David Milch, my friend Bill tells the story, would make everybody in the class at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop stone cold crazy. Everybody else would sweat their hearts out in the reams of fiction they’d bring to class taught by the Vonneguts, the Algrens, the John Irvings or whoever the professor was that term. But not Milch. Milch would effortlessly toss a page or two together that would knock everybody out of their chairs.
One of those pages was the premise, the beginning of “Hill Street Blues.”
Milch took the premise to Steven Bochco who made it into something that was new to television. “Hill Street Blues.”
And when Bochco died this weekend at an all too young 74, I thought first about the rain. All the important stuff on Hill Street happened in the rain.
Me, Bugs, Larry and Stiggs would be sitting around my kitchen table, drinking beer, every Thursday night, listening for the rain to come as we watched Hill Street Blues. All of us, young guys, figuring out who we were and where we were all going and Hill Street Blues—characters, plots, themes and stories so richly drawn that they stayed with us. Even now. After all these years. Even now I thank Steven Bochco for what I learned from those stories.
And how I am still listening for the rain.