On Screen: Goodby to Hill Street Blues

The final episode of Hill Street Blues, which aired on May 12, was a surprise because it contained nothing particularly surprising. In concluding this series that so often tried to zing the viewer with violent deaths of cast regulars, with black comedy, with (hints of) kinky sex, and with startling character revelations, the staff writers contrived nothing catastrophic. Nobody even married or divorced, though officer Bobby Hill, a sensitive caring male, finally met a woman with whom he could be sensitive and caring. Mick Belker (the snarling but sensitive and caring undercover cop) inherited some money. The regular prosecutor (a bald but sensitive and caring type who pined for the beautiful court-appointed counsel, Mrs. Joyce Furillo) decamped for Los Angeles; but that’s all right: Steven Bochco (creator of Hill Street Blues) can get him into LA Law (Bochco’s newest creation). And though the station house (a dingy, fetid but sensitive and caring edifice) caught fire, its structure survived, so we weren’t even subjected to seeing the cast dispersed — as we were when another MTM product, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, showed its regulars scattered at the finale. We can continue Hill Street Blues in our imaginations and picture LaRue still scheming, Howard still pontificating, Joyce and Frank still giggling under conjugal sheets at the end of each day, and Washington still mumbling that toothpick.

Yet there was one significant transition effected before the fade-out. Detective Norman Buntz was given the boot. This Dirty Harry with tics; this uncomfortable, improvizing vigilante; this dependably courageous and dependably unsavory character; this counter-weight to all the walking embodiments of sensitivity and caringness that packed the station house, finally lost his badge. It was a long time coming, but it had to come. Cleared of a cocaine heist frame-up yet unable to stop himself from decking the police chief who slandered him in public, Buntz realized he was through. Though he confessed to Sid the Snitch (his only friend, or reasonable facsimile of one) that being a cop was the one thing on earth that mattered to him, Buntz didn’t commit suicide or choose some other explosive exit. Standing for the last time in the main lobby of the station, the sadly hulking man listened to a fire marshall remark on how well the place had survived the blaze and how sturdy was its underlying structure. Buntz numbly agreed and walked out. End of program. End of series. Hill Street, this last image seemed to say, will outlast the downfall of one of its members and the law will outlast one rogue cop. At last this malevolent joker had been eliminated from the pack even if he had survived right through the final deal of the cards. This repudiation of Buntz seemed as necessary to this show’s final installment as the presence of Buntz had been necessary to all the other episodes in which he had appeared, and very nearly dominated.

Strangely enough, this wasn’t really Buntz’s first exit from Hill Street Blues. In the 1982-83 TV season, a character named Sal Benedetto, a thoroughly evil cop who had been truly guilty of cocaine trafficking (and also murder), was beseiged by his fellow officers in a bank vault and ended up shooting himself. This part was played with such brio by Dennis Franz that both critics and public took notice.

About two years later, Franz reappeared in the character of Norman Buntz, displaying almost the same mannerisms and attitudes as Benedetto but not his complete lack of ethics. Benedetto broke the law; Buntz bent the rules nearly to the breaking point. Both men killed without much compunction, but Benedetto committed out-and-out murder, whereas Buntz was forced to kill in self-defense. Both characters used a slimy underworld character named Sid. Yet, whereas the earlier Sid was a drug dealer, his reincarnation is merely Sid the Snitch, an informer who has grown increasingly fond of Buntz despite the latter’s snarling irrascibility. It’s as if Benedetto had come back from the dead with all his violence and shiftiness intact, but with some slight moral scruple implanted in his nature which keeps his actions just barely this side of the law.

Why was Benedetto/Buntz resurrected? In an article in TV Guide (“Dennis Franz of Hill Street Blues,” by Bill Davidson, August 30, 1986) executive producer Jeffrey Lewis is quoted:

In thinking of our characters, we came up with the same problem we’d had back in 1982 when we introduced Benedetto: our cops were too good. We had buffoons and sleeze-bags, yes, but they all had integrity. We needed a rule-bender, a troublemaker, a survivor — someone who’d cause problems for Captain Furillo. He couldn’t be all bad, or we’d end up having to blow him away, as we did with Benedetto. He’d have to be tough, a guy who knew how to get the job done — but in his own way. At the same time, he’d have to have characteristics to make him sympathetic to the audience: bravery, an amusingly rebellious amorality, the capacity to land on his feet.

The last sentence is a shrewd estimate of what makes certain roguish characters attractive to a wide audience. Yet there surely was another reason to resurrect Buntz, a further shrewdness at work. One of the supposedly major innovations of Blues lay in its portrayal of its continuing characters. It had a large cast which got larger as the show evolved, so the writers could afford to give some of the characters flaws. What intrigued me was that all the characters were given flaws: Furillo was an alcoholic, Joyce could be bitchy, Belker and Hill feared intimate love relationships, LaRue was a con artist, Renko cut corners on the job. But no matter what flaws they possessed, all had virtues that clearly outweighed their vices. Thus, if Renko momentarily clutched in a tense situation in which his partner needed him, you could count on him displaying courage only a few episodes later. If Furillo retreated to the liquor store during a marital crisis, you would see that unopened bottle disposed of in the next installment. And of course, everybody got so many chances to disclose their sensitive, caring natures that the station house often appeared to be turning into a consciousness-raising center.

Everybody except Norman Buntz. He had a refreshingly bad attitude towards life, love, work, citizenship. Buntz hated to be touched, physically or emotionally. Dennis Franz played him the way it is said Olivier played Macbeth on stage, as a man whose arm you would never casually touch in order to get his attention. In fact, I can remember Buntz being touched only once and that was in the very last episode. Trying to console Buntz about the cocaine frame-up, Sid tried to pat him on the shoulder; the cop recoiled as if from the touch of a leper. No wonder Buntz never had a girlfriend. The one time he made contact with a woman was when he counseled a female officer who had for the first time killed a man in the line of duty. In a brilliant speech Buntz told the woman to stand tall, not because she had done her duty, but because she had faced an enemy in the most naked, the most basic, of human encounters and had triumphed. Buntz’s speech was a precis of the territorial imperative.

Jeffrey Lewis wasn’t wrong in ascribing sympathetic characteristics to Buntz, but even these traits were more the by-products of Buntz’s ferocity than basic virtues. In one stomach-churning episode, Buntz and a fellow cop were taken captive by a sadistic killer who liked to slaughter people precisely at the moment he succeeded in breaking their spirits. Buntz’s partner soon broke down, begged for mercy, and was executed. Not only did Buntz maintain his defiance, he outwitted and killed the monster. The scene was so effectively made that I inwardly cheered when Buntz broke from the closet where he had momentarily hidden and charged his captor, hurling him out a fifth story window. Yet Buntz himself was at that moment as terrifying as a crazed animal. When, a few scenes later, he asked Furillo for the address of his slain partner, so that he might comfort the man’s widow, he couldn’t help but add that he was doing this despite the fact that his partner had died a lily-livered coward. Actually, we had been clearly shown that the partner had broken down in a moment of understandable weakness. In the world of Norman Buntz there are no fine distinctions between weakness and absolute cowardice.

Norman Buntz saved Hill Street Blues not from plummeting ratings (it progressively lost ground) but from dramatic incoherence. One pre-Buntz program, for instance, had public defender Joyce Furillo witnessing one of her clients committing a crime while out on bail. She got him acquitted of the earlier charge even though the punk made it quite clear that he would next eliminate her. A remorseless, bragging killer, he could afford to sneer when Furillo briefly manhandled him because he knew Furillo was no vigilante.

What to do? Knowing the man was a dope addict, almost all the other Hill Street cops, given an implied go-ahead by Furillo, collaborated in keeping him from his drug connections. Undergoing cold turkey and cracking, the man robbed a store. Figuring he would defend himself in a withdrawal-induced state of frenzy, the cops stationed themselves right outside the store and gunned down their prey with precision.

Yet who did the shooting? Loveable, compassionate Mick Belker. Easy-going Washington. When a rookie cop questioned the ethics of the operation, the station house liberal, Henry, remarked that one must always cover for fellow officers. Who covers? Henry? The man who pickets against capital punishment? Who insisted on taking natural childbirth classes with his girlfriend, even though the child she was bearing wasn’t his? The episode zoomed across the screen effectively but didn’t ring true. However, if Buntz had been in the cast at the time, none of these characters would have had to be in on the kill. A one man vigilante force, Buntz would have set up and murdered the punk on his own. In fact, much later in the series, he did set up a murderer who had provoked him, pumped lead into his body, and then kicked the corpse! Monstrous but believable behavior, coming from Norman Buntz. In the next scene, Furrillo (remember Furillo? the one who dispatches cops to murder the tormentor of his wife?) told Buntz that he not only detested his deed, but that he would kick him off the force if he only had the evidence to do so. When a devil is in residence, it’s easy for the angels to stay spotless.

I’ll miss Hill Street Blues. Its innovations, overlapping dialogue and cluttered visual textures, were innovations for TV only. Robert Altman had developed and refined these techniques in his films California Split and Nashville. And even the device of using running stories was familiar to devotees of the afternoon soaps. Yet even if the characterizations were never as complex as the show’s fans claimed, they were nevertheless funnier, funkier, and more forceful than anything else you could see on the air. I’ll miss Renko, Belker, Jablonski, and LaRue.

But, most of all, I’ll miss Norman Buntz. I wouldn’t want to be arrested by him on suspicion of any charge whatever. He might think I was smart-mouthing him if I asked to call my lawyer, or he might have doubts of my masculinity if I were wearing a tie he didn’t like. But as long as he was safely behind the glass plate of my television set, perpetrating his outrages where he couldn’t reach me, I liked him. He brought the sting of reality to a show that tried hard for realism, but often didn’t make it.

Author

  • Richard Alleva

    At the time he wrote this review, Richard Alleva was a free-lance writer living in Washington D.C. He still works as a film critic for publications such as Commonweal today.

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