tv’s great writer: David Milch

20 April 2007, interviewed by Forum Director David Thorburn, MIT Communications Forum

Abstract

David Milch has been called television’s first artistic genius, its great writer. His powerful dramas have troubled the censors in the networks and in Congress and have explored human weakness and violence in disturbing and artful ways. One of television’s most honored writers, his credits include Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue (co-created with Steven Bochco) and the pioneering HBO series Deadwood. In this Forum, Milch will discuss his career as a writer and creator with Forum Director David Thorburn, a historian of television who knew Milch as a Yale student. The session will include clips distilled from Milch’s best work.

Summary

[this is an edited summary, not a verbatim transcript]

DAVID THORBURN: Our guest is David Milch, who has been called television’s first artistic genius. He’s won numerous awards for his work on shows such as Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and most recently, Deadwood. I met David at Yale when I was starting my career as a professor and he was a graduate student; when he heard I was interested in media, he showed me a short film he had made in a truck stop that was full of the kind of black humor that characterizes his work today. I thought we’d begin by showing a clip from Hill Street Blues. It’s a brief clip, but I think it demonstrates some of the qualities that characterize his work.

(A clip from Hill Street Blues is shown in which Sid the informant tries to convince Buntz the cop to help buy a large, under priced quantity of cocaine and become rich selling it.)

David, could you tell us about these characters?

DAVID MILCH: Sid is kind of a Falstaff character, a cheerfully amoral counterpoint to Buntz. Buntz is a cop who is very uncomfortable in his own skin. Sid is the inner part of Buntz that wants to break the law, and Buntz is always repressing that urge by beating down Sid… [more]