Hill Street Blues
is regarded as a hallmark in American dramatic television. It was the first dramatic series to incorporate long shots, hand-held shots and continuous story lines. It was nominated for a record 21 Emmys
Britain’s Channel 4 didn’t even exist until 2nd November 1982, and by that time Hill Street Blues had been running on ITV for well over a year. The series didn’t move to Channel 4 until November 1984. Therefore, it was probably Cheers (which first aired on 4 in February 1983) that first got you regularly tuning into the strange new channel that previously only had you scratching your head at the weird existentialist escapades of Murun Buchstansangur in a series of animated shorts, or wondering if a film called P’tang Yang Kipperbang would require you to read subtitles?
ITV had actually been the ‘early adopters’. They first broadcast Hill Street Blues only a week after it had aired on the NBC Network in the US, back in the days when the show was still deemed to be a major misfire by the network that had commissioned it.