Steven Bochco quotes

Steven Bochco was an American television producer and writer, recognized for creating groundbreaking dramas such as "Hill Street Blues" and "NYPD Blue." His work transformed the landscape of TV storytelling, introducing complex characters and serialized plots to prime time. He influenced generations of writers and producers in the television industry. Here are 16 of his quotes:

Casting is sort of like looking at paintings. You don't know what you'll like, but you recognize it when you see it.

Steven Bochco

The entertainment world, television, movies, social media, YouTube stuff, we're so bombarded with so much imagery and such a great sense of inhumanity, and there is a coarseness, a coarsening of interaction.

Steven Bochco

I tend not to spend a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror. If you say, 'Oh, I did 'Hill Street Blues' or 'L.A. Law' and everything I do has to measure up to some preconceived notion of that,' it would paralyze you.

Steven Bochco

'Hill Street,' because of the wacky nature of many of our characters, really allowed us to indulge a kind of cheek-to-jowl juxtaposition of high drama with very low humor.

Steven Bochco

Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images.

Steven Bochco

Hill Street Blues gave me an opportunity to work with an ensemble cast of people whose work I admired.

Steven Bochco

Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.

Steven Bochco

I think the best work flows out of a collaborative environment.

Steven Bochco

Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.

Steven Bochco

You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.

Steven Bochco

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

Steven Bochco

When it is perceived that a show has gone awry, the pressure is staggering, and as a writer caught in that storm, it feels like you are being attacked by jackals.

Steven Bochco

The thing that always interests me from a storytelling point of view is how that moment of trauma, whatever the trauma is, even divorce, your dog dies, whatever it is, the consequence, in terms of people's emotional lives and the way it resonates behaviorally for a long time is really the stuff that interests me.

Steven Bochco

One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they're good.

Steven Bochco