Steven Bochco Quotes

I think the best work flows out of a collaborative environment.

Casting is sort of like looking at paintings. You don’t know what you’ll like, but you recognize it when you see it.

The thing that has always interested me in the kinds of shows that I do have more to do with the consequences of behavior than the behavior itself. Pulling a trigger and shooting somebody, or dismembering somebody.

Hill Street Blues gave me an opportunity to work with an ensemble cast of people whose work I admired.

The entertainment world, television, movies, social media, YouTube stuff, we’re so bombarded with so much imagery and such a great sense of inhumanity, and there is a coarseness, a coarsening of interaction.

I tend not to spend a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror. If you say, ‘Oh, I did ‘Hill Street Blues’ or ‘L.A. Law’ and everything I do has to measure up to some preconceived notion of that,’ it would paralyze you.

‘Hill Street,’ because of the wacky nature of many of our characters, really allowed us to indulge a kind of cheek-to-jowl juxtaposition of high drama with very low humor.

Privately, we always called ‘Hill Street’ ‘Cop Soap.’

The thing that always interests me from a storytelling point of view is how that moment of trauma, whatever the trauma is, even divorce, your dog dies, whatever it is, the consequence, in terms of people’s emotional lives and the way it resonates behaviorally for a long time, is really the stuff that interests me.

If bad taste were a felony, every writer I know would’ve done prison time.

Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.

When all of your decisions are based on economics, you end up with a sameness of vision. You’re not taking the risks, you’re not exploiting the passions of your creators. You’re manufacturing product for a huge vending machine.

I remember practically every joke I’ve ever heard in my life.

Imagery is like music.

When you look at Mark Zuckerberg and Snapchat and all these twentysomething billionaires, it’s really kind of fascinating; a classic tale of the haves and have-nots.

Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.

You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.

Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images.

One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they’re good.

When it is perceived that a show has gone awry, the pressure is staggering, and as a writer caught in that storm, it feels like you are being attacked by jackals.

Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.

Cop shows are by definition melodramatic; they’re larger than life. They create very stark contrasts and conflicts emotionally. They’re provocative, assuming they grapple with – to the extent that cop shows are mirrors of the culture.

The thing that always interests me from a storytelling point of view is how that moment of trauma, whatever the trauma is, even divorce, your dog dies, whatever it is, the consequence, in terms of people’s emotional lives and the way it resonates behaviorally for a long time is really the stuff that interests me.