You Don't Need Me to Depress You! You Can Let Stephen Bochco Do That!

FROM A STEPHEN BOCHCO profile article in Forbes. (H/T to Caroline) -- think of this as sort of a mint to the ageism discussion some of my fine colleagues have weighed in on:

Between Hill Street Blues and LA Law, among others, you raised the bar for all network drama, and now here you are on cable. Why the move?

I think the broadcast television universe has kind of, on a certain level, devolved, if you will. It's overrun with the kinds of programming that I'm simply not good at or have any interest in doing: reality programming and very sort of fantastical concepts. I'm more of a reality-grounded drama guy.

For that reason alone, I find myself drifting from broadcast television. There's just not a lot of room in that world for what I do. Additionally, the working environment in broadcast television has really shifted radically over the last half a dozen years or so.

How so?

Well, we used to be pretty much left alone to do our jobs--and we did those jobs pretty well. We didn't always succeed, you can't guarantee a hit, but we knew what we were doing.

But broadcast networks today tend to so micromanage every single aspect of production that it's an impossible chore. You really sort of become a moment-to-moment warrior in defense of the show you're doing, and it's very hard to do it. If you don't give them what they think it should be creatively, they'll get rid of you. I find that the cable environment, because it's much more of a boutique environment, is much more respectful of what we do.

The flip side of that is you're working on a cable budget (about $2 million per episode rather than broadcast's $2.5 million or more). How do you make that work without sacrificing good content?

I think you do sacrifice something. You know, you figure out how to make adjustments. Fundamentally, you're still telling complex stories with interesting characters, and you're raising complex questions. What you may have to give up on here, and there is a certain level of production value, which if you do what we hope we're doing well is something the viewer won't actually miss.

This is a show which because of budget constraints really doesn't allow us to go outside very much. So it's an interior show. But because it's a courtroom drama, you sort of belong inside. I haven't seen to many outdoor courtrooms.

We're all making Canadian Television now.