The White Shadow Revisited

Scientific Experiment:

1.Decades is running a weekend long "White Shadow" binge.

2. I'm writing this to the marathon in the wee hours of the morning, after immersing in the show for the day. (I also watched four episodes from season four of House of Cards).


Rewatching the "White Shadow" reveals its faults, but more than this reminds me of who I was when I was watching it, and what the show said to me. I loved basketball, so it appealed to that part of me right off the bat, and I grew up in L.A. where fictional "Carver" High is located, so the inner city story must've also appealed to me, even if I was living an upper middle class life in private school, making the characters on the show the flip side of my potentiality. I didn't so much want to be Goldstein, or Salami, (the white kids) let alone Thorpe, or Coolidge, but they were me in spirit, since they were living a life that seemed in my view, the life of high school basketball player finding meaning through his team and his friends.

It's a beautiful feeling to be very young and to find a movie, book, or show, that you actually feel speaks to your visions and hopes of a future that you can see yourself living, and though we're always living one step away from the future, the number of years before us dims as we get older, and I'm not so sure art/entertainment/reflection functions on this level so much, and I miss that. I miss being 11 years old and thinking that my high school experience was going to be like the White Shadow, and that I was allowed a rare glimpse into how I imagined things were going to be for me, with the show predicting the future. James at 15 did this too, and Family, but neither of those had basketball as a theme, so the reflection was internal.

The White Shadow must've tapped into a communal background for white kids, like the Bad News Bears movies, and promised a kind of dysfunctional life in sports, but "The White Shadow" was about more than sports, and much of its greatness lie in it being able to navigate the fine line between jockdom and depth. The players on the team weren't the jocks of the '80's obsessed with money and professionalism, but a breed not unlike me and my friends, or the Bad News Bears - misfits who needed a little guidance, and like in the Bad News Bears it came from a quasi old school kind of guy who never intended to lead anyone, but fate threw him into L.A.

The episodes aren't necessarily as good as I remember, even though I considered them a high level mark in TV, but there was always a sense this was between me and my friends, more than our parents, or the society in general. "The White Shadow" was no "Mary Tyler Moore," or "Mash," or any show that I could tell was just of the highest quality for TV, with unforgettable ensemble casts and writing. The "Shadow" was always a little rough around the edges like Ken Howard as Ken Reeves, the coach from Chicago, who comes to L.A. with a chip on his shoulder, but an open attitude and a desire to learn, even if he is from a gruff old school way of thinking. He lives a bachelor lifestyle, and this might've contributed to his coolness, but it was also his willingness to understand his players and their plight, off and on the basketball court.

"The White Shadow" has some cheap sets, and though I can't speak for the authenticity of life in South Central in the late '70's there is both the sense that the show is tackling the real life of the streets, but in a Hollywood manner. The Hollywood part didn't feel bad because the show was put down for being too real and in comparison to everything else on at the time it may as well have been season one of "Friday Night Lights," a show I was quoted as saying "If Lars Von Trier did a drama about America it would probably look like this."

"The White Shadow" doesn't feel as gritty anymore, but right now there is an episode of Hayward looking at his friend at a morgue, so who am I to say? It was a pre-rap world and a lot of the songs about 'fucking the police' hadn't been written yet, so in some ways the ghetto it's portraying is almost nostalgic. Bad things happen, but the Carver high basketball team has each other, and the support of Ken Reeves, their coach. No matter how sad the kids lives seem on the show, there is hope in the team, which could be equated as a hope in America.

There really wasn't the sense that the kids were never leaving the ghetto, because they were receiving real guidance from their school, and that alone could help them crawl out from their relative poverty. I can't imagine a show today about the perils of inner city life and basketball having a redemptive message of any kind unless it was about the one or two bona fide basketball stars who got out and made it to the NBA. No one on Carver high is even thinking of the NBA, or a scholarship to UCLA, and yet none of them feel stuck in the circumstances they were born into, but there is nothing but my intuition sensing this. They were children of the '60's and their positive groovy attitude had yet to be obliterated by the Reagan years, and the denial that there was any problem in the inner city, or if there was one it could be solved with tanks.

I forgot how much of a school drama the show was, and remember more the communal feeling of the team, that found the true nature of Carver in sports, because that was my dream for myself. Structurally, the show is actually quite nerdy, and a lot of the episodes have an almost Room 222 feel. There are a lot of moral/intellectual/ethical debates going on between Coach Reeves, the players, and the pretty black intellectual Vice Principal, who serves as a counterpoint to Reeves's instinctual reasoning that wasn't reared in the administrative body of public school. In some ways, these little moral plays work well to show the coach's evolution, but there is not enough of a dynamic between Reeves and her, nor is there any love story, or even a hint of one, which would've really blown the top off the show and introduced a mixed couple.

Maybe that's the dated feel of the "White Shadow." It does have a lot of episodes about heavy issues, but they are not brought up easily in the context of the show. The episodes mostly feel like WW II era movies that had to teach everyone a clear cut lesson at the end. The show itself may have been loose for the time but there is something more uptight about it than I remember, even if the funky intro song is awesome! The players are loose around each other, but not loose enough, and the heavy themes are presented rather clumsily, and lacking the subtlety someone other than an 11 year old might find particularly deep, but the show should be given credit for tackling heavy themes.

It's weird, but I wish the "White Shadow" was looser, and yet the reason me and my friends liked it was for how loose it was and how it reflected our life. Maybe the times were just more serious back in the '70's, or the way people addressed them, but now it would be hard to imagine anyone from an inner city school getting caught up in clunky but necessary morality tales fit for a white audience week after week even if we thought we were watching 'bro's. The situations intellectually feel real, but not literally.

It might be that the lessons of the White Shadow were never meant for an adult audience, and that the show was primarily for teenagers, except the main character is the coach, and this might be why it was never a big hit. I read on wikipedia that part of the reason it was never a hit was that the episodes didn't resolve the heavy questions it awkwardly asked and left the show ambiguous, neither white or black, but it doesn't seem that way now.

The "White Shadow" doesn't always know what it wants to be, although what it's striving for is rather unique. It wants to be a sensitive post flower power drama about a white coach learning from black kids, and vice versa, and on this note it does a very good job, because one never feels that the coach and the kids have nothing to say to each other, or learn from each other, and if I had an ex Chicago Bull for a coach I'd feel like hot shit! If anything, what they learn from each other is almost too intimate, because the coach is dangerously close to the players and while this was a romanticized idea from the '60's it didn't pan out too much in reality, and now feels like an impossible dream.

It's the political minefield the characters walk through week after week that feels forced and out of place, and the focus of the "Shadow" is never very clear. Most are about one of the kids on the team, and something they are going through, intermingling with a story about Reeves and the Vice Principal, or some inner conflict he's going through, but sometimes it's more about Reeves and the school establishment, while other times about the team and the establishment they belong to and abhor, but it doesn't balance this well. It wants to be tough and soft at the same time, a teleplay about rebels and keeping rebels in line, without taking sides except to say that we all need structure whether it comes through school, basketball, or family, and for this it's wise.

I think we must've liked how much the show would never speak to our parents, even if it was made for them. It was bad, but in a way that was very good, and cult figures are made on such aesthetic attributes. We knew it wasn't the best show, nor could it ever be, and yet it was the best show, or so we thought, making our love for it tribal like "Bugsy Malone."