Everything I learned from JD LaRue

Steven Bocho, the writer and creator of the groundbreaking US TV show Hill Street Blues sadly died this week aged 74. He was credited with re-defining the police drama and was praised by show-runners past and present.

As I read the news about his passing, I reflected on my first experience of the show, which I watched on a VHS tape when I was thirteen. I watched the pilot episode and it contained probably the first depiction of addiction that I had ever seen. One of the most important characters in the show for me was always the alcoholic detective JD LaRue, played by the actor Kiel Martin, who also suffered from a chaotic life, blighted by drinking.

A sequence of scenes is burned deeply into my memory, partly because later, as a drinking alcoholic myself, I partially recreated them. LaRue's boss, Captain Frank Furillo orders him and his partner to carry out a drugs bust, but LaRue never makes it because his car has broken down. The car has broken down because the money he would have spent on it has gone on alcohol. I believe now that only an alcoholic in recovery could have written the storyline here and have that much insight into how and why alcoholics are so deeply unreliable.

Later, the debts that he has accumulated through drinking and gambling lead him to try to con his girlfriend into giving him money. She sees through the scam and writes him a cheque, saying that she wants him to take it, and then to leave her life and never return. Desperately, he grabs the money but in a final, tortured moment he realises what his drinking has really cost him. As she shuts the door, LaRue sees that he might have evaded his problems temporarily, but at the price in the long term of his soul.

At the end of the pilot episode, JD enters his first AA meeting (as previously suggested by Furillo) and there, at the front of the room is his captain, who welcomes him in a spirit of compassion and solidarity.

Why has this had such a hold over me for thirty years?

I think in part, I have never been able to forget JD because the character was portrayed by an addict who had numerous struggles with the illness throughout his life; some critics have suggested (not implausibly) that the character viewers saw on the screen was simply Kiel Martin. A performance so real has the ability to exude a deep truth from the TV itself into the experience of the viewer.

I could see, aged 13, all the deception, desperation, slyness and vulnerability and suffering of Detective JD LaRue and at the time I had a deep and abiding fear of alcohol and a fear of becoming an addict.

However, I could also see in the character something that I knew that I was, a person full of fear who had to put on a pretense every day. Eventually I did become an addict and alcohol was the way in which I helped to keep up the pretense and the performance. Just like the fictional detective that haunts my sober imagination, it was the glue that held my life together and for both myself and JD, it worked until one day, it stopped working.