Hill Street Blues on DVD

[Larry]

I'd given up on this show being put on DVD, but I just got it at Best Buy.

And it was cheap, like $35 for 3 DVDs for the first season.

I'm looking forward to Lt. Hunter doing his pep talk for Camp Quadalcanal: "Jointly sponsored by Hill Street precinct and the US Army Special Forces, where disadvantaged youth can build character through courses like hiking, archery, swimming, first aid, desert survival, marksmanship, and escape and evasion."

A really classic show.

[PCS]

" Hey, let's be careful out there."

One of the all time great shows. Love it. This is something I could see investing in.

[Larry]

One thing they did in the first season I liked: unlike other "cop shows", they didn't start with a crime, investigate it, and solve the thing in an hour.

One week, they'd have a crime report. Then they'd deal with something completely different.

A week or two later, they'd find a clue to the crime from two weeks ago. They'd start looking for a suspect. But they wouldn't find him till the week after that.

I like that way of scripting things better. But the execs decided, after the first season, that viewership was too low bwcause channel surfers weren't able to follow the plots that took 5 episodes to develop.

So in season two, a new rule came down. There will be at least one story line that starts ans ends in the same episode. But I liked the season one approach better.

(Heck, I still remember things like that, from when I watched the show originally. I must be an old fart.)

(I even remember watching the show with my dad. At the end of one episode, they'd been investigating a string of murdered Johns, and there was a scene at the end of one episode where two cops stopped two hookers in a van. While they're joking with the hookers, yeah, we've got to book you, but we both know you'll make bail in two hours, and no, we don't want a freebie, so c'mon.

And out of the blue, the two hookers deliver quick blows to the two cops' adams apples, with the edge of their hands. Cops fall down. Ending credits. I turn to my dad: "I think they just killed those two cops". (I was correct. Next week's episode opens with the Captain being briefed about what the crime scene folks found at the place where the bodies were found.)