Starsky and Hutch

A popular detective show during the 1970s, Starsky and Hutch (1975-1979) brought violence on television to the forefront of national debate in that decade. Shot in Los Angeles, but set in a city that was never named, Starsky and Hutch —unlike previous detective shows—featured a shootout and a car chase in each episode. The show starred dark haired Paul Michael Glaser as the wisecracking, street smart David Starsky and blue-eyed blonde David Soul as the educated, soft-spoken Ken "Hutch" Hutchinson. Every week, the two undercover police officers came in contact with big city criminals, drug dealers, prostitutes, mobsters, cultists, and murderers, and managed to catch the bad guys in less than 60 minutes while wearing skin tight bell bottom pants. Drawing inspiration from hit movies like The French Connection, the capture of the criminal always required a car chase, which featured Starsky's prize possession, the "red tomato," a 1974 Ford Torino with a white racing stripe.

When the show debuted on ABC in 1975, much was written about the chemistry between the two lead actors. Starsky and Hutch was one of the first shows where men could be friends and openly care about each other. These two young, hip, bachelor plain clothes detectives were as vulnerable as they were tough. Not afraid to hug each other, they were a far cry from the cardboard Joe Fridays and Mike Stones that preceded them, and the relationship between the two men had sensitive qualities rarely—if ever—seen before on television.

The show also featured blaxploitation film star Antonio Vargas as the flamboyant Huggy Bear, a con man who moonlighted as a police informant, and had the fashion sense of a pimp. Starsky and Hutch's boss was Captain Harold Dobey, played by Bernie Hamilton. Captain Dobey, a member of the old guard, often butted heads with his two new-breed detectives about the manner in which police work should be done. The gruff-but-lovable Dobey was a glimpse of what would later become a staple in many television cop dramas—the almost one dimensional African-American police boss. The use of the African-American actor as a supervisor in these kinds of dramas became very popular in the 1990s, with the likes of Homicide's Lieutenant Al Giardello, NYPD Blue's Lieutenant Arthur Fancy and Law and Order's Lieutenant Anita Van Buren.

William Blinn created the show. Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg acted as executive producers and produced 92 episodes of Starsky and Hutch, which ended its television run in 1979. Glaser and Soul directed several episodes of the show themselves, which was unusual for actors at the time. In subsequent decades, the practice of stars performing directing and producing duties would become more common.

Starsky and Hutch's influence can be seen in TV cop shows in which the partners have a very close relationship. But the good looking hipster cops were descendants of television's The Mod Squad (1968-1973), and they were part of a post-Serpico spate of cop narratives, including Baretta and Toma, which depicted law enforce-ment's battle with the dark side of America's crime-ridden urban landscape. The contentious relationship they had with their superior has become a staple in cop dramas. The violence in the show, shocking in 1975, seems tame by later standards.

In the late 1990s, though it had been off the air for a couple of decades and had not been a terribly popular network choice for reruns, Starsky and Hutch surfaced in a rather odd way. An August 18, 1997 New York Times article by Amy Harmon about fan fiction, an Internet phenomenon in which fans write and post new episodes of their favorite shows, mentions Starsky and Hutch as a favorite of the "slash" genre writers and readers. In "slash" fan fiction, the sexual orientation of the main characters has been changed, and in 1999, there were about a dozen web pages devoted to the homoerotic exploits of the two detectives.

—Joyce Linehan