Just So You Know

20 years of crime TV

My husband had me Netflix Hill Street Blues as soon as he heard it was coming out on DVD. I didn’t watch this show when it was on television originally but today, I’m a crime show junkie. I’m in love with CSI and NCIS, if I had Tivo I would see more of Numb3rs (I’m waiting for that to hit DVD). It’s amazing what 2 decades of change can do. Hill Street Blues is not as gory as my shows of today but in a way it’s more violent. It shows a lot of racial tension and let’s not even go into the way women are treated. There is one place though where I prefer the older show to today’s TV. The gang warfare and the street violence may not be shown graphically on HSB the way it is on CSI but the shows today show gun violence as almost a sterile, clean hit. Hill Street Blues lets people see that crime is not pretty, it’s not glorified, and there are victims beyond the immediate one the criminal hit. Crime is messy not sterile and able to fit in a box. Violence is often senseless and unexplainable. Sometimes the motive is “he looked at me funny.” Sometimes the tools aren’t there and the answers aren’t in the test tube or on the chalkboard. I think that we could use a modern Hill Street Blues, something less like COPS (talk about racial and economic profiling) and not NYPD Blue. We need Belker, Howard, and the mess that is the paperwork again. Everything today is too clean, it makes crime look good and criminals look smart.

posted by Shondratasha @ 17:52