminating any nuance from the situation in order to make a point: they were evicted through no fault of their own due to a scamming lessor, and they can’t collect welfare since they don’t have an address; Pablo was stealing a mere three dollars’ worth of newspapers, and yet the court feels compelled to set $500 bail, once again because Pablo doesn’t have an address. Renko and Hill are also particularly saint-like in this one, pursuing every avenue to undo the effects of their own arrest, eventually seeing that money is raised for Pablo thanks to Bobby’s girlfriend, reporter Lynn Williams. The only slight bit of subtlety in the storyline comes at the very end, when Davenport is dissatisfied with the tidy happy ending. While she’s glad for the Jackson family, she points out that such neat, feel-good resolutions serve to distract people from the larger, messier reality. Which makes one wonder what the writers’ intention was in telling the story this way to begin with.

Then, in an altogether more lightweight story in “Grin and Bear It,” Bochco manages to get in one final animal plot before departing, as Bobby and Andy are tasked with accompanying police mascot Officer McBear, a black bear in a police hat who makes appearances for school trips and other child-oriented events, serving as a kind of hybrid of McGruff the Crime Dog and Smokey the Bear. Delightfully, a thickly German-accented James Cromwell portrays Officer McBear’s handler, Mr. Lowenhandler. In the cold open, a rather fearless Jim Sikking repeatedly elbows the bear obnoxiously until it finally attacks him. (The actual attack is someone in a bear suit, but Howard aggressively elbowing the poor creature appears to be the genuine animal.)

For one final time during Bochco’s run, the show explores the well-worn theme of departmental corruption, thanks to the presence of a new transfer from Midtown, Detective Phil Dugan, as well as a fortuitously-timed Belker undercover op at a garment shop. This storyline culminates in curiously convoluted fashion. The corruption at the Midtown Precinct leads all the way up to Captain Joe Keenan. Keenan casts a somewhat large shadow over this season, despite appearing only once, in “Ewe and Me, Babe,” where he was played by Hector Elizondo. In that episode, Renko referred to him as “Inspector,” not “Captain.” He seemed to come off as a semi-sympathetic character in his final scene, as he strongly implied to Frank that he was involved in some kind of corruption, but framed it as if Daniels and others had strong-armed him into it, and he sadly wished he could go back to being a regular cop. A few episodes later, two things came to light: that Keenan had done some extracurricular work for Daniels by digging up dirt on Ozzie Cleveland during the election last season; and, that Keenan was part of the conspiracy to kill Mayor Cleveland (along with Jerry Fuchs). Rather incredibly, it was stated during the captains’ retreat in “El Capitan” that Keenan was somehow still drawing a paycheck, after allegedly being part of an assassination attempt! Now, it appears that not only is he still on the force, but he’s been promoted to captain? It’s all a little weird. We learn from Dugan that not only is Keenan allegedly the kingpin of all the corruption in the Midtown Precinct, but he also has a hit squad to eliminate squealers! The season leaves this on a rather ambiguous note, as Keenan himself turns up dead, revealing that the corruption goes even further up…with Briscoe and Furillo noting that the only other people who knew they were moving on Keenan were Fletcher Daniels and Ozzie Cleveland.

Jablonski has a delightful storyline where he gets to go out on patrol, since Lucy twisted her ankle. During a chaotic, hilarious car chase, poor Coffey holds on for dear life while maniac Jabo repeatedly drives on sidewalks, plowing through a street sign and a fire hydrant. Stosh subsequently suffers a severe attack of angina that requires hospitalization, leading to some good work from Prosky as Stan angrily confronts the frustrating realities of aging.

Other stuff:

Once again, the budget on these episodes seems slightly higher than normal, perhaps indicating an IDGAF attitude from lame duck Bochco. For instance, the production seems to have rented a train engine to drive through a shot when Bobby is talking to Pablo’s family in the trainyard (a nice bit, demonstrating how noisy and chaotic this poor family’s living situation is).

Bochco puts in a voice cameo at the 8:18 mark in “You’re in Alice’s,” when he can be heard as one of the officers in line to pee, giving his name as “Bochco, S.”

Leonard Stone (Mr. Beauregarde in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory) appears as Al Berman, the double-dealing tailor at Belker’s undercover. Stone previously played the late bookie Mouse Feldstein in Season 3. Chuck Mitchell (Porky in Porky’s) plays a customer (credited as “Fat Guy”).

The Belker-Jablonski bromance gets one final nice scene, when Mick visits Stan in the hospital, and the Sarge tells the doctor that Mick is family.

Once again, Mayo’s character arc centers almost entirely around her sexuality and dating life. She goes out with Detective Dugan (who had previously ghosted her after a one-night stand), and gives him information about Belker’s undercover that nearly blows the operation and endangers officers. At least she’s smart enough to eventually realize that Dugan’s being overly inquisitive, and she warns Furillo just in time.

Robert Hirschfeld (Officer Leo Schnitz), whose promotion to series regular has proved to be utterly pointless, makes his final appearance on the show in “Grin and Bear It.” An always-likable standby on the show going back to the pilot, Leo will be written off the series next season due to cast cutbacks.

Ray has a little storyline wherein he qualifies as fourth in line on the Captains’ Exam, and then promptly three captains either die or retire for health reasons, leading him to feel guilty about how excited he is.

Darwin Joston (Napoleon Wilson in Assault on Precinct 13, and Paul of “OK PAUL!!!” fame in Eraserhead) appears in the A.A. scene.
 
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SEASON 6 EPISODES 1-5

Per the Conversations book, Mark Frost left the series because he realized that he doesn’t like to do the same thing over and over. He felt that if he stayed with the show, it would be solely for the money, and his writing would become stale. One also gets the sense, based on the timing, that loyalty to Bochco was a factor in his exit. After Frost turned down Lewis and Milch’s offer to stay on, Bochco invited him to come over to Fox and work on the law show that Bochco was in the very early stages of developing. By that point, though, Frost had met with John Schlesinger about adapting the novel The Religion (into the film that would eventually become The Believers). With the opportunity to work on his first feature film, with a director he hugely admired, and Schlesinger’s promise to let Frost act as associate producer and be involved in every aspect of production, Frost was done with television for the time being. Frost went on to work with a few Hill Street alums again: both Charlie Haid and Michael Warren appeared in Storyville (with Warren ditching the weave that he wore on Hill Street and committing to his natural bald look); Haid directed and co-exec produced on Buddy Faro; Hill Street director John Patterson also directed a Faro episode; and George Wyner (ADA Irwin Bernstein) and Dennis Franz both appeared on Faro (Wyner as the corrupt business manager of a child star, and Franz cameoing as himself, riding a lawnmower).

So, why was Steve Bochco fired? It’s complicated. But, the simple cliff-notes version is: The show had always lost money for MTM despite being fairly successful in the ratings. One major reason for this deficit was the large cast, who were all entitled to a pay bump each season (the pay bump was standard operating procedure for any show; however, the huge number of actors getting the raise meant that the already bloated budget increased exponentially each year). MTM President Arthur Price repeatedly pressured Bochco to cut cast members, and Bochco refused (and, in fact, added four new regulars in Season 5, ballooning the main cast to seventeen). Finally, at the end of Season 5, Price approached Jeffrey Lewis and David Milch to see if they’d be willing to run the show. As Milch succinctly puts it in his autobiography: “Arthur asked Jeff Lewis and me if we’d be willing to lose some characters and we said sure.”

Here are a few contemporary articles on the changing of the guard, which are remarkably candid:

www.nytimes.com

'HILL STREET' TO TRIM ITS CAST AND PLOTS (Published 1985)

www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

www.latimes.com

'HILL STREET' TAKES A DETOUR

Reports a few months back that NBC's multi-award-winning cop show, "Hill Street Blues," would be simplified next season may have been premature.
www.latimes.com www.latimes.com


These articles strike me as really interesting, first of all, simply because they exist at all. My understanding is that, during that era, there was very little awareness or attention given to “show runners” (a term that didn’t even exist at the time). Aside from moguls like Aaron Spelling, Normal Lear, and Stephen Cannell, executive producers didn’t make headlines outside the trades, and their names weren’t recognizable to the general public. My hunch is that Steven (“reached on vacation in Hawaii”) Bochco instigated this press cycle. Exhibit A: His own autobiography, wherein he recounts being fired at the start of Season 4. According to Bochco, he threatened to tell the press that he was fired because he refused to “reduce the density and complexity of the show,” and that MTM was “dismantling the best show on TV.” Also according to Bochco, a chastened Arthur Price rehired him before he got to the elevator.

To be fair to Bochco, he had some method to his madness in not wanting to fuck with the established formula. It’s not like he was just deliberately trying to bankrupt MTM. The standard business model for TV shows at that time—rather insanely—carried an expectancy of loss for the production company (as the New York Times article notes). The network licensing deals simply didn’t cover the full budgets of most series. For a company such as MTM, it was a long-game gamble that the show could survive long enough to enter syndication, which is where the money was made back. Bochco’s feeling was that the surest way to secure the longevity necessary to reach syndication was to keep doing all the things that had made the show successful to begin with. A reasonable perspective. For his part, Arthur Price saw a series that was bleeding money with no promise of any return on investment. It’s also difficult to argue with his perspective. Even Mark Frost, in the Conversations book, notes that Hill Street was probably a tough sell in syndication for that era due to how serialized it was. It’s also probably worth noting that Price finally pulled the trigger on Bochco’s firing immediately after Hill Street had passed that magic 100-episode milestone, now secure in the knowledge that even if Lewis and Milch royally fucked the show up, it could still be syndicated.

There was potentially another, more personal factor in Bochco’s firing. Bochco didn’t succeed in the industry solely due to his creative savvy; he was also a shrewd, cutthroat businessman. In his autobiography, he proudly refers to his business attorney as “the Doberman” over and over, and gleefully tells story after story about how he outmaneuvered enemy and ally alike, including a few where he advanced his own interests at the expense of MTM by exploiting loopholes or playing hardball. All completely above-board stuff, but not the kind of thing that endears you to an employer, as he freely admits.

What’s most interesting about those 1985 press articles is that EVERYONE interviewed seems to agree that the show had become too bloated, and too married to formula—it wasn’t just Arthur Price and Lewis and Milch saying this, but even people who had championed the series from the beginning, such as Grant Tinker and Brandon Tartikoff. In fact, even Greg Hoblit—who quit the show in solidarity with Bochco—admits that the scripts had gotten too dense and were impeding the production. The only person who seems to feel differently is Bochco himself…which is perhaps the best argument for his dismissal. Bochco always maintained—all the way up through his 2016 autobiography, which was published just two years before his death—that his “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to Hill Street was the unequivocally correct strategy. He and Mike Kozoll had invented the Hill Street format (each episode opens with roll call and covers one day, etc.), and he didn’t see any reason to depart from that for even a single episode. That worked for many years, as the characters and the types of stories he was telling kept things fresh within that rigid structure. But five seasons in, other series that owed their existences to Hill Street had surpassed it in terms of style (Miami Vice) and willingness to be playful with structure (St. Elsewhere). It was time to evolve or die.

When the ax fell, Bochco said he wasn’t surprised by the firing, but he was hurt by Lewis and Milch going behind his back and not giving him a heads-up. These were Bochco’s employees, his friends, and guys who both owed their careers to him. Per Bochco: “I knew I could forgive David. He’s a self-described sociopath. He actually said that to me once. And he’s just not capable of the kind of integrity that I think most of us would feel compelled to act upon. It would be like being angry with someone for not having blue eyes.” Milch more or less repeats Bochco’s assessment verbatim in his own autobiography, and doesn’t seem to take issue with it. Of course, the two men would go on to collaborate again to great success on NYPD Blue.

According to Bochco, the cost of the show skyrocketed even higher after he left. There certainly isn’t any noticeable dropoff in production value on these early Season 6 episodes, and contrary to what is said in those news articles, the sizes of the guest cast and background cast are comparable to prior seasons. Seemingly corroborating Bochco’s assertion, Jeff Lewis is quoted in the June 1985 L.A. Times article as saying that the budget “is not less, but is more.” Milch, in the Chicago Tribune article, also denies that they were told to scale down the budget, but rather says that their mandate was to freshen the formula.

Bochco has said that he never watched another episode of the series after he left because it was too hurtful. To ease that hurt a little, he made $75K per episode on those final two seasons, for doing absolutely nothing (Bochco: “America. What a country”).

As for the dynamic between Lewis and Milch, Milch told the New York Times in 2014: “Jeffrey was the boss. I was writing a lot of the pages. You throw a typewriter out the window enough times, you don’t get invited to the meetings with the executives.” With the benefit of hindsight, one has to chuckle at the idea of Arthur Price firing Steve Bochco because he was too difficult, and naively thinking that David Milch was the safer option.

STAFF

Steven Bochco is gone. Gregory Hoblit is gone.

Jeffrey Lewis moves up from Producer to Executive Producer. David Milch makes the jump from Co-Producer to Co-Executive Producer. Scott Brazil remains as Supervising Producer, and is now the senior directing producer.

Walon Green joins as Co-Producer. Starting out as a producer/director of National Geographic documentaries in the late ’60s, he went on to direct the Oscar-winning pseudo-documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle, and also cowrote the screenplay for The Wild Bunch. Hill Street was his first position on a scripted TV series; he subsequently went on to work on the writing staffs of various shows in Dick Wolf’s Law & Order franchise, on David Milch’s NYPD Blue and Big Apple, as well as on ER, and most recently, on the Apple+ series Hello Tomorrow!

Mark Frost is gone. Roger Director exits the series to join Moonlighting.

Jacob Epstein moves up from Story Editor to Executive Story Editor, the position Frost occupied last season.

Dick Wolf joins as Executive Story Consultant. Wolf at this point only had a couple of low-budget feature writing credits to his name: a skateboarding flick called Skateboard, and the gas-shortage comedy Gas (the man clearly had a way with titles). After working on Hill Street for this one season, he jumped over to Miami Vice, before of course rising to unimaginable, unfathomable success as the creator of Law & Order.

CAST

Up to this point, not a single main cast member has left the series over the first five seasons, aside from Michael Conrad dying. New cast members have come on board, but no one has exited. Given that, this season’s shakeup feels monumental. But in ordinary TV terms, it’s honestly pretty typical. For all the hubbub in the press about the cast being slashed, five series regulars are cut (sort of) and one is added, which brings the total number of regulars to thirteen…which is exactly the same number the series was at before Bochco went crazy adding people in Season 5.

So, who’s out?
  • Fay Furillo. Bochco always said that Fay was originally meant to be a guest role, but the then-CEO of NBC Fred Silverman loved the character in the pilot so much that he called up demanding that she become a regular (apparently not realizing that the actor was Bochco’s wife). Steve used this anecdote to try to avoid the appearance of nepotism, but let’s be honest: there is no way that such a tertiary character would have remained part of the show for five years if the actor weren’t married to the show runner. Barbara Bosson was initially slated to appear in six episodes in Season 6, as a sort of hybrid guest/regular, but she quit after appearing in only two. In the two episodes in which she appears, Fay only has a combined minute-and-a-half of screentime; it’s stated that her Victims’ Aid program is now being run out of the courthouse, explaining why she is barely around at the precinct. Bosson said that she quit because Lewis and Milch (who supposedly didn’t like Fay) were bringing the character back to her nagging persona from early seasons, after Bosson had spent years trying to get Bochco to give Fay more depth and to make her less shrewish. It’s impossible to say whether Bosson’s assessment of this season’s writing was accurate, based on the little that ended up onscreen (she does nag Chief Daniels a little). Here’s an interview with Bosson after leaving the show: BOSSON LEAVING 'HILL ST.' IN SALARY, ROLE DISPUTES
  • Lieutenant Ray Calletano. Like Bosson, René Enríquez found himself demoted from series regular to glorified guest star, appearing in only a handful of episodes, but being credited as part of the main cast when he did appear. Ray is another easy cut, as the writers rarely found anything interesting for him to do. Often, when putting my thoughts down for these posts immediately after watching an episode, I can’t even remember whether Ray had appeared, since he frequently would have nothing more to do than handing Frank a piece of paper. Like Fay, it’s amazing that he lasted as a regular for five seasons. The sad thing is, over the past few seasons, the writers had actually given Ray some depth, and there were the makings of an interesting character there: an ambitious immigrant, one of the few Latinos in the department to become a ranking officer, a man outraged by the ignorance and casual racism he encounters every day, but also hamstrung by his own pride and ambition, often feeling overly entitled and overestimating his own worth. On paper, that characterization has the potential to be a great tragic figure, or a great comedic figure, or both. Ironically, Enríquez himself fell victim to a form of racism, as the producers felt that his accent was too difficult to understand, causing them to severely limit his screentime. (Incidentally, I never have a problem understanding him.) Following on from his storyline at the end of last season, Ray is promoted to the position of Captain of Polk Ave., finally accomplishing his lifelong ambition…and also clearing the way for Milch to replace him with Dennis Franz.
  • Detective Harry Garibaldi. Another easy cut. He’d only been on the show for a little over a year. He was initially introduced as a potential LaRue replacement in case Kiel Martin flunked rehab, and he never ceased to feel like a bargain-basement version of J.D., equally obnoxious but without any of the charm or wit. Ken Olin guest stars in the second episode of Season 6, which features a major arc involving Harry getting in deep with illegal gambling debts, finally stupidly getting himself killed at the end of the episode—making Garibaldi the first main cast member on the show to die by the writers’ choice (as opposed to Esterhaus dying due to exigent circumstances). We knew that Garibaldi had his fair share of vices (women, cutting corners, impetuousness, just generally being a dick), but I don’t think there was ever any prior indication that he had a gambling problem, making the whole thing feel pretty out-of-left-field. Presumably, this storyline about Harry playing the ponies came from Milch (who has co-story and sole teleplay credit on the episode), making Garibaldi the third character Milch has given a gambling problem (along with Hill and Coffey…and possibly LaRue as well).
  • Detective Patsy Mayo. Yet another obvious character to get rid of. As I’ve complained a few times, during her year as a regular, we rarely got to see her doing actual cop work, and most of her storylines focused on her sex appeal and/or her dating life. Trained dancer Mimi Kuzyk was very new to acting, and I never found her believable as a detective. Both Kuzyk and Ken Olin seem to have been cast more for their looks than for acting ability. The in-show explanation for Patsy’s disappearance is a transfer to Midtown (she had transferred to Hill Street from Jefferson Heights the prior season…Mayo gets around). She guest stars in a handful of episodes this season, including the third one, where she sits with Garibaldi’s dad in the hospital.
  • Officer Leo Schnitz. It certainly makes sense to remove Robert Hirschfeld from the main cast given how small his role typically is, but it’s a shame to lose him entirely. Out of all the exiting regulars this season, he’s the only one who never appears at all in the final two seasons, which is strange given how omnipresent he has been for the series’ run up to this point. The June 1985 L.A. Times article says that Hirschfeld was going to appear as Leo, presumably bumped down to his old costar status, but for whatever reason that never came to be. Maybe Hirschfeld was offended by the demotion and quit. In the third episode of the season, Jablonski explains that Leo and Natalie DeRoy eloped to New Zealand so they can raise a family in a nuclear-free zone. It’s a strange and abrupt exit for the character. The last we knew of his personal life, Leo and his ex-wife Myrna had reunited, and he wanted to be father to her child.
Continued in next post
 
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SEASON 6 EPISODE 1: “Blues in the Night”

This is a strong start to the season, and an all-time classic episode. It starts off with a great bit of audience fake-out. Playing into all the rumors in the press about the cast being gutted, the show opens on a roll call full of entirely new characters. Within a couple of minutes, we realize that this is the night tour. Although the deception doesn’t go on for long, it’s a ballsy move: viewers might have immediately gotten pissed, felt that their worst fears about the direction of the show had come true, and changed the channel. It’s also a demonstration that Lewis and Milch are seemingly much more willing than Bochco to be playful with the format and audience expectations. (Although, it’s worth noting that Bochco helped out with the story on this one, his final contribution to the show.) The Bizarro night-shift counterpart to Jablonski is Sgt. Jenkins, played by hulking gravel-voiced Lawrence Tierney, a superb bit of casting. One of the most famously difficult and troubled actors in Hollywood history, Tierney had spent the 1970s and early ’80s in Manhattan, barely acting and mostly working odd jobs. At the time of his Hill Street role, he had just recently moved back to L.A. and was in the early stages of the career comeback that would culminate with Reservoir Dogs.

The rest of the episode is an inversion of the usual “morning to night” formula. Instead, the episode covers our cops’ lives from the end of their shift throughout the night, cheekily ending the show where it would usually begin: Jablonski starting the next morning’s roll call with “Item 1.” The storylines range from small and contemplative to emotionally charged.

Belker is the only one of our leads who’s scheduled to work overnight, staked out in a garbage chute, waiting to catch a burglar. For most of the episode, Belker’s scenes are a small, silent little character piece. Unbothered by his surroundings, indeed perhaps more comfortable sitting alone in trash than he is in most “normal” situations, Mick watches a mouse run across his shoes. He’s pelted by garbage (and, sniffing the discarded mayo that lands on his sandwich, decides it’s good enough to eat). Bruce Weitz is always a pleasure, and it’s great seeing him just sitting still, no dialogue or other actors, no wacky hijinks with him fighting a mime or dressing as a chicken. This storyline does take an unexpectedly heartbreaking turn as Belker gets word that his mom passed away in the night. For the only time in the series, we get to see her in the flesh, dead in her bed, as Mick tearfully says goodbye.

Jablonski spends the night at home. It’s a bit melancholy, watching this older man quietly going about his solitary routine, but both the writing and Prosky’s performance make sure that it’s all very matter-of-fact and not remotely sentimental. It’s just a joy to watch all these little moments: Stan reluctantly giving his begging dog a piece of Weisswurst while lecturing him that he’s going to get gas; clipping coupons while telling off a bragging wrestler on TV (evidently another thing Belker and Jablonski have in common is a shared love of wrasslin’); and turning his late wife’s photo face-down so he can chug his bedtime shot of vodka without her watching.

Bates goes to either a community college or a civic center (I’m not certain) in order to fire some ceramic work she made, including a horse she painted for Fabian’s birthday. Over the course of several hours, she has a sweet, low-key conversation with the pottery instructor, and is disappointed when he mentions that he’s married. As with the Jablonski storyline, neither the writers nor the actors inject any artificial sentimentality into these scenes; it’s all just very slice-of-life.

The major storyline in the episode involves Goldblume being held hostage by an activist and his devoted followers, who are outraged at the city not providing their organization with any housing units in a new development. Yaphet Kotto plays the activist, Calvin Matthias, and is absolutely riveting. Kotto is always a fascinating performer to watch, but this episode is some of the best work of his career, I think. Calvin is a guy that Henry hugely admires for the work he’s done in helping the underprivileged, but he’s clearly got some severe mental issues that are worsening. He abruptly stopped his lithium dosage, and is suffering from paranoia. Kotto plays the guy as completely lost in his own head, desperately trying to navigate the darkness inside as he tries to decide whether or not he wants to commit suicide by cop. Joe Spano is great in these scenes as well, doing some of the best work he’s done on the show, desperately trying to convince Calvin not to give up on his life and his mission.

A running theme in the episode is the way our cops can’t escape their sworn duty even during their off-hours. Andy has a backstage pass to meet his favorite country singer, Bobby Angel, but when Angel snorts coke in front of him, poor Renko is duty-bound to have his idol arrested. (Angel is played by Billy Green Bush, Robert Blake’s partner in Electra Glide in Blue.) The majority of our regulars spend the evening at the Kubiak bar, where they can’t even enjoy their meatloaf and beer without being pulled into a tenant-super conflict that ends with the tenant stabbed (the storyline has a great punchline where Coffey’s ditzy girlfriend misunderstands Joe, and thinks the guy will have to live the rest of his life with a knife sticking out of him).

Early in the evening, before Andy departs for his concert, Renko and LaRue enter a bar bet about the fastest way to get to work, leading to a race the following morning on which all the cops enthusiastically wager. The race occurs at the end of the episode, with con man J.D. calling in a favor to get Renko’s route flooded. It’s a great, fun ending to an episode that more than anything is about just spending time with characters we’ve come to know and love.

Other stuff:

Along with Bochco, Lewis, and Milch, a gentleman named Barry Jay Kaplan has a story credit. Evidently an author of historical novels and a playwright, Kaplan’s only other IMDb credit is for writing an episode of the Hill Street spinoff Beverly Hills Buntz.

This is the first episode of the series not to feature the typical “ROLL CALL” chyron, obviously left off to hide the fact that we’re opening on the night shift. The only two prior episodes that didn’t open with the chyron were “Of Mouse and Man” in Season 2 and “Here’s Adventure, Here’s Romance” in Season 4. Both of those episodes started with Furillo at a murder scene in the late night/early morning hours…but both episodes did then feature the chyron after that initial prelude.

The final phone conversation we get with Belker’s mom is through a frustrated night tour detective, adding to the Bizarro nature of the opening, as well as lending a bit of poignancy in retrospect to the final messages she leaves for her son (she says she loves him, and “it’s gonna cool off tonight, so he doesn’t need to leave the air conditioner on”).

Goldblume’s mustache is finally gone, but it seems to have migrated onto Bobby Hill’s face.

For the main titles this season, the familiar Chicago footage looks a little less familiar: it’s much more washed-out, and is given an almost monochromatic blue tint. Another change is that on the cast credit screens, the freeze-frames are gone. The actors simply keep moving the entire time their credit is displayed, which makes the main title sequence simultaneously feel more dynamic and less old-fashioned.

Before Furillo is called away to the hostage scene, we get a little peek at his and Davenport’s social life, as they attend a dinner of Joyce’s public defender coworkers (and Irwin). There’s some hilarious Milchian dialogue here, as one of Joyce’s coworkers (played by Dan Lauria, Kevin’s father on The Wonder Years) is berated by his wife (Rita Taggart, a.k.a. catty casting director Linney James in Mulholland Drive) for the photos her private investigator took of him on all fours being fed dog food by a hooker.

Anne Ramsey (Momma in Throw Momma from the Train) plays Mrs. Scalisi, the bartender and cook at the Kubiak.

A minor point, but Jablonski’s dog Blackie is missing his front right leg. Based on the story Stan told in the Season 5 premiere, about him accidentally cutting off Blackie’s leg when he raised it to take a wiz, you’d think it would be a rear leg missing. What kind of dog raises his front leg to piss? I guess when it comes to screen-trained three-legged dog actors, you have to take what you can get.
 
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SEASON 6 EPISODES 2-5 (“Hacked to Pieces,” “Seoul on Ice,” “In the Belly of the Bus,” “Somewhere Over the Rambo”)

After a season premiere that demonstrated that the new show runners were able and willing to shake things up, these next four episodes feel like a somewhat disheartening return to status quo. For all of Lewis and Milch’s talk in the press about how they weren’t going to be married to formula, these episodes all follow the typical “one day, morning to night” approach, and have just as many disparate storylines per episode as any Bochco-era hour, many of which feel like variations on themes that the series has dealt with before (Belker undercover as a cabbie, Hill brokering a truce and eventually friendship between a black youth and a Korean market owner). The only real departure is that the episodes no longer start with roll call. They’ll generally open with a short scene or two that take place a little earlier in the morning, usually showing characters at home, before then going into the roll call scene. Not exactly an earth-shattering change. I don’t mean to be too down on these episodes, because overall I’m still enjoying the show a lot. But you’d hope that Milch might have taken a slightly more adventurous approach to redefining the show.

Strangely enough, Jablonski’s “Let’s do it to them before they do it to us” catch phrase is retired. If the line was indeed Milch’s idea to begin with, I wonder why he decided to get rid of it. Now, Stan finishes roll call with the extremely lame, “Let’s do our jobs.” Esterhaus’s “Let’s be careful out there” gets a one-episode-only revival when Stan says it for the first (only?) time in “Seoul on Ice,” acknowledging the sense of unease in the squad room following the attack on Garibaldi the night before.

We get a slow-drip introduction to Dennis Franz’s new character, Lieutenant Norman Buntz, a transfer from Jefferson Heights to fill Ray’s position. After appearing in the main titles for the season premiere, he makes his official debut in the second episode of the season, an appearance that mostly amounts to a couple of wisecracks and one small indication that he’s willing to color outside the lines. His role expands a bit more with each subsequent episode. It seems pretty clear that Milch just loved writing for Franz from the get-go. Milch felt that the biggest shortcoming of Hill Street was that all the characters, even the most flawed ones, were too moral, which he found unrealistic as well as a restraint on the types of stories the writers could tell. Buntz was the antidote to that. Buntz is basically the exact same character as Season 3’s Sal Benedetto, just with the roughest edges sanded off a bit so that he’s palatable enough to be a regular. Unlike Benedetto, he’s not a sociopath. (He’s also not Italian; Buntz shares Franz’s German heritage, but as a nod to his previous role as Sal, Norm tells an unamused Furillo that his nickname in the Heights was “Guido” because he looks like a guinea.) Just as Buntz is a more evolved version of Benedetto, he’s also simultaneously a proto-Sipowicz. He lacks the complexity and the rich backstory: Norm is basically a caricature, at least at this point. But all the seeds are there in terms of the brash personality, the vocabulary, and the mannerisms, and it’s fascinating to chart Franz’s twenty-two-year extended jazz riff with Milch/Bochco, from Sal’s debut in 1983 to the end of NYPD Blue in 2005.

The biggest overarching storyline in these four episodes involves yet another investigation into departmental corruption, this time with Furillo appointed by Chief Daniels to head a committee looking into the Joe Keenan stuff from the end of last season, with a free hand to follow wherever it leads. Each time the show does one of these corruption storylines, the writers try to make it seem more consequential than prior instances. The malfeasance uncovered by Furillo’s commission is certainly more systemic and widespread than anything else the show has depicted in prior storylines, but the problem is, it still boils down to a storyline where the bad guys are caught, they’re generally not cops that we know, and the status quo is preserved, which makes the whole thing feel anticlimactic. There is potentially some fallout between Furillo and Daniels, which could be interesting going forward if the writers follow through on it. The storyline starts off with Frank flat-out telling Daniels that he thinks it’s possible that Daniels had Keenan killed. It ends with Furillo taking a half-measure in his final report: he concludes that Daniels either was aware of the corruption or should have been, but lacking any inculpatory evidence, he doesn’t outright call for Daniels’s firing, leaving it in the hands of either the city council or Fletcher’s own conscience (ha!) to do the right thing. Daniels keeps his job, and now he has it in for Frank and his entire precinct.

A very troubled cop becomes collateral damage in the feud, with Daniels using the guy just to stick it to Furillo; the cop kills himself that night. A furious Frank promises Joyce that he’s finished being naïve. I hope this has lasting repercussions for Furillo and Daniels’s relationship. We’ve seen so much sketchy behavior from Fletcher over the years, and I wish the writers would fully commit to giving him dirty hands, instead of always just skating up to the edge. It’s very difficult to understand how someone as pious as Furillo can remain loyal to Daniels, although we do get a hint in “Somewhere Over the Rambo,” when the Chief unsuccessfully tries to appeal to Furillo by reminding him how Daniels stood by him when he was a drunk young lieutenant whom others were calling “unfit to serve, an embarrassment.”

As a lawyer, I really enjoyed “In the Belly of the Bus,” which has a major plotline about gun dealer Louis Russ testifying for Frank’s commission. Russ gives them Joe Keenan’s killer, essentially wrapping up their whole investigation with a bow; but he also testifies to murdering Harry Garibaldi, and because he was granted “testimonial immunity” (more typically called use immunity), and was directly answering a question asked by Furillo, he can’t be prosecuted for Garibaldi’s murder unless it’s proved through totally independent means. Furillo does his best to guide a VERY confused LaRue and Washington toward investigating Russ, in a roundabout way that’s maybe-kind-of (but not really) legally sound, as poor Irwin cringes in the background, trying to give nonverbal guidance to Frank, and watching the whole thing just go further and further down the crapper. It’s a situation I can relate to way too much, trying to explain to cops what they can and can’t do, and then watching them bulldoze their way through. I’m guessing these scenes were born of some of Jeff Lewis’s experiences as an ADA. This being Hill Street, street justice prevails where the legal system fails, with Garibaldi’s dad gunning Russ down in the precinct.

The strongest storyline in these episodes involves Mayor Ozzie Cleveland’s son Lee, who is revealed to be a heroin addict. Ozzie (who we’ll recall from an earlier season lost his brother to an overdose) has given his son too many chances, and now insists that he be imprisoned before he can hurt himself or someone else. It’s a strong portrait of what it’s like to deal with an addict family member. Ozzie’s position, as cold as it is, is valid, and J. A. Preston does his best work of the series, playing the anger, exhaustion, and pain. Hilly Hicks (Roots) is heartbreaking as Lee Cleveland, portraying a guy who doesn’t even know anymore when he’s lying, so fully has the need for the drug replaced the person who used to be there. (This is something that Milch had some experience with.) Lee’s halting, rambling, twitchy attempt to speak in court—to the embarrassment of Judge Wachtel and all else present—is particularly powerful. Rosalind Cash (The Omega Man) is also great as Ozzie’s wife and Lee’s mom Leona, who tearfully implores Frank to go against Ozzie and get the kid into treatment. Ozzie’s position turns out to be correct; after committing a series of robberies to get his fix, Lee is gunned down after pulling a piece on Coffey. Ozzie, weary and defeated, his son gone, has a wonderful closing line to Frank: “You can’t believe how much you remember.” This ended up being Preston’s final appearance on the show as Ozzie Cleveland.

One amusing little running gag in these episodes involves the precinct being sent several incompetent—but very attractive—female khaki officers in the wake of Leo’s exit. Evidently, the only job qualification is fucking the personnel guy. Buntz initially calls the guy out, but then is persuaded to partake in the “hiring process” himself…only to have it blow up in his face when a (highly qualified) young woman, Celeste Patterson, threatens him with a harassment suit if he doesn’t hire her. It’s a good first impression for Celeste, who will stick around on the show for awhile. As a punchline to the story, Buntz furiously tells Jablonski never to involve him in personnel matters again: “The entire area is a quagmire!”

Peter Jurasik returns for the first time since Season 3 as weaselly Sid “the Snitch” Thurston, a character who was created by Milch and first appeared during a storyline where LaRue and Washington were undercover buying coke from him. This season, he’s freshly out of prison and on parole. Buntz and Sid have their first substantial interaction in “In the Belly of the Bus,” with Sid feeding Buntz a tip about a gun dealer. Lewis and Milch clearly really enjoyed the dynamic between these two (BUNTZ: “Are you a psychopath?” SID: “No! I went through a phase like that, but this was for real”). Norm and Sid would become a regular team for the rest of the show’s run, and even beyond, as Lewis and Milch built the spinoff Beverly Hills Buntz around their dynamic.

A major development: Robin Tagalia is pregnant. This leads to some very cute moments between Mick and Robin, with many more to come, I’m sure. We also get to see a very old-school pregnancy test. Home pregnancy tests had only been on the market for seven years at that point, and Mick talks about it like it’s a very novel thing, which is kind of funny given how ubiquitous they are now both in life and in films/TV.

There’s a somewhat interesting little storyline where Howard begins dating a woman, and learns she’s transsexual. Naturally, for a man of his generation, he’s extremely uncomfortable with this, and immediately ends things. The whole thing is handled with surprising sensitivity and dignity for the era. The woman is played by Lee Garlington, whose greatest cultural legacy is possibly as waitress Claire, the original female lead in The Seinfeld Chronicles pilot. The decision to replace her with Elaine Benes was made for several reasons, not least of which was that Garlington tried to rewrite her dialogue, incensing Larry David.

Another Hunter storyline involves him adopting a Shar Pei puppy, and in the process falling victim to a Ponzi scheme. The storyline has a happy ending, as he gets to keep the dog (the scenes of Howard alone with the pup talking to him are extremely endearing, especially Sikking’s hilariously understated reaction when the little guy pisses all over him). Additionally, the experience brings him into contact with Prunella Ashton-Wilkes, a member of an animal protection league, as well as potentially a (for once age-appropriate) love interest for Howard, who shares his love of dogs and his passion for firearms.

LaRue has some good scenes surrounding Garibaldi’s downfall and death. In one of those rare but welcome scenes where J.D. is the adult in the room, he sees that Harry is clearly in trouble and corners him, trying to impart wisdom born of his own mistakes (Harry, in dialogue sadly accurate for any addict: “Listen, J.D., if you’ve been here, then you know this whole conversation’s a waste of time”). Later, after Harry’s death, J.D. has a breakdown in a bar restroom over the fact that he didn’t do more to try to help. Kiel Martin does that “fake crying” thing that TV actors do, and the acting is arguably too over the top, but he certainly commits to the moment. What works best about the scene is the physicality, as he wails on a paper towel dispenser, shattering glass and then tearing the thing off the wall. It’s impressive how he doesn’t hold back, and I imagine he must have bruised himself a bit.

Our buddy Alan Branford (Martin Ferrero from Miami Vice) makes one final appearance, giving “Somewhere Over the Rambo” its title. Having previously caused havoc pretending to be the Cisco Kid and Cochise, this time he takes on a more contemporary role, terrorizing various Vietnamese establishments (restaurants, massage parlors). Specifically, he’s acting out the plot of Rambo: First Blood Part II, which had only just been released a few months prior to this episode’s airing. (Incidentally, Hill Street co-creator Mike Kozoll has a screenplay credit on the first First Blood.) Unlike Branford’s previous appearances, neither the character nor the actor he’s impersonating are named in dialogue, presumably for legal reasons. Branford’s shtick is certainly getting rather tired. He has a few mood swings in this one that bring the seriousness of his mental illness more into focus, as opposed to just playing it for laughs.

Other stuff:

After the season premiere left off the signature opening chyron, these episodes bring it back (mostly: it’s missing on “Seoul on Ice”). The words “ROLL CALL” are eliminated, since the episodes generally open with scenes in various other settings (Frank and Joyce’s apartment, Belker and Tataglia’s apartment, etc.).

The bookie Garibaldi owes money to is played by Stuart Margolin (the guy who gives Charles Bronson his first gun in Death Wish, and also Jim Rockford’s con man buddy Angel on The Rockford Files).

The cold open of “Hacked to Pieces” has a gag about Hunter using gravity boots, making me think of Dale Cooper.

Captain Art Eastland, the retiring captain Ray replaces at Polk Ave., wasn’t at the Captains’ Retreat last season in “El Capitan.” I wonder why they didn’t just bring back one of those actors for this relatively small role. We do see a guy from the retreat, Captain Gene Scapizzi, who serves on Furillo’s commission.

Graffiti seen at the 12:14 mark in “Hacked to Pieces”: “TEAMSTERS GO HOME.” I’m not certain what this means, but it feels very L.A.

Robin uses the term “BF,” meaning “boyfriend.” I was surprised that that abbreviation was in common parlance way back then. I assumed it had evolved out of texting culture.

The date of “Hacked to Pieces” is mentioned as being September 26. The writers didn’t quite get the timing right: “Blues in the Night” aired on September 26, and “Hacked to Pieces” aired a week later, on October 3.

With Belker’s mom gone, he instead has a phone call with his sister Luana in “Seoul on Ice.” We met her only once, way back in Season 2. Evidently, she’s living in Hawaii now, and dating a Samoan.

“In the Belly of the Bus” has a weird little storyline where a list of twelve women’s names is found in the male locker room. Jablonski assumes it’s a list of sexual partners to be notified due to a venereal disease diagnosis, but it turns out it’s just Goldblume’s “sweethearts list”; apparently he’s insecure that the number of women he’s had sex with in his life is too low. This seems like very bizarre and awkward behavior for someone who’s approaching age forty; it seems like something a high school or maybe college student would do.

“In the Belly of the Bus” also has a decent Belker subplot, wherein he gets cold-cocked while crawling on the filthy floor of a bus station men’s room looking for a drug dealer, and ends up unconscious in a duffel bag in the baggage compartment of a bus for hours. His bus ride back home is charming, as he is at first annoyed by an obese woman who sits next to him, but the scene suddenly takes a turn from the obvious direction it seems to be going. As poorly as his day is going, he starts to actually like the woman, and accepts her offer of a pickle.

Incidentally, the bus storyline has perhaps the most blatant indication yet that the show is set in Chicago, with the bus’s stops announced as Glen Ellyn, Lake Forest, Elgin, Evanston, Northwestern, and Springfield. There’s also a box prominently marked “Springfield Ill” in the baggage compartment.

A nice bit of continuity: it’s revealed that Joe Keenan was killed by Charlie Weeks, the narcotics detective from waaay back in late Season 1, who was wrongly accused of racist motives in a shooting and was cleared by Washington. Evidently, since we last saw Weeks, he was booted from the force, spent some time in prison, and was contracted by Keenan to do some shady work for Daniels’s mayoral campaign. Up until recently, he’s been living in a shitty bedbug-infested apartment (which Buntz tears up with enormous enthusiasm: “I try to enjoy the work”), with only a blowup doll for company.

Frank, Henry and Irwin listen to a tape recording of Keenan and Weeks, with Hector Elizondo (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) and Charles Hallahan (The Thing) respectively reprising their roles from earlier in the series, in uncredited voice-only performances. It’s a nice touch that they got them both in to do that.

Pamela Gordon (whom Mark Frost later cast as Buddy Faro’s deadpan secretary and occasional romantic interest Velma Fleckner) has a small role as Charlie Weeks’s apartment manager.

In the final piece I wrote on Season 5, I mentioned that the Joe Keenan stuff is a bit convoluted, inconsistent, and messy. It just gets worse this season. The two dirty detectives who were getting free suits at the end of last season were from Midtown—that was the whole genesis of the investigation into Midtown and Keenan—but in the tape recording, Keenan says they were from the Heights. Another retcon: Keenan was an “Inspector” the one time he actually appeared onscreen, then in the 5th season finale he was said to be Captain of Midtown. Now, it’s repeatedly said that he was Daniels’s Deputy Chief for three and a half years, specifically during the period when Daniels was running for mayor. This doesn’t check out, as we saw Dennis Mahoney in the Deputy Chief role throughout the campaign arc, and Warren Briscoe took over the job shortly thereafter. This retcon was presumably made so that Daniels’s ignorance of Keenan’s deeds is even tougher to swallow.

“Somewhere Over the Rambo” is the first episode of the show directed by Stan Lathan, who would go on to co-create Def Comedy Jam and to direct many Dave Chapelle specials.

David Byrd (prison physician Dr. Mel Smordin in Lost Highway) appears as the very unpleasant high school principal of a boy who was killed by a cop, in “Somewhere Over the Rambo.” One other Lost Highway alum I neglected to mention in earlier episodes: Gene Ross (Warden Marshall Clements) played Daryl Ann’s racist dad in the final two episodes of Season 4.

Rico, the meth addict Leo tried to help get clean in Season 3, pops up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in “Somewhere Over the Rambo,” when J.D. and Neal raid a drug den. This is the last we’ll see of poor Rico; an ignominious end for a great character.

We get a hint that Buntz likes big girls when the personnel guy asks his preference: “Tell you one thing. I think this country’s too hung up on thinness.”
 
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ON THE AIR AND HILL STREET BLUES

There are several cast members who appeared during Frost's run on HSB, and worked with him again on On the Air. There are the obvious ones: Miguel Ferrer appeared as drug dealer Carlos Salvadone in Hill Street's "Ewe and Me, Babe." Tracey Walter appeared on HSB as two different informant characters who get intimidated by LaRue, in Season 2's "The Shooter" and Season 4's "Here's Adventure, Here's Romance" (the former was before Frost's time on the series). Betty Thomas (Lucy Bates) directed Episode 6 of On the Air. Then there are the less prominent ones, folks who were day players on both shows. Robert Costanzo, who played gangster Lester Franco in the final three episodes of Season 4, appeared in Episode 6 of On the Air as Mr. Plumber. (Animation/comic book fans may best know Costanzo as the voice of Harvey Bullock on Batman: The Animated Series. ) John Quade, who appeared in Season 5's "Intestinal Fortitude" and "Of Human Garbage" as kingpin Sal Intestinale, was in the final episode of On the Air as Billy "The Ear" Mulkahey, the inventor of the "voice disintegrator" technology that Lester plans to use to sabotage Betty. And On the Air Episode 3 (the quiz show episode) features two alumni from Frost's time on the Hill: Charles Tyner, who played Jennifer Tilly's mobster boss Al DiPiano in Season 5's "Davenport in a Storm" and "Passage to Libya," plays Professor Right Answer, the smartest man in the world. And Betty's grade school teacher Ethel Thissle is played by Diana Bellamy, who had a small but memorable role in "Parting Is Such Sweep Sorrow" as the woman Renko attempts to help out of her bathtub, when he ends up herniating himself.
 
THE REST OF SEASON 6: EPISODES 6-22

I’m going to do this writeup as more of a “season roundup” as I did for Season 1, since Frost has now exited the show, and because the series is undeniably a bit past its prime, and most importantly, because this has become way more of a time-consuming burden for me than I’d initially planned! That being said, even if these episodes’ only value was as the first instance of David Milch co-running a series, they would be an indispensable piece of TV history meriting attention. On top of that, there’s still some very good stuff in here, although it’s definitely a mixed bag.

I previously noted that the back half of Season 5 seemed to pivot to being more episodic than ever before. Season 6 Episodes 2-5, which I previously wrote up, moved back into the more familiar serialized format. Starting with Episode 6, the show again favors standalone episodes almost exclusively this season, with only one or two continuing storylines per episode—usually focusing on the characters’ personal lives. In keeping with this move to the more episodic, not a single episode this season features a “Previously on Hill Street Blues” recap. Episodes 18-21 do become a bit more serialized again, with each episode featuring one major procedural storyline that carries over.

The writers take another stab at coming up with a closing line for the roll calls. Beginning with Episode 6 (“Oh, You Kid”), Jablonski now proclaims, “They’re gettin’ away out there!” It’s not great, but it’s certainly better than the lame closer used in the prior four episodes: “Let’s do our jobs.”

Staff:

With “Oh, You Kid,” Robert Ward joins as Story Editor. Ward was primarily a novelist, who had written the screenplay for the 1980 film adaptation of his novel Cattle Annie and Little Britches, starring Scott Glenn, Burt Lancaster, Rod Steiger, a teenaged Diane Lane, and featuring Hill Street’s Michael Conrad. Milch hired Ward after reading his unmade screenplay adapting his novel Red Baker. After the end of Hill Street, Ward joined the fifth season of Miami Vice as a co-exec producer. He also worked on Dick Wolf’s New York Undercover, as well as writing several TV movies and an episode of NYPD Blue.

Robert Schlitt joins as Co-Producer beginning with “Remembrance of Hits Past.” He’d been in the industry for two decades at this point, having written for The Monkees, The Mod Squad, Hawaii Five-O, and Lou Grant, among many others. He seemed to work almost exclusively as a freelancer. Following his half-season on Hill Street, he was on staff at Matlock for several seasons, and then worked as supervising producer on Father Dowling Mysteries.

John Hancock directs “Oh, You Kid” and “The Virgin and the Turkey.” He is probably best known for Bang the Drum Slowly, the 1973 baseball drama starring a then-unknown Robert De Niro. Hill Street had spoofed the film’s title last year with the episode “Bangladesh Slowly.”

“I Want My Hill Street Blues” has story and co-teleplay by John Mankiewicz, grandson of Citizen Kane scribe Herman J. “Mank” Mankiewicz. This same year, John was also a story editor on the second season of Miami Vice. He went on to create the syndicated crime show The Street (Stanley Tucci was a regular) and ABC’s The Marshal (starring Jeff Fahey). Among other series and TV movies, he has worked as a co-exec producer on House, Magic City, and House of Cards; an exec producer on Bosch; and a consulting producer on In Plain Sight and The Mentalist. His most recent credit was as a consulting producer on Showtime’s Bryan Cranston vehicle Your Honor. This was Mankiewicz’s only Hill Street credit.

Mankiewicz shares teleplay credit on that episode with Russ Woody. This was also Woody’s only time on the Hill. Prior to this gig, he’d written episodes for shows such as Fantasy Island and Newhart, and went on to write for many more, primarily sitcoms, including working on staff at Murphy Brown, Parenthood, Mad About You, Cybill, Becker, and The Drew Carey Show.

“Larry of Arabia” has a co-teleplay credit for John William See and a co-story credit for Jerry Patrick Brown. I can’t find any information on See (this is his sole IMDb credit), but Brown had one more story credit on Hill Street in Season 7, and went on to work on a few other shows, including Stephen Cannell’s Silk Stalkings.

Duncan Smith has co-story and co-teleplay credit on “Iced Coffey.” Smith only has three other IMDb credits: one episode of Remington Steele and two of St. Elsewhere.

Former staff writer Michael Wagner shares story credit on “Slum Enchanted Evening” with Jonathan Lemkin, who went on to write for 21 Jump Street, and has screenwriting credits on The Devil’s Advocate, Red Planet, and Shooter.

Buntz

“Is he as much of an outlaw as his rep?”
“He gets the job done.”
-- Lipsky and Washington, cliché cop-movie dialogue from “Slum Enchanted Evening”

I think Norman Buntz plays a central role in more episodes this season than any character other than Furillo and Belker. I’m also finding that he has overall turned out to be a much tamer character than I remembered, although I suppose that in the context of that era of television, it was still a rather edgy characterization. For the most part, any unethical behavior he engages in isn’t to benefit himself; he’s just a bit overzealous in his pursuit of justice. He frequently talks about his instincts; even Goldblume, who generally disapproves of Buntz’s methods, praises his instincts, but says that he can’t treat them as law. (This is a problem a lot of seasoned cops I worked with ran into: their gut intuition has become so attuned to reacting quickly that they often can’t articulate what tipped them off to something. Which makes them very effective on the street, but less so when yours truly is trying to make out a legally sufficient case based on their actions.) The most memorable instance this season of Buntz employing some colorful and questionable means is a classic scene in the Christmas episode, wherein Norm—clearly in a festive holiday mood—employs a “drug-sniffing” turkey to intimidate a dealer he knows is holding. In another episode, Buntz tortures a suspect with scalding water, then afterwards admits that the statement he got will likely be tossed due to coercion. The fact that he is fully aware that the evidence he obtained is useless hints that perhaps there is an element of sadism in him.

Occasionally, the show does show us a more cold-blooded, brutal side to Buntz. In “Oh, You Kid,” after a robbery perp socks him in the mouth, Norm delivers a vicious beatdown on the guy (by 1985 TV standards), clearly crossing into the realm of police brutality. Later, when the same guy commits a particularly nasty assault, Norm doesn’t arrest him. Instead, he stealthily stalks the guy until he commits a gunpoint robbery, giving Buntz the excuse to gun him down. Furillo immediately sniffs out what happened, and says that even if IAD squares the kill, Buntz isn’t square with Frank. Buntz simply replies, “I can live with it.” This sets up a potentially interesting dynamic between the two that unfortunately isn’t really followed up on. For the rest of the season, the furthest Furillo ever goes in condemning Buntz’s actions is to tell him, “We’re different sorts of cops.”

A similarly cold-blooded Buntz moment occurs in “Scales of Justice,” when Norm deliberately lets a guy escape from custody, knowing that he’ll gun down two drug dealers, with the dual benefits of removing a highly dangerous designer drug from the streets, and of protecting Sid the Snitch, who was made by the dealers. Even here, the show ameliorates Buntz’s ruthlessness with some humanity, as his actions demonstrate his growing appreciation for Sid…at least as a resource, if not as a person. Goldblume is pissed, causing the rift between the two to grow ever larger. Dennis Franz and Joe Spano would go on to play a similar dynamic fifteen years later on NYPD Blue (after Milch had left the show), when Spano played the father of Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s character (Spano’s John Clark Sr. was a much more damaged and corruptible character than our Henry Goldblume, but one who deeply resented Sipowicz’s methods).

We get a hint of a potentially more sordid past for Norm, in a storyline that stretches out over several episodes, involving his former partner and childhood friend (his only friend, Buntz says), Tommy Donahue. The scenes between the two are poignant, with Franz never playing to sentiment; but beneath his gruff tough-love exterior, the affection for Tommy and the deep hurt at watching this guy destroy himself are obvious. We learn that Norm transferred out of the Heights to get away from Tommy because he was tired of being involved in shady doings. In “Das Blues,” Buntz reluctantly stands watch as Donahue violently shakes down a loan shark to relieve his gambling debts. This comes back to bite Norm a few episodes later when Tommy murders another Heights detective, and eventually comes for Buntz as well, forcing Norm to kill him. IAD uses the earlier shakedown as evidence that Buntz was complicit in Tommy’s crimes and killed him to prevent him from talking. One would imagine that Furillo would be happy to use this as an excuse to get rid of a problematic cop, but instead, he goes above and beyond to clear Norm, and resists pressure to transfer him.

“What Are Friends For?” (Dick Wolf’s only solo writing credit on the show) shows a more heroic side of Buntz, as he and his ill-fated partner Rodriguez are captured by an escaped serial killer Buntz put away years earlier. I wanted to like this one more than I did. I enjoy it when shows do these storylines that are basically just two people in a room psychologically fucking with each other, like a stageplay. Unfortunately, the scenes are lacking in atmosphere, shot and lit in far too pedestrian a fashion. The actor playing the killer, while fine, doesn’t have enough presence to carry such a major featured guest role. (It also feels a bit reminiscent of Goldblume’s scenes in the season premiere, but without Yaphet Kotto’s magnetism.) Franz has some good moments, but doesn’t get to show a ton of range, as Buntz realizes that keeping up his usual brash, confident, ball-busting demeanor is the best way to delay the guy from killing him. Buntz does get some good vulnerable moments in the denouement, when Goldblume comes across him vomiting in the bathroom, and when he asks Furillo for permission to notify Rodriguez’s widow and tell her he was a credit to the badge (“It’s a lie, but at least it’s something, huh?”). The real highlight, though, is when Buntz—still with his arms zip-tied to a chair—head-butts the killer through a third-story window to his death.

We also get a little glimpse of Norm’s love life by way of not one, but two, followups to the storyline where Buntz briefly got involved in hiring khaki officers (Episode 5, “Somewhere Over the Rambo”). He asks out Celeste Patterson, whom he previously ineptly tried to coerce during her job interview. This time, he’s extremely earnest and respectful about it, which seems to earn him points. Although she initially says she’s nervous about being alone with him, they apparently do go out…she later accuses him of never calling her again! Then, in a later episode, the prior khaki officer stops by: the one Buntz slut-shamed over the fact that she only got the job by fucking the personnel guy. She comes in to reveal that she passed her civil service test, and has been fantasizing about Buntz! These are again classic male wish-fulfillment storylines with some decidedly weird gender dynamics at play.

One final note on Buntz: he’s apparently a bit of a health nut, despite appearances. His constant gum-chewing is because he quit smoking, and he lectures Hunter on his eating habits.

Some Noteworthy Episodes

While Lewis and Milch don’t really live up to their promise this season to “freshen the formula,” a handful of episodes do try something a bit different, and are among the season’s more interesting efforts (although the premiere, “Blues in the Night,” is still by far the best episode of the season).

“The Virgin and the Turkey” (Episode 10)

This Christmas episode primarily focuses on Furillo and Davenport visiting Frank’s parents in the suburbs, the first time Frank has seen them in five years, and the first time Joyce has ever met them. Evidently, Furillo’s Catholic parents did not take his divorce from Fay well. It’s a good little family drama, and a nice showcase for Veronica Hamel, who all too often is given short shrift this season. The primary conflict revolves around a mother who values family above all else being devastated that her little boy has married a career woman (of course, the attacks on Joyce’s childlessness hit a particular nerve, since we know that Davenport can’t have children). The casting of Frank’s family is great all around, and the family dynamics are very believable, never feeling exaggerated or overly dramatic (although the resolution with the mother is a bit too pat). Frank’s Mama Barbara is a classic manipulative, guilt-sowing Italian mother. It’s fun seeing Frank, who’s usually in control of any room he’s in, reduced to being a submissive child (it’s also adorable hearing him call his parents “Mama” and “Papa”).

Frank’s younger brother Joe is played by Michael Durrell, who is arguably best known as Robert Maxwell on V; he previously appeared as attorney Irv Luboff in two Season 4 episodes. Someone watching those scenes between Luboff and Furillo must have noticed how much Durrell looks like a doughier version of Dan Travanti; the decision to bring the actor back as Furillo’s brother is inspired. Durrell and Travanti bring a real lived-in feel to their relationship. Joe clearly looks up to his older brother and has missed him terribly, even as the two are opposites in most respects (“country mouse, city mouse”). Joe is the only one who remembers how unhappy (and drunk) Frank was when he was with Fay, while his parents have happily forgotten how worried they were about him. Joe is the balancing force in the family. He’s more comfortable standing up to their mother than Frank is, and his combination of openness and kindness helps Joyce let go of her anger and feel at ease enough to open up more to the rest of the family.

Frank’s father (no first name is given) is an old-school dad who just doesn’t know how to relate to his son. He works at “the plant,” and spends most of his free time hunting and carving duck decoys. He clearly loves his grandkids, and is very proud of Joe for having things that Dad can understand: a nice suburban house, an office building. Joe tries to talk up Frank’s news-making accomplishments with the anti-corruption commission, but Pop just can’t get excited about such abstract achievements. Although there’s not exactly a resolution between the two, Frank does run back downstairs at the last minute to hug his dad and tell him he loves him. Papa Furillo is surprised and doesn’t really know how to respond, but he’s also clearly very moved. It’s a sweet, simple moment, beautifully acted by both men. The episode ends with a nice moment between Frank and Joyce in the car: “For five years, I’ve been afraid I’d wind up standing at my father’s grave thinking about all the things I wanted to say to him and never did. Thanks for coming with me.” The look Veronica Hamel gives him as he says this is beautiful.

The other subplots are: a fun storyline about a charity “Olympics” competition between the Hill cops and the local fire department; the aforementioned Buntz turkey storyline; and a landlord-tenant dispute tangentially involving the supposed appearance of the Virgin Mary on a water-damaged wall. The Virgin scene acts as a tentative, temporary truce between Buntz and Goldblume, as they each help the tenant in their own very different ways. Henry sits with the guy and laboriously works out a workable monthly budget that allows him to make back-rent, while Norm stands outside the building acting as a barker, drumming up customers for the Virgin Mary attraction.

“Say It as It Plays” (Episode 12)

This is a rare instance this season of an old-school Hill Street serialized mini-arc: almost all the storylines from the preceding episode, “Two Easy Pieces,” continue into this one. The main plot of these two episodes revolves around Officer Ronnie Garfield (Mykelti Williamson). We last saw Ronnie at the beginning of Season 5, when he nearly got fired for his role in the rookies’ rape-by-prostitute of the Tim Robbins character. When Furillo saved his job, Garfield told Frank that he wanted to work for him one day, and Furillo said he had a long way to go before Frank would have him. A year later, Ronnie has transferred to the Hill, and immediately finds himself in trouble again. The Internal Affairs inquest testimony of each witness is dramatized through Rashomon-style subjective flashbacks, a technique the show has never used before. In fact, as far as I can recall, I don’t think the show has ever had any flashbacks at all. Through the first 113 episodes, I’m pretty sure the series has been entirely linear…often with many storylines going on at once, but in temporal sequence. Likewise, the series has never portrayed scenes through a subjective viewpoint (for instance, there’s never been a dream sequence). These flashbacks replay the same events we saw last episode several times, but with new, different footage each time. (Unfortunately, the same cheesy Mike Post suspense music plays over every single one of the flashbacks.) There’s also an element of Twelve Angry Men, with the always-perceptive Furillo clearly channeling Joyce (as foreshadowed in the first scene of the episode) as he doggedly wins the others over to Garfield’s side, despite his story initially seeming unlikely.

Continued in next post...
 
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SEASON 6 ROUNDUP CONT'D (2/4)

More Noteworthy Episodes

“Remembrance of Hits Past” (Episode 16)

Sole teleplay credit by Walon Green, who also shares story credit with Lewis and Milch.

Before the cold open is over, Furillo is shot, and spends the rest of the episode in and out of surgery in grave condition. This is really the first time an episode of the show has had only one single storyline, as every scene is focused on Furillo’s condition and the impact it has on the other characters. Another way this episode breaks from the usual formula is its use of flashbacks. While “Say It as It Plays” used subjective flashbacks to events we’d already seen, this episode is the first to feature traditional flashbacks: specifically, showing us how Frank and Joyce met. The flashbacks take place seven years prior to the present events…so, although the year is never stated, that places them in about 1979, two years before the beginning of the show. That timeline fits with information we’ve been told in the past. This is another good one for Joyce, who carries much of the episode, and Veronica Hamel gives a really good performance. For someone who got into acting through modeling, and as far as I know didn’t have much if any formal training, she’s got the stuff.

We see that the first time Joyce and Frank interacted was during a cross-examination, when Frank was a lieutenant, at the trial of mobster Al Biamonte (Joyce represents a codefendant). In classic meet-cute fashion, it’s a car accident that initially brings them together, although it’s still awhile before things truly get rolling due to Joyce’s reluctance. Following her divorce, she’s adamant about staying focused on herself, and she immediately senses that if she lets anything happen with Furillo, she’ll be all-in. As she puts it, when Frank asks about her current boyfriend: “He’s safe. With you, I’m not so sure.”

The two mostly bond over classical music initially, which leads to some nicely-written scenes that provide some good backstory for both characters. Frank played violin as a kid (badly), Joyce danced. Furillo observes that she still moves like a dancer, and has the good line, “Some things mark you for life.” He later talks about his father translating radio opera broadcasts for him from the Italian, and how, to Frank, those stories represented the exotic world that his father talks about from his time with the Merchant Marines. Frank admits that he’s never been “anywhere,” and Joyce says that she’s been to Europe, but feels like she didn’t really see it. This is especially poignant, since we know as of the present day, the two still have never taken a real vacation together, and Joyce went to Paris without Frank during their trial separation a couple of seasons ago.

Pizza also ends up being a major factor in their courtship, and impliedly, is the reason that Joyce has called Frank “Pizza Man” since the second episode of the show. (In reality, Bochco and Kozoll chose the sobriquet for its vaguely sexual implications. In addition to the inherent porno-ish connotations of a pizza guy, there was—and is—a chain in L.A. called Pizza Man with the slogan, “He delivers.”)

The costume designers delight in dressing Flashback Frank hideously…not quite Norman Buntz levels of awful, but still displaying some shockingly poor taste, given how classy he always looks in the present day. There are no vests: his trademark three-piece suit look is still in the future. The ties are all terrible. At one point, the front of his tie is tucked into his pants while the back part frantically flails. He has a hideously crinkly rain jacket, with the collar adorably askew. Part of this is to convey that he’s poor, barely making ends meet after his divorce, which is a plot point (he can only afford to ask Joyce out to free chamber music concerts at the museum). But part of it is also to show how much his relationship with Joyce informed and transformed the man. As for Joyce, the costumers make her look younger by putting her in more girlish ensembles, and the hairdressers take a similar approach, but she is of course always stylish…except for the comically gigantic glasses she wears in court which cover half her face.

We also get some nice new insight into the relationship between Furillo and Chief Daniels. In the flashbacks, Daniels is an Inspector. Already harboring political ambitions, he invites Frank to accompany him to a cocktail party, where one of the liberal attendees grills the two cops on their opinions of the Supreme Court’s Miranda decision (which wasn’t exactly new news…it was already thirteen years old in 1979, but remained extremely controversial). Daniels takes a hardline pro-police, anti-defendant stance. Furillo has a much more nuanced view: he likes the ruling and feels it has improved policing overall, but he also feels that the small number of cases that get bounced due to technicalities are the ones that make press, eroding public confidence, thereby paradoxically causing the public to demand a harder line. Daniels, whose brute intellect isn’t nearly sophisticated enough to make the points that Furillo can, clearly even then sees the value in having this guy in his corner.

In the present day, Daniels and Joyce share a hospital bench, momentarily allies in pulling for Frank’s recovery. Tying in to the flashbacks, he recalls when Furillo passionately argued for the fairness of giving Joyce’s client a plea, noting that Frank did so “maybe not for [Joyce], but because of [her].” Daniels tells Joyce, “It was the first time I saw Frank really starting to emerge. I think you had a lot to do with that.” It’s reminiscent of comments that Frank’s brother made earlier this season, about how strongly the relationship with Joyce has shaped Frank for the better. Daniels notes that the first thing he did after being appointed Chief was to promote Frank to Captain. “I knew what he had in him was very special. I saw it right from the beginning. In spite of our differences, the tension caused by recent events, I still see it, even though I don’t want to.”

The cops initially pursue obvious suspects with a motive to shoot Frank, but the truth turns out to be something much more chaotic and random, and perhaps a little chilling in light of recent events here in 2024: the shooter was just a delusional kook looking to target a political candidate. (News had just broken that Furillo is considering a mayoral run, which I’ll address a bit more below.) Namely, the would-be assassin is Randolph Scripps, from Mark Frost’s Season 4 episode “Goodbye, Mr. Scripps” (I hope Frost got some character residuals from Scripps’s return). We’ll recall from that episode that Scripps initially seemed like a good-natured loony who decided to run for mayor on election day, but then took a dark turn when he tried to stab Ozzie Cleveland following his victory. Here, we learn that he’s been arrested two more times since then for trying to assassinate candidates for local office, and was recently released from a mental institution. Bringing Scripps back is a nice, deep cut. It’s not essential for viewers to have seen the earlier episode, or to remember it, but it’s cool that the producers added some extra value for attentive viewers who did recall that episode from two years earlier. I also enjoy the realism regarding which characters do and don’t recognize Scripps. Renko, who arrested him two years earlier, has a discussion with him (disguised as a cop) and doesn’t recognize him at all. Goldblume immediately recognizes the face when he sees a photo, but can’t place who he is until he goes through mugshot books. When Goldblume tells Davenport about him, the name doesn’t ring a bell even though she briefly represented him (and Goldblume doesn’t seem to recall that Joyce was in the room with him and Scripps).

Continuing the show’s balancing-act between Buntz being a hardass but still somewhat lovable, he lies his way into ER so he can tell Joyce that he has a sixth sense about people, and he is absolutely certain that Frank is tough enough to pull through. It’s a presumptuous act that could very well piss off a distraught wife—especially since Joyce and Norm have butted heads before, and he’s exactly the kind of cop she’s inclined to dislike. But displaying the soft spot that Lewis and Milch have for the character, the scene is played as purely sweet, with Joyce being grateful and touched. I’m not entirely sure I buy it.

Also keeping with the Lewis-Milch love for Buntz, Norm gets to be the one to take Scripps down and avenge Furillo (it looks to me like he wings Scripps in the shoulder, not actually killing him). It’s a pretty cool scene showing off Buntz’s marksmanship skill, reminiscent of the staircase scene in American Psycho, but with a bullet instead of a chainsaw.

“Come and Get It” (Episode 22)

Written by Robert Schlitt. This is the season finale. For some reason, the season ended very early, with this episode being broadcast on April 3. I’m not sure why that was. NBC’s other Thursday night shows continued airing new episodes into May that year, as did their 10pm dramas on other nights (St. Elsewhere, Miami Vice, Remington Steele). TV Tango says that Hill Street continued airing reruns throughout April and May, but doesn’t specify which episodes. It’s possible that TV Tango is wrong and NBC put something else in the 10pm Thursday slot, perhaps because Hill Street’s ratings were declining, but that’s just speculation on my part.

Like “Remembrance of Hits Past,” this episode is tightly focused on one singular storyline…almost. The only, minor subplot is Belker at the hospital, waiting for Robin to give birth (the birth is the final scene of this season). Otherwise, it’s all about the aftermath surrounding the capture of serial killer Albert “the Creeper” Sawyer, which occurs in the cold open. Sawyer is creepily played by Paul McCrane, who portrayed the eponymous Leonard Betts in the Vince Gilligan-penned X-Files episode of that name. The capture sequence, shot from Sawyer’s perspective as he realizes his face is in the newspaper and he begins to suspect everyone is looking at him, is nicely suspenseful, and well-shot and edited (Scott Brazil directs this one), albeit with some slightly corny music from Mike Post (a much more rock-oriented action track than usual). The sequence is heavily based on the real-life arrest of Richard “Night Stalker” Ramirez the preceding year, with the cold open following the real events almost beat for beat.

The rest of the episode is a portrayal of the media circus that surrounds these types of crimes, and its ripple effect on society. An irritated Jablonski has to try to control the gaggle of press, as well as the threat of vigilante justice by outraged citizens. Renko is obsessed with trying to maximize his portion of the reward money for the capture. In one of the most effective scenes in the episode, Buntz and Sid the Snitch work a fence who has some items that Sawyer took from his victims. The fence (nicely played by Elizabeth Peña, of *batteries not included) describes how deeply Sawyer disturbed her during their interactions (the descriptions of his crimes are as graphic as 1986 TV would permit, including Peña’s memorable intonation of “everything comes off”). The usually glib Sid gets very quiet, and Norm listening over the wire outside is equally creeped out.

Davenport at first finds Sawyer terrifying and doesn’t know if she can represent him, but then becomes competitive when another attorney tries to oust her, implying to Sawyer’s father that Joyce won’t be a zealous advocate because she’s married to the police captain. (Realistically, while we know Joyce is a great attorney, her office shouldn’t be assigning her cases in that precinct at all.) It turns out the new attorney is backed by an agent who earlier approached Joyce, and who plans to exploit Sawyer’s life rights to make the family millions. The slimy agent is played by yet another Terminator veteran, Earl Boen (Dr. Peter Silberman).

Daniels, as usual, is happy to use the citizens who aided in the arrest as props in a press conference, then to discard them afterwards. A major storyline in the episode involves an unemployed veteran named Manolo whom Daniels promises to give special attention if he applies to be a police officer, but Manolo hits a roadblock due to an old conviction. Near the end of the episode, a distraught and drunk Manolo is firing a gun on his car (hilariously, while discharging a firearm in public, he at least has the courtesy to keep his liquor bottle inside a brown paper bag…some rules must be honored). Rather than arrest him, Hill and Renko take him to get coffee and sober up, in the process affording him a small moment of heroism when a little girl recognizes him from the press conference.

Character Arcs

Furillo is romanced by a local kingmaker to run for mayor, in a storyline that stretches out over about half the season, on and off, although it never really gets much traction. Furillo is more willing to entertain the prospect than I would have expected, but he’s continuously cagey when asked about it, and clearly uncomfortable with the back-room horse-trading aspect. He finally inevitably blows up his prospects in the penultimate episode of the season when he realizes how beholden he would be to those who put him in power. The actual plot impetus for him being dropped is that he refuses to throw Buntz to the wolves in the Tommy Donahue shooting, choosing instead to show leniency, even if it reflects poorly on Frank in the press. He’s deemed not a team player for sticking to his scruples. Davenport is a bit peeved that Norman Buntz, of all people, is the indirect reason that the city is deprived of a very worthy mayoral candidate. She has a point.

Bates fucks the pottery instructor from the season premiere, but he turns out to be a heel who hits it and quits it. (There is a cute bit when she first brings the guy home, and is embarrassed that, after three years of putting off painting her bedroom, she finally started last night.) Since the first season, Bates’ dating life has seemed to fluctuate between nonexistent and deeply depressing. Following the debacle with the pottery guy, she gets very sulky and tells Joe that she just has to accept that she’s never going to have a family or someone who loves her; but things turn around when she learns that Fabian’s mom Vivian is back to hooking and using. Beverly Hope Atkinson is once again very good as Vivian. In contrast to her last courtroom scene, where she committed to the detox program for the sake of her kids, this time she chooses to pay the $25 fine so she can return to being high. There’s no pride or joy in her attitude; just the profound defeat and emptiness of an addict. Fabian is soon back staying with Lucy. All the actors are great, but the writing on some of this stuff gets a little melodramatic. A particularly bad offender: Fabian tells Coffey, “I’m never taking dope. I’d be too afraid, Joe! If it’s gonna stop me from loving people.” Oof. I can’t believe that line got through Milch. I guess with the grind of a weekly show, you don’t have time to rewrite everything. Or maybe Milch himself was taking a lot of dope the week that script came due. We also get this heartwarming episode-closing line from Coffey: “Hey, everything is gonna be okay.” Of course, whenever a film or TV character says that, we have no reason to worry about them at all…

So, two episodes later, at the end of “Larry of Arabia,” Coffey is gunned down. It’s an unexpected gut punch, as Furillo was just shot in the prior episode and is still not back to work. The circumstances leading up to Coffey’s death are completely mundane and arbitrary: because Goldblume has plumbing issues at his new apartment, the weekly precinct poker game is moved to Coffey’s place. And so, just because Joe happens to be buying beer and cigars—and because his first choice of store is out of Garcia y Vegas—he walks in on a robbery. For a show that has been stingy about offing regulars, it’s the first truly big, affecting death other than Esterhaus. Ed Marinaro has said that he asked to be written off the show, as he sensed that the end was coming soon, and he wanted to get a head-start on finding new jobs; he said that he later regretted not staying until the end, as he never again worked with a cast and crew that he liked so much, or on a show where he felt the same degree of creative freedom.

The episode building up to the death is a nice sendoff for Joe, focusing on the thing that makes his character really work: his deep love for and friendship with Lucy. She’s been getting hit up by Fabian’s mom and her pimp for more and more money, so Coffey steps in and puts a stop to it, then insists that they take personal time off to file guardianship papers for Fabian, because he’s tired of Bates accepting that she doesn’t deserve happiness. “Doomed hero spends his final day filing forms and haggling with bureaucrats” doesn’t exactly sound like the most exciting way for a main character to go out, but given the context, it’s an incredibly sweet and appropriate ending for one of the best relationships on the series. Joe is a character who was nearly killed off at the end of Season 1 when he was still a guest star (by some accounts, he was killed off and the scene was reshot for syndication, although I’m skeptical of that). Since I’ve seen the show before and I knew this was coming, I was struck by a line Lucy had back in Season 4, in “Fuchs Me? Fuchs You!” Coffey has been shot again, and Lucy observes that the silver lining is that the chances of being shot three times are ridiculously unlikely (the old “getting struck by lightning twice” concept). I don’t think that line was deliberate foreshadowing at the time, but it certainly resonates in retrospect. Bates has a good spotlight in the next episode, “Iced Coffey,” as she struggles with her inability to identify Joe’s killer.

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SEASON 6 ROUNDUP CONT'D (3/4)

Character Arcs Continued

Belker’s undercover subplots, once my favorite part of the show, have now become the most tiresome and repetitive aspect of most episodes. He’s undercover at a food truck, he’s undercover at an animal shelter. He’s in deep cover as a PCP cook (another thing he’s apparently inhumanly good at), and keeps missing his wedding to Robin. In one of the better ones, he’s undercover as a homeless guy (again), and encounters a couple of suburban kids who get their kicks from getting homeless guys drunk and then enticing them to jump off of buildings. Mick is such a great undercover cop because he’s a product of the inner-city streets (we learn in this episode that his dad was a poor, hardworking tailor). There’s an element of class resentment in him always simmering just below the surface, and this episode is a rare instance where the show really foregrounds that. Drunk and angrier than we’ve ever seen him—and not in the usual comical, growling way—he almost seems ready to actually force the entitled creeps off the roof at gunpoint. It’s easily one of Bruce Weitz’s best moments this season. Another entertaining Belker plot, in an entirely different tonal vein, is in the episode “An Oy for an Oy” (oy), when Mick gets stuck in the middle of a wacky feud between two Hassidic Jewish brothers whom Belker can’t tell apart, and who keep impersonating each other. Michael Lerner—who previously appeared in Season 3 as bookie Rollie Simone—plays Meyer Rabinowitz. His brother Israel is played by an actor who doesn’t look THAT much like Lerner, honestly, but with both of them hidden beneath heavy beards, hats, and glasses—and the other actor wearing a very obvious prosthetic nose—the similarity is decent enough to pass off the silly plotline. But it’s really Weitz’s increasing confusion and frustration that makes the whole thing work.

Belker also has a really nice storyline in “Slum Enchanted Evening,” where he encounters former male prostitute Eddie Gregg, from back in Season 3. As I mentioned previously, this character is loosely based on Milch’s drug dealer, Eddie Grundy, who was a good friend of his. Like the real Eddie, Eddie Gregg dies of complications from AIDS in this episode. Belker is at his most nurturing here, sitting with Eddie, buying him ice cream. There are a couple of nicely-played beats where Eddie tries to initiate some kind of physical contact, and Mick’s gut reaction is to recoil, but he immediately softens and takes Eddie’s hand. Charles Levin is really good as Eddie, especially when he gives Belker some parenting advice: “Don’t make fun of him, Mick…the way he walks.”

Goldblume’s biggest storyline of the season involves him using the money Gina Srignoli left him to buy an apartment building in a shitty part of the Hill, becoming both a resident of the building and its landlord. It’s certainly a noble idea, for a ranking officer to actually live in the area he polices, and to get involved in local matters. As usual, Henry’s actions can’t quite live up to his pure intentions. In “I Want My Hill Street Blues,” he improperly uses a police investigation to jam up a neighboring property owner who’s trying to gentrify the area. This provides an interesting parallel between Henry and Buntz. While Goldblume disapproves of Buntz’s rule-bending methods, Henry is taking advantage of his position here just as much as Buntz does, and both do so in the interest of accomplishing what they believe is a righteous end that can’t be achieved by the flawed system. The only significant difference is that Buntz sometimes employs physical violence. Ultimately, Henry, realizing that he’s fighting a losing battle against the inevitable gentrification of the area, sells his property to a slick entrepreneur and doubles what he initially paid. This leads to an episode where Henry—as usual, when he’s feeling guilty about something—gets really pissy and takes it out on everyone around him, until Jablonski sets him straight.

Neal Washington gets a rare spotlight in “Oh, You Kid,” written by Robert Ward. Out of all the main characters, we’ve probably seen the least of Washington’s personal life, ever since he and his girlfriend Jill presumably ended their relationship in Season 2 (after that weird storyline where she pretended to be in Hollywood when she wasn’t). His new girlfriend, Lynnetta, has a son, Kenny. Neal seems to have transferred his own daddy issues into a wholesome compulsion to become the father figure he never had (as we’ve similarly seen Bobby Hill do with various kids). In reality, actor Taurean Blacque adopted ten children (in addition to having two biological sons), and outside of devoting himself to his family, his primary passion seems to have been acting as a spokesperson and ambassador for adoption. So perhaps the writers were borrowing a bit from the actor’s personality here to inform the character. Anyway, things take a turn when the kid becomes afraid that Wash is going to break up with his mom, and during a fight, Kenny shoots Neal with his own gun. It’s a melodramatic soapy development that doesn’t have much of a payoff in subsequent episodes. Neal’s convalescence only lasts for one episode, and then he more or less decides not to see Lynnetta and Kenny anymore, making the whole thing feel kind of cheap. Blacque does get a couple of very good scenes out of it, anyway: one where he plays basketball with Kenny while effectively explaining adult relationships in kid-friendly terms, and another where a hospitalized and drugged-up Neal tells a tearful J.D. about his childhood with an abusive alcoholic dad.

Renko and Hill have some fun storylines, such as a wacky plot about their efforts to recover a heart in a cooler stolen from an ambulance, which leads to some fun Marx Bros.-style wordplay (“the heart in the chest!”) and a great goofy Graduate-style bit with Bobby trying to make a run of it to the hospital after they get in a car accident. In another episode, the two are put on morgue pickup duty and their first parcel is an obese phone sex hooker who has fallen victim to rigor mortis, phone still in hand. In yet another episode, Renko does “past life therapy,” and distraughtly realizes that he’s been reincarnated throughout history as “the Eternal Foot Soldier.” In a more serious vein, they have one of their Good Samaritan storylines, where they try to take care of a sweet, mentally challenged homeless guy.

“Larry of Arabia” features a delightful comedy of errors that begins because Renko ate a bran muffin and desperately needs to take a colossal dump, leading him to come across a corpse in the bathroom stall. This quickly spirals into our guys (Andy, Bobby, J.D., Neal, Henry) inadvertently fucking up a federal investigation and endangering all their careers, but then fixing everything (with the help of Sid the Snitch) when they realize that the feds are even bigger fuckups.

Bobby has a multi-episode arc about his dad turning up dead. We first met his wayward father Reggie in Season 3’s “Santaclaustrophia.” Renko, who stubbornly refused to attempt a reconciliation with his own dad when he was dying in Season 2, has always pushed Bobby to be more sympathetic to the old scoundrel, including in an episode earlier this season (where Bobby did at least call him “dad” for the first time). Both Michael Warren and Charlie Haid are very good in a barroom scene where Hill weeps while trying to reckon with his complicated feelings after the death, and Andy is uncharacteristically quiet and sweet. The rest of this storyline isn’t quite as good, as Bobby brings the body to Roanoke, Virginia, where his aunt lives (the second time we’ve followed a character out of state, after last season’s Vegas episodes, although in this case, the scenes were almost certainly shot in Cali). The funeral is mainly an excuse for another of those lazy, meaningless, wish-fulfillment instant-love storylines that were so popular in that era, as Bobby meets the girl across the street, now all grown up, and they’re immediately smitten with each other. Naturally, we’ll never see this chick again.

Howard Hunter stars in one of the most notorious episodes of the show, “Das Blues.” It’s an extremely silly storyline about Hunter getting a concussion in the precinct boiler room and thinking he’s a captive on a Soviet ship, sabotaging the precinct’s heating, and cold-cocking anyone who comes down. It’s admittedly the kind of thing that would feel more at home in an episode of Community, with Chevy Chase or Ken Jeong in the Hunter role. But hey, I love Community, and I appreciate Lewis and Milch trying something different; and the late Jim Sikking always cracks me up when he gets to go really broad as Howard. So I’m the weirdo who actually enjoys this episode, even if it doesn’t really fit with the somewhat more grounded usual Hill Street reality (why the fuck is the precinct boiler room lit by a single submarine-style giant red lightbulb?!).

For the rest of the season, whenever Lewis and Milch deign to give Hunter a storyline, it’s invariably extremely silly, even by the usual standards of the character. His casual racism has all but disappeared, and he’s now mostly just a hapless bumbling goofball. In one episode, his loyal subordinate Ballantine, who has been around since Season 2, suddenly snaps and reveals that he despises Howard. I’ve compared Hunter to Inspector Clouseau before, and here Ballantine essentially becomes his version of Chief Inspector Dreyfus, a colleague driven nuts by our hero’s stupidity and incompetence. Gary Miller’s performance as Ballantine is just about as over-the-top as Herbert Lom in the later Pink Panther films. In a subsequent episode, a heavily medicated Ballantine comes into work in full ninja regalia and tries to chop off his own fingers.

Although Howard and dog trainer Prunella Ashton-Wilkes are together for much of the season and seem to be an ideal match, this too is taken from poor Howard under the most bizarre of circumstances, as she leaves him for a Pacific Islander whom she had previously married in a ritualistic ceremony. It’s all very goofy, moderately racist, and not very amusing.

LaRue doesn’t have a lot to do this season; some of his worst tendencies seem to have mellowed. For instance, whereas he used to regularly bully Belker, we don’t really see any of that this season. In fact, he’s in charge of Belker’s wedding gift, and he goes above and beyond, and repeatedly resists temptations to take advantage of his gift-buying authority, to skim or to scam. He’s somewhat stunned at the end of the episode when Neal tells him he’ll just have to accept that, for once, he didn’t have an angle and just did something nice. He also displays uncharacteristic sensitivity in several scenes, such as when he intervenes while Davenport is being pushy with Bates in the case surrounding Coffey’s murder.

Following the Furillo Commission findings, the relationship between Chief Daniels and Frank is suitably hostile at first (Daniels has a good Milchian line, ranting at Furillo: “More sniveling homilies from the Marshal Pétain of Hill Street. What a penchant you have for pursuing the innocent and slacking off on the guilty!”). Still, despite his resentment, Fletcher plans to recommend Frank as his successor as Chief if Daniels receives an opportunity in the private sector. After Frank’s near-fatal shooting, Daniels becomes much friendlier toward Furillo; and after losing the private sector gig, and recognizing that his political career is shot as well, Fletcher becomes weirdly chill and even pleasant. This turns out to be because he’s divorcing his wife Cora, and has taken up with none other than Patsy Mayo! Mayo deciding to date Daniels after he relentlessly sexually harassed her last season is explained thusly: “Oh, I couldn’t stand him, and he kept pursuing me. But then I finally began to realize that it wasn’t him I couldn’t stand. The things that I didn’t like were a reflection of his unhappiness.” It’s all pretty problematic to say the least, but Patsy’s character has been kind of problematic from the beginning, so I guess it’s consistent, at least.

Fay puts in her final appearance of the series in “Remembrance of Hits Past.” Evidently, following Barbara Bosson’s dispute with the producers earlier this season, she was persuaded to make one further return; an episode about Frank nearly dying certainly wouldn’t feel complete without her. She’s not credited on this episode: I’m assuming the producers couldn’t come to an agreement with her representation on her billing. In a flashback, we get one last dose of the guns-blazing hellfire-spewing Fay we met in the pilot, bringing things full circle. We also get a slight hint about the circumstances of the divorce, as Fay says “you left,” implying that Frank was the one who ended the marriage. This flashback is the first time that Fay and Frank have shared a scene since “Passage to Libya,” the seventeenth episode of Season 5; most of her Season 5 scenes had been independent of Frank. For a character whose initial existence was entirely dependent on nagging Furillo, she came a long way. I had my ups and downs with Fay, but I’ll admit I ended up being really fond of the character.

Sid the Snitch quickly becomes a deus ex machina, albeit an entertaining one. Seemingly every episode, he pops up just as an investigation is stalling to give someone—usually Buntz—the tip that leads to the case being solved. It’s pretty comical that this guy still seems to have limitless street cred; no matter how many players he sells up the river, his underworld buddies keep trusting him. I believe Sid’s surname is spoken for the first time in “The Virgin and the Turkey.” When our boys make a Christmas gift to Sid of his winning betting slip from earlier this season, nicked from the evidence locker, a touched Sid opines: “Don’t let anybody ever put down America in front of Sidney Thurston, alright? Don’t let anybody ever knock law enforcement.”

Ray Calletano, now Captain of Polk Ave., more or less vanishes from the season after the early stretch. René Enríquez only ended up appearing in five episodes this season, and on the fifth one he is uncredited (“Remembrance of Hits Past,” the same episode where Bosson appears uncredited). His final credited appearance this season, “An Oy for an Oy,” is a good mini-spotlight for him. A lazy cop from his precinct is dropping off Polk Ave. homeless on the Hill, instead of driving them to the shelter. Ray is initially defensive about Furillo questioning his precinct, but in the episode’s penultimate scene, he waits outside Hill Street Precinct in the snow to tell Frank he’s contemplating resigning due to his fears that he’s inept. It’s a sweet scene that makes clear how deeply Ray admires Frank and how adrift he feels without Furillo’s guidance. Frank is characteristically modest and mentorly, and both actors do really nice work.

Guest stars:

For Peaks fans, the big news is a two-episode guest arc by none other than Grace Zabriskie! Zabriskie appears in “Das Blues” and “Scales of Justice” as tattoo artist and fence Terry Silvestri, an associate of Sid who loves nothing more than her snake Salome. (The snake is very docile in most shots where Grace is interacting with it, leading me to wonder if she was mostly handling a rubber imitation, but there is one shot where the snake is very clearly real while wrapped around her shoulders, with the tongue flicking in and out.) She’s really fun in the role, especially when playing up her sexual magnetism with LaRue, which much to J.D.’s dismay comes to nothing after he accidentally shoots her snake while saving Terry’s life.

“Larry” Fishburne appears in “Look Homeward, Ninja” as slick pimp Maurice Haynes.

Another Peaks guest star: Frances Bay appears in “Larry of Arabia” as Elizabeth Mies, a woman whose toaster was stolen. She wants her goddamn rye toast with melted cheese in the morning, and will stop at nothing to get it! Bay is charming as always, and is a good foil for Belker.

A pre-Seinfeld Michael Richards appears as a scammer who picks the wrong mark in Stan Jablonski. Richards and Prosky have a good scene where Stan nearly beats the hell out of the guy in a holding cell.

Lindsay Crouse has a three-episode run toward the end of the season as Officer Kathryn “Kate” McBride, a transfer from the Polk. In addition to starring in House of Games, directed by her then-husband David Mamet, Crouse also played Michael Ontkean’s wife in Slap Shot. McBride has a nice relationship with Bates, who goes to bat for her when McBride is accused of soliciting sex from a prostitute. Bates obviously has some personal baggage surrounding the presumption that all female cops are lesbians, and Kate is finally forced to reluctantly tell Lucy that she actually is a lesbian. The storyline is a nice little portrait of the compounded difficulty of being a cop who’s both female and gay in that era.

Plumber Sal Benaci makes his first appearance in “An Oy for an Oy.” Sal is another one of those characters that Lewis and Milch clearly enjoyed, as he keeps returning again and again over the final two seasons. His main shtick is hitting on Bates, which gets old pretty quickly, but does result in an amusing exchange where he asks after “Sergeant Buns,” to Buntz’s confusion. Sal is played by Jack Andreozzi, who previously appeared as a DEA agent working with Mick on a pawn shop undercover in the last few episodes of Season 1.

Sid Haig (Captain Spaulding in Rob Zombie’s Firefly series) has a brief appearance in “An Oy for an Oy” as a local merchant who complains to Furillo about the homeless situation.

NFL kicker Tony Franklin, who was with the Pats at that time, has a small role as rookie Officer Seabrook, whom Coffey leaves alone for hours in an apartment with a days-old corpse.

Jack Jozefson (who appears in a Wild at Heart deleted scene as Chet, the New Orleans bartender who chats with Johnnie Farragut) plays the slimy manager of an animal shelter where Mick goes undercover.

Frank Collison (Muddy in Twin Peaks Part 13, and Iguana Motel assistant manager Timmy Thompson in Wild at Heart) plays Nolan Trevitt, the junkie who steals the human heart from the ambulance in “Two Easy Pieces.” (If you can’t remember who Collison is in Wild at Heart, he has the memorable line, “Robert Brenton, that dumb fuck?! That stupid shit?! That fucking Bob was so fucking dumb he deserved to die! That asshole!”)

Valentin de Vargas (thug Pancho in Touch of Evil, Eli Wallach’s henchman Santos in The Magnificent Seven) plays Suarez, the target of Belker’s undercover PCP op.

Darrell Zwerling (Faye Dunaway’s ill-fated husband Hollis Mulwray in Chinatown) has a small role as Mr. Teasdale, a beleaguered funeral home assistant. (Zwerling also has a small nonspeaking role in Wild at Heart, credited as “Singer’s Manager.” He appears in the Iguana Motel courtyard scene. He’s the vaguely mobster-looking bespectacled guy accompanying the equally ominous black-clad cowboy as the obese porno girls cavort behind them.)

Carl Franklin, future director of One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress, plays Lucius, a thief associate of Zabriskie’s character.

Beah Richards (Oscar-nominated for her role as Sidney Poitier’s mother in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) appears in two episodes as Bobby’s aunt (his late father’s sister). She tells Bobby that Reggie’s full name was Leland Reginald Hill: “he had a bank president’s name and a bank robber’s heart.”

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SEASON 6 ROUNDUP CONT'D (4/4)

Guest Stars Continued

Billy Drago (Al Capone’s bodyguard Frank Nitti in The Untouchables) appears as the creepy robber who holds Zabriskie at gunpoint.

Hal Williams (who was then a series regular on the NBC sitcom 227, playing the father of a teenaged Regina King) plays a crooked parole officer in “I Want My Hill Street Blues.”

Richard Bright (Al Neri in The Godfather trilogy) appears as car thief and parolee Stubby in that same episode.

Also in that episode, Liz Sheridan (Jerry’s mom on Seinfeld) appears as the neighbor/lover of an elderly housing rights activist who commits suicide. As I previously mentioned, both actors who played Seinfeld’s dad have appeared on the Hill, as has Lawrence Tierney, who played Elaine’s father in one episode. Too bad Jerry Stiller and Estelle Harris never appeared.

Al Israel (Hector the Toad in Scarface) plays crime boss Al Biamonte, the subject of the trial where Furillo and Davenport first met in “Remembrance of Hits Past.” In a nice bit of continuity, Furillo’s political angel Graham Wells mentions Frank’s arrest of Biamonte when introducing Frank at an event, several episodes before Biamonte actually appears.

Tom Bower (Nic Cage’s dad in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans) appears as one of the FBI point guys that LaRue and company run afoul of in “Larry of Arabia.”

Chris Noth (Mr. Big on Sex & the City, Detective Mike Logan on Law & Order) plays Officer Ron Lipsky in the final three episodes of the season. His most memorable storyline is when he tries reverse psychology on a potential jumper, with disastrous results.

Ron O’Neal (Super Fly), who previously played police captain Pete (last name and precinct unknown) last season at the captains’ retreat, now plays Ozzie Cleveland’s chief of staff in “Look Homeward, Ninja.”

In that episode and the following one, Richard Romanus (the loan shark in Mean Streets) appears, and was apparently considered a big enough deal to merit an “and” above his credit, for his guest role as Captain Bob Ajanian of the Heights. As far as I can recall, this is the first time a guest star has been singled out this way on the show. At this point, we’ve met four different police captains who didn’t appear at the captains’ retreat last season, making the continuity a bit of a mess. They have made some effort to be consistent, with Gene Scapizzi from the retreat having returned a few times now, as well as Captain Leder returning last season. Considering that one of the actors from the retreat appears in this very episode in a different role, one wonders why they didn’t just use Ron O’Neal in the captain role here. Ah, well.

H. Richard Greene (McCann-Erickson head Jim Hobart on Mad Men) appears in “Slum Enchanted Evening” as a slumlord who is sentenced by Judge Wachtel to the ironic (and difficult-to-enforce) punishment of having to live in his own building.

Lawrence Tierney returns in “Slum Enchanted Evening” as night tour Desk Sergeant Jenkins, reprising his role from “Blues in the Night.” We’ll see more of him next season.

Odds and ends

Episode 6’s title, “Oh, You Kid,” refers to a 1909 song, “I Love My Wife, But, Oh! You Kid.” The song became a cultural sensation and turned the phrase “oh, you kid” into a rather scandalously racy come-on for a few years after. This resulted in a huge moral firestorm, with many social reformers and even judges considering the phrase obscene. Ah, simpler times. The phrase continued to be referenced ironically for decades afterward by comedians like Groucho Marx, keeping it alive in the cultural zeitgeist.

Howard’s Shar Pei is named after Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu (the dog’s full name is “the Emperor Lao Tzu”).

The opening chyron for “Fathers and Huns” is the first instance on the series where the opening caption says anything other than the time and the words “ROLL CALL.” The time is joined by the location, “MICHIGAN AVE. COMPLEX,” which is where Joyce is in the opening scene.

“Fathers and Huns” (written by Walon Green) has a sort of interesting plot, sociologically speaking. A mobster who’s on trial is essentially extorting the city into giving him a better plea by shutting off the tap on the Hill’s drug supply, leading to an explosion in violent crime from desperate addicts (a bunch of kids take over a hospital and inject straight Demerol). Deputy Chief Briscoe wants to give in to the gangster’s demands, in order to not piss away the good press surrounding recent low crime rates. Furillo, of course, resists, and perseveres. But it’s a fascinating (and very Milchian) idea for a 1980s show to address, that on a practical level the cops prefer it for the lower classes to be sedating themselves, even if they’ll never say that out loud.

Betty Thomas is absent from “What Are Friends For?”; it’s said that Bates is out with the flu. Likewise, Belker misses “Scales of Justice” because he’s on his honeymoon. The press leading up to this season said that some regulars wouldn’t appear in every episode, but I believe these are the only two times all season that a main cast member misses an episode. With Lucy missing her first episode (I think), I believe this leaves Furillo, Renko, Hill, Goldblume, and Washington as the only characters to have appeared in every episode.

“What Are Friends For?” has perhaps the most boring subplot of the series, as Furillo has trouble with his mortgage insurance when trying to purchase a condo with Joyce. I have to imagine that this is something that happened to one of the writers, and they just needed to get it off their chest.

In “The Virgin and the Turkey,” Joyce mentions that she and Frank have discussed adoption and “lots of things.” It had seemed back in Season 4 that Joyce really wanted to be a mother, but for reasons we’re not privy to, it seems like they’ve decided against adoption and whatever other options were available in 1985.

Evidently, Buntz replacing Ray doesn’t mean that he took Ray’s place in the precinct hierarchy. When Frank is away from the precinct, it’s now Goldblume who serves as acting captain.

We learn that Fay has been calling Frank’s mother every week with updates on Frank Jr. Fay Furillo, ex-daughter-in-law of the year!

Joyce regales Frank’s family with the story of her client who dressed as the Cisco Kid and Cochise. (Amusingly, Frank’s nephew Tommy is surprised to learn that his grandmother knows who Cochise is. Presumably, Tommy is thinking of the character from The Warriors, not the historical figure.)

As a dog lover, I find it disheartening that the writers seem to have forgotten that Lucy adopted a dog (“Sarge”) back in Season 4. I guess maybe it passed, because we spend a lot of time at her apartment this season and never see a dog.

“Two Easy Pieces” opens with the roll call, and so for the first time all season, the words “ROLL CALL” again appear in the opening chyron. This repeats in a few more episodes, whenever the roll call is the first scene.

There’s a nice 50-second single take in “Two Easy Pieces,” directed by Gabrielle Beaumont. The shot tracks a hooker bust for about half a block, following different cops and various bursts of activity, nicely capturing the chaos of the whole thing. There’s another good shot in the same episode that gets solid production value out of a shoot in a scrapyard, starting wide and high, then slowly tracking in on Belker and his associate as they pull up in a car and walk and talk, and finally finishing in a medium four-shot as they join two other guys.

“Say It as it Plays” has the earliest opening timestamp up that point, 5:45 A.M. (although this is later beaten by the 5:05 A.M. timestamp in “Slum Enchanted Evening,” when Furillo gets the call that Buntz killed Donahue). Belker’s handlers at the PCP lab briefly allow him to go home and see Robin. It strikes me as rather absurd that Mick, while undercover, would take these guys to his real address. For one thing, it raises the risk that they could learn his identity and find out he’s a cop. For another, God forbid something were to go wrong with the bust and the guys got away, they could do harm to Robin. I can’t believe Mick would ever be this sloppy, no matter how badly he wanted to see Robin, and I can’t believe that made it through in a script.

Coroner Wally Nydorf returns in “Say it as It Plays.” He previously seemed to have survived his “public hanging” in Season 3, as he was still working as coroner a few episodes later. But since then, he was evidently removed from his position after all, and has been running a funeral home. He’s briefly back in public service here, as he’s willing to cross the picket lines of the Health Department strike. Pat Corley gleefully plays Wally as even more of a disaster than ever, growling his way through dialogue almost incoherently and karate-chopping corpses to get them to fit in the drawers.

“Das Blues” is the first episode of the series not to have the roll call occur in the cold open. Instead, we finally get to it at the top of the first act. This has another side effect: the producers clearly didn’t want to have credits running over the roll call, because that would feel weird. So, we get a longer-than-usual opening montage of Chicago footage while the credits play, accompanied by a nice Mike Post jam.

Khaki officer Celeste Patterson gets a bizarre sendoff in “Scales of Justice.” She’s REALLY pissy about a smoking ban (which conveniently only applies to the precinct in this one episode before being reversed), and eventually quits. It’s a pretty abrupt turn of events, given that, insofar as she’s been given a characterization at all, she’s mostly been portrayed as competent and hardworking…and we’ve never seen her smoke before, so her dickish behavior in this episode really comes out of left field. I found an interview with the actor from during her time on the show where she said that she much preferred theater work and didn’t particularly like TV, so perhaps Stan’s line about how “she wasn’t that happy here anyway” was a bit of meta commentary.

We learn that Lucy attended St. Mary’s, the school from Season 3 that gave us J.D. LaRue horndogging over Ally Sheedy. Bates thus joins the fairly substantial cluster of series regulars with a Catholic background (Furillo, Jablonski, likely Coffey given his traditional Italian upbringing, likely Buntz given his German background and a mention of Lent in one episode).

“I Want My Hill Street Blues” has a couple of very fun storylines. One involves a cop-themed music video being shot at the precinct, for a song called “Love Patrol,” to the exasperation of Jablonski (who ends up being cast in the video, which he keeps calling a “TV program”). Another features Mau-Mau gang member Dudley Hicks, who’s been around since Season 2, here in his final and most memorable appearance. Dudley’s latest scam is to go around sitting on people and demanding money to get off. A baffled Renko and Hill arrest him, unsure what exactly can be charged (Renko initially goes with “gravitational assault”). Davenport, representing Hicks, suggests they try the highly technical “stupidity defense” (“It’s when you try to get [the judge] to want to tell his date about you tonight”).

The cold open of “Remembrance of Hits Past” starts with a fake-out tease about a precinct talent show for charity, something which we never get to see once Frank is shot and the episode takes on a much more somber tone. Renko is going to sing folk/country, Coffey apparently has a heretofore-unmentioned penchant for magic tricks (!), and Buntz tells a skeptical Jablonski that he has a comedy routine (“harmless things, like Polish jokes”…clearly Norm’s not great at reading his audience).

When Belker repeatedly tries to use the phone while on an undercover op, the foreman assumes that he’s a “degenerate gambler.” This is the exact phrase Milch used to refer to himself in his internal monologue for many years, as recounted in his autobiography.

“Remembrance of Hits Past” contains the first mention of NBC on the show: Furillo says he and his dad listened to the NBC Symphony with Toscanini conducting.

“Remembrance of Hits Past” also gives us what I believe is the first instance of the show using a real, commercial recording: “Night Fever” by the Bee Gees plays in the pizzeria when Frank and Joyce chat, making sure we know it’s the 1970s.

In “Larry of Arabia,” Buntz goes on a People’s Court-style show to testify about a car accident his nephew had. This whole scenario is basically just an excuse by the writers to get Buntz talking about cunnilingus (“an unnatural sex act”). I’m not certain, but this may be the first use of the term “carpet muncher” on network television. In another episode, since they couldn’t use the word “slut,” the writers have Buntz call a woman a “slat,” which weirdly sounds even more vulgar (like “gash” on Sons of Anarchy).

The cowboy animatronic from the arcade in the episode “Gung Ho” pops up backstage at the courtroom show, for some reason. Also, the insignia on the bailiff’s uniform says “City of Chicago.” It seems like Lewis and Milch are committing to setting the show in Chicago moreso than Bochco had.

As of “Larry of Arabia,” Bobby Hill’s mustache is gone.

We learn in “Iced Coffey” that Joe had a mother and a stepfather in Florida. And in a subsequent episode, it’s mentioned that he had a sister, and that a scholarship fund is being set up in Joe’s memory.

“Be careful out there” makes a one-time comeback in “Iced Coffey” following Joe’s death, just as it did earlier in the season following Garibaldi’s death.

In “Jagga the Hunk,” Stan again talks about wearing a string of garlic around his neck to ward off illness. Is this an actual old wives’ tale, or is he just completely nuts?

Former gang member turned paralegal Jesus Martinez has a two-episode arc wherein he finds himself implicated in a bribery case, as well as a suspect in the death of his boss, Attorney Brown. Trinidad Silva gets some decent, if somewhat overwrought, material to play as he is aggrieved that he’s being punished for trying to improve himself and play it straight (although, as Frank notes, he did forge high school and college degrees in order to get into law school). Joyce points out that Furillo gave Jesus more leeway when he was on the wrong side of the law.

Jesus’s late employer has usually just been referred to as “Attorney Brown,” but his first name was initially given as Byron in one of his early appearances, whereas this season, it’s said to be Harold.

The title “Look Homeward, Ninja” references either Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel or John Milton’s “Lycidas,” or both, and almost certainly came from Milch.

The scene where Jablonski tells off Goldblume for his shitty lashing-out is well-acted by both men, and well-written, except that it has a very weird and awkward ending. Jablonski, on his way out the door, proposes that if Henry’s money makes him feel guilty, he should “give it to some black people,” then makes things even weirder by specifically naming Bobby Hill and Neal Washington. Uhhh…okay.

After his real estate deal, a self-loathing Henry sarcastically refers to himself as the “Donald Trump of the Hill.”

After being held hostage, Judge “Give ’Em Hell” Wachtel (Jeffrey Tambor) gleefully reveals that he had his fingers crossed when promising amnesty. He’s been a semi-reasonable jurist for the past couple of seasons, but this little beat is a hilarious reminder that he’s still an utterly childish moron at heart.

The city’s power brokers—the same men who tried to install Furillo as mayor—have obviously decided that Ozzie Cleveland is no longer useful, so they leak his involvement with an underage student who interned at city hall. Ozzie is briefly seen in a news report, covering his face as he passes the press. I’m assuming Ozzie’s usual actor, J. A. Preston, was either unavailable, or else didn’t want to participate in giving the character such a sordid ending.

We learn in “Come and Get It” that Joyce has a brother.
 
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SEASON 7 EPISODES 1-12

By all accounts that I’ve been able to find, everyone knew going in that this would be the final season. The most commonly-circulated story is that Dan Travanti declared that this would be his final year playing Furillo, and the producers and the network decided not to try to continue the show without him. Charlie Haid (Renko) has pushed back on this narrative, claiming that ALL the actors agreed that this would be their final season. (For whatever it’s worth, the always-outspoken Haid seems to have a bit of a chip on his shoulder regarding Travanti being given too much credit for the show’s success.)

The show’s ratings, which at the best of times had been good-not-great (it never cracked the top 20, and rarely even came particularly close), were declining. The series was no longer the critical and awards show darling that it had been during its first four seasons (its only Emmy win for Season 5 was Betty Thomas’s Supporting Actress victory, and Season 6 was the first year the show went home completely empty-handed). Perhaps most importantly, NBC was no longer the troubled, desperate network it had been when it took a chance on Hill Street in 1981. Under the leadership of Grant Tinker and Brandon Tartikoff, the network had been totally revitalized, with more hits on the air than either of its competitors—and it wasn’t even a close contest. Like all of us, TV shows age, and it seemed pretty clear that HSB had reached the end of its natural life. Ten weeks into this final season, the series that had been the first building-block of NBC’s acclaimed Thursday-night lineup was moved to Tuesdays, where it became the sacrificial lamb to ABC’s ratings juggernaut Moonlighting. The show that took Hill Street’s place Thursdays at 10? Steven Bochco’s freshman drama, L.A. Law. Bochco had a bit of a vindictive streak, and I have to imagine he took pleasure in this symbolic revenge on MTM and Arthur Price (not to mention Jeffrey Lewis and David Milch).

Of course, in 1986-1987, “final seasons” weren’t really a huge deal the way that they are today. For the most part, the show is business as usual. A few of the arcs I’ll discuss below perhaps feel like the writers beginning to build towards an appropriate resolution for certain characters, but only in a very low-key way.

With one exception. Right from the start of the season, Lewis and Milch seem to be teasing the idea of a Buntz-Sid spinoff. The season premiere, “The Suitcase,” begins in uncharacteristically action-packed style with the crash of a drug smuggler’s plane (shot in poor-man’s poor-man’s process, given that this is 1986 TV). A small-time crook recovers a suitcase containing eighty pounds of uncut cocaine from the wreckage and offers to unload it on Sid for a song. In an excruciatingly long three-minute monologue (so long that it goes from amusing to awful to sort-of funny again), Sid seems to be essentially pitching a spinoff when he tries to convince Buntz to take the money and run to sunnier climes: “I know that you are in law enforcement, but I’m asking you as a human being to consider the possibility of an entire fresh concept and start in life.” The rest of the episode plays up their bickering buddy-movie vibe as they find themselves in increasingly harrowing circumstances, with the trauma-bonding strengthening their friendship (or whatever it is). Buntz’s motivations are left ambiguous throughout the episode: he repeatedly insists that he’s going for a bust by the book, but also doesn’t call in to let anyone know what he’s doing. He does ultimately turn the coke in, but the episode ends on him lying in bed daydreaming about the suitcase in the evidence locker. Periodically, in subsequent episodes, we get hints that Norm is becoming frustrated with the work and questioning his future as a cop.

Buntz’s character is even tamer so far this season than he was last year, not engaging in any acts of improper violence, and hardly even violating anyone’s due process. (Franz has a hilarious line reading in one episode when Norm’s improper use of privileged information escalates into a hostage situation; he sheepishly admits to the furious perp, “I guess we violated some civil rights.”) Even after a loan shark chops off his pinky with a cleaver (the most violent scene the show has done), Buntz tries to handle the subsequent arrest by the numbers—a sharp contrast to last season, when he put a vicious beatdown on a guy just for punching him in the mouth. (When he’s forced to shoot the loan shark anyway, Norm starts kicking the corpse and has a bit of a mental breakdown over the fact that there’s no point in doing the right thing when he still gets jammed up. His pinky is of course reattached and working fine within a couple of episodes.) He almost never butts heads with Furillo or fellow officers now, and is often used for comic relief.

In an episode written by Milch, Buntz has an unexpectedly vulnerable moment when he opens up to Flaherty—a cop whom up to that moment Norm hated—about his love for Tommy, the former partner he shot last season. A later scene in the same episode makes it clear that Norm is beginning to feel that same affection for Sid, when he has a panic attack after Sid is nearly killed. Sid even moves in with Norm briefly (while he has a target on his back due to a guy he snitched on), creating a literal Odd Couple dynamic. (The music for the scene of Sid moving in even sounds like 1980s/1990s sitcom music.) For his part, Sid becomes sort of a mother hen for Buntz, cooking for him and bringing him soup when he’s convalescing. The show acknowledges the absurdity of Sid’s constant snitching: it’s revealed that pretty much everyone on the street knows that Buntz is “his cop,” but Sid still thinks he’s being smooth by playing dumb.

Goldblume is also becoming increasingly disillusioned with the way the department hamstrings him. Henry has always been an uneasy fit for cop work, and from the beginning of the series has been frustrated at his inability to bring about meaningful change. But his innocence from the earlier seasons is almost entirely gone, replaced by a hardened cynicism. There’s always been a somewhat selfish streak in him that undermines his idealism, and I think his evolution over the course of the series is one of the most satisfying arcs on the show. He and Buntz even have a buddy-cop moment, with Henry actually getting some joy from playing things Norm’s way. They pretend to have a warrant, tricking a major dealer into flushing his product down the toilet. It’s a clever play, and Henry can enjoy it because they’re not actually violating anyone’s rights (aside from trespassing in the stash house). Henry even agrees to get a beer with Norm after, and Buntz seems genuinely delighted.

Goldblume is the subject of one of those storylines I mentioned that seems like it may be setting a character up for a (happy?) ending. It’s revealed that he had wanted to be a writer, but gave up on the dream. (I’m pretty sure there was a very early episode where Henry said he went to college to be a meteorologist.) When an old high school friend of his is gunned down by police, Henry is persuaded to go on a prominent talk show to discuss the incident. He ends up dating Dotty Walker, the pretty P.A. who convinced him to go on the show in the first place, and due to his TV appearance, he receives a book deal to write a memoir based on his experiences as a cop in “the most dangerous precinct in America.”

Stan Jablonski is forced into retirement, thanks to his heart condition (which has been previously alluded to multiple times). In part, this was due to actor Robert Prosky asking to be semi-written-out after he landed a pilot. (The pilot was presumably Old Dogs, which aired on ABC as a TV movie the following summer. It featured Prosky and Robert Loggia as two retired cops—Prosky is by the book and Loggia isn’t—who are deputized to investigate internal corruption within the force.) The pilot didn’t go to series, and Prosky continued to appear throughout this season as a part-time regular. Prosky, whose real love was the stage, had always been a bit ambivalent about the idea of doing a series anyway (he had previously accepted, then rejected, the role of Ernie “Coach” Pantuso on Cheers, saying that he didn’t like the idea of just playing one role for so long). Prosky has some great scenes to play here, as Stan confronts his anxiety about feeling useless and being alone in his old age, even admitting to Furillo that his greatest fear is that he’ll live through the bypass procedure.

Howard Hunter is demoted to sergeant, after he shoots a kid robbing a store in the season’s second episode. The optics are bad: neither his piece nor the ammo were department-approved (it’s never made entirely clear whether he had a private carry permit). The decedent is a fourteen-year-old black kid. And the bullet entered near his back. (On this last point, the edit of the episode actually does a terrible job of portraying what happened. I gather from the dialogue that what’s supposed to have happened is this: Howard identifies himself as a cop, the kid turns his gun on Howard, and then in a split-second, the kid’s accomplice enters the store and the distracted kid turns away from Howard JUST as Howard fires. This is not at all what we see, though. The way the scene is actually edited, after turning toward the door, the kid again points his gun directly at Howard, so there’s absolutely no way Howard’s bullet would have entered anywhere near the kid’s back.)

Anyway, in his internal affairs statement, Howard refuses to categorize himself as off-duty (because a police officer is never off-duty), making his use of the inappropriate hardware look even worse. While initially somewhat bitter, Hunter takes his demotion with an admirable focus on doing his duty as it’s assigned to him, and he becomes the new turnout sergeant, taking over from Jablonski. This is another one of those arcs where it feels like the writers may have been conscious of saying goodbye to the character, as they put Hunter through an ordeal that could be humiliating, but allow him to persevere with a humility and maturity we wouldn’t have imagined from him earlier in the series (not to mention that his new duties entail almost exclusively dealing with people, something the self-absorbed Howard has struggled with for much of the series). We also learn that Howard has never killed at close range before, and although he’s fully confident in the necessity of his actions, he’s still deeply disturbed at the reality of taking a life: a far cry from his jingoism of earlier seasons. After making Howard wackier than ever in Season 6, Lewis and Milch now seem to be consciously humanizing him.

The season introduces two new regulars: Megan Gallagher as Officer Tina Russo, and Robert Clohessy as Officer Patrick Flaherty, both transfers from Division. Hill Street is among the very earliest IMDb credits for both actors. Gallagher, who went on to play Larry’s wife on The Larry Sanders Show and Frank Black’s wife on Millennium, is credited as a guest star on her first three episodes before joining the main cast. (She also seems to be a “part-time” regular, as her credit is dropped when she doesn’t appear, although she only misses two episodes all season after her first appearance.) A Juilliard-trained actor who studied under John Houseman, she initially seems to have been hired primarily for sex appeal: three of her first four episodes feature her in undercover operations requiring her to wear flimsy tank tops (complete with comments from the men along the lines of “nice bust”). The show has a complicated history with female roles. After a VERY rocky start in Season 1, Lucy Bates became in my opinion one of the great woman characters of 1980s TV. I’d also put Joyce Davenport right up there with her. Patsy Mayo, on the other hand, was a pretty messy and problematic characterization. Russo is a bit of an odd mix. It seems like the precinct only gives her assignments that involve seducing men, but the show also comments on this. “Bald Ambition” features a storyline where she’s undercover dating a big-time crook (a very early-career role for Chazz Palminteri), and to maintain her cover, she has sex with him. Furillo is outraged and disgusted, but Russo defiantly points out the hypocrisy of putting her on an operation where she’s expected to seduce a guy but not fuck him. It’s sort of a strawman argument on the writers’ parts, because truthfully, I don’t think real cops are ever given assignments like this—certainly not a relatively inexperienced uniform cop like Russo. So all they’re really doing is commenting on a trope that only exists in movies and TV. Still, it’s a trope that Hill Street has indulged in before (particularly with Mayo), so there’s at least a degree of self-awareness in letting Tina criticize it.

A few episodes later, Furillo, in a bizarre lapse of judgment, again dispatches Russo to seduce another Mafia creep for intel. This time, she’s worked out a better angle: she claims to be a good Catholic girl who’s waiting for marriage. Unfortunately, things take a dark turn when he gets tired of waiting, and rapes her. Gallagher is very good in the subsequent scenes with Belker and especially with Frank, where she bitterly jokes about breaking “Furillo’s Law” again, and about how she’s lost the respect of her fellow cops (who all consider her promiscuous). Unfortunately, the aftermath of the rape isn’t addressed any more in subsequent episodes. Tina only pops up very briefly in the next episode to tell Frank she arrested the rapist, and then is either absent or nearly absent from the next three episodes. When she finally gets a slightly more substantial role again, rather exasperatingly, it’s yet another stupid undercover operation focusing on sex/romance: she and a very uncomfortable Belker are supposed to pose as a couple (Mick immediately ducks out when she says they should kiss for verisimilitude). Again, this is not the kind of assignment real cops would ever actually be given.

Robert Clohessy joins the series as Flaherty beginning with the third episode. Clohessy is probably best known to discriminating television fans as C.O. Sean Murphy on Oz. (Right around the same time as his Hill Street season, he also had a small role in the Mark Frost-scripted The Believers as an NYPD detective on the scene after
Jimmy Smits stabs himself to death.
) Flaherty is clearly meant to fill the Joe Coffey void: the (supposedly) charming, immature, loudmouthed, ultimately good-hearted lug. Clohessy does his best, but the character does nothing for me. He just feels like a milquetoast archetype. The show even tries to recreate the flirtatious will-they-or-won’t-they dynamic with Bates, but the chemistry isn’t there, and it just feels like an insult to the memory of Coffey’s character.

Belker, who was initially depicted as a one-dimensional growling, biting cartoon character, has gained so much depth over the series, but I feel like his character has really hit the point of diminishing returns more than almost any other. He’s become too soft, too much of a teddy bear, to really be interesting. He does have a nice moment where he’s the only one who takes the time to comfort Russo when she’s being slut-shamed. He takes on sort of a mentor role to the younger cop, who really wants to do undercover work. “People take things out of context. They look for easy ways to think about other people,” he says, referring back to his own reputation as “the biter.”

After the show was primarily episodic last season, the early stretch of this season strikes a conciliatory balance: most of the major storylines exist in two-episode arcs, with periodic episodes that are largely or completely standalone. Episodes 9-12 are all entirely standalone, with no continuing storylines at all.

In a few instances, the show engages in a “torn from the news” kind of storytelling that it didn’t usually indulge in, perhaps demonstrating that they were running low on ideas. One episode focuses on the crack epidemic, which was really beginning to make headlines. In another, the circumstances surrounding the death of Henry’s friend Steve, and the subsequent glorification of him as a righteous vigilante by some corners of the public and media, clearly parallel the 1984 Bernie Goetz subway shootings (except that Goetz obviously didn’t die). And the season premiere features a subplot focusing on tainted pharmaceuticals, reflecting the 1982 Tylenol poisonings in Chicago, and the subsequent copycat crimes. For whatever reason, there was a spike in these drug tampering cases in 1986, around the time this episode was produced. This storyline really amounts to a whole lot of nothing, other than an obvious attempt at being topical. This subplot strikes me as emblematic of the problem with trying to make the procedural storylines on Hill Street episodic, and the very reason that Bochco chose to make the show serialized in the first place. In order to service the large cast, most episodes inherently have to feature four or more storylines. A story like this simply can’t be done justice in the limited screentime available in a single episode. (I did a quick scan of the episode and determined that this storyline occupies approximately four minutes and fifteen seconds’ worth of screentime total!) The whole thing wraps up in very lazy fashion, with a crazy guy simply throwing a coffeepot through Furillo’s office window, and confessing.

The season reuses many old chestnuts that at this point are very well-worn, such as Furillo being pitted against a P.R.-obsessed city councilman who repeatedly interferes with investigations. “She’s So Fein” centers on yet another hostage situation, this time with Davenport being taken by a client. It’s decently tense, and Hamel is very good (simultaneously acting as hostage, advocate, and negotiator), but it just feels too derivative of way too many earlier episodes. (It does give Furillo a good closing punchline, when he says that Joyce will do anything for a plea bargain). The Belker undercover plots in particular have become such a stock formula, with most of them limping pointlessly and predictably from beginning to middle to end. Similarly, Hill and Renko’s plots are mostly in familiar and rather tired molds: they’re Good Samaritans going out of their way to help a hard-luck case (a woman who’s struggling to take care of her grandparents); they try to defuse a racially charged situation (a salesman accusing a black kid of stealing his sample case); Renko does something wacky (he becomes convinced that he has a curse on him). One Hill-Renko storyline takes on more serious subject matter, as the two deal with a situation between a sexually abused eleven-year-old girl, her older brother, and an elderly neighbor who gets beat up. It’s unfortunately not a well-written storyline. Renko and Hill initially believe that the brother is the abuser, when it’s obvious from the get-go that it’s the old man, making the “twist” incredibly lame, and the cops just look dumb.

Continued in next post due to character limit.
 
SEASON 7 EPISODES 1-12 CONTINUED (2/4)

Davenport has a good arc in the first three episodes, dealing with a public defender strike. Joyce is ambivalent on the idea of striking, trying to reconcile in her conscience the tradeoff of screwing over her current clients in the interest of hopefully gaining conditions that will allow her to more effectively represent future clients. The best two scenes of this arc are between Joyce and Judge Wachtel. We’ll recall from way back in his first appearance in Season 2 (in Jeffrey Lewis’s “Fruits of the Poisonous Tree”) that Alan and Joyce attended law school together, so they have a long history. After Joyce grinds court proceedings to a halt by availing herself of all the procedural rights that are typically waived or stipulated to (I have seen defense attorneys do this to make a point), a peeved Wachtel goads her into slapping him (by basically calling her a trust fund baby), then charges her with assault. Hamel and Tambor are equally great the next episode when, with cooled tempers, they make up. Wachtel observes, “You know, Joyce, I Iook at you and you are beautiful. You got a few bucks. But I get the feeling you’re just visiting. I have to live here.” He’s pleased with her response: “I assure you, Your Honor, that I’m no visitor. This is my house too.”

Ray Calletano returns for a three-episode arc—credited in the main titles again for those episodes only. He has proven to be absolutely incapable as a leader, and his precinct has devolved into race wars between cops (his men call him “Captain Taco”). This was all hinted at last season, and it’s consistent with Ray’s characterization going back to Season 3. Ray has had an interesting run, from starting out as a mostly functional character acting as Frank’s dignified strong right arm in the early seasons, to being slowly revealed as a rather vain man who wants the trappings of leadership but is completely ill-suited to the task. His own assessment of his leadership failures is that he’s spent too much of his life seeing the other man’s point of view, so when it came time to lead, he saw too many sides to every question. When things turn violent at his precinct, he’s relieved of his command and given a token adviser role working directly under the hated Chief Daniels, until he finally works up the courage to quit. He has a good line when describing his difficulty quitting (and, presumably, the Latin immigrant community’s work ethic): “You don’t understand how deep the feeling is with us. To keep any job, to fear the unknown.”

A.D.A. Irwin Bernstein gets a rare spotlight in “Bald Ambition” (the title presumably refers to both Irwin and Ray). Recently separated from his wife, and working in close quarters with Davenport on a case where her client will be testifying as a prosecution witness, he confesses that he’s been in love with Joyce since he met her. The scene is a weird, interesting mix of sweetness and what the kids call “cringe.” It works because the episode really slows down to let us spend time with the two characters, and builds to the moment in a way where you can understand why he thought this was a potentially good idea, even as you’re yelling at the screen for him to stop because it’s obviously a terrible idea. George Wyner plays the moment so earnestly and awkwardly that you just have to feel for the guy, but what really makes it work is Joyce’s reaction. The writer and director and Veronica Hamel could have played her response a dozen different ways, but they wisely decided to say volumes with a look: a compassionate smile and a single tear that tell Irwin all he needs to know. It’s a beautiful moment, with the two of them being simultaneously miles apart but also weirdly intimate. (Incidentally, this is the first episode with a solo writing credit for showrunner Jeffrey Lewis since the very first episode he wrote for the show, “Fruits of the Poisonous Tree” way back in Season 2. I wonder if he might have assigned himself this episode because, as a former A.D.A., he had a soft spot for Irwin.)

Esterhaus’s paramour Grace Gardner returns for the first time in three years with a two-episode arc, another indication that the writers were aware that this was the final season and wanted to give an iconic character a curtain call. Grace is now a nun named Sister Chastity. Barbara Babcock is fun, but the whole storyline is based on the one-joke premise of a sex addict taking the vows, and things end pretty much as you’d expect (Grace finds herself unable to contain her passion for Flaherty, who has some VERY confused feelings of his own). We do get an amusing interaction between Grace and Howard, who briefly dated Grace in early Season 2 (when he had an “equipment misfire”). Caught off-balance by Grace’s new situation, all he can think to say is, “So…what have you been doing with yourself?” There are also a couple of nice mentions of Esterhaus, when Grace says that Phil would be proud of Howard “carrying [his] staff forward” as roll call sergeant, and later when she goes to the roll call podium as a sort of totem when she’s having serious doubts about her calling.

Some Noteworthy Episodes

“Fathers and Guns”

The season’s ninth episode is a departure for the series in a few ways. For one thing, it’s bookended by dream sequences, a device the series has never before used (more on that in a bit). The episode is much more focused than usual, with only two main plots, both centering on the concept of fatherhood (there is also a minor comic relief subplot involving J.D. getting revenge on a Korean restauranteur). This one appears to have been Jeffrey Lewis’s baby, with him receiving sole teleplay credit, and sharing story credit with Jerry Patrick Brown (who had had one other story credit last season). The episode is directed by Ed Sherin, a noted theater director with credits on Broadway (including The Great White Hope with James Earl Jones), as well as having been the resident director at the Arena Theater in D.C. during the 1960s. (Robert Prosky, who isn’t in this episode, was in the Arena acting company for over two decades, including during Sherin’s tenure). Sherin went on to further television directing jobs after this episode, most notably many years as a director and executive producer on Law & Order.

The main plot focuses on Furillo reckoning with the death of his father, initially thought to be due to a home invader. As soon as Frank learns that Papa was concealing a brain cancer diagnosis, his cop mind quickly puts the pieces together and pegs it as a suicide, which Mama covered up to ensure him a proper Catholic burial. (As Davenport correctly notes at the end of the episode, the Church had only just begun to take a more lenient view towards suicide right around this time.) The central premise of this storyline is pretty great, as moral Furillo chooses to dispose of the gun to protect his mother. It’s the first time we’ve seen him commit such a breach of his duty (technically, a felony, as Joyce teases him later), and such a thing would be unimaginable for him under any other circumstances. The investigating lieutenant, a decent guy, quickly catches up with Furillo’s thought process, but he agrees to leave the “murder” case open and unsolved, as a professional courtesy. (Robin Gammell, who plays this lieutenant, previously appeared as smug superstar attorney Douglas Comstock in earlier seasons.)

Travanti’s performance for most of the episode is very contained, consciously not playing big emotion (although he’s more open during a private moment with Joyce when, sounding and looking very small, he says he thinks his father had contempt for him and wanted to hurt him right up to the end). Due to a combination of being angry at his mother and brother for keeping the cancer diagnosis from him, and needing to be in “cop” mode in order to protect his family, Frank is mostly cold and businesslike, leading his brother Joe to decry Frank’s incapacity for closeness.

Perhaps in a nod to his theater background, director Sherin plays Furillo and Davenport’s usual episode-ending bedroom conversation (at a Downtowner Motor Inn near his family home) in a single three-minute take. It’s a nice choice, letting the two actors be present together as the scene’s emotional shifts unfold. Initially, Joyce sweetly attempts their usual playful bedtime banter. Travanti has a weird, almost robotic line reading of the most important line for his character in this episode: “My father was a stiff cold man, and I am, aren’t I?” After being bottled up all episode, he finally reaches his emotional breaking point when he takes a check-in call from Henry, and says the word “suicide” out loud. The ending of the scene is played in near-blackness, with a glistening stream of tears on Frank’s cheek as he lays in Joyce’s arms, a beautifully lit shot all the more impressive for the fact that it comes at the end of a continuous take. Joyce comforts him in the final moments of the scene with something she learned from a colleague: the reason the Catholic Church apparently eased up on suicides is that we’ll never know if someone might have changed their mind at the last second before death (she gives the example of someone throwing himself off a building). Frank smiles, and the actors play the moment beautifully, although I admittedly find this concept horrifying. Obviously I don’t mean to endorse suicide, but any time a loved one dies, my greatest hope is that their final moments were full of peace and acceptance, not screaming terror and regret.

The other major storyline in the episode is Belker’s. The episode opens with his nightmare, filmed in black and white, and shot and cut far more impressionistically than Hill Street’s typical house style. (Sherin’s theater background may have played into his being chosen for this more-experimental-than-usual material.) The dream centers around a nuclear attack threatening Robin and their baby Phillip. This sort of thing was obviously on a lot of people’s minds at the time—St. Elsewhere also did at least one episode centering on A-bomb anxiety. The next morning, Mick calls the White House to ensure that “we’re being very careful, for my baby” (this seems a bit too childish and silly for Belker, even in his panicked state). Mick then turns his parental instincts in a more productive direction, as he tries to help an abandoned baby. This storyline is hit-or-miss. He engages in a suspect pursuit while the baby is in his car, then the car and baby are stolen while Mick makes the collar. This is contrived and lame, and makes Belker look like he’s recklessly endangering the baby. Later, they find the car, which the thief somehow managed to crash so that’s it’s precariously balanced ON TOP of a bridge abutment (looking totally undamaged!). There’s literally no way a car would ever be able to do that naturally. This sequence at least ends with a pretty impressive car explosion, once it inevitably topples (although the fall itself is of course offscreen due to budget). Subsequently, Mick makes it his mission to try to help the troubled but good-hearted father of the baby gain custody from the addict mother. (The dad is played by David Harris, a.k.a. Cochise in The Warriors, who previously played a gang member in Season 5.)

The episode ends on three dreams, which honestly feels like extreme overkill. I would have much preferred to just end on the lovely Frank-Joyce bedroom scene. Instead, we get Frank’s nightmare, wherein he is present for his father’s cancer diagnosis (shot in black-and-white with lots of high and low angles); then Frank’s happy dream, with color footage of him as a kid on a picnic with his Papa; and finally, and most unnecessarily, Belker’s happy dream, which involves Ronald Reagan calling him on the phone and telling him they’ve destroyed all nuclear weapons on Mick’s advice! It’s pretty stupid, especially with Dream-Mick ending the episode with a sitcom-style knowing shrug while smiling directly into the camera! This may be the only time a character has broken the fourth wall.

“More Skinned Against Than Skinning”

The season’s tenth episode is another interesting but somewhat flawed one. It focuses heavily on racial tensions in the force, when a racist white cop (Sam McMurray, a.k.a. Nic Cage’s boss in Raising Arizona) shoots his black partner, and the black officers feel that the investigation is being handled as a coverup. Institutional racism was obviously an important issue to Milch, which he would explore in greater depth on NYPD Blue. It’s worth noting that the credited writer of this episode, David Black, was white, as was the entire Hill Street writing staff. (In a bizarre coincidence, this episode is written by David Black and directed by Dale White.) Eight years after this episode aired, David Milch—in his typical self-destructive overly-honest fashion—made some controversial remarks at a writers’ seminar, with the goal of encouraging aspiring writers to examine their biases, by way of exposing some of his own. Among other things, he said that a black writer would likely have to be ten percent more talented than a white writer for Milch to hire him or her, because Milch would be afraid that a black writer couldn’t divorce the characters’ truth from the writer’s own cultural trauma, and every script conversation would become bogged down in race debates. The subsequent negative press caused Milch to reevaluate the way he was running his show, as he details in his autobiography. For one thing, James McDaniel, who played Lieutenant Arthur Fancy on NYPD Blue (and once remarked in the press that he was the most overpaid extra on television), confronted Milch about his remarks, and how those biases might bear on the lack of substantial storylines Milch wrote for Fancy. Milch made a conscious effort afterwards to tell some strong stories with that character. Appropriately, McDaniel works with Milch for the first time on this Hill Street episode: he plays the main guest role, Officer Mason, a passionate member of the Black Officers’ Coalition who fans the flames of his fellow black officers’ anger.

The episode works best as a spotlight for the perpetually-underutilized Neal Washington, who tries to be a good soldier, but is increasingly troubled by the way he sees the department handling the investigation. The episodes where tensions arise between Washington and Furillo always have some good drama and character work. Furillo knows that Neal is his best detective, and we’ve repeatedly seen that he’ll bend over backwards as much as possible on those rare occasions when Neal is furious about something, moreso than he would for any of his other cops. But Frank also has to remain pragmatic about the larger picture, and respectful of the chain of command. The episode also explores the strain that racial tensions put on partnerships between black and white cops, due to their inherently different cultural experiences. The show has gone over that terrain before, but this one feels a bit grittier and more honest. There’s a terrific moment when Wash and LaRue attempt to reenact how the shooting went down, with Neal making a point of having them play the race-reversed roles. At the end of the exercise, LaRue, disturbed by Neal’s doubts, says, “Come on, man, don’t go native on me, OK?” Neal responds to the racist comment simply by completing the recreation, and “shooting” J.D., with a grim, deliberate, “Bang.”

The always-deplorable Chief Daniels makes matters worse by pulling the investigation over to Division, making it look like a coverup, although he confidentially tells Furillo the two cops involved were part of some high-level corruption, and the investigation needs to be folded into a planned takedown. The optics become even worse when the supposed “corruption” amounts to penny-ante bribes. Furillo, furious that he’s betrayed his officers’ trust based off of Daniels’s false promises, confronts the chief and learns the truth: the takedown was a petty personal revenge ploy! It turns out that Patsy Mayo, who has been on the fringes of the episode throughout, broke up with Daniels and is seeing another cop—the cop who was the target of the takedown. It’s an odd ending for Mayo, a character Lewis and Milch clearly had no fondness for; she resigns from the force in anger. But more importantly, it’s a convoluted and unsatisfying way to resolve the race storyline, dodging the questions about systemic racism that the episode teases, and opting for an easy, silly resolution. The implicit message is that the black officers overreacted and were in the wrong, since racism wasn’t actually involved. The takeaway seems to be, “trust the system, even when it isn’t being transparent and you have no reason to,” which I’m assuming wasn’t the writers’ intent.

This resolution also begs the continued question I have, which is how on Earth Furillo can continue working for Fletcher Daniels and maintain his self-respect. (We even learn earlier in the episode that Frank and Joyce had planned to have dinner with Fletch and Patsy that weekend…it’s tough to imagine Davenport willingly subjecting herself to Daniels for an entire meal.)

This episode also has some lazy and awkward writing, with characters conveniently wandering into a scene just to deliver exposition. This happens with Mayo showing up at Daniels’s office just in time to tell Furillo what’s going on, and also in the Renko-Hill subplot when a meat truck driver pops up to explain why there are skinned gorillas and bears all over the street. (Spoiler alert: It’s not because RFK Jr. is in town.)

Bobby has a nice monologue near the end of the episode where he pontificates on how potentially debilitating and all-consuming it can be for a black person to be constantly aware of the racism around them, and the resentment that builds up when their white friends can’t see it.

A rather bizarre secondary plot in the episode focuses on a storeowner and WWII veteran who’s tired of being robbed, so he decides to put up Nazi regalia to intimidate would-be thieves (naturally outraging the Jewish community in the process).

Continued in next post due to character limit.
 
SEASON 7 EPISODES 1-12 CONTINUED (3/4)

More Noteworthy Episodes

“A Wasted Weekend”

The twelfth episode of the season is the David Mamet episode. Mamet was a fan of the series. When his wife Lindsay Crouse was cast in Season 6 as Officer Katy McBride, Mamet took the opportunity to hang around the set, and ended up pitching this episode idea to Milch. (Imagine being a fly on the wall for a conversation between those two!) The episode is more focused than usual—both in a thematic sense and in terms of concentrating on a small core of characters—but is simultaneously loose, comfortably letting characters just spend time together in the manner of a stageplay. There’s essentially no policework done at any point, and it’s a pleasure just watching these characters talk to each other.

It’s no surprise that Mamet chooses to give Stan Jablonski a central role, as Robert Prosky had starred in the Chicago and Broadway productions of Glengarry Glen Ross as Shelley “The Machine” Levene (Prosky mentioned this episode as a favorite of his). Mamet also shamelessly devotes a storyline to his wife, Crouse, who returns for the first time this season, and to Norman Buntz. Unsurprisingly, Mamet is a great fit for writing Buntz dialogue, and Norm has a harder edge in this episode than he does for most of this season. Both Mamet and Dennis Franz came from the Chicago theater scene, and they knew each other, although I’m not sure if Franz ever actually did a Mamet production before this episode. Of course, about a decade later, he was in the film adaptation of American Buffalo. Furillo is reduced to two walk-on appearances (well, two and a half). Belker only appears in roll call and has one line, and Davenport is entirely absent. Russo is absent and Megan Gallagher is uncredited, for the second and final time since she joined the series.

Milch’s tendency to rewrite every script on the shows he ran began on Hill Street, but one gets the sense that this one he more or less left alone, and that Mamet had pretty free rein. There isn’t much of the famous “Mamet speak,” but the episode breaks from the usual format in a few ways. It’s the only episode of the series that doesn’t have a cold open. It takes place over two days, as opposed to the usual one. And, most obviously, a large portion of the episode takes place in a rural environment unusual for the typically urban series. The flow of the scenes is so loose and “slice of life”-style that in a couple of cases, the episode cuts away from a scene in the middle of a line.

The main plot centers around Jablonski, Renko, Hill, and Goldblume going on a hunting trip…although Henry never ends up making it, due to a series of mishaps and delays. His day from hell escalates from giving an unplanned speech to a group of boy scouts, to being accused of rape by a mentally ill woman, and finally being taken hostage in his car and forced to dig his own grave in the woods. The other guys fare better only in comparison to Henry, as they’re detained by some state cops, break into the wrong cabin, and finally have their trip cut short when Bobby steps on a spike. Back in the city, Katy McBride is in a fog after shooting an armed guy the prior night, and Buntz makes it his business to give her some tough love (and get her good and drunk), sharing his philosophies on life and policework in the process. It’s the Buntz dialogue that feels the most consciously Mamet-like, with that very specific, deliberate, highly-punctuated style of speech that he loves.

Killing is an omnipresent theme in the episode, often with a decidedly macho slant to the discussions. All of Buntz and McBride’s conversations center on killing, with Norm refusing to let Katy become mired in guilt or trauma (she’s initially fixated on the idea that the guy said something before she shot him, and she couldn’t hear what it was). Buntz glorifies the idea of killing in a “combat” situation, repeatedly calling McBride a hero, and forcing her to admit that she liked the sensation (“The guilty secret is: It is the greatest exhilaration it is possible to know”). McBride talks about her father, also a cop, being killed on the job. In another “kill or be killed” situation, Jablonski recounts how he killed a German soldier in WWII when his airborne unit was taken prisoner in Yugoslavia. In contrast to Buntz’s philosophy, Stosh lives with regret over the taking of life, even though he recognizes the necessity. After straightening things out with the state troopers, our Blues have a friendly lunch with them, and they engage in some shop talk about what to do if someone gets the drop on you and demands your gun. They all agree that it’s better to die on your feet with a gun in your hand than on your knees. In a dramatization of this very point, Goldblume, having lost his gun to his captor, ends up literally on his knees begging for his life. As soon as he gets back to the precinct from his ordeal, he applies for a permit to carry a backup gun, not intending to be caught unarmed again. (It strikes me that Goldblume, who historically doesn’t like guns, is an odd fit for the hunting trip.) It’s worth noting that Joe Spano is really good throughout this episode, especially in those final scenes where he’s completely dazed and traumatized.

The “kill or be killed” theme obviously doesn’t really apply to the concept of deer hunting (although Washington does at one point joke to Goldblume that “they’d do the same to you”). Bates is very anti-hunting, repeatedly giving the guys shit over the deer’s defenselessness. Jablonski discusses hunting strategies with cold precision, ruthlessly talking about taking advantage of a terrified deer who can’t hear over the sound of its pounding heart and hooves. Of course, no deer end up being killed, and the episode ends on a nice little wordless punchline. After an episode full of people talking about guns and shooting, but no one actually firing a gun onscreen, Andy decides that he’s going to shoot SOMETHING before going home. He takes three shots at a can at very close range, and doesn’t even graze it.

A secondary theme in the episode is duty, which is the focus of Henry’s talk to the boy scouts. Buntz also repeatedly frames McBride’s shooting of the suspect as her duty. This episode’s dialogue probably has more aggressively pro-police rhetoric than any other episode of the show. Renko, offering the opposing viewpoint, rails against the idea of being cogs in a machine.

Odds and Ends

The main title is more or less back to normal, after Season 6’s experiment with giving the Chicago footage a washed-out, monochromatic blue look. The blue still seems to be pumped up in the color timing of the opening shots, but in a warmer, more welcoming way than the Season 6 look.

The main title has generally been the same from episode to episode within a season, aside from occasional modifications (such as eliminating Michael Conrad after his passing). It began to vary episode to episode a tiny bit in early Season 6, depending on whether or not Fay and/or Ray appeared. But this season, it’s full-on chaos, with nine separate versions appearing in the first twelve episodes. The season starts off with twelve series regulars, the same number as we ended last season on, following Coffey’s demise. This is the fewest number of main cast members the show ever had. In the initial version of this year’s main title, on the season premiere, five actors have reused shots from last season: Dan Travanti, Robert Prosky, Jim Sikking, Dennis Franz, and Charlie Haid. The rest are new. Beginning with the third episode, Robert Clohessy (Flaherty) is added, bringing the cast to thirteen. In the fourth episode, Prosky/Jablonski is out, there’s a new shot of Sikking/Hunter in his sergeant’s uniform doing roll call, and René Enríquez (Ray Calletano) is inserted between Sikking and Spano (Enríquez’s credits shot is the same as last season); additionally, Taurean’s Blacque’s footage inexplicably reverts back to the scene from last season’s main titles beginning with this episode. With the fifth episode, Betty Thomas, who has always appeared very near the end of the credits, moves way up, to the #3 slot; Prosky is back, with a new shot of him at home in an undershirt post-retirement; and Megan Gallagher joins the main cast after three episodes as a guest star. With the sixth episode, Blacque has a brand-new shot in the main title (his third change this season), reflecting his newly clean-shaven look, with just a mustache (returning to his original pilot look). The seventh episode features yet another variation, with Enríquez now gone again. The eighth episode features yet another slightly different version, with Prosky gone, and Thomas now moved one spot later, to the fourth slot (after Weitz/Belker). The tenth episode inexplicably reverts, for one episode only, to Jim Sikking’s main title shot from last season and earlier this season (with him in his EATers outfit), and Megan Gallagher isn’t credited, as Russo doesn’t appear in this episode. The twelfth episode, “A Wasted Weekend,” restores Prosky, and omits Gallagher.

This season adds an “also starring” billing to the opening credits at the beginning of Act 1, which is awarded to many returning guest stars from prior seasons: Jon Cypher (Chief Fletcher Daniels), Mimi Kuzyk (Detective Patsy Mayo), Barbara Babcock (Grace Gardner), Jeffrey Tambor (Judge Alan Wachtel), Trinidad Silva (Jesus Martinez), Louis Giambalvo (LaRue’s brother-in-law, used car salesman “Wacky” Rob Nelson), Andy Romano (Deputy Chief Warren Brisco), George Wyner (A.D.A. Irwin Bernstein), Lisa Sutton (Officer Robin Tataglia), Arthur Taxier (I.A.D. Lieutenant Shipman), Janet Carroll (LaRue’s sister Peg), and Peter Jurasik (Sid “the Snitch” Thurston). Cypher is always listed first when he appears, and is granted the added distinction of having his character name listed (“Jon Cypher as Chief Daniels”). Jurasik is always credited last when he appears, and is granted the distinction of having an “and” above his name.

One other actor given “also starring” billing: Ron O’Neal, who only appears once this season, in “Bald Ambition.” He plays Stan Williams, a police captain who seems to have a supervisory position with the Vice Squad, whom Chief Daniels appoints to assess the race problems at Ray’s precinct, and who ultimately is appointed to take over Ray’s command. This is O’Neal’s third appearance on the show in three seasons, and his casting is a little messy continuity-wise. Originally, he played a police captain simply known as “Pete” at the captains’ retreat in Season 5. Then, in late Season 6, he played Mayor Cleveland’s chief of staff, named Stan. So he’s played two captains, and two characters named Stan, and it’s unclear if any of them are meant to be the same person. My assumption is that this is meant to be the same Stan from last season. This guy mentions being a founding member of the Black Officers’ Coalition, as was Ozzie Cleveland. It makes sense that when Ozzie was elected mayor, he would have brought over a trusted colleague from the department to act as his right hand; and presumably, following Ozzie’s scandal last year, Stan has returned to the force. (We can assume Ozzie resigned, although there hasn’t been any mention of who the current mayor is.)

The season premiere, “The Suitcase,” is the first episode of the series to feature no roll call whatsoever, anywhere in the episode. This is repeated in “Falling from Grace.” Also, this season, the words “ROLL CALL” are entirely eliminated from the opening caption. Even on episodes that do open directly with the roll call, the caption only says the time, a departure from last season.

Milch’s horse trainer, Darrell Vienna, shares story credit on “The Suitcase” with Milch and John Romano.

“The Suitcase” has a weird tangent that sort of reminds me of some of the random scenes in Twin Peaks: The Return (such as Lucy and the insurance man). A guy whose phone line has been hacked shows up with a stack of bills, and Jablonski and Davenport do their best to compassionately blow him off while trying to deal with everything else they have going on.

“The Suitcase” features a particularly wacky subplot where J.D. attends the wedding of a fellow cop, realizing to his dismay that he’s been boning the merry bride—as has half the police force. This was mostly interesting to me due to the scene where LaRue delicately breaks the news to the irate groom, by describing a movie where Jack Hawkins tells Frank Sinatra about a tribe that only has the numbers one, two, three, and “more than three.” The tribe in question appears to be the Pirahã of Brazil. However, it doesn’t appear that Sinatra and Hawkins ever appeared in a film together. My guess is that Milch and/or cowriter John Romano were fascinated with linguist Daniel Everett’s 1986 study of the Pirahã language, and made up a fictional Sinatra-Hawkins movie so that they could slip the trivia into dialogue in a believable way for J.D.’s character. (Technically, Everett’s work at the time suggested that the Pirahã language only has numbers up to two, not three, but presumably this didn’t work as well for the punchline about the bride’s promiscuity. Everett’s more recent studies have suggested that the Pirahã language is in fact far more nuanced, and any comparison to our familiar numerology vocabulary is perhaps impossible.)

Buntz’s apartment, first seen in the season premiere and visited many times afterward, has a couple of weird paintings by the entrance. They look like creepy children, or creepy clowns, or Chico and Harpo Marx, or maybe all three of those things mashed up into pure nightmare fuel. What the fuck, set decorator.

“The Suitcase” has possibly the last instance on the series of Belker biting someone, when he bites a perp’s nose (pretty hard, it looks like!).

I have no clue what the title “A Case of Klapp” means, aside from the obvious STD pun. No one in the episode has gonorrhea, as far as I can tell, and no one with the name Klapp appears.

On the DVD, two episodes this season open with the disclaimer, “The following episode was mastered from the best available source(s).” The first is “A Case of Klapp” (“source” singular) and the second is “Fathers and Guns” (“sources” plural). These episodes definitely look noticeably crappier than the norm on the set: dark, washed-out grey colors, fuzzy resolution. “A Case of Klapp” is by far the shittier-looking of the two. It’s VERY murky in spots; and, inexplicably, pixel-like bright yellow artifacts periodically appear (most noticeably concentrated on the characters’ faces). “Fathers and Guns” fares better; it doesn’t look good, but there’s not anything distracting once you get used to the presentation, other than one glitchy scene that has tracking lines going through it for a few seconds.

DailyMotion has two versions of “A Case of Klapp” uploaded. One is ripped straight from the DVD. The other is clearly from a different source, with more vibrant colors more in line with the series norm. The weird thing, though, is that the two versions have different music cues playing in Hunter’s car in the first scene. The non-DVD version has “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” and this was clearly the original intent. Hunter’s head movements in the scene match Mozart’s music, and in that version, Howard even quietly sings along with the music (his mouth movements can still be seen in the DVD version, but his audio is removed). For reasons completely bewildering to me, the DVD version subs in a generic film library piece entitled “Clinical Search,” a sort of M.O.R. jazz-fusion thing that sounds like it could be the intro music for a Discovery Channel documentary…not the sort of thing that classically-inclined Howard Hunter would listen to (realistically, not the kind of thing that ANYONE would listen to). It’s unclear if this change was made specifically for the DVD, or if two different dubs of the scene were created back in 1986.

In the roll call for “A Case of Klapp,” J.D. references the 1985 surgery to remove cancerous tissue from President Reagan’s nose.

In his only roll call this season before his forced retirement, Jablonski simply closes with “let’s roll,” dropping his “They’re gettin’ away out there” line from last season.

The writers seem to have messed up Internal Affairs Shipman’s rank. When introduced in Season 3, he was a lieutenant, but in “A Case of Klapp,” he’s consistently referred to as “Officer Shipman.” Shipman had a pretty memorable first appearance, when he had to deal with the resentment of all the cops who feel he’s out to get them, but presumably his great speech (which was only heard by Bates and the audience) turned the whole precinct around, because in all his subsequent appearances, he seems to be a pretty well-tolerated fixture. This episode has a rare instance of one of our guys being hostile toward Shipman, as Buntz suggests that Howard piss on Shipman’s hand for his drug test.

Howard has a great line when lamenting the small-mindedness of the department: “Before the enormity of the Sphinx, they would discuss the desert heat.” I assumed that this was a quote from something, but I can’t find any reference to it anywhere online (other than a 2023 newsletter that uses the quote unattributed). I think it may be an original Milchism. I can certainly picture Al Swearengen saying this.

“The Best Defense,” directed by John Patterson, has a pretty sweet one-minute take floating all over the precinct set from one interaction to another, with fourteen credited actors walking and talking in and out of the shot. This is exactly the kind of shot Gregory Hoblit mentioned in the press when he left the show, saying that these elaborate setups ate up too much time and money. Thankfully, his words went unheeded.

In “The Best Defense,” Bates yells out, “Hey, Flaherty, be careful out there, the guy’s a real wacko.” A nice callback to Bates’s fondness for Esterhaus.

“Bald Ambition” has a fun little C-plot about Furillo having to wear a sports coat to work because Davenport took all his suits to the cleaners at once. Throughout the episode, to his exasperation, everyone looks askance at him and makes offhand comments (Sid: “Captain’s looking a little country club there, isn’t he?”). The laundromat ends up burning down, and the wardrobe department takes this as an excuse to occasionally put Frank in two-piece suits going forward (though not very often).

Hunter typically ends his roll calls with a simple “dismissed,” often following a summation of the weather forecast (Howard apparently has a bit of David Lynch in him). He also works in a “be careful out there” in “Bald Ambition.” “Fathers and Guns” gives him the catchy, “Keep your powder dry, keep your spirits high.”

“Bald Ambition” has a little plot where Hill catches a baby that a dude dropped out of a window. This is mostly an excuse for J.D. to do a bit of physical comedy, imitating an NFL receiver who catches an airborne baby, and immediately spikes it.

I’ve mentioned before how Hill Street seemed to invent its own euphemistic vocabulary a lot of the time, and in particular, the frequent use of the word “brown” (usually by Daniels or Hunter) to indicate embarrassment, presumably as a metaphor for shit (“wearing the brown jock strap,” etc.). Daniels puts a nicely racist spin on this when discussing Ray, somehow making the whole thing even grosser than usual: “None of us wants to see Raymundo with a lot of brown burrito on his face.”

Another seemingly made-up slang term that gets used repeatedly is “hummer,” generally meaning (I think) a bad or lazy arrest. I know that in our world, the term “hummer” is (or was) used to refer to blow jobs; I’m not sure if there’s supposed to be some sort of connection there?

Continued in next post due to character limit.
 
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SEASON 7 EPISODES 1-12 CONTINUED (4/4)

More Odds and Ends

The building used in the establishing shot for Ray’s Polk Avenue Precinct is the same building that was used for the Jefferson Heights Precinct last season (in fact, it might be the exact same shot).

Time capsule moment: Ray mentions that “they’re computerizing the 9-1-1’s.”

In “Bald Ambition,” Joyce mentions spending the weekend at Lake Kern where Frank’s brother has a boat. So it seems they’ve been associating a bit more with Furillo’s family since the Season 6 Christmas episode.

A classic Howard Hunterism when Henry mentions his friend Steve’s guilt complex. GOLDBLUME: “I mean, he gets robbed, he thinks it’s his fault.” HUNTER: “He’s not a Jewish fellow, is he, Henry?”

“I Come on My Knees” is the final episode with a solo script credit for Milch. I’m also not entirely sure what this title refers to, but I assume it has something to do with a plot involving a Vice undercover cop with an unfortunate tendency to involuntarily ejaculate when working the massage parlors…which he has to do frequently. This storyline also gives us the tidbit that LaRue had problems with premature ejaculation, which were resolved by a sex therapist who made him talk like a baby (shades of Frank Booth).

“I Come on My Knees” opens with Sid talking in his sleep, keeping Norm awake. He’s addressing someone named “Daddy,” and is either reliving a troubled childhood or a kinky sex encounter…or both.

“I Come on My Knees” ends on the morning following the main events of the episode (Renko, having refused to participate in an auto insurance scam, finds his car returned but trashed). This is the fourth time an episode has not taken place solely on one day, following “Jungle Madness Part 1” in Season 1 (the final scene was the following morning, as with this episode), “Of Mouse and Man” in Season 2 (the first scene took place the night before the rest of the episode), and “Blues in the Night” in Season 6 (the night-to-day episode). “A Wasted Weekend” is the fifth episode to join this club.

The episode “Say Uncle” has a couple of interesting little touches. In a briefing scene, Buntz has a persistent cough…I assumed this was going to have some significance, but it’s just an isolated little realistic beat. Similarly, later on, the U.S. Marshal Buntz is working with has a canker sore. I like when shows include these moments of verisimilitude that don’t serve any greater purpose.

“Say Uncle” gives us another example of Buntz’s impressive marksmanship skills (after he took out Randolph Scripps on the hospital staircase last season). He grabs a rifle from an Emergency Action Team member and within seconds lines up his shot and takes out a sniper on a nearby water tower.

More characters with Catholic ties: Grace Gardner/Sister Chastity, and Flaherty, whom we learn is a lapsed Catholic. For a show run by a bunch of culturally Jewish guys, Hill Street really had a fixation with Catholicism. (Recall that the first episode Milch wrote was about a nun being raped and murdered.)

Betty Thomas’s main title shot this season comes from the seventh episode. So, presumably they had episode 7 shot, or partially shot, before the season premiere aired. I’m always curious to know how far ahead of airing these network shows were working back then, given how crazy the schedule was.

In almost an exact replay of a subplot in the Season 4 Christmas episode, LaRue once again embarks on the sleazy task of convincing his sister to take her cheating husband Rob back, with the promise of LaRue receiving a car from Rob’s lot if he’s successful. And once again, predictably, Rob screws J.D. over once he dodges the alimony bullet.

The very sympathetic crack-addicted soul food cook Belker busts in “Amazing Grace” has a well-acted monologue about the shame of his addiction, which feels like it could be a confessional from Milch. The character is nicely played by John Hancock, who portrayed Judge Richard Armand on both L.A. Law and Cop Rock.

J.D. sarcastically name-drops Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney in “Falling from Grace.” These days Winchell is best remembered as the original voice of Tigger in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh cartoons, but in the 1950s, he had a very popular children’s series starring him and his ventriloquist dummies, with Mahoney as the main draw. In the same episode, Furillo and Davenport drop a more contemporary kiddie show reference, to Sesame Street.

The precinct’s bad luck with khaki officers following Leo’s departure keeps up. It’s revealed that Melvin (who has been a pretty neutral background presence for the back half of Season 6 and the first third of this season) sold a copy of Neal Washington’s personnel records to a vengeful city councilman, who in turn reveals Neal’s prior codeine dependency (from the Season 5 finale) to the press. After briefly acting as an informant against the councilman, Melvin’s career reaches an inglorious end. The final khaki officer of the series, Raymond, debuts in “She’s So Fein” and lasts through to the finale.

Belker’s nuclear attack nightmare has a soundbite of journalist Herbert Morrison reporting on the Hindenburg disaster, and—more confusingly—sportscaster Russ Hodges’s famous “Giants win the Pennant!” call from the 1951 National League playoffs.

The dream sequences also give us glimpses of Belker and Furillo as kids.

Things apparently aren’t going so well for Renko and Daryl Ann, as Andy quips that he’s going to take the department’s new bulletproof jock straps home with him at night.

After Belker’s nuclear panic, Hunter mentions his co-op at First Strike Estates in the Alleghanies, a callback all the way back to Season 2.

Joyce’s mother, who has been mentioned a few times throughout the series, apparently passed away without mention sometime before the events of “Fathers and Guns.” Furillo refers to her in the past tense: “your mother loved you.”

“More Skinned Against Than Skinning” has an amusing little subplot with a Belker-Buntz team-up, such a perfect pairing that I can’t believe the show hasn’t done it sooner. Norm, who is temporarily blind after an eye doctor appointment, decides to go undercover as a blind beggar with Belker as backup. One amusing touch is that Buntz changes into an even tackier shirt-and-tie combo than he was already wearing—apparently he doesn’t think his regular fashion sense is tasteless enough for a blind person.

It’s been awhile since we’ve gotten a gross Belker sandwich. Mick has become more normal-seeming and less weird since he started dating Robin. But on the stakeout, he offers Buntz half of his sandwich containing a spread consisting of chopped cabbage, sardine paste, mashed lung (boiled), and “a schmear of chicken fat.”

Sharon Fein, the namesake of “She’s So Fein,” is played by Gela Nash. Nash previously appeared in the recurring role of Belker’s girlfriend Debbie Kaplan, who just sort of vanished from the show after Season 1. Fein is a new public defender on the Hill, and the episode harshly portrays her as a pretty lousy person. She’s like a dark mirror of what Davenport could have become: she shares Joyce’s privileged upbringing, but unlike Joyce, who has guts and passion, Fein is a poser, a tourist trying to prove something to herself. She’s scared of her clients, and she smuggles the gun into the precinct that ends up being used by the guy who takes Joyce hostage. She also asks out Neal, just so she can scandalize her parents by dating a black guy.

Renko’s Waylon Jennings cap returns in “A Wasted Weekend.” That hat goes all the way back to very early Season 1. I feel like it’s been a long time since we’ve seen it.

In “A Wasted Weekend,” Renko quotes Robert Burns, and Hunter quotes Louisa May Alcott.

The state troopers who detain our Blues in “A Wasted Weekend” have Illinois State Police patches. Once again, Lewis and Milch seem to be more comfortable than Bochco was definitively stating the series location.

Robert Prosky was only 13 in 1943, the year of Stan’s WWII story.

Guest Stars

Eighteen-year-old Cuba Gooding Jr. appears uncredited in the season premiere, “The Suitcase,” in his second-ever screen role. He plays Ethan Dillon, one of three kids arrested in a car with a gun, who turns out to have an outstanding robbery-homicide warrant. His scenes are mostly with Davenport.

Jack Kehler (the Dude’s landlord in The Big Lebowski, and Guard Johnny Mack in Lost Highway) appears in “The Suitcase” as the twitchy guy who retrieves the suitcase of coke from the plane crash and gets in over his head trying to sell it.

Pepe Serna (best known for being dismembered with a chainsaw in Scarface) also appears in “The Suitcase,” as a high-strung dealer who takes Buntz and Sid hostage.

Reni Santoni has a three-episode arc at the beginning of the season as Danny Santana, a public defender coworker of Joyce’s who’s a major instigator for the strike. Santoni is probably best known as Chico Gonzalez in Dirty Harry. He previously appeared in Season 5 as an insane prosecutor-turned-defense attorney, who carries a loaded gun to intimidate his clients.

Whitman Mayo (Grady on Sanford and Son) puts in his second and final appearance on the Hill in “The Suitcase,” as a vagrant Belker meets on his undercover who’s very excited about “cocktail hour.”

Also in “The Suitcase,” Jason Wingreen—the original voice of Boba Fett in Empire Strikes Back before the 2004 redub—appears as a pharmacist whose store is temporarily shut down due to the drug poisoning investigation.

One final casting note on “The Suitcase”: Mykelti Williamson makes his final appearance of the series as Officer Ronnie Garfield, partnered with Bates for this episode.

Martha Hackett (Seska on Star Trek: Voyager) makes her first screen appearances in the second and third episodes of the season, as Carol Greene, a public defender coworker of Joyce who favors the strike.

William Edward Phipps (the voice of Prince Charming in Disney’s Cinderella) appears in “The Best Defense” as Professor Explosion, a nutcase who straps dynamite to himself and tries to drum up a paying audience to watch him blow himself up. (Chief Daniels himself, Jon Cypher, had also played the Cinderella prince, in the hugely popular 1957 Rodgers & Hammerstein TV musical starring Julie Andrews.)

In that same episode, Chino “Fats” Williams, who later appeared in Mark Frost’s Storyville as a strip club barker, has an uncredited role as Jerry, a good-natured local drunk Bates and Russo briefly interact with. Williams is noteworthy for being the first person to appear on screen in The Terminator: he’s the garbage truck driver who sees the T-800 appear.

Scott Paulin (Deke Slayton in The Right Stuff) has a two-episode arc as Henry’s ill-fated high school friend, struggling writer Steve Merker. Paulin had previously appeared as a pill-addicted cop in Season 2.

Geno Silva (the Skull in Scarface) appears in “I Come on My Knees” as Antonio Robledo, editor of The Latin Daily Signal. Lynch fans will recognize Silva for his dual (?) role as Cookie the hotel manager and the Silencio emcee in Mulholland Drive.

In that same episode, ’60s pop singer Dion (“Runaround Sue,” “The Wanderer”) has a nonspeaking cameo as a character named only as “Kid” in the end credits (despite Dion being in his late 40s at this point, he does look youthful). He’s the new lodger waiting to move into Steve Merker’s vacated room. (Presumably he’s a…wanderer?)

Charles Hoyes (Decker, the employee Pete talks to outside the burning mill in Episode 7 of Twin Peaks) appears in “Say Uncle” as Jimmy, a mob henchman.

C.C.H. Pounder makes her third and final appearance on the show, after having a small role in Season 2 as a prostitute, and a larger role in Season 3 as the wife of a Vietnam vet who holds her hostage. In “Amazing Grace,” she’s the mother of a ten-year-old who O.D.s.

In that same episode, Don Calfa (Assistant Principal Greege in Twin Peaks Episode 17) plays drug dealer Kenny Armis. He previously portrayed a Department of Corrections employee with gambling debts in Season 4.

Also in “Amazing Grace,” F. William Parker (Captain Luneau in Lost Highway) plays a franchisee of Captain Trident’s (a Long John Silver’s-style fast food chain).

Finally, also in “Amazing Grace,” Kane Hodder (Jason Voorhees from Part VII through Jason X) appears as a dealer running crack through Captain Trident’s.

Frances Conroy (Ruth Fisher on Six Feet Under) has a very amusing turn in “Falling from Grace” as a woman who’s just come from Assertiveness Training to find her Porsche stolen. After the adrenaline rush of seeing Mick in action, she realizes that he’s a “Level Four Assertive” and she’s smitten.

Brian George (Babu Bhatt on Seinfeld) also appears in “Falling from Grace,” as realtor Jake Pickle.

Mrs. Morgenstern from the Youth Authority, who has popped up occasionally since Season 2, makes her final appearance of the series in “Fathers and Guns.” Her first name was previously given as Ruth, but here it’s Roseanna.

Ben Kronen (the waiter Lester gasses in Episode 2 of On the Air) plays Father Conklin, the Furillos’ family priest, in “Fathers and Guns.”

Staff

Milch is elevated from Co-Executive Producer to full Executive Producer, joining Jeff Lewis.

Lewis and Milch didn’t have a great track record for retaining writers. Jacob Epstein had been the only writer to carry over from Bochco’s Season 5 to their Season 6. In Season 7, once again, only one writer stays on from the prior year. It may have been particularly tough to keep people on staff if they knew the show was ending.

John Melvoin joins as Co-Executive Producer. He had previously been on staff at Remington Steele. He went on to work on Northern Exposure, then had a lengthy career as a showrunner on various series: David E. Kelley’s Picket Fences, CBS’s sci-fi Early Edition, Showtime’s Going to California, ABC’s Line of Fire, and Lifetime’s Army Wives. He was also an exec producer on season 4 of Alias and season 3 of Killing Eve.

John Litvack also joins as Co-Exec Producer. Litvack was better known as an executive. After starting out as a director on daytime soaps like Guiding Light, he held positions as director of programming at CBS, MGM, NBC, MTM, Disney, and the WB. His time as a producer on Hill Street intersected with his tenure at MTM (I’m guessing that Arthur Price wanted to have one of his own people inside the show to keep tabs). After retiring from his executive career, Litvack served as a co-exec producer on Smallville and a consulting producer on the first season of Fringe.

Walon Green and Robert Schlitt are out. Steve Bello takes over the Co-Producer slot for the first ten episodes of the season (and the twelfth). Bello had co-written the 1981 exploitation flick Circle of Power (starring Yvette Mimieux), and then had been a story editor on St. Elsewhere and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He went on to produce on a few more series and TV movies, including the 1990s Untouchables show.

Jacob Epstein and Dick Wolf are out. Robert Ward, the sole writer remaining from Season 6, is promoted from Story Editor to Executive Script Consultant.

John Romano joins as Executive Story Editor, beginning with the season’s eighth episode, “Falling from Grace.” (Technically, he’s first credited with the position on the series premiere—which he also cowrote with Milch—then vanishes from the end credits for the next six episodes. This is presumably a result of some arcane production vagaries that I honestly can’t make much sense of, except to observe that the season premiere has a much later production number, yet clearly has to air where it does in terms of Joyce’s storyline.) Romano was a Yale graduate, and likely crossed paths there with Lewis and Milch. He had been an English teacher at Columbia and a New York Times book reviewer prior to landing this, his first TV gig. He went on to be a producer on Steve Bochco’s Cop Rock, as well as Knots Landing, Party of Five, NBC’s Third Watch, and AMC’s Hell on Wheels, among others. He also wrote or co-wrote the features Intolerable Cruelty, Nights in Rodanthe, and The Lincoln Lawyer.

Terry Curtis Fox joins as Story Editor. A playwright and professor of writing at NYU’s Tisch School, he’s had “consultant” positions on Stargate SG-1 and Diagnosis Murder. Fox notably wrote the play Cops; a Chicago production of that show was the first of many times in his career that Dennis Franz played a police officer.

Somewhat oddly, two staff writers have credits on only the second and third episodes of the season, then they’re gone: Brad Kern and Jonathan Lemkin. Lemkin had shared story credit on last season’s “Slum Enchanted Evening,” and I discussed him in a prior post; he’s credited as Story Editor on these two episodes, and shares story credit on “The Best Defense.”

Brad Kern is credited as Executive Story Editor. Today, Kern is best remembered as the (somewhat controversial) showrunner of Charmed. Prior to Hill Street, he had been a story editor on fellow MTM/NBC series Remington Steele. This probably explains his abbreviated stay on the Hill: Remington Steele had been canceled, but then was uncanceled once Pierce Brosnan landed the role of James Bond (in the film that would become The Living Daylights), leading to a wave of publicity for the actor and the series. NBC renewed Steele for an abbreviated six-episode season, which ended up temporarily costing Brosnan the 007 role, as Cubby Broccoli didn’t want his movie star to be associated with a TV series (TV, ick). After leaving Hill Street, Kern returned for the final season of Steele as a supervising producer. He was later a supervising producer on Carlton Cuse’s The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr. (starring Bruce Campbell), co-exec producer on Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, an exec producer on Dick Wolf’s New York Undercover, and showrunner on Fox’s Human Target and the CW’s Beauty and the Beast. He was the showrunner of NCIS: New Orleans until he was fired in 2017 for sexual misconduct.

David Black joins as Story Editor beginning with “Fathers and Guns.” A novelist and journalist, he went on to story edit on Miami Vice, co-created the short-lived Nasty Boys with Dick Wolf, co-created The Cosby Mysteries with Columbo co-creator William Link, and went on to produce on Law & Order, CSI: Miami, and Sidney Lumet’s legal drama 100 Centre Street. He also wrote the TV movie Legacy of Lies starring Michael Ontkean, Martin Landau, and Eli Wallach; and the feature The Confession with Ben Kingsley and Alec Baldwin.

Supervising Producer/Director Scott Brazil exits the show after “Fathers and Guns.” With Hill Street ending, he left to produce the pilot for Tony Yerkovich’s Private Eye starring Josh Brolin, a short-lived series that aired the following season on NBC.

“She’s So Fein” is written by freelancer Marjorie David, the only woman besides Karen Hall to ever write on the series. A few years earlier, David had been one of the credited writers on Andrei Konchalovsky’s Maria’s Lovers (starring Nastassja Kinski, John Savage, Robert Mitchum, Keith Carradine, and John Goodman). She went on to write and produce on a number of series, including Millennium, Chicago Hope, Dark Angel, 90210, and most recently, on NBC’s Taken prequel series.
 
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I found a book by David Mamet called 5 Television Plays. It contains four unproduced teleplays, as well as the Hill Street script for "A Wasted Weekend." For anyone who's ever read a Mamet screenplay, it's in the expected idiosyncratic style. The weirdest thing about the script as published is that the entire Buntz/McBride subplot is absent. The book was published in 1990, the same year that Mamet and Lindsay Crouse (who played McBride) divorced, so...I wonder if Mamet simply deleted those scenes because he was feeling bitter? The Buntz dialogue in those scenes feels SO Mamet-like, more than anything else in the episode, that I can't imagine they were written by anyone other than him.

Other than that omission, the script is very close to the episode. One difference is that Bates does the roll call in the script, whereas it's Hunter in the episode. Presumably, when Mamet wrote the script, he didn't know that Jablonski would be retired and Hunter would be demoted to sergeant. The episode's references to Jablonski's retirement are absent from Mamet's script; Mamet seemed to be writing on the premise that Jablonski was simply on vacation, with Bates filling in. The rather formal dialogue Mamet wrote for Bates ended up being a much better fit for Hunter in the episode as filmed.

LaRue and Washington are absent from Mamet's script, as is Flaherty. In the episode as shot, these three are given some lines that were scripted for Buntz and Belker. The script has a lot of characters calling each other "sir," a strangely formal touch that wasn't included in the episode as shot. And, one of Hunter's best lines from the episode doesn't appear in the script ("Sergeant Bates, if you would allow me a minute. Women bond together as they do to raise their consciousness. To knit, to sew, to discuss childbirth, that's fine. Why do you find it ludicrous that men would do the same?").
 
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SEASON 7 EPISODES 13-20

As with the prior four episodes I covered, the episodes in this stretch continue to be almost entirely standalone, with serialization only coming into play with a handful of character arcs, particularly the Russo-Flaherty relationship. Things become a bit more serialized again with the sixteenth through eighteenth episodes.

Goldblume

Henry Goldblume continues to have the most interesting arc of the season, although it unfortunately peters out a few episodes before the end of the show.

“Der Roachenkavalier” (cowritten by Bob Woodward, of Woodward & Bernstein fame) focuses on the aftermath of a horrific car accident caused by a drug addict who was released from custody the day prior. It turns out the guy was on the street because Henry didn’t follow new city regulations mandating felony “intent to sell” charges for fairly low weights of drug possession. In another indication that Henry has hardened since the earlier seasons (while most of the other characters have become softer and more likable), his main issue with the regulations isn’t what you’d expect from the show’s liberal conscience: that the policy is overly draconian toward defendants. Instead, his complaints focus on the fact that the regs are logistically impossible to enforce because the system isn’t equipped for so many felony arrests; in other words, it’s a “woe is me” argument, as opposed to focusing on the rights of the accused as you’d expect him to. It becomes clear as the episode progresses that to some extent, Goldblume is just being a contrarian, as his point keeps changing as he gets progressively angrier, bitching about everything from not being granted enough discretion, to police underfunding. Eventually, suspended by Chief Daniels and with nothing to lose, he goes on The Don Chesley Show (where his girlfriend Dotty works) to defend himself. Ironically, his complaining on the show causes the city council to immediately approve more funding for the department and grant many resources Daniels had been requesting for months, and Goldblume immediately goes from pariah to hero!

This outcome is interesting ideologically. I know this was the 1980s and there was a war on drugs, but even so, I’d think that an episode like this, focusing on Goldblume, should be about the inherent unfairness of disingenuously inflating charges on a victimless crime. Instead, Henry is elated that he “beat the system” and got the cops more resources, so that they can presumably continue overcharging people. Henry seems to be more pro-policing than ever, while simultaneously also being more dissatisfied with being a cop than ever before, due mostly to his anger and resentment toward upper management. It’s depressingly realistic that a guy like him would lose sight of his ideals as the years go by, and just become increasingly pissed off and jaded about how difficult it is to do his job at all.

One complaint about this one: the series’ “one day per episode” format doesn’t work great with Henry’s storyline, which feels way too packed. After being suspended, he immediately gets booked on Don Chesley like an hour later. Does Don just have a lot of empty airtime, and will book anyone with no notice? Also, is his show on 24 hours a day? The last time Henry went on, it was a nighttime show, but now it’s on in the middle of the afternoon. Then, IMMEDIATELY after the show goes out live, Henry is summoned to talk to the city council. Were the councilmen just sitting around watching TV in the middle of the work day?

In the next episode, “Norman Conquest,” Henry is part of a panel—with Furillo and a third guy identified only as Mike—reviewing potential candidates for promotion to lieutenant. When Mike tries to pressure them to favor a diversity hire for affirmative action purposes, Goldblume bristles because he just doesn’t like being told what to do, even when it aligns with his supposed values. It becomes clear that he’s gaining a reputation across the department for being a malcontent (Mike derisively refers to him as the “department subversive”).

In “Sorry, Wrong Number,” the brutal gang murder of a family causes Furillo to task Goldblume—accompanied by Buntz—to lean on a kid Henry has been trying to get out of the gang life and into art school. Predictably, things go very poorly for the kid, who doesn’t even end up providing any useful information. Goldblume doesn’t hold the situation against Buntz, even getting a beer with him afterward, presumably because Norm is who he is (as Steve Bochco once said regarding David Milch, “It would be like being angry with someone for not having blue eyes”). But the rift between Goldblume and Furillo that’s been periodically building since at least Season 3 grows ever wider, with Goldblume calling Frank a “bottom liner” who has stopped caring about the lives that get chewed up. For his part, Frank explodes at Henry, saying he’s tired of his moralizing. Later, Frank admits to Joyce that Henry used to be the first person he went to for judgment, but now he does his best to sideline him. In the next episode, the two form a tentative truce, but the exchange doesn’t bode terribly well for Goldblume’s future with the department. Henry admits that he doesn’t trust himself as a cop anymore, and Furillo says that Henry is too scattered, and needs to decide if he wants to be a cop, a reformer, or a writer. GOLDBLUME: “You used to say it was my strength, remember, Frank? That I saw more of the picture than the other cops? Maybe it’s not a strength anymore.” FURILLO: “It’s time for you to decide that for yourself, Henry, that’s all. It’s just time.”

Unfortunately, after this good scene, this thread is frustratingly completely dropped in the final five episodes of the season. So, even though we’ll see plenty more of Goldblume, this is essentially where his arc on the series ends, in a state of uncertainty.

His girlfriend Dotty isn’t seen or mentioned after “Sorry, Wrong Number,” the sixteenth episode of the season. It also occurs to me that Henry’s kids haven’t been mentioned at all in, like, years, which is another somewhat surprising change in the character, given that being a father was such a core part of his identity in the early seasons.

Hunter

Having been demoted to sergeant for much of the season, Howard Hunter is temporarily enlisted to fill in in his old gig, heading the Emergency Action Team, on a hostage situation perpetrated by Howard’s insane former protégé Jack Ballantine. Although the situation is resolved successfully, and leads to Hunter having his lieutenancy restored, the experience is also yet another humbling indignity for Howard: the hostage, Ballantine’s therapist, vocally blames Howard’s self-absorption for Ballantine’s breakdown. (“You were the father he never had! But you were too busy hanging upside down from the ceiling, or dating transsexuals!”)

“Days of Swine and Roses” ends on a seeming non-sequitur scene, with Hunter joining a friend in a basement the friend is renovating, where he’s discovered some Iroquois bones and tools (Howard has friends?! Do any of these characters have friends outside the force?). The guy is doing the repair work based on a book Hunter lent him called Early American Carpentry and the Myth of the Melting Pot (“a classic patriotic analysis”), with the punchline that of course the place collapses, entombing both men. End of episode. In the following episode, Howard is missing, and Furillo and Goldblume are trying to locate him.

Buntz

Following the David Mamet episode, Norman Buntz seems to regain some of the edge that was lacking earlier this season. After Belker is shot, Buntz brutally beats an informant, sending a disgusted Bobby Hill out of the room so that the worst of it is left to the viewers’ imaginations. In another episode, he extorts Davenport’s client into cooperating in an investigation by threatening to leak to the prison population that the guy’s junk was shot off.

“Norman Conquest” is an episode that I suspect a lot of people didn’t like. It feels distinctly like a late-in-the-run episode, and the underlying premise is admittedly really stupid: for some reason, the apportionment of overtime pay to the precincts is based entirely on the street value of the drugs they bring in. But once you accept this unrealistic foundation for the story, everything that springs from it is great. Buntz is left in charge for the day, and in order to save the precinct’s overtime, he tacitly gives permission for all the cops to violate every civil right imaginable, with no concern for having arrests that will stick: just confiscating as many drugs as possible. There’s a great giddy energy to the whole thing, as a funhouse-mirror version of what the show would be like if the precinct were run in the questionable image of Norman Buntz’s view of cop work, as opposed to the noble Furillo’s. Renko and Hill gleefully shake down every lowlife they can find, Washington and LaRue make a fake 911 call as a pretense to enter a known stash house. Buntz even sets up a makeshift drug lab in roll call, with a blackboard tracking their progress like the donation board in a telethon, as the cops all stand around and cheer each other on. The Buntz-encouraged shakedowns inevitably bring him into conflict with Davenport, who eventually obtains a court injunction. As Joyce says near the end of the episode: “That’s why the city hires people like me, Lieutenant. To keep a lid on people like you.”

Following the injunction, Buntz takes the audacious step of trying to steal a major bust from Division, demonstrating that he really doesn’t give a shit about making enemies in the department. In a very fun resolution to the episode, Buntz gets the last bit of cocaine that puts them over the top when an annoying interior decorator lady who’s been hanging around the precinct all episode tries to steal some coke from the evidence locker and they bust her, convincing the lab tech to count the same drugs twice, since the cocaine is technically evidence in two different crimes. (The comic relief storyline with the interior decorator feels like a very lazy replay of the second episode of the series ever, and the circumstances under which Phil Esterhaus and Grace Gardner first met.)

Buntz’s affection for Sid the Snitch continues to be obvious, even as he often speaks to him in a belittling fashion. Sid gets repeatedly let off the hook by both Norm and J.D. when he’s caught committing crimes, like boosting coke from a drug lab, receiving stolen property, and even attempting to assault a guy while acting as a loan shark’s enforcer (inevitably, Sid gets his ass kicked). Norm and Sid have even become friendly enough that they plan on getting together to watch a boxing match on TV.

Buntz’s impeccable marksmanship is again referenced, as J.D. persuades him to enter the department’s annual shooting competition. Norm thinks contests are moronic, but he agrees to do it for 20% of the betting pot. (He loses, just barely, to the four-time champ.)

Russo and Flaherty

After showing some potential in the first half of the season, Celestina Russo ends up having nothing to do in these final episodes aside from being required to go undercover as a hooker way too frequently, and an incredibly tedious dating storyline with the season’s other new regular, Patrick Flaherty. The writers subvert expected gender dynamics by having Patrick interested in a serious relationship while Tina just wants sex and nothing else; and that seems to be the only point of the storyline. I had initially hoped that perhaps Russo’s difficulty reconciling intimacy with sex might be addressed as part of the emotional fallout from her rape, but nope…the rape is never even alluded to after the episode in which it happened. Instead, Russo is basically reduced to just being a prop in mopey Flaherty’s storyline. It’s not that Flaherty is necessarily presented as being in the right—he’s repeatedly depicted as being overly invasive of the boundaries Tina sets. But still, we spend far more time seeing his point of view than hers—whether we’re meant to agree with him or not—and Russo ends up being reduced to almost a nonentity as a character, an object of desire and little more. Once they finally break it off, Russo’s appearances are reduced to cameos with maybe a line or two an episode, whereas Flaherty continues to have his own prominent storylines, making it clear which character the writers are more interested in.

Bates

Speaking of the show not doing great by its female characters/actors: After being given one of the better season-long character arcs last year, Lucy Bates’s most significant storyline this season revolves around her love life, or lack thereof. For reasons that are not obvious to me, she spends the season pining for Flaherty, which seems like low-key character assassination. For the entire run of the series, she’s expressed her staunch refusal to date other cops because doing so could impact the way she’s perceived professionally. If she was going to date anyone, it should have been Joe Coffey, who was far more charming and (as he evolved) kind to her than Patrick is. For whatever reason, the writers choose to transform Lucy into a lovelorn teenager, jealous when she learns of Flaherty and Russo’s relationship. I understand it’s the human condition that people don’t always behave consistently; but it’s just such an unrewarding, lame direction to take a great character during a final season. (Also, Lucy, who has a history of supporting other female officers throughout the series, becomes a bit bitchy toward Tina after learning about the relationship.)

Lucy’s adopted son Fabian only appears in one scene all season, and I think is only ever mentioned by her one other time. Actor Zero Hubbard, who plays Fabian, first appeared on the series in a different role (the kid who insisted on being called Speedboat) in Season 3, when he was twelve. In his final appearance on the show, he’s now nearly sixteen. Fabian casually mentions that his mother died “of dope” sometime since we last saw her in Season 6.

Furillo and Davenport

Our Francis Xavier Furillo serves in a mainly functional role for this last stretch of the series, usually as a supporting player in other characters’ stories. He seems to have evolved into a more pragmatic character than he was at the start of the series, more willing to look the other way for certain things. When Bobby guiltily confesses a “roust” of civilians, Frank’s response is, “That’s something we don’t talk about, but a roust is something we sometimes do.” When Buntz beats the informant, Furillo initially chides him, “I want a case that’s going to stand up. Not be thrown out because some cop thinks he’s above the law”; but he later ameliorates this by saying, “I can’t condone criminal behavior by my men under any circumstances. But on occasion, Lieutenant, I can understand it.” I can’t imagine the Furillo of the first few seasons expressing that sentiment (or being willing to keep Buntz at his precinct).

In the earlier seasons, the main driving force in Frank’s personal life (besides his relationship with Joyce, obviously) was the challenge of being a divorced parent. These final two seasons ignore that element (in part out of necessity, since Fay and Frank Jr. were played by Steve Bochco’s wife and son, respectively); neither Fay nor Frank Jr. is mentioned at all this season until the series finale. Instead, these last two seasons have shifted the focus in Frank’s personal life to his parents and brother. “The Runner Falls on His Kisser” returns to this topic for one final time, following the suicide of Frank’s father a few episodes earlier. The episode opens with Furillo having a nightmare about his Papa leaving on a boat, which clearly leaves him disturbed. Then, later that day, his brother Joe reluctantly comes to him asking for a loan due to a massive downturn in his construction business over the winter. It ends up being the impetus for the two brothers to vow to become closer, now that they’re out from under their father’s shadow. It’s a slight, but sweet, little storyline, well-acted by Travanti and Michael Durrell. This dynamic was likely at least partly inspired by Milch’s own life. Milch’s father also committed suicide; and Milch always felt that his father resented him and favored his brother (who became a doctor, like their dad). The two Milch brothers remained largely distant for years due to the massively different ways they’d been treated by their father.

Joyce Davenport also has a largely functional role in this final stretch. She has an OK-sized role in most episodes, but rarely is given any material that develops her character in a meaningful way. She’s generally either Furillo’s loving supportive wife, or the zealous defense attorney who butts heads with our cops.

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SEASON 7 EPISODES 13-20 CONT'D (2/3)

Belker

Some more predictable heart-of-gold plotlines for Mick Belker: He adopts a purse-snatching dog. He befriends a drug-dealer kid, who bites Mick when he tries to arrest him (in a bit of dialogue that it’s probably not ever advisable to say to a minor, Belker says, “Somebody bites me, I take an interest”).

At the end of “The Cookie Crumbles,” Belker becomes the last of the many series regulars to be shot and survive (going back to Renko and Hill in the pilot). He’s very seriously injured and spends the following episode, “Dogsbreath Afternoon,” in and out of surgery while the other cops try to track down the killer. To the very end, the series remains staunchly unwilling to kill regulars, with Esterhaus and Coffey (and Harry Garibaldi, who, let’s face it, no one cared about) the only main cast members the show ever offed.

The shooting is largely an excuse to see the impact Belker’s near-death has on the other characters, reminiscent of last season’s “Remembrance of Hits Past,” when Furillo was shot. LaRue, who has historically been a bully and a jerk to Mick, has been overall much more respectful to him since Lewis and Milch took over the show. When Furillo theorizes that someone made Belker’s cover, J.D. immediately rejects this, saying that Mick was too good to let that happen. Robin, who nearly broke up with Mick back in Season 5 because he couldn’t open up to her, can’t help the investigation because he still doesn’t tell her anything about work: “It’s always ‘the usual.’ Or ‘nothing much.’” Furillo gets angry at himself for not forcing Belker to take a partner, and laments that Mick kept such poor records that no one can retrace his steps. The would-be killer is eventually tracked down due to some solid detective work from Washington, LaRue, and Buntz. (The gunman dies in circumstances very reminiscent of the way Dennis Franz’s Sal Benedetto went out in Season 3, but this time with Franz on the other side of the door.)

There’s a question of whether or not Mick will return to work if and when he recovers. In a rare humanistic moment, Buntz angrily asks, “What’s a guy like that, with a kid and all, doing undercover anyway?” Tataglia, who previously refused to quit the force when Mick was worried about her safety—even when she was pregnant—is now adamant that she and Belker are done with policework, although Jablonski tries to reason with her that Mick is going to have to decide that for himself. The show could have gotten some drama out of Belker facing a reckoning, having to choose between the work that defines him and the family he loves, but the show disappointingly just glosses over this. A couple of episodes later, Mick insists on getting back out there before his stitches have even fully healed, telling Furillo that Robin will murder him if he doesn’t get back undercover (I guess, impliedly, she’s realized that he’s unhappy if he can’t do what he’s best at). This ends up being Mick’s final undercover operation seen on the series, a blandly typical affair with him working at a bakery with a feisty older woman whose husband is pretty deep into some loan sharks.

Hill and Renko

“City of Refuse” is a good spotlight for Bobby Hill, highlighting the duality that makes him a compelling character: his bottled-up resentment, and his inherent morality and goodness. He creates a potential powder keg situation by trashing (literally) the funeral procession of a drug kingpin worshiped by the community as an outlaw folk hero, then spends the rest of the episode feeling terrible about how he failed to live up to his uniform. When Bobby receives an anonymous death threat over the incident, the other cops go on a “roust” of the funeral on his behalf, then joyously celebrate afterwards, making Hill even more uncomfortable.

“Sorry, Wrong Number” has a cute “day in the life of” C-plot with Andrew J. Renko in which he gets piss dumped on his head outside a methadone clinic, then is vomited upon, but finally gets a happy ending to his day when a grateful mother names her newborn baby after him.

Two of the fundamentally lamest, laziest engines for conflict in a story are love triangles and cheating storylines. Perhaps indicating the writers’ desperation for story ideas, in the same episode (“The Cookie Crumbles”), the show does the love triangle with Bates-Flaherty-Russo, and also does a cheating storyline with Renko and Daryl Ann. Andy thinks his wife is cheating with the business manager of her cookie business (it turns out he’s right), and he in turn cheats with a classmate from his night school, who turns out to be a hooker who tries to blackmail him. It’s not terribly compelling stuff. Things are left uncertain between the couple in Daryl Ann’s final appearance, with her appearing to weaken and potentially accept him back. She isn’t mentioned in the final three episodes of the series, although one imagines that if she had thrown him out, Renko would have been a lot mopier in those last episodes.

Washington

The oft-neglected Neal Washington gets one more good spotlight episode in “Days of Swine and Roses.” He becomes invested in the wellbeing of a little girl and her mother, again demonstrating Neal’s soft spot for children. The family is being repeatedly harassed and threatened by the girl’s paranoid schizophrenic brother Darius Milton, played by a twenty-two-year-old Don Cheadle in a very early career role. Cheadle is pretty heartbreaking playing this guy who’s generally very sweet, but obviously precariously balanced. The storyline of course ends tragically, with the little girl shooting Darius dead (although it’s pretty unbelievable that the tiny thing was able to aim a giant shotgun when she has one arm in a sling and a cast!).

Jablonski

Robert Prosky returns for two final episodes as Stanislaus “Stosh” Jablonski, mostly focusing on the sweet friendship between him and Belker that began in Season 5. After Mick is shot, Stan is by Robin’s side at the hospital throughout the episode. In “Days of Swine and Roses,” he gets his badge stolen by a hooker he was with (cops are generally allowed to keep their badges as a sentimental token after they retire). This storyline results in a poignant final scene for Stan, where he tells Mick to prioritize keeping himself safe and treasuring the time he has with Robin. Without saying it, Stan is clearly thinking of his late wife, and explaining the loneliness that drove him to the prostitute. It’s a sad moment to leave the character on, but at least we know he has Mick and Robin in his life.

Calletano

Ray Calletano puts in one final appearance on the show in the season’s seventeenth episode, “The Cookie Crumbles.” Now a field representative for the Latin American Coalition, he contemplates a lawsuit against the department and Daniels, after a Hispanic kid is shot by an officer who didn’t speak Spanish and therefore misunderstood the situation. Furillo is aware that Daniels has passed the buck on Spanish-language training to the precincts and covered his own ass, so it’s actually Frank who could be liable; but always-noble Furillo chooses not to share this information with Ray, because he doesn’t want to discourage Ray from doing what he feels is right. Ultimately, instead of pursuing revenge against Daniels, Ray leverages the situation to ensure mandated Spanish-language training for the officers…through Calletano Language, Inc. Having triumphed over the department, helped the advancement of his people, and lined his own pockets, Ray’s final line of the series is, “I’m learning, Frank…wouldn’t you say?”

McBride

Also in “The Cookie Crumbles,” Officer Kate McBride has her final appearance. To the show’s credit, after revealing last season that she’s a lesbian, that aspect never defines her character as it might have on other series of the 1980s. In fact, her sexual orientation is never even mentioned in either of her appearances this season. Buntz’s mentor-like feelings towards her, introduced in the Mamet-scripted “A Wasted Weekend,” continue here, with the two joking that he’s adopted her. Norm is far warmer towards Kate than he is with any other character; it’s really charming watching the two together, and this storyline overall is very good, and tonally not quite like anything else the show has done. She’s being presented with a medal of honor (presumably for the shooting she was being investigated for in “A Wasted Weekend”). After first pretending that he’s too busy to attend the ceremony, in an endearing performance by Franz, Buntz shouts her praises across the precinct. Another honoree at the ceremony is an officer who died in the line of duty, leaving a wife and two kids, and McBride is emotionally transported back to the loss of her own father. Lindsay Crouse gives a beautiful performance.

Other Storylines

“City of Refuse” has a particularly sitcom-ish plot where J.D., in desperate need of a laboratory analysis for a preliminary hearing, enlists Sid to work at the understaffed lab. Things go about as well as you’d expect. Another sitcom-ish C-plot involves Buntz mistakenly thinking that Joyce is cheating on Furillo. “Sorry, Wrong Number” has one of the stupidest subplots the show ever did, about a horny vending machine that spits out an unending stream of treats every time Russo touches it.

There are also inevitably plots that feel very familiar. “The Cookie Crumbles” repeats one of the most unpleasant subplots from earlier seasons: LaRue perving on a bunch of sixteen-year-old girls visiting the precinct. Evidently, he didn’t learn anything from his decision not to go through with shagging Ally Sheedy in Season 3. This time, though, all the girls just view him as a pathetic joke.

Another plot that feels like a retread, in “Days of Swine and Roses,” involves Renko and Hill test-driving a new squad car equipped with a computer, as they did at the end of Season 4; although this one is even more high-tech (“completely computerized”), inevitably leading to endless problems (has any TV writer ever been pro-technology?). This storyline does have an amusing ending: after they accidentally rewire all the traffic lights on Dekker Avenue, they inadvertently win the “outrageous acts” radio station contest that the whole city has been competing for throughout the episode.

That same episode also has one final hostage storyline, probably around the twentieth the show has done if I were to venture a guess. The punchline this time is that there actually is no hostage situation: the robber immediately left the store without anyone noticing, and both the cops and the “hostages” (hiding in the storeroom) just assume he’s still in there for hours.

The A-plot in “The Runner Falls on His Kisser” focuses on a pro football wide receiver, played by Keenen Ivory Wayans, being arrested for soliciting an undercover Russo. This initially feels repetitive of LaRue and Washington arresting a pro baseball player last year. But whereas that guy was kind of a jerk, Wayans’s character, Raymond Jackson, feels terrible about letting down his wife and fans, and is only interested in taking accountability. (Well, after his initial impulse to run…which allows Wayans to display some impressive speed and agility that make him believable as a wide receiver.) Wayans plays the role with a straightforwardness and earnestness that makes Jackson genuine and likable, especially in his final scene when he rejects his lawyer’s prepared statement shifting blame onto the police, and instead gives a heartfelt apology to his fans. It’s implied that Jackson seeking out a prostitute was driven by impostor syndrome. That cycle of feeling unworthy when people praise you, and then feeling the need to degrade yourself, is something Milch experienced for much of his life, as recounted extensively in his autobiography. It’s also worth noting that this episode aired just a couple of weeks after the release of Hollywood Shuffle, the first film Wayans cowrote.

Odds and Ends

The words “ROLL CALL” (now with added colon) are added back to the opening caption for episodes that begin directly with the roll call (after it was omitted on the episodes “Say Uncle” and “She’s So Fein”).

The main titles settle down after the nine separate versions that appeared over the first twelve episodes of the season, but there are still a few more variations. The seventeenth episode, “The Cookie Crumbles,” is a new version, since no prior version featuring René Enríquez also included Megan Gallagher but not Robert Prosky; for this version, Betty Thomas is moved back into the #3 slot, where she had been placed for three episodes earlier in the season. “Dogsbreath Afternoon” reuses the same main title as “Amazing Grace,” due to Robert Prosky’s appearance. “Days of Swine and Roses” restores the footage of Howard in his EATer uniform, due to his lieutenancy being reinstated. “The Runner Falls on His Kisser” has yet another version, with Prosky now gone, and Thomas returned to the #4 slot. This is the final version, which is used for the final three episodes of the series.

Two more returning guest stars are added to the ranks of this season’s “also starring” credits, joining the thirteen I previously mentioned: Marc Alaimo, who returns as Gene Scapizzi (formerly Captain, now Inspector); and Deborah Richter, as Renko’s wife Daryl Ann. Scapizzi was first seen in the Season 5 “captains’ retreat,” and was very sympathetic, with a good monologue about his wife cheating on him. In his subsequent appearances, however, he generally seems to be Daniels’s enforcer (and was presumably given his current position because he backed Daniels following the Furillo Commission last season). He’s seemingly moved on from his cheating wife, as in “Norman Conquest,” he’s banging the interior decorator Buntz busts for stealing drugs.

The title of “Der Roachenkavalier” is a reference to Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Buntz rejects this opera because he doesn’t like the idea of “boys dressed up as girls,” and elects to buy Furillo tickets to Beethoven’s Fidelio instead.

I was amused and perplexed when, in the roll call for “Der Roachenkavalier,” Hunter says, “Item 6: Moonlighting.” For a second, I wondered if the show was going to suddenly get meta and directly address its competition on ABC.

In “Der Roachenkavalier,” Renko gets to do an amusing Johnny Cash impression, as well as an amusing and probably racist impression of a made-up reggae group called the Ravers.

Buntz describes Furillo and Davenport: “He’s paisan. She’s yacht club.”

Goldblume has a fun throwaway line when discussing arrestees, casually mentioning “the physical therapist with the hand grenades.”

The “and” above Peter Jurasik’s credit disappears beginning with “Norman Conquest.”

Shasta soda—or a bootleg film-prop version—pops up a bunch in these final episodes.

One final Belker sandwich in “Norman Conquest”: anchovy and cream cheese.

I mentioned during an earlier season that I rarely observed the Chicago location footage being repeated. In these last couple of seasons, I am definitely noticing that there is reused footage periodically. “Sorry, Wrong Number” opens with some B-roll that’s clearly from Greg Hoblit’s original Chicago shoot way back in 1980, including the same family we see walking in the street every week in the main titles.

The money Goldblume inherited from Jennifer Tilly, and doubled in a real estate transaction last season, is never referenced this year. In “Sorry, Wrong Number,” he offers the kid he was trying to get into art school $200 to relocate (promising more later), which seems incredibly cheap given how much Henry supposedly has.

Russo wears a lot of dangling earrings that no uniformed officer would wear (or be permitted to wear) due to the potential danger in a struggle.

Not quite “be careful out there”: Howard ends the roll call in “The Cookie Crumbles” with, “Take care. Dismissed.” I guess the fifth episode of this season, “Bald Ambition,” was the official final “be careful out there” of the series.

After Belker is shot, some cops reminisce about him wearing the chicken suit in Season 5’s “Rookie Nookie.”

Is Buntz an unlikely Star Trek fan? When a public nuisance tries to fly with the aid of weather balloons, Norm calls him “Captain Kirk.”

In “Days of Swine and Roses,” LaRue and Washington hang out at the Billy Goat Tavern on Michigan Ave. in Chicago…or, at least, that’s what was shown in the establishing shot. The interior of the bar was presumably shot somewhere in L.A. (As a side note, the Billy Goat Tavern was the inspiration for the John Belushi “Cheeseburger Cheeseburger” SNL sketch.)

A depressed Neal Washington quotes Job 5:7: “You know, the Bible says man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upwards.”

I assume that the title “The Runner Falls on His Kisser” is a reference to something, but I don’t know what.

“The Runner Falls on His Kisser” has no opening timestamp. This is the fourth and final time on the series that there is no timestamp, following “Blues in the Night,” “Seoul on Ice,” and “A Wasted Weekend.”

Furillo claims in “The Runner Falls on His Kisser” that his father never went anywhere away from home his whole life. Presumably he means during Frank’s lifetime, since it was previously established that his dad traveled the world as a merchant marine.

In “The Runner Falls on His Kisser,” Flaherty says “pin a rose on you,” a favorite Milchism which was previously spoken by Mayor Cleveland in Season 4.

One part of “The Runner Falls on His Kisser” that doesn’t make sense: there’s a little subplot about the pro footballer wanting to have Davenport represent him, instead of his family attorney. Given that everyone knows who he is and how wealthy he (presumably) is, there’s no way he’d be entitled to a public defender, so it’s weird that everyone just goes along with his request.

When Howard is missing, Goldblume theorizes that he could have had a recurring bout of amnesia, referencing last year’s “Das Blues.”

Narcoleptic stand-up comic Vic Hitler gets a shout-out in “The Runner Falls on His Kisser,” as an example of a prior LaRue scheme where his investors got screwed over.

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