The Golden Age

Forget the 1950s. The real golden age of television started 25 years ago with the debut of Hill Street Blues. Sure, the old live era had some fine moments with the occasional anthology drama by Rod Serling or Paddy Chayefsky or Gore Vidal, but for its consistent artistry, influence and innovation, Hill Street was like nothing we'd seen on TV before.Jan. 15, 1981, the day of the show's premiere, was a singular moment in American television history. The three-network world as we knew it was giving way to the creation of the multichannel universe. CNN was less than a year old. The launch of MTV was still seven months away. But some 30 percent of homes had cable already, and 12 percent were receiving at least one pay channel. All evidence pointed to plummeting network audience shares as cable and VCR penetration offered an increasing number of choices to an increasing number of viewers.Demographics had been an important element of the business of television for years in 1981, but it was about to take center stage. If TV was going to be a house divided into many pieces, why not go after the piece advertisers would pay most for: the young, affluent and educated? Unfortunately, these were the very viewers most likely to abandon network TV for the headier regions of cable and home video.Then the executives at third-place NBC had an idea uncharacteristic for the TV industry at the time. Why not try to appeal to premium audiences with high-quality programs? When all else fails (and all else was indeed failing for NBC at the time), why not try to make something really good? Hill Street Blues was the first serious attempt at this radical new strategy. The show was literate and visually complex, cinematic and novelistic. Not surprisingly, the critics loved it, and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences showered it with 21 Emmy nominations. It ended its first season very close to the bottom of the ratings.Still, the sacrifice of a mass audience for a class audience began to pay off. The show swept the Emmy Awards with eight wins, American Film called it "TV for people who hate TV," and its audience began to grow. Needless to say, it performed best among the primo demographics, a fact not lost on Mercedes-Benz, which granted the show its first regular network program commitment. All those "tertiary educated" (people who'd been to college) "POM's" (professionals, owners and managers) in Hill Street's audience were like so much catnip to advertisers who couldn't reach those viewers by buying time on, say, Diff'rent Strokes. At its peak, Hill Street could command the same price for a 30-second spot as shows with a 30 percent higher audience share.The old "least objectionable programming" theory didn't go away. NBC was still doing good business with The Facts of Life, and The A-Team and Knight Rider were on their way. But the "quality TV" theory was also finding its way. At first, NBC created a quality ghetto on Thursday night. In the fall of 1982, they assembled a line-up consisting of Fame, Cheers, Taxi and Hill Street Blues and dubbed it "the best night of television on television." A few seasons later, they took the night and didn't let go for two decades.Although Hill Street Blues never got beyond 21st place in the overall seasonal ratings, its influence was remarkable. NBC followed up with St. Elsewhere; ABC with Moonlighting, Thirtysomething, China Beach and Twin Peaks; and CBS with Northern Exposure and Picket Fences. Quality TV had become a business model, aggressively courting the yuppie nation. (Hill Street's first season is out on DVD this month.) As it turned out, the "quality TV" formula that Hill Street Blues pioneered began to spread beyond the blue-chip demographics. Steven Bochco left the modest hit to produce the monster hit LA Law, also a literate, complex, sophisticated series that appealed to an educated, young, sophisticated audience. But it appealed to a lot of other audiences as well, spending its first five seasons in Nielsen's top 25. Hill Street's marginally performing sister show St. Elsewhere inspired ER, which spent its first five seasons in first or second place. By the 1990s, quality TV had become mainstream TV.Even HBO, which had spent the mid-1980s on undistinguished and sometimes trashy series like The Hitchhiker and First & Ten, began to see the possibilities for the medium that Hill Street Blues and its offspring had developed. Starting with Tanner '88 and continuing with Oz, The Wire, The Sopranos and Deadwood, HBO took high-octane prestige television to new places the networks weren't allowed to go.After 25 years of developing our national medium into an artistic form to be reckoned with, however, have the broadcast networks passed the baton of quality programming on to cable venues like HBO and FX? Sure, shows like Lost and 24 have proven the networks can still pull rabbits out of their hats. These programs, along with senior citizens like Law & Order and The West Wing, are complex, innovative series that don't need the added freedoms of cable. But this innovation comes less frequently now than it did in the 1980s. While the prime demographics are being seduced by a dizzying variety of choices, the networks seem content to dance and skate with the stars. TV became respectable in 1981, and it's so much better today than it was before Hill Street Blues. I started graduate school in 1981, majoring in television studies at Northwestern. The timing was felicitous, for at last there was now something on the air good enough for a Ph.D. student to really sink his teeth into. If I'd been born a year earlier, I may have been writing my dissertation on CHiPs.Robert Thompson, a regular 'Adweek' columnist, can be reached at rthompson@syr.edu.

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The Golden Age

Robert Thompson

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Robert Thompson