YMMV / Hill Street Blues

• Awesome Music: The series' main theme, of course.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Hunter is a Vietnam vet who advocates violent/lethal solutions for all situations, demonstrates survivalist traits, and generally has a cocky, uber-patriotic demeanor. There are also brief moments when he shows sadness and remorse over what the war did to Vietnam. This leads some to speculate that he might have PTSD and is overcompensating to mask his internal suffering.
• Genre Turning Point: The show was the first to show that police work wasn't as neat as shows like Dragnet and Adam-12 had depicted. It also pushed the limits of how much sex and violence could be shown on network television. However, as groundbreaking as the show was in 1981, nowadays it can look downright quaint compared with the later shows it inspired (NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire, Law & Order, Blue Bloods, etc.).
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Dominique Dunne, daughter of writer Dominick Dunne and best known as the older daughter in Poltergeist (1982), appeared on the show as a teenage mother and victim of parental abuse. Some of her bruises were real, having been inflicted by her violent boyfriend the night before. He murdered her shortly afterward.
  • Detective J.D. LaRue is almost always seen either smoking a cigarette or with one in his mouth. His actor, Kiel Martin, would later die of lung cancer three years after the the series ended.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: On this show, Jeffrey Tambor played a man trying to sort out his "feminine identity issues" through doctor-mandated cross-dressing. Tambor would later earn critical and popular acclaim through his role on Transparent, where he plays a transgender woman coming to terms with her identity late in life.
• Memetic Mutation: "Let's be careful out there." Several other cop shows have paid homage to the line.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation actors Dwight Schultz, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine actor Armin Shimmerman have small speaking parts in single episodes.
  • Babylon 5 actor Peter Jurasik as "Sid the Snitch"
  • CSI: Miami and NYPD Blue actor David Caruso as a gang leader.
  • Andy García as a gang member
  • Law & Order actor Chris Noth as a beat cop.
  • Ally Sheedy as the Catholic school girl.
  • Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul actor Jonathan Banks as Reggie, a murder suspect with multiple personalities.
  • thirtysomething actor and This Is Us showrunner Ken Olin as Detective Harry Garibaldi.
  • Oscar-winning actor Forest Whitaker as Ernest Green, a young man who was in prison for murder since childhood.
  • Joaquin Phoenix as the son of a mentally ill man threatening to set fire to his family.
  • Barbara Bosson (Fay Furillo), Jeffrey Tambor (Judge Wachtel), Marco Rodriguez (Rico the Junkie), and Dennis Franz (Benedetto/Buntz) went on to star in other Steven Bochco-produced series.
  • Jesus Martinez would (mysteriously) show up on UHF's U62 lineup for Raul's Wild Kingdom. Tragically, his actor, Trinidad Silvia, was killed in a hit-and-run while filming his scenes.
  • A young Edward James Olmos appeared in a few Season 2 episodes.
• Sending Stuff to Save the Show: A success story.
• Values Dissonance: It is a show set during The '80s in a Police Precinct located in a run-down neighborhood of an unidentified East Coast city, so expect a lot of what would be nowadays considered homophobic and sexist comments, a cavalier attitude to administrative procedures of the Police Department, etc. etc. The first episode notoriously features the show putting the blame for a man molesting his stepdaughter on his new wife for not putting out.
• Values Resonance: The series ended in 1987. Yet, decades later, it's commentaries on social, economic, and political issues^Including Aggressive policing, police violence, militarization of police, police corruption, race and gender discrimination, drug use and police response, gun proliferation, homophobia, transphobia, etc. remain frightfully current.
• The Woobie: Bates. She's the lone female on the squad (for a while) and was seen as being Married to the Job, but not entirely by choice. She wished to have a relationship, but given her career and her tall frame, she was often rejected or in romances that never went anywhere, and she lost both of her partners and good friends Coffey and Garibaldi to murder.

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