Art & Creativity Quote by Steven Bochco

Casting, for Bochco, isn’t a spreadsheet problem; it’s a gut-level act of recognition that resists being fully rationalized. By comparing actors to paintings, he quietly rejects the fantasy that you can engineer chemistry through résume lines, demographic boxes, or even raw talent. You can study technique the way you study brushwork, but the real decision happens in that slippery moment when something in the room clicks and you feel it before you can defend it.

The metaphor also reframes power. A producer is usually imagined as a decider, a manager, a person with answers. Bochco casts himself instead as a viewer confronting art: receptive, fallible, surprised. That’s not humility for its own sake; it’s a practical creed from someone who built high-stakes ensemble dramas where one wrong note can flatten an entire series. His shows (think the era of Hill Street Blues and later network and cable realism) depended on actors who could carry contradiction: competence and mess, charm and corrosion. Those are qualities you don’t always spot on paper because they emerge in presence, timing, and how someone changes the air around a scene partner.

There’s a defense embedded here, too, one every casting decision-maker knows they’ll need. When asked why this person and not that person, “you recognize it when you see it” is an argument for taste as expertise. It admits subjectivity while insisting it isn’t arbitrary. In a business addicted to metrics and marketability, Bochco is protecting the last irrational space where television still gets to be art.