Steven Bochco

"I f I Ran a Network . . . ," last Sunday's commentary by television producer Steven Bochco ("Hill Street Blues," "L.A. Law") has prompted a heavy response from readers. A sampling: Bravo, Mr. Bochco. As a writer struggling to break into the television industry, I view it with a schizoid mixture of love and revulsion. Your observations and suggestions for rectifying the ills of the medium are radically brilliant. If those in control take heed--and I pray they will--there is hope for this powerful, occasionally wonderful thing we call television.

After four decades, 10 Emmys, and more than a few flops, Steven Bochco still hasn't figured out what makes a hit television show. "Every show by definition is a shotgun marriage," the producer of "Hill Street Blues," "NYPD Blue" and "L.A. Law" said recently. "You're putting a gun to people's heads and you say, 'OK, you're marrying this material, now learn to love it.' " His latest wedding, “Raising the Bar," will debut Monday on TNT. A legal drama set in the Bronx, the 10-episode series is based on "Indefensible," a book by public defender David Feige.

Steven Bochco is taking his act to movie making. After a run of TV series that have dealt with the law--"Hill Street Blues," "L.A. Law" and "NYPD Blue"--he is planning an as-yet-untitled feature film drama about another aspect of the justice system, the Supreme Court, MGM announced Monday. It is Bochco's first feature film as a producer and his second as a writer. He will write the screenplay with "NYPD Blue" co-creator David Milch.

Steven Bochco, one of television's most successful producers but absent from prime time since the spring of 2006, will return this year with a new legal drama for TNT. The cable channel said Thursday it has ordered 10 episodes of "Raising the Bar," a series about lawyers who went to school together but now find themselves working on opposite sides of the aisle. It will star Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Gloria Reuben, Jane Kaczmarek, Teddy Sears and Melissa Sagemiller. Bochco, 64, who created the series with David Feige, previously produced "Hill Street Blues," "L.A.

Auto mechanic or Hollywood producer, it always helps to have someone good show you the ropes. Ask Steven Bochco. As co-creator of "NYPD Blue," "Hill Street Blues" and "L.A. Law," he's a TV icon. But there were times, he says, when he just didn't think he was good enough for the job. Three people, he says, helped make the difference in his earlier professional life--producer William Sackheim, former MTM and NBC boss Grant Tinker, and Bochco's father, a violinist.

The leading man is bald, a bit paunchy, middle-aged and not a household name. He plays a celebrity attorney who defends questionable clients. The format is a risk--23 episodes that follow a single murder case for an entire TV season. And, oh yes, it's a freshman show going up against the hottest series on the air, "ER." So why the buzz about this new, fall ABC drama, "Murder One"? Why did it sell to British TV for a reported $250,000 an episode even though only the pilot has been shot?

As creator of "L.A. Law" and "Hill Street Blues," Steven Bochco packed lots of drama into 60 minutes. Now he's trying to entertain in closer to 60 seconds. Bochco is joining the masses of wannabe online video moguls with "Cafe Confidential," an Internet series that's all about brevity and punch. The 44-clip collection, which premieres today on video site Metacafe, features people in their teens or 20s telling lighthearted, semi-confessional stories.

Steven Bochco, co-creator and executive producer of NBC's "L.A. Law," co-creator of ABC's "Hooperman" and co-creator of "Hill Street Blues," made what he called a "terrible confession" during a recent interview: He does not watch TV. TV, however, is definitely watching him . Just a few weeks ago, CBS had its eye on Bochco. The network offered the 44-year-old writer-producer the job of president of its entertainment division, even before the Oct. 30 resignation of then-President B.

The two most recent episodes of "L.A. Law" featured stories about computer-generated pictures of sexual positions, Arnie Becker's twisted testicle, a crooked judge, the rape trial of a baseball star who doesn't know the meaning of the word no and a case involving Nazi experiments on live human beings. Steven Bochco is back in charge. "One of the things that I did find generally missing in the early going of this season was that the fun to a significant degree had been lost in 'L.A.

There is bad news in the capital of envy and schadenfreude: Steven Bochco has written his first novel. As if 10 Emmy Awards and credits as co-creator and executive producer of "Hill Street Blues," "NYPD Blue" and "L.A. Law" weren't enough, now he has turned out a too-sexy-for-prime-time amorality tale that publishers fought over as they lavished the rookie author with praise and multibook deals.

The man sitting in the big comfy chair in the big comfy office in Santa Monica looks familiar and sounds familiar but -- in some hard-to-define way -- he is not familiar at all. He turns 64 this December yet remains youthful in a way that only California and good genes can confer. His hair is gray. His skin is unwrinkled. But what is so different about Steven Bochco may be this: He is reflective and even philosophical.

As creator of "L.A. Law" and "Hill Street Blues," Steven Bochco packed lots of drama into 60 minutes. Now he's trying to entertain in closer to 60 seconds. Bochco is joining the masses of wannabe online video moguls with "Cafe Confidential," an Internet series that's all about brevity and punch. The 44-clip collection, which premieres today on video site Metacafe, features people in their teens or 20s telling lighthearted, semi-confessional stories.

"Over There," the much-heralded but little-watched Steven Bochco drama about the war in Iraq, won't be picked up by FX for a second season because of low ratings. The series about a U.S. combat unit in Iraq premiered strongly in July with 4.1 million viewers, but steadily declined. FX President John Landgraf praised the show's quality, adding the decision not to renew it was based solely on ratings.

Backstage intrigue and power struggles are rocking the Oval Office -- and that's after just two airings of ABC's "Commander in Chief." Walt Disney Co.'s Touchstone Television, which produces "Commander in Chief" for ABC, another Disney unit, Friday replaced Rod Lurie -- the writer-producer who created the series about the nation's first female president -- with producer Steven Bochco of "Hill Street Blues" and "NYPD Blue" fame.

Tony Perry Staff writer Tony Perry spent 10 months with 1st Marine Division combat units. Do the characters seem real? Yes Do you discern political bias? No Would you embed with this squad? No, they are too undisciplined. Is it too entertaining? No. "Over There" nailed it: orange sandstorms, fear of roadside bombers, anguish about families left behind, need for quick action in confused situations, daily examples of bravery and leadership. The drama and the dread of serving in Iraq is all there.

Premiering tonight on FX, "Over There" is the network's second series, after "Rescue Me," to have sprung, in a general way, from the events of 9/11. Set in contemporary Iraq among the members of a small, variously employed combat unit, and to a lesser extent among the people they left behind, it shares with the earlier, FDNY-set series elements of unusual stress and heavy gear.

High drama was never in short supply on "City of Angels," CBS' freshman series about a struggling inner-city hospital. A patient walked around the medical center with an ax lodged in his skull. A convicted murderer's liver transplant jeopardized the welfare of another transplant candidate. A black doctor reluctantly operated on a racist police officer who arrested him that morning on a traffic violation.

In a nondescript industrial warehouse in Chatsworth, something unprecedented, emotionally risky and potentially politically volatile is going on. A drama series is being produced for television about a war that is underway -- a war where the American death toll is mounting, American public support is eroding, and there is no end in sight.

In the first 18 months after the U.S. invaded Iraq, Hollywood didn't exactly scramble to dramatize the war. But that was before Steven Bochco reported for duty. The TV producer, never one to shrink from controversy, has joined cable network FX, which itself has raised eyebrows with provocative dramas such as "The Shield," "Nip/Tuck" and "Rescue Me," to create "Over There" -- a gory, profanity-laced, $4-million series pilot following six soldiers in Iraq and their families in the United States.