- Born
- Died
- Birth nameSteven Ronald Bochco
- Attended Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon University) as a playwriting major. Barbara Bosson (his second wife), 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.
- IMDb mini biography by: Dan Hartung <dhartung@mcs.com>
- SpousesDayna Kalins(August 12, 2000 - April 1, 2018) (his death)Barbara Bosson(February 14, 1970 - August 1998) (divorced, 2 children)Gabrielle Kraft Levin(September 12, 1964 - April 1969) (divorced)
- His father, Rudolph Bochco, was a Russian-born violinist.
- Graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, with a BFA in playwriting and theater in 1966.
- Father of Jesse Bochco and Melissa Bochco.
- Younger brother of Joanna Frank.
- Brother-in-law of Alan Rachins.
- [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 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.'
- 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 Hill Street Blues (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 Hill Street Blues (1981) took place. I wanted L.A. Law (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.
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