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to the television medium—differentiating the series from the single episode dramatic programs from the fifties, which were Broadway plays performed in front of a camera. But the Hill Street innovations weren’t all that original; they’d long played a defining role in popular television—just not during the evening hours. The structure of a Hill Street episode—and indeed all of the critically acclaimed dramas that followed, from thirtysomething to Six Feet Under —is the structure of a soap opera. Hill Street Blues might have sparked a new golden age of television drama during its seven-year run, but it did so by using a few crucial tricks that Guiding Light and General Hospital had mastered long before.
    Bochco’s genius with Hill Street was to marry complex narrative structure with complex subject matter. Dallas had already shown that the extended, interwoven threads of the soap opera genre could survive the weeklong interruptions of a prime-time show, but the actual content of Dallas was fluff. (The most probing issue it addressed was the now folkloric question of who shot JR.) All in the Family and Rhoda showed that you could tackle complex social issues, but they did their tackling in the comfort of the sitcom living room structure. Hill Street had richly drawn characters confronting difficult social issues, and a narrative structure to match.
    Since Hill Street appeared, the multithreaded drama has become the most widespread fictional genre on prime time: St. Elsewhere, thirtysomething, L.A. Law, Twin Peaks, NYPD Blue, ER, The West Wing, Alias, The Sopranos, Lost, Desperate Housewives. The only prominent holdouts in drama are shows like Law & Order that have essentially updated the venerable Dragnet format, and thus remained anchored to a single narrative line. Since the early eighties, there has been a noticeable increase in narrative complexity in these dramas. The most ambitious show on TV to date— The Sopranos —routinely follows a dozen distinct threads over the course of an episode, with more than twenty recurring characters. An episode from late in the first season looks like this:

    The total number of active threads equals the number of multiple plots of Hill Street, but here each thread is more substantial. The show doesn’t offer a clear distinction between dominant and minor plots; each storyline carries its weight in the mix. The episode also displays a chordal mode of storytelling entirely absent from Hill Street : a single scene in The Sopranos will often connect to three different threads at the same time, layering one plot atop another. And every single thread in this Sopranos episode builds on events from previous episodes, and continues on through the rest of the season and beyond. Almost every sequence in the show connects to information that exists outside the frame of the current episode. For a show that spends as much time as it does on the analyst’s couch, The Sopranos doesn’t waste a lot of energy with closure.
    Put these four charts together and you have a portrait of the Sleeper Curve rising over the past thirty years of popular television.

    In a sense, this is as much a map of cognitive changes in the popular mind as it is a map of onscreen developments, as though the media titans had decided to condition our brains to follow ever larger numbers of simultaneous threads. Before Hill Street, the conventional wisdom among television execs was that audiences wouldn’t be comfortable following more than three plots in a single episode, and indeed, the first test screening of the Hill Street pilot in May 1980 brought complaints from the viewers that the show was too complicated. Fast forward twenty years and shows like The Sopranos engage their audiences with narratives that make Hill Street look like Three’s Company. Audiences happily embrace that complexity because they’ve been trained by two decades of multithreaded dramas.
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