Steven Bochco, the television pioneer who revolutionized the medium with dramas such as Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and NYPD Blue, died from cancer on Sunday.
He was 74.
The 10-time Emmy winner also created the dramedy, Doogie Howser, M.D., which made Neil Patrick Harris a star.
Born in New York City on Dec. 16, 1943, to a violinist father and a jewelry designer mother, Bochco cut his teeth at Universal Studios right out of college. There, he learned under some of the all-time greats, including Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, and his first 90-minute episode writing credit on Colombo was a 1971 story directed by a young Steven Spielberg.
But his career would be made when he successfully pitched Hill Street Blues to NBC, then in last place. The show ran for 146 episodes after its January 1981 debut.
“Here are these cops who are trying to keep the lid on 10 pounds of crap in a nine-pound can,” Bochco said in a 2002 interview for the Archive of American Television. “That created the incredible push/pull tension of that series. … We stuck intensely powerful melodrama side by side with slapstick farcical, fall-down clowning. It was absurd, and it worked.”
Bochco, who had fought leukemia for years, received a stem cell transplant from a 23-year-old donor in late 2014.
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