Steven Bochco
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Steven Ronald Bochco (born December 16, 1943) is an American television producer and writer. He has been involved in a number of popular hits including Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and NYPD Blue.
-->He was born in New York City into a Jewish family. His parents were both artistic, his mother a painter, his father a violinist. He was educated in Manhattan at the High School of Music and Art. In 1961, he enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh to study playwriting and theater. He graduated with a BFA in Theater in 1966, having also had an MCA Writing Fellowship.
He went to work for Universal Studios as a writer and then story editor on Ironside, Columbo, McMillan and Wife and the flops Griff, Delvecchio and The Invisible Man. He wrote the screenplay for the 1968 TV movie The Counterfeit Killer and worked on Silent Running (1972) and Double Indemnity (1973). He left Universal in 1978 to go to MTM Enterprises where he had greater scope for producing.
He achieved major success for NBC with the police drama Hill Street Blues. It ran from 1981 to 1987 and Bochco was credited as co-creator and also wrote and produced. Despite critical acclaim and awards the series was never very lucrative. Bochco was fired from MTM in 1985 following the failure of his (1983) Bay City Blues baseball project.
Bochco moved to Twentieth Century Fox (which ironically now owns the MTM library) where he made as creator and executive producer, L.A. Law (1986-1994), first aired on NBC. In 1987 Bochco created the half-hour dramedy Hooperman which starred John Ritter and lasted two seasons, despite Bochco offering to take over direct day-to-day control of a third season.
He was given a lucrative deal with ABC in 1987 to create and executive-produce ten new TV series, forming 'Steven Bochco Productions'. From this deal came Doogie Howser, M.D. (1989-1993) and the 1990 musical flop Cop Rock, which notoriously combined straight police drama with live-action Broadway singing and dancing. It was one of his worst failures.
After a lull he came back with the controversial, by network standards, NYPD Blue (1993-2005) with David Milch. He created the show with the express intention of changing the nature of network one-hour drama to compete with the more adult fare broadcast on cable networks. Other projects in this period that failed to take off include Murder One (1995-1997); Brooklyn South (1997); City of Angels (2000), Philly (2001), and Over There (2005). All four shows failed to match Bochco's earlier success though "Murder One" and "Over There" garnered critical praise from critics and have developed cult followings.
In 2005, Bochco took charge of Commander in Chief (2005-) which was the creation of Rod Lurie and brought in a new writing team. However, in Spring 2006, he left the show because of conflicts with ABC.
His impact on the nature of American primetime network television drama is considerable: prior to Hill Street Blues it was rare for American straight drama shows to have story arcs, i.e. several stories running over many episodes (with the exception of primetime soaps such as Dallas). It was also rare to have a large regular cast. The structure of the modern 'ensemble' television drama comes from Bochco who many regard as having changed the 'language' of television drama.
He married actress Barbara Bosson (b. 1939) in 1969. They divorced in 1998. He is currently married to Dayna Kalins (m. August 12, 2000).
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