MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "T.J. HOOKER"

Stakeouts used to be a terrific deterrent. Smoke one bandit, robberies would drop to zero overnight. Stay that way for months. I'd vote for that one...unfortunately it's not on the ballot. Progress. -- T.J. Hooker

Ah, Memory Lane. Where else can we wander with such a sense of self-indulgent purpose as upon this charming little road, whose houses are so full of fond memories? There is an especial pleasure in the idea of revisiting the entertainment of yesteryear. I would be lying, however, if I said every stop on this journey yielded the same set of emotions. Some of the showhouses we visit are full of almost painful nostalgia; some contain unexpected surprises; a few still retain their old power to shock or terrify or amuse; still others are disappointing because our memories have betrayed us, and what was magic viewed through the golden haze of childhood is merely silly and cheap and obvious now. But when we come upon the rather stern-looking, barracks-like home of T.J. HOOKER, we feel none of these things. What we experience, mainly, is happiness. We do not experience this happiness because what lies behind the door is good: oh no. We are happy because we know it is bad, but it is entertainingly bad, and yet, if we care to probe a little deeper into what we are seeing, discover it offers us some insight into ourselves and the society in which we once lived -- and may live in again. So let's kick down the door and get this party started.

Way back in 1982, William Shatner made his much-anticipated return to television with an Aaron Spelling-produced melodrama originally and revealingly titled THE PROTECTORS. Shatner was cast in the role of T.J. Hooker, a hardass veteran cop reeling from a painful divorce, now assigned as a partner a cocky, happy-go-lucky young trainee named Vince Romano (Adrian Zmed). The embittered, hard-drinking, all-knowing Hooker tries to educate the naive "Junior" in the ways of the streets while fighting the department's sluggish bureaucracy, epitomized by oafish stickler Captain Dennis Sheridan (Richard Herd), who dislikes Hooker's take-no-prisoners attitude. And in fact Hooker is, and is meant to be, a walking embodiment of the "club-'em-'n-shoot-'em" school of law enforcement popularized by DIRTY HARRY. Hooker is a man who would rather blast a crook with his .357 than arrest him, who doesn't believe in pesky things like Miranda or search warrants, and generally feels society is crumbling at the foundations because of excessive liberalism and overtolerance for evildoers. In the show's pilot episode, he rails against criminals and the laws and lawyers which he believes enable them, and slaps heavy coats of sentimental gloss over the Old Days, when justice was swift and brutal. As an instructor at the Academy, he presents police work as war, and trains his probationary cops as soldiers who must shoot to kill, jeering at all soft-headed, well-intentioned, newfangled ideas and technologies. "I've seen the past," he laments over his bourbon. "And it works."

The PROTECTORS name was quickly scrapped in favor of the eponymous HOOKER title, probably to flatter Shatner's ego, or because of the cold realization that most of the viewers were STAR TREK fans tuning in solely because their captain was now once more available each week, albeit in a different uniform; however, the idea behind the original title -- that the police are all that keeps the ordinary citizen from being robbed, raped and murdered, and that cops are unappreciated and unfairly hobbled by red tape and pettifogging laws that favor the crooks -- remained not close to the show's heart but its actual center for its entire five year run. Over and over again Hooker would pound away at the idea that criminals needed to be scared of the police, at one point even saying that if you killed one bandit, robberies would go down for months afterwards. In another episode, he fumes that a murderer who beat a rap is "laughing at us, and at the system." I italicize this for a reason. Hooker may be frustrated as all get out by the inequities and failings of "the system" but he cannot abide it being mocked. His power, the power to beat the hell out of crooks and gun them down if he sees fit, devolves from it: he is both its beneficiary and its guardian. Like Charles Dickens, whose thesis was essentially that capitalism was not evil but rather that individual capitalists sometimes behaved wickedly, Hooker does not feel "the system" is bad, merely that it is in the wrong hands and using the wrong tactics. There is no deeper social criticism in T.J. HOOKER, just an implication that if "they" (courts, politicians, social workers, journalists, the big public) stopped trying to interfere and gave the cops a free hand, justice would be served and served cold. Shatner himself, a Canadian who is wisely uninterested in American politics, later noted that the show was a big hit with the real-life LAPD cops he encountered during its broadcast run: as over-the-top and melodramatic as it was, it presented "their side of the story" to an anxious and conflicted public caught between touchy-feely 70s ideas of rehabilitation and Reagan-era "law & order" hardassery.

HOOKER's plots tended to be simple to the point of idiocy -- you could describe many in half a sentence -- and therefore the series relied heavily on the repartee and chemistry between Shatner and Zmed, which was very good and livened up unimaginative storylines such as "Hooker must protect a witness," "Hooker must stop a serial killer," "Hooker must hunt down armed robbers." Romano's excessive virility was an ongoing joke, as were Hooker's alimony payments and terrible diet, and both cops' penchant for destroying patrol cars during pursuits; indeed, the series was at its best when it climbed down from off its soapbox and had a little fun at its own expense. Although objectively mediocre and occasionally laugh-out-loud dumb, HOOKER was usually fun and sometimes even a little charming, especially in its first two seasons. By the end of the second, it had expanded its cast to include both Heather Locklear as Stacey Sheridan (another trainee cop) and James Darren as her training officer and partner, Corporal Jim Corrigan. This added some depth to the roster and a surprisingly progressive male-female dynamic, but reduced Romano to one-fourth of an ensemble rather than one half of a partnership, and cooled off the show's strongest asset, the buddy-buddy relationship between the lead and the sidekick. An unrealistic series is always strengthened by humor: it invites the audience to laugh with rather than at the series, and removing some of the humor simply highlighted HOOKER'S scribbled-on-a-napkin plots and lazy writing. This was exacerbated when Adrian Zmed left the show at the end of the fourth season, giving Shatner no one to facetiously banter with as he prowled the streets. The producers -- or maybe it was the network -- compensated by making the stories darker and grittier, which probably improved HOOKER's objective quality, but killed its sense of fun stone dead.

HOOKER was an extremely formulaic show, and one quite at odds with its own concept. The whole raison d'etre of the character was that he'd willingly given up his detective's badge to return to street policing, yet in almost every episode, he acts as a detective, either because “the [actual] detectives are spread too thin right now,” or because the case was “personal” to Hooker. In one scene, later lampooned by THE SIMPSONS, Captain Sheridan tells Hooker he's off a case; Hooker barks, “Wrong – I'm ON the case!” and storms off, leaving the Captain to scowl impotently into the middle distance, as usual. Even as a kid this kind of insubordination insulted my intelligence, but you can't apply logic to a show like T.J. HOOKER, in which gunshot wounds can be shrugged off with gritted teeth and will-power, getting thrown off a car going 40 mph doesn't hurt, and nobody ever seems to have to do any paperwork. Hell, I have never, in my entire life, seen a series in which more cars explode. Literally anything will make a car explode on T.J. HOOKER, and an episode where a car or a truck (or both, if one collided into the other) didn't blow itself to pieces in a holocaust of flame. In one unforgettable scene, a police car catches fire and then explodes so violently it splits in two as it is lifted into the air, bathing the entire street in oily flame...simply because it spun out. I laughed at this in 1983, and I laugh at it now, but I confess if watch an episode of HOOKER and I do don't see car annihilated by explosives, I'm disappointed. Like inexplicable jumps in the DUKES OF HAZZARD, the absurdity was baked into the concept.

Most episodes followed a strict pattern. A crime would be committed, Hooker would be assigned (or assign himself) to the case, and following a predictable series of car chases, foot pursuits, fist fights and shootouts, punctuated by lectures from Hooker to all and sundry and arguments between Hooker and lesser mortals who couldn't see he was right in his hunches, there would be a culminating final fistfight or shoot-out, where the criminal or criminals would either be captured (as was the case early in the series) or killed off (as was the case later). It is interesting to note that while he shot plenty of people, Hooker seldom killed anyone directly: they would swing at him with a knife, overbalance and fall off a roof; or he would shoot them during a gun battle, and then they would stagger and fall off a bridge. This applied to the other characters as well. The subtext here seemed to be that, as The Shadow had warned a couple of generations earlier, "the weed of crime bears bitter fruit:" that criminals end up destroying themselves through their own short-sighted wickedness. Or as Sherlock Holmes put it: "The schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another."

Because the formula was so repetitious, and because as the years wore on Hooker became increasingly all-knowing and invincible, the real pleasure in the show rested entirely in watching Shatner growl insults at hapless hoodlums – “maggot,” “scum” and “dirtbag” were his favorites – and say things like, “Resist arrest...resist arrest, PLEASE!” as some drug dealer or hit man trembled in his sights. Also in the boyish hijinks of Vince Romano and the somehow wholesome sex appeal of Stacey Sheridan, who was dressed in a bikini or hot pants at every possible opportunity. Occasionally the writers dug deeper and produced stories of genuine merit, or tampered with the formula enough to create a feeling of freshness, and there were episodes where the actors got hold of a decent script, seemed to come alive and put real blood, sweat and tears into their performances; but HOOKER remained until its final episode an enormously predictable affair, striking over and over again at the same "law and order" note in which the cops always get their man, and police are well justified in bending the law (and civil rights) to get the scum off the streets. It's worth mentioning that Mark Snow, that brilliant creator of TV themes (THE X-FILES is probably his most famous work), composed for HOOKER the most exuberant, pulse-pounding, bombastic score imaginable for this series, one which seems to encapsulate the view it takes of police and police work. I must say that even while it was on the air, HOOKER was regarded as fully disposable entertainment, a sort of shake 'n bake mix of scenery-chewing and explosions, and to its credit, it seldom pretended to have larger ambitions. Jack Klugman once famously explained his crusade to turn QUINCY, M.E. into a social justice campaign with the remark "it can't all just be screeching tires." Well, by 1987 audiences had grown bored with the screeching tires of HOOKER and it disappeared into what Shatner referred to as "syndication, and then oblivion." When I saw Shatner do his one man show in Los Angeles some time ago, he devoted no words, and only a single slide of an old publicity photo, to the five years of his life he spent portraying the role. HOOKER is not going to be the subject of any fan conventions or reboots. If the name is uttered today, it is generally as a punch line.

So why bother opening this door, you ask? Why not simply pass on by and discuss a better TV show, like MAGNUM, P.I. or BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER? The fact is that despite its shallowness and predictability, HOOKER is culturally quite significant. It presents us not merely with a a whole slideshow of 80s-era thought on the subject of crime and policing, and more than that, with insight as to how we as Americans tend to look at the world.

One does not need to be an expert on criminology to know there was a huge upgrade in crime in the late 1960s which had by no means exhausted itself by the early 80s when Sergeant Hooker first drove through the streets of my old hometown, Burbank, CA, on his quest to spit justice out of his Magnum. A lot of this was simple Baby Boom demographics at work: the massive Boomer generation hadn't yet aged past the point where its meanest members were too gray in the muzzle to rape, murder, rob banks or burn down buildings. The surge in street crime, however, scared the shit out of millions of ordinary people who, by the end of the 70s, often felt that law and order had collapsed or was collapsing and that it was the crooks and not the citizens who owned the streets of America's cities. This surge pushed its own wave of vigilante and cop-vigilante movies into theaters, where audiences could experience some make-believe wish-fulfillment as Bronson or Eastwood mowed down criminals without compunction or remorse and made the world safe again. HOOKER's conception and its success were reflective of the desire Americans had to see crooks get bashed in the teeth. But it was also emblematic of a desire, perhaps even a need, to live (if only for an hour each week) in a simpler world.

The simplicity of the view HOOKER takes on crime and society is incredibly seductive. I work in law enforcement, and if you don't think if I dreamed of smashing a smug little street hood in the face so hard his teeth flew out of his asshole then you're sadly and sorely mistaken. But actions of this type only provide momentary satisfaction: they don't solve anything. And the deeper roots of social problems and crime hardly exist in Hooker's universe, just as they do not exist in the world of The Shadow or any DEATH WISH or DIRTY HARRY film. The drug dealer is inevitably called a "drug pusher" because this view of life demands that your children smoke dope or shoot heroin because they were basically forced to do it, not because they want to. The embezzler in the suit and tie steals because he is greedy, not because he is desperate. The woman beaten by her alcoholic slob husband is purely an innocent victim and never codependant and an enabler. Crime and evil are almost indistinguishable from one another in this morality model, just as the motivation to commit crime is always wickedness, laziness, amorality, lack of discipline, etc., and there is never any other driving force (except wrath, and even that is condemned; governmental sanction is necessary before you can mow down criminals like so many rusty tin cans parked on a fence; then it's just peachy). The idea that laws can be unjust, and that factors other than an evil disposition can motivate illegal acts, scarcely enters the mind of Sergeant Hooker or Rick Husky, the writer who created him. Individuals in office can be bad, but the office itself is never. The deeper and more sinister factors that drive a great deal of the problems any society faces go entirely unmentioned, either because they are too complex, have no recognizable solution, or would point the finger in the wrong direction. Hooker often nosed out corrupt cops or dirty city politicians, but there is never any suggestion that the system itself is corrupt, racist or classist: it is merely presented as having been hijacked by sniveling liberals, paper-pushing bureaucrats and amoral ambulance-chasers. If only we took a fat black marker to some of those pesky amendments and Supreme Court decisions, Los Angeles would look like Mayberry!

Mind you, I no longer occupy the inevitable collegiate position that crime is entirely a function of poverty, racism and inequality and all the rest of that nonsense they drum into everyone's head at university: life in law enforcement beat that out of me with alacrity. There are indeed many crooks who would be crooks even if they were born into extreme wealth, and infinities of poor people who never turn to crime no matter how desperate they become. My point here is merely that a simple view of the world carries with it great comfort. Shades of gray go cheerfully unacknowledged. Life is now heroes and villains. Good and evil. Right and wrong. Us and them. It's why the WW2 narrative is so sacred to Americans: it appeals to our sense of simplicity. After WW2, things got very blurry indeed, and Americans cannot cope with blurriness. They want everything as clear and sharp as a John Wayne movie, and in essence, that is what all five years of T.J. HOOKER amounted to: five years of watching a walking archetype of traditional American values and attitudes punching one-dimensional bad guys through plate-glass windows.

My father used to say that American politics are pendular: they swing from one extreme to the other, touching on the middle along the way but never resting there. The 70s saw a whole slew of what Sgt. Hooker would describe as "bleeding heart" criminal justice reforms which failed to curb the rising tide of crime. Perhaps unfairly, these measures were blamed for a condition which was neither created by them nor in the final analysis curable through them. Nevertheless, there was a perception that "the system" was coddling criminals, and that harsher medicines were required. The success of T.J. HOOKER was in part a reflection of this fact, for he embodied harsh medicine. You would not, in today's virulently anti-police political climate, be able to make a show even remotely similar to T.J. HOOKER now, but unless I miss my guess, the nationwide shortage of cops will soon bring about another swing of the pendulum, and the climate will change once more, and before long the streets of Burbank -- my old stomping ground -- might once again reverberate with the sound of screeching tires.