Hill Street Blues

One of my favorite television series ever. A testament to good writing and an absence of pandering.

Embarrassingly dated

Dated but important that it set the tone for many series that came after it. It was grim and sometimes altogether depressing in the every day reality of working cops.

Human-centred police drama, better than the usual junk in the sense that some of the characters and actors were quite good (Travanti and Hamel were both good, as I recall), the writing was perhaps a little above average, and, most unusually, there was a sense of the melancholy realities of working life, the petty conflicts, the difficulties caused by higher-level bureaucrats, the tragic inability to really effect change or make much of a difference, and so on. So, not too bad.