Steven Bochco

Birthday: 16 December 1943, New York City, New York, USA

Birth Name: Steven Ronald Bochco

Attended Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon U) as a playwriting major. Barbara Bosson, Michael Tucker, Bruce Weitz and Charles Haid were classmates; he and Tucker drove cross-country to Hollywood for full-time jobs at Universal, where Bochco would remain for 12 years. In 1978, he moved to MTM Enterprises, who after several attempts gave him carte Blanche to create a show similar to Fort Apache the Bronx (1981) (Hill Street Blues (1981)). In 1985, MTM fired him, in part for his inability to keep HSB on budget. After creating L.A. Law (1986) and Doogie Howser, M.D. (1989) for NBC, he struck a $15M deal with ABC in 1987 to create 10 series pilots over 10 years. Show less «

[on Hill Street Blues (1981)]: 'We conveyed the sense of being powerless--as cops, you were garbage ...Show more »

[on Hill Street Blues (1981)]: 'We conveyed the sense of being powerless--as cops, you were garbage collectors in a sense. You might have kept the lid on things, but it never got better. Furillo ['Daniel Travanti'] had tons of responsibility and very little authority and the cumulative impact thematically was a kind of despair, alleviated by outrageous gallows humor.' Show less «

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a no...Show more »

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience. Once you have your map, once you know your final destination, you can take all these pit stops along the way. You can take side trips and digress, riff on something and come back to the main road. It's so much fun. Show less «

Steven Bochco

Steven Bochco's FILMOGRAPHY

Feedback about this page?