Is Television an Art Form?
Sometimes it can be. (Keeley Schroder May 12 Challenge)
One series I can watch again and again, but not every day, is Hill Street Blues. It’s a great show, but it’s too intense to binge.
Hill Street Blues was a police procedural launched on NBC in 1981, running for six seasons. It was groundbreaking in its production technique and in its storytelling methods.
The program was character-driven, and there were lots of characters. Characters’ lives intertwined at work and at home; storylines carried through multiple episodes, without the standard end-of-show resolution so common before. Handheld cameras produced an edgy effect that built tension without the viewer actually understanding why. (Even though they don’t consciously perceive it, viewers are used to handheld cameras in news and documentary work, so the “shakiness” of handheld cameras evokes a realism that is often missing from dolly-mounted and studio cameras.)
Hill Street Blues also used lots of close-ups, bringing the character and the audience together in a more intimate way than before. Edits were faster, creating a faster pace. Transitions between settings were often abrupt cuts, with no warning that we were going somewhere else. Common practice today, this was jarring to the audience in 1981.
