Daily Inspiration Quote by Steven Bochco

“Imagery is like music” is producer-speak stripped down to a clean creative principle: the picture isn’t decoration, it’s orchestration. Coming from Steven Bochco, this lands less as a poet’s metaphor than as a showrunner’s workflow note. Bochco helped redefine American TV drama in the era when network television was learning to feel cinematic without losing its weekly, mass-audience mandate. In that pressure cooker, imagery has to do what music does: set tempo, cue emotion, and carry meaning even when the dialogue can’t stop to explain itself.

The subtext is almost a rebuttal to the tyranny of plot. Music works through pattern, repetition, and variation; it builds expectation, then pays it off. Bochco’s best shows operate that way visually: recurring spaces (the bullpen, the hallway, the precinct) become leitmotifs. Camera movement, blocking, and lighting don’t just “look good,” they tell the viewer how to listen to a scene - where the tension sits, when it swells, when it resolves. A glance can function like a chord change: small, but it shifts the whole emotional key.

There’s also a pragmatic producer’s intent baked in. Music is expensive, subjective, and often added late; imagery is the score you control from day one. If you can make the visuals do the emotional labor, you’re less dependent on swelling strings to manufacture stakes. It’s a statement about craft, but also about power: the showrunner as conductor, turning images into feeling with rhythm, not speeches.