New inn in Canandaigua

While the opening of the Holiday Inn Express hotel in Canandaigua is a plus for the town, it will also have a positive impact on Ontario County, said Canandaigua Town Supervisor Sam Casella.

“From a economic development standpoint, this means less for the town, and more for the community,” Casella said. He added that the new hotel — in addition to existing lodging in the area — will help boost the sales tax revenue, and will help other businesses in the area.

The Holiday Inn Express is located at 4420 Routes 5 and 20 in the Town of Canandaigua, next to the Super 8 Hotel, and across the road from Wegmans. It features 75 rooms, a swimming pool, fitness center and a business center. According to General Manager Karen Antosh, the rooms are currently priced at $99 a night — $105 a night for the larger “king executive” rooms. She said those prices vary depending on the time of year, with summer prices being typically higher.

The planning process for the hotel began more than a year ago, said Rakesh Patel, the vice president of operations. Construction started in March, and the hotel opened Nov. 29.

Hotel staff, along with the Canandaigua Chamber of Commerce, celebrated that opening Wednesday with an open house and ribbon-cutting event.

“We’re real excited,” Operations Manager Manoj Patel said of the hotel’s opening. “The community has been real receptive.”

He added that they choose that specific location because of its proximity to attractions such as Canandaigua Lake, as well as Finger Lakes Community College.

About two-thirds of the way through Hill Street Blues’ first episode, 1981’s “Hill Street Station,” officers Bobby Hill and Andy Renko—played by Michael Warren and Charles Haid—walk into a boarded-up tenement, looking for a telephone so they can report a stolen patrol car. Instead, they stumble onto a circle of junkies, who get spooked and start firing guns before the cops can respond. When the episode begins, Hill and Renko look like they might be Hill Street Blues’ breakout characters. One’s a level-headed, handsome African-American; the other’s his goofy, hot-tempered cowboy partner. But when the episode ends, it’s unclear whether either man will survive.

Twelve years later, Hill Street Blues producer Steven Bochco debuted another cop show, NYPD Blue, and about halfway through its pilot episode, another major character gets gunned down. Dennis Franz’s alcoholic, combative Detective Andy Sipowicz walks out of the squad room after getting suspended for beating up a mobster, and heads straight into a bar, where he picks up a prostitute, who lures Sipowicz to a hotel room where that mobster is waiting, with vengeance in mind. Unlike Warren and Haid, Franz was a fairly well-known actor before NYPD Blue premièred—he’d been on Hill Street Blues for years, as well as its spin-off series Beverly Hills Buntz—but in its first episode, NYPD Blue focused more on Sipowicz’s partner, John Kelly, played by David Caruso. So right up to the final scene, where a comatose Sipowicz squeezes Kelly’s hand in intensive care, it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that Bochco could kill off Franz’s character. Because while Bochco was never a journalist, somewhere along the line, he seems to have learned the first rule of the news business: If it bleeds, it leads.

Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue were credited for revolutionizing television in their respective decades, and for similar reasons. Both shows’ first episodes are immersive experiences, thrusting audiences directly into fast-paced, dangerous, at times blackly comic worlds, populated by so many jaded lawmen and vicious criminals that at first, it’s hard to keep track of who’s who. Both then expand out to include glimpses of the cops’ complicated home lives, while still finding time to show the police interfacing with the other side of the criminal justice system, where state’s attorneys and defense lawyers are slugging it out. Throughout their respective runs—1981-87 for Hill Street Blues on NBC, 1993-2005 for NYPD Blue on ABC—both shows explored the edges of what broadcast censors and the FCC would allow, in an overt attempt to compete with other media. Hill Street Blues looked to be as sophisticated and adult as contemporary cinema, which was in the middle of a heyday of R-rated maturity. NYPD Blue was looking to draw people away from cable TV, which at the time was luring viewers with the promise of nudity and profanity, even though its original programming wasn’t yet up to the networks’ best standards.

Most importantly, both shows’ first episodes were genuinely surprising, setting up many, many hours of stories to come. The shootings aren’t their only twists. Throughout “Hill Street Station,” Captain Frank Furillo spars with public defender Joyce Davenport, who protests the police’s incompetence and abuse of power. At the end of the episode, the audience learns that Frank and Joyce are actually lovers. In NYPD Blue, Detective Kelly flirts with his lawyer ex-wife, Laura, but ends up having sex with uniformed officer Janice Licalsi , who at the end of the pilot is revealed to be working for the mob, on a mission to kill Kelly. Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue were partly about the tangled relationship between crooks, cops, civilians, and the legal system, so it made sense for both to carry that idea forward via scenes of its lead characters literally sleeping with the enemy. But even beyond the metaphorical implications, the sexual relationships let viewers know that they had plenty of intrigue in store.

Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue shared key personnel besides Bochco. Gregory Hoblit was a producer and director on both shows, and helped establish NYPD Blue’s jittery, handheld, swish-pan-heavy look. (On the commentary track to “Hill Street Station,” Bochco says he considered employing a similar style for Hill Street Blues, but decided to use handheld cameras sparingly, figuring that wall-to-wall docu-realism would exhaust the audience, especially since so many of Hill Street Blues’ scenes are long, and set in one location.) NYPD Blue co-creator David Milch got his start as a TV writer in the early days of Hill Street Blues—later becoming its showrunner—and his personality is embedded in both shows as much as Bochco’s. In interviews, Bochco comes across like a Frank Furillo type: calm and cerebral. Milch is more of a Sipowicz: irascible yet perceptive.

Actors who worked with Milch on his later shows Deadwood and Luck sometimes talk about Milch’s strangely effective methods, which involve him walking onto a set, making a few tweaks in the staging, and delivering an offhand comment that clarifies exactly what the scene’s really about. On a featurette included on the NYPD Blue season-one DVD set, this “Milch touch” is evident in the way he describes the cops on the show as wayward Catholic boys, who serve institutions as a way of assuaging their guilt at being sinners. Bochco had a standing deal at ABC when he and Milch were developing NYPD Blue, but the network stalled on picking up the show, which gave Milch an extra year to do research with real-life NYPD cop Bill Clark. In that time, Milch picked up tips not just about how cops behave, but why.