First airing on January 15, 1981 and ending its broadcast television run on May 12, 1987, Hill Street Blues broke new ground to become one of the most critically acclaimed television dramas ever, and won 26 Emmy Awards for NBC. Police dramas had been a staple, if not a cliché, since the beginning of prime time television broadcasting, with shows such as California Highway Patrol and Dragnet setting the standard from the 1950s onwards. These series featured straight-laced, tight-lipped cops upholding the law in a black-and-white world where every crime was solved within 30 minutes. The focus changed radically when NBC President Fred Silverman, his network mired in third place, gave Steven Bochco free rein to create and produce a show that would reinvent television police drama. As Robert J. Thompson, Director of the Center for the study of Popular Television at Syracuse University summarized it, "What Bochco did in...