"Ron, on another board we've been having a discussion about the comparisons between Galactica and Hill Street Blues, which just came out on DVD (Season One). How much of a conscious foundation is HSB for BG?"Hill Street Blues was an incredibly innovative television series and can probably stand as one of the five best American television series. I bought the season 1 DVD set and found it remarkable as to how well the show stands up to today, except for maybe the 1980s hairstyles.
Hill Street Blues was definitely something of an archetype we looked to for developing the structure of the series. I made explicit reference to the show in our series bible and talked about how we would strive to emulate their structure as much as possible. That structure was, basically, to have a self-contained A-Story that would begin and end each week, with smaller character-centered B-Stories that would take place over a few episodes, and finally long-running C-Stories that would arc throughout the season. It was a starting place for a lot of story discussions and script meetings, but we didn't strictly adhere to the form, as you can see from the experimentation we did throughout the first season. The first seven episodes of season two roughly follow this format, but then we varied again from that structure for the rest of the season. Why didn't we hew more closely to the Hill Street format? Partly it's a result of not wanting the show to get so serialized as to be inaccessible to new viewers, and partly it's a result of continually wanting to try new things on the show and mix up the story-telling.
Is the new Battlestar Galactica amongst the 10 best ever? Hard to say but it is, of the current shows on television, in my opinion, one of the top 10.
