‘Hill Street Blues’ helped rewrite the rules of network television

"Hill Street Blues" Michael Warren and Charles Haid. NBC

This week in Autopilot, a Globe series on great first television episodes:

“Hill Street Blues”

Episode: “Hill Street Station”

Pilot air date: Jan. 15, 1981, NBC

Stream it on: Prime Video

Every gritty, character-based, semi-realistic cop show — “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” “The Shield,” even “The Wire” — owes a round of drinks to “Hill Street Blues.” But even that’s an understatement. NBC’s more-than-a-police-procedural, which ran from 1981 to 1987, showed that network TV — which, at the time, was just about the only game in town — could provide a home for mature longform storytelling and offer visual flair, to boot.

The pilot episode introduces us to the men and women of Hill Street Station, located in a city never officially identified as New York. It begins, as subsequent episodes would, with a roll call and briefing, provided by Michael Conrad’s avuncular Sgt. Phil Esterhaus.

And we’re off, into a master class of character introduction and multi-narrative structure. Daniel J. Travanti’s Capt. Frank Furillo is the man in charge, benevolent but firm, putting out a rapidly escalating series of fires. Sgt. Mick Belker (Bruce Weitz) growls and even bites. Officers Bobby Hill (Michael Warren) and Andy Renko (Charles Haid) go to mediate a family dispute — a teenager is sleeping with her stepdad, and mom is wielding a knife — then their car is stolen, and then they’re ambushed in a scene that must be one of TV’s first depictions of smoking crack. The pilot also introduces us to Mike Post’s indelible theme song (featuring ace guitarist Larry Carlton), which became a hit in its own right.

I was ten years old when “Hill Street Blues” premiered; I certainly had no historical sense of its place in the TV firmament. But I could sense the buzz in the air, defined by a question: What exactly am I watching here? And: TV can do this? The pilot has what would now be considered cringy elements. Sgt. Esterhaus reveals that he’s dating a high school student. The Puerto Rican teens who take hostages at a liquor store come straight out of ethnic typecasting. It was a different time, especially for network TV, and “Hill Street Blues” could stumble a bit as it came out of the gate to chart its new territory.

But “Hill Street,” created by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll, still walked tall. At the end of the pilot, we see that the divorced Furillo and the attorney Joyce Davenport (Veronica Hamel), who has been deftly rebuffing the advances of undercover Detective J.D. LaRue (Kiel Martin), are in fact a couple. It’s the perfect denouement, the kind of merging of the personal and professional that would make the series a standout.

In the words of Sgt. Esterhaus, let’s be careful out there.