It's Not a Book About Underwater Naval Vessels

One thing about watching old TV shows — especially those for which I was around when they were new — is the glimpse back at how things were then. Granted, it was TV. It never quite captured or recreated life the way it really was, and some of the shows that were "edgy" then have seen their edge grown dull in reflection.

I'm still plugging away at Starsky & Hutch, and am now about one-fifth of the way through season three. Monday night I resumed my viewing and, in episode five, titled "Death in a Different Place," was witness to what I thought was a rather odd exchange between the two main characters:




As I am the master of double entendre, I absorbed the end of this exchange with the exuberance of an eighth grade boy who just learned a new use of the word "rubber."

But then the episode deals with a married police lieutenant who is murdered in a dive hotel where he has been seen frequently taking a different young man up to his room each night.

At first both Starsky and Hutch react with shock and disbelief that their friend and colleague was apparently living a secret life as a gay man.

I was mildly shocked that a weekly network TV action show did, in 1977, take on the topic so frankly. Starsky was portrayed as having a tough time dealing with this revelation about his friend, and having some prejudiced views about homosexuality — reflecting the general attitude of the nation at the time. Hutch was portrayed as being of the more progressive view, that it's not so strange or taboo, that homosexuals are human and deserve the respect of humans, regardless of their sexual preference.

An added wrinkle was the plot complication that their boss, Captain Dobey, was under pressure to make the murder investigation go away because the department was under pressure by certain entities of the public to allow gays on the police force, and now it had been revealed that one of "the city's finest was a homosexual." To me, the implication was clear that their fictional police department — not unlike real ones across the nation — was resisting that pressure.

By today's standards, the show's handling of the topic was certainly ham-fisted. But then, everything the show did was ham-fisted, so why complain? However, there seemed a raw honesty about it, and an enthusiasm about their message. I think they were breaking new ground — or at least making tracks on recently broken ground — in American television, and making a bold statement: homosexuals exist in society and are not awaiting your permission to function beside you; their private lives are none of your business, and shouldn't be a factor in their hiring or firing, or whether or not you'll share the sidewalk with them; denying their existence or their lifestyle won't make them straight, nor will it make them go away.

I recall reading recently that many people saw a homosexual undercurrent between the two characters in the program, perhaps when the show was on the air, but certainly when observed today. The program's epilogue, despite the message, still tweaked on a general sense of homophobia when Hutch asked Starsky if he thought two men spending 75% of their time together implied a certain preference. Starsky indicated his assent to the notion. But when Hutch laid down the correlation of his and Starsky's relationship, that the two spent about twelve hours a day together, sharing most of their meals together, and asked what that meant about them, Starsky was fairly disturbed by his partner's implication.

At the end of this episode I realized the unfortunate dialogue highlighted at the beginning of this post was probably not unintentional after all, and subtly, subliminally, introduced the episode's subject matter as subtext before coming out of the closet to hit the viewer over the head with it.

Perhaps the undercurrent wasn't so sublime after all.



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Starsky & Hutch and Me

There’s a TV station in Chicago that seems to play nothing but old TV shows all day. One evening a couple years ago I happened to catch an episode of Starsky & Hutch and I watched it. Or, rather, I tried to watch it.



For anyone who doesn’t remember — or who doesn’t really care to remember — Starsky & Hutch was must-see television from 1975 to 1979. At least it was must-see for me. Weekly tales about two street-smart, street-tough, big-city cops who are closer than brothers, it was the perfect TV show for an adolescent boy. Rugged, good-looking cops who don’t take shit from anybody, zipping around town in a souped-up muscle car, kicking ass and taking names, and shooting it out with the bad guys: it was the ideal recipe for the newly minted testosterone factory that was an eleven year old boy…this eleven year old boy.



I was all about Starsky & Hutch during those four years. Throughout the fall and winter, each week's most important task was making it to Wednesday night (Tuesday in the latter years of the show’s run). In the spring and summer, while the show was in reruns, I, with my black hair, was Starsky. Along with Paul, a blond kid (who else would be Hutch?) who lived across the street from me, we tore up and down the block — on his side of the street, since he was five years younger than I, and he wasn’t allowed to cross to the other side at the time — he on his Big Wheel™, and I on his yellow racing wagon, and sometimes on our bikes, we acted out our own story lines and wrote our own scripts as we went along, shooting it out with invisible bad guys and making out with invisible babes. Well… I did; at age six, Paul still got the heebie-jeebies at the thought of kissing girls.

At first, our weapons were whatever we could cobble together. If I remember correctly, I provided them in the form of two plastic, spring-loaded suction-cup dart guns, one red and one blue, in the shape of miniature Colt .45s. Then one year, for Paul’s birthday, I got him a 1:1 scale Starsky & Hutch gun set for us: the Colt Model 1911 .45 for me, and the Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum for Hutch… er, I mean Paul!

I was so Starsky that I dressed like him as much as I could. Well, only one outfit, as I already had a blue windbreaker jacket. It was really simple: the windbreaker, blue jeans and a dark blue or black t-shirt. All I needed was the blue nylon-and-suede-leather running shoes with the three white stripes, and I was him! Unfortunately — and this really bothered me — my parents couldn’t afford the Adidas shoes that completely fit the description. Instead, my mom got me a pair of knock-offs, K-Mart Trax shoes that fit the description closely, but had dorky four white stripes instead of the cool Starsky three.

Starsky defined cool for me through my adolescent years, and shaped my fashion sense for quite a long while afterward…which probably explains a lot of things. Even before the TV series was canceled I outgrew playing with Paul. I was still trying to sport the cool influenced by Starsky, but a five-year age difference, to an eighth-grader, might as well be a lifetime, and I left Paul to his friends of the same age, and I turned my attentions to more teenagerly endeavors.

I was delighted, those few years ago, when I caught the beginning of an old Starsky & Hutch episode. It was a blast from the past, and a wave of nostalgia washed over me as I remembered the clothes, the realistic toy guns, Paul and his racy yellow wagon with the hollow plastic rear “slicks,” in which I could execute perfect power-slide turns…until the rear wheels split down the center, and the wagon had to be tossed….

And then the show started. Within minutes I was gagging at the dense (and I don’t mean intricate) writing, the flat acting and the preposterous story lines. I had to turn it off. I really watched this crap? And worse, I really enjoyed it?! And then I recalled the problems I had with the show, even when I was a kid. Too often the plots revolved around someone out to kill Starsky, or Hutch, or any of the regular characters; even at that age I was hung up on realism. I remember that Hutch evolved into the show’s lone heartthrob, and he always had the romantic scenes. At least that’s how I remembered it. And “Don’t Give Up On Us, Baby?” Give me a break! And the extent of their “investigations” was getting all the answers from Huggy Bear and his underworld friends, and from wild hunches they followed with bulldog conviction. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I stuck with the show through its end, in the spring of 1979.

A couple of years ago I was on a flight where the airline played the Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson movie spoof of Starsky & Hutch. With much trepidation, I plugged in the headphones and took a shot. The movie hit the nail on the head of so many of the show’s flaws that I was laughing at things that only a true fan of the show would notice. I wound up laughing through most of the movie and came away nodding approval and feeling nostalgic once again for the TV show. It even has a cameo appearance by Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul, the original stars of Starsky & Hutch!

So last year, when I subscribed to Netflix, and I found the entire series of original TV episodes, I put season one in my queue. I’ve worked my way down to it, and this weekend I watched the pilot and the first three weekly season 1 episodes.

And? I had forgotten how gritty the show was. These were not (supposed to be) high-class cops. They were down and dirty detectives who pushed — and sometimes overstepped — the limits of law to get to the bottom of their investigations. The early episodes seem to have been written by people who had barely skimmed through the best crime novels in existence at the time, and got a lot of details wrong. For instance, in the pilot, the boys are being stalked, and the word is out on the street that a couple of hit-men are gunning for them. They confront the likeliest suspect, a high-powered criminal against whom they are to testify in court in a few days. He tells them that if they testify, he will be found guilty and — he even admits — he is guilty. BUT? He’s old. He’ll be found guilty, and then he’ll be out on bail. (On BAIL??!! After a trial?!) And then his lawyers will appeal, and the fight will drag on in the courts while he ages further. They would finally find him guilty two years after he’s dead.

Oh, well. We bought that crap 33 years ago, and the proof is preserved in the 93 episodes that followed it.

But I had forgotten about the feel of the show, and of the high-powered action it packed into each episode. And now it’s funny to see Starsky’s huge, lumbering Ford Gran Torino heaving its way sluggishly through the streets of their non-descript city with no name (I always thought they were in San Francisco, but they were not), but back then it was heart-pounding, adrenaline-dripping drama!

This weekend, as I sat watching the first four Starsky & Hutch tales, I found myself alternately intrigued, then cackling in offended disbelief at the tales and their flimsy plots, the ham-fisted fight choreography, and the visibly hasty production values. It’s a true glimpse into a part of our nation’s history: the cars on the road, the clothes the characters wear, the plot lines and elements that are today cliché. And it’s also a fantastic example of how sophisticated today’s TV shows have become — or maybe of how sophisticated today’s TV audiences have become.

But, despite it all, there's still a soft-spot in my heart for Starsky & Hutch, for the show will forever live on in the child who still dwells inside me.