The TV season may be limping to a premature end, courtesy of the seven-week- old writers’ strike, but fans of Hooperman and L.A. Law can hardly say they didn’t get their money’s worth. Police Detective Harry Hooperman talked a couple of potential suicides down from building ledges, negotiated a clutch of hostage crises and got his on-again, off-again girlfriend (and downstairs neighbor) pregnant. Over at L.A. Law, a mob boss was gunned down across a restaurant table from Attorney Grace Van Owen; Michael Kuzak, a partner in the firm of McKenzie, Brackman, watched a client get shot to death outside the courtroom after being acquitted of murder; and Senior Partner Douglas Brackman had surprise reunions with no fewer than two long-lost halfbrothers — as well as his dead father’s mistress. He is now sleeping with the latter.

It has been, in other words, business as usual in the world of Producer Steven Bochco. And that business has been awfully good. Bochco, 44, a deceptively laid-back Californian with a fierce determination to shatter TV’s familiar formulas, is on a roll. L.A. Law, his designer drama about life in the legal fast lane, is about to end its second season on NBC as the highest- rated dramatic show on TV’s highest-rated network. Hooperman, starring John Ritter as a sensitive San Francisco cop, is one of the season’s top-rated new series and an ambitious pioneer of TV’s newest form, the “dramedy.” A potential spin-off is already in the works, focusing on a dwarf private eye named Nick Derringer, to be introduced in a segment next week. In addition, Bochco has signed a development deal with ABC that calls for him to create ten more series over the next nine years. Even if only two or three of the shows make it, Bochco’s stamp will be on a sizable chunk of the prime-time schedule for much of the next decade.

That stamp, first seen in his groundbreaking police show Hill Street Blues, has changed the face of TV. Unlike simplistic TV dramas of the past, Bochco shows typically feature a medley of interwoven plots and characters. They grapple with tough social issues, yet leap from scenes of intense drama to raucous comedy. They relentlessly push network standards of good taste, often with a schoolboy penchant for gross-out humor and sexual fetishes. “Steve has . always been one to break the rules,” says former NBC Chairman Grant Tinker. “He does it more cleverly, even diabolically, than anyone else. He rocks the boat as a hobby.”

Most important, Bochco has demonstrated that boat-rocking can win an audience — one, moreover, made up of the sort of young, upscale viewers that advertisers prize most. Bochco creates TV shows for people who don’t watch TV. No producer of the 1980s has been more influential. “He’s shown that there’s an audience for excellence,” says David Milch, a former Hill Street writer and now an executive producer of Beverly Hills Buntz. “In so doing, he has increased the possibilities for everyone.”

His success has not come without a fight. In the collaborative medium of network TV, Bochco is known as a tough and sometimes abrasive battler for his standards. Colleagues describe him as cool and self-confident, stubborn when dealing with superiors and direct with underlings who do not deliver the goods. “I know I can be difficult,” Bochco concedes. “But you can’t do work at this level without being demanding of yourself and others.”

That self-assurance — some call it arrogance — has contributed to professional rifts. In March 1985, at the end of Hill Street’s fifth season, Bochco was fired as executive producer after he resisted efforts by MTM Enterprises to reduce the show’s high production costs. And late last year Bochco became embroiled in a bitter feud with Terry Louise Fisher, his creative partner on both L.A. Law and Hooperman. After negotiations to take over Bochco’s job as executive producer of L.A. Law next season went awry, Fisher was barred from the show’s set. She responded with a $50 million breach-of-contract suit, which was later settled out of court. The pair have now split for good.

The legal wrangle was an ironic backstage twist for TV’s savviest courtroom drama. Among its substantial achievements, L.A. Law has brought TV lawyers into the ’80s; the firm of McKenzie, Brackman is the first to deal with the whole gamut of cases that preoccupy America’s litigious society, from sensational rape trials to mundane contract disputes. Unlike the Perry Masons and Owen Marshalls of TV’s earlier days, these lawyers worry about salaries, office politics and off-hours relationships, like the steamy romance between Van Owen (Susan Dey) and Kuzak (Harry Hamlin). Sometimes they even lose cases.

Not that the show is quite the truth-telling breakthrough it is meant to be. L.A. Law may be high Bochcovian drama, but it is still TV drama. The courtroom scenes are full of implausible outbursts and Perry Masonesque confrontations. Complex legal issues are simplified into neat black-and-white choices. The wrong side is usually represented by an oily attorney who badgers witnesses ruthlessly. The right side is usually represented by, well, our guys.

Bochco’s sly accomplishment is to have concocted a show that, while styling itself as a no-holds-barred look at the legal profession, manages to reaffirm a host of romantic illusions about lawyers. Except for one cartoon villain (the mercenary Brackman, played by Alan Rachins) and to some extent the slick divorce lawyer played by Corbin Bernsen, virtually all the main characters on L.A. Law are upright, principled, sensitive and dedicated. There are few hints that ethical compromises, or even a healthy professional detachment, might be part of the terrain. When Abby Perkins (Michele Greene), one of the firm’s young associates, tried last fall to get a pair of feuding former business partners to settle their contract dispute out of court, there was a hint (rare on L.A. Law) that she might not be pulling her weight at the firm. The doubts, however, were short-lived: her clients made up, praised her effusively in front of the boss — and got her a big raise to boot. No good deed goes unrewarded at McKenzie, Brackman. The show says you can have your ideals and your BMW too.

“I’m much more of an idealist than a cynic,” Bochco says, “more of an optimist than a pessimist.” To be sure, his own life is one argument for the possibility of having it all. Bochco, boyishly charming but prematurely gray, lives with his second wife, Actress Barbara Bosson (who co-stars in Hooperman), and two children in a spacious 14-room house in Pacific Palisades. In a town of driven workaholics, Bochco nearly always gets home for dinner with the family. “What keeps him fresh is that he’s not obsessive,” says Producer Milch. “He doesn’t occupy the self-enclosed world of the writer. Family life is important to him.”

Bochco’s childhood family life was close but beset by money problems. He grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the son of a violinist who once played with the NBC Symphony under Toscanini. After flirting with music, Bochco opted for playwriting at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon). The only play of his to be given a student production was a “disaster,” Bochco . recalls. But he established a close circle of lifelong friends — among them Actors Michael Tucker (Stuart Markowitz on L.A. Law) and Charles Haid (Renko on Hill Street Blues).

Bochco broke into TV with a summer job at Universal studios and wound up spending twelve years there, turning out scripts for shows like Columbo and McMillan and Wife. In 1978 he moved to MTM Enterprises, the studio started by Grant Tinker and his then wife Mary Tyler Moore. After a couple of failed series, Bochco and another MTM writer, Michael Kozoll, were asked by NBC to develop a police series with a human touch. They came up with Hill Street Blues, which debuted in January 1981. Though ratings were low at first, NBC stuck with the show; it went on to win a record 26 Emmys (six for Bochco alone) and to virtually reinvent television drama.

Hill Street’s success was followed by Bochco’s most notable failure: Bay City Blues, an ensemble show about a minor-league baseball team, canceled after just four episodes in 1983. Less than two years later, Bochco was ousted from Hill Street and MTM. But he resurfaced quickly at 20th Century Fox, where he began working on an idea that had been percolating for a year and a half: a Hill Street-style ensemble drama about a high-powered contemporary law firm. L.A. Law, which debuted in September 1986, caught on almost immediately.

Bochco has remained closely involved in the series, overseeing everything from casting and budgets to regular story conferences. Casually dressed in jeans and sneakers and idly tossing a football during meetings, he is adept at managing the show’s complex story lines as well as a crew of collaborators. “I see myself as more of a chorus member than a soloist,” he says. “I’m good at creating an environment in which people can function creatively.”

Bochco has less day-to-day involvement in Hooperman, for which he co-wrote the first three scripts and now serves as consultant. The show, a provocative but overly congested half hour of drama and comedy, has yet to hit its creative stride. But Bochco’s batting average has been impressive enough that the networks seem convinced he has a golden touch. Last fall CBS tried to hire Bochco as its chief of programming. He turned down the job, partly because it would mean giving up his financial interest in L.A. Law and Hooperman, expected to be worth millions when the shows go into syndication.

Instead, Bochco accepted ABC’s lucrative development offer. Though he will continue as executive producer of L.A. Law for one more season, his new role will probably force him to give up close supervision of any one series. Some associates think that will be hard. “I think he’d have trouble being an Aaron Spelling, creating a series and stepping away,” says Michael Tucker. “Steve isn’t a step-away kind of guy.”

Unusual among successful TV producers, Bochco has no yen to make movies. “You can reach a tremendous audience with more sophisticated stuff in TV,” he says. “Movies have a different audience, and I don’t have much to say to that audience.” Trying to justify people’s increasingly high expectations of him is challenge enough. “I never imagined the tyranny of success — the way you have to deal with a new standard of excellence,” he says. “Do you play the game not to lose? Or do you keep going for a win — pushing it a bit and doing it better or different?” If you don’t know Bochco’s answer to that question, you haven’t been watching.

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