'NYPD Blue,' 'LA Law,' 'Hill Street Blues' creator Steven Bochco dead at 74

Steven Bochco, pictured in 2014, won 10 Primetime Emmy Awards over a TV career that spanned nearly five decades. (REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson)

Steven Bochco, who wrote and produced some of the most memorable shows in television history, died Sunday after a lengthy battle with leukemia. He was 74.

His assistant, Phillip Arnold, told Fox News that Bochco "died peacefully in his sleep with his family close by."

"Steven fought cancer with strength, courage, grace and his unsurpassed sense of humor," said Arnold, who added that Bochco's family had requested privacy at this time.

A New York City native, Bochco won 10 Primetime Emmy Awards, six of them for "Hill Street Blues" -- his breakout hit in a television career that spanned nearly five decades.

Bochco picked up three more Emmys for his work on "L.A. Law," his "Hill Street Blues" follow-up for NBC. In 1995, 14 years after his first Emmy, Bochco was at the top of the TV world again when ABC's "NYPD Blue" won for outstanding drama series.

Though best-known for his cop dramas, Bochco was also behind the more comic "Doogie Howser, M.D." and the high-profile flop "Cop Rock," which attempted to marry gritty police work with Broadway show tunes.

In October 2014, Bochco received a stem cell transplant from a 23-year-old man named Jon Kayne, which helped Bochco temporarily beat back a rare form of leukemia called blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm.

In 2016, Bochco published his autobiography "Truth Is a Total Defense: My Fifty Years in Television," in which he revealed that his older sister Joanna had declined to donate bone marrow to him after his leukemia diagnosis.

"That [relationship] is just sort of gone," Bochco told the New York Post. "I don’t care. I have not spoken to her or communicated with her since that day. I don’t imagine I ever will again."

Bochco's last TV project, TNT's "Murder in the First," was canceled that same year after 32 episodes over three seasons.