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[on Polizeirevier Hill Street (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 ['nm0871240'] had tons of responsibility and very little authority and the cumulative impact thematically was a kind of despair, alleviated by outrageous gallows humor.'

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.

Years and years ago I worked for a producer who taught me more about how not to behave than how to behave. One of the most valuable lessons I ever had. This person said to me, "You get shit on by the people above you and you shit on the people below you." I thought, "Hah, there's a life lesson." I figure if you turn that upside down, you're on to something. So what you try to do is never shit on the people below you and only shit on the people above you. That always seems to work.

[on Polizeirevier Hill Street (1981)] Here are these cops trying to trying to keep the lid on ten pounds of crap in a nine-pound can. That created the incredible push/pull tension of that series . . . We stuck intensely powerful melodrama side by side with slapstick farcical, fall-down clowning. It was absurd and it worked.

To me, Los Angeles was the total antithesis of that fictional city in which Polizeirevier Hill Street (1981) took place. I wanted L.A. Law: Staranwälte, Tricks, Prozesse (1986) to be the polar opposite thematically. One show at its core was about despair and the inevitable failure of a kind of system. At the other end, I got L.A. and the land of dreams and wealthy, young, upwardly mobile attorneys who drive Porsches. It's the same legal system, yet these people are masters of the universe.

I suppose I was naive. I thought New York Cops: NYPD Blue (1993) would open a door to more adult mainstream programming.

[on Polizeirevier Hill Street (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 J. Travanti) had tons of responsibility and very little authority and the cumulative impact thematically was a kind of despair, alleviated by outrageous gallows humor.'