Hill Street Blues (Seasons 1–7)

Hill Street Blues (1981–1987) is the NBC crime drama you can watch online on iFILM. One run-down precinct in an unnamed big city, one shift at a time — from the morning roll call to the small hours. Sergeant Esterhaus ends every briefing with the line that became television shorthand: "Let's be careful out there."

Captain Frank Furillo keeps the station upright between street gangs, City Hall paperwork and his own cops, who drink, lie and sometimes draw on the wrong man. Everyone carries a thread: feral detective Mick Belker, who has been known to bite a suspect; public defender Joyce Davenport, whose affair with Furillo nobody is supposed to know about; uniforms whose shift can end in any alley. Daniel J. Travanti, Veronica Hamel, Bruce Weitz and a young Dennis Franz play it like the camera wandered into someone's actual workday.

Creators Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll tore up the cop-show rulebook: handheld cameras, a wall of overlapping voices, a dozen storylines per hour and almost no tidy endings. The first season alone took home eight Emmy Awards — a record at the time — and the run piled up more than twenty. No Hill Street, no Homicide, no Wire. Stream every season of Hill Street Blues online on iFILM.