I’ve had a string of better luck lately working my butt off, and in the background I have been binge watching a little 70s icon, called Starsky and Hutch.
Anyone reading this knows I am a 70s car nut, and Starsky and Hutch has the definitive 70s muscle car, the iconic 2B Bright Red Gran Torino with a black outlined white vector stripe, and a set of Ansen Sprint aluminum slotted mag wheels.
The car is what initially drew me in, and is what a lot of people remember from the show,but it quickly stood out on its own as more than just having a cool classic car from the period.
20+ hours into this show, and Starsky and Hutch has proven to be a smart, progressive, action packed, and morally righteous show that wasn’t afraid to show the darker side of crime.
In an age of identity politics, authoritarian law enforcement, and hyper violence, this show manages to stand up to the test of time I wasn’t expecting.
I watch plenty of older shows from the 90s and maybe a few from the late 80s, but I’ve never really dabbled in anything from the mid 70s. I’ve seen documentaries and retrospectives on the era in television, but was never able to associate the historical information to anything tangible.
However, after watching Starsky and Hutch, I feel like I can connect a lot of what I have learned about 70s television, and break it down in terms of what this show does great, but also how it is held back by the standards of its era.
Let me first and foremost. The show is a product of its time, but surprisingly holds up very well in terms of modern viewpoints on sex, race, gender, crime, vice, bureaucracy.
The show manages to always show every element of a criminal underworld without major bias. For example, there is a full episode dedicated to a murderer targeting strippers at a bar. The bar isn’t dirty or skeevy. The bar owner isn’t a pervert or a dirtbag. The bar owner ends up being this sex positive progressive guy trying to look out for people he treats like family. He grieves for the workers he loses, and works with the detectives to solve the case.
At no point did the show lecture me with “stripper bad”.
However, on the flip side, there are some episodes that feature those skeevy scumbag business owners who take advantage of the sex workers or employees. They do show both sides of the coin, and even then, the sex workers are respected.
There’s plenty of drug users in the show, and it is one of the less progressive views in the show by today’s standards, but they never treat drug addicts like inhuman people. They call them “junkies”, and don’t really ever lecture us about how they all should be saved, or suffer from a disease.
They don’t necessarily hassle people about petty drugs like weed, but they do several coke and heroin busts in the show.
This show still has elements of the drug wars, but doesn’t come close to being Reagan level preachy.
On the flip side, there are some fantastic and heartfelt episodes featuring characters getting clean after being drugged or addicted. However, these great episodes are limited by the dated broadcast television formatting of the era, which I will expand upon further down.
Before we get to that, there’s still a few other great highlights this show touched on, even while being a product of its time.
There’s an episode where 3 long-time detectives steal a kilo of cocaine during a bust. The drug lord knows about the stolen goods, due to an inside department informant, but doesn’t know who. Everyone thinks it’s Starsky and Hutch, but it ends up being the veteran long-established officers.
There’s tons of episodes featuring police corruption, and there is a moral line Starsky and Hutch never cross. Now, there’s not really any episodes, thus far, of police brutality or racism, but there is an episode where Starsky shot a kid.
Starsky is chasing a masked robber, but instead of giving up, the robber draws a gun. Starsky shoots, and kills the robber, but it is revealed it was only an underaged black kid.
He is then accused of shooting an unarmed kid, but take note, race was never mentioned here.
Starsky is wrought with guilt, and ready to resign over the incident, even after being cleared after a lengthy trial.
After battling his demons, he confronts the mother of the son he killed, and promises to get the other robber who put that gun in his hand.
It’s a really heavy episode for the era, and one of the better ones I’ve seen thus far. The only issue is that it clearly makes Starsky innocent. There was no mistake in the show that the kid pulled a gun. We also don’t touch on any socio-economic issues that I’m sure the single black mom and son were dealing with.
The show is great, but it definitely skates around some heavy handed issues that police have always had, and gets called out for today.
Racially and sexually I think it’s pretty hip for the era, and still holds up great. One of the supporting characters, Huggy Bear, is a black business owner. Captain Dolbey is played by veteran black actor, Bernie Hamilton.
Bad guys and good guys are always a solid mix of races and sexes. I haven’t ran in to any homophobic or transphobic episodes. Hell, Starsky and Hutch do some pretty “gay” things for a show from the time. They cook and care for eachother. They’re more like a married couple at times, with emotional support being a huge factor between their relationship. It’s a true bromance that television and film didn’t even touch on in the 80s.
I’ve seen all of Miami Vice, and Crokett and Tubb’s relationship isn’t as close as Starsky and Hutch.
Women haven’t played a massive role in the main cast of the show, aside from very femine roles. You got an undercover female detective in one episode, which was cool. You had a female business owner in another. It’s no Brooklyn-Nine-Nine, let’s just say that. If I get some awesome female driven episodes, I’ll have to revise this.
Oh, and there hasn’t been any racist language or dated jokes either. There was an episode where Starsky and Hutch were undercover as Texan drug buyers, and Hutch was calling a black dealer, “boy”. I know “boy” is sort of a generic term, but it felt racially charged.
In a 2010 Supreme Court case, they ruled in favor of an employee after his employer referred to him, a black male, as “boy”.
The show was obviously making his undercover persona racist, but I don’t know if that would work today on TV.
If I find anything that stands out to me as weird or dated, I’ll update this write-up.
This brings me to the most important section, where I tie this show to the era of television it lived in.
Television was getting syndicated, and many production studios opted to have their shows wrap up in a single episode for viewer simplicity and rerun potential.
Police procedurals were already a well established thing as well, and Starsky and Hutch is technically no different.
This dated era of media structure gives Starsky and Hutch its worst quality.
The lack of character development and continuity…
One of the most heavy and wells written episodes features Hutch getting kidnapped and forcibly addicted to heroin until he revealed the location of a witness. That is some extremely serious subject matter. Starsky gets to Hutch, and hides him from getting reported until the withdrawal goes away.
You watch Hutch crawl out from darkness as Starsky stays by his side. In a matter of days, Hutch is clean, they catch the bad guy, and the show is over with NO mention of it at all later.
Hey Hutch, remember being kidnapped and fucking ADDICTED TO HEROIN.
That procedural syndicated one-shot nature of the episode ruined what heavy hitting emotional impact it could have had. I’m not saying modern television that draws out plot points an entire season are amazing, but if you are going to wrap up a really serious matter like that, please reference it later.
Television really didn’t start doing that until the 80’s, and then it became more of a mainstay in the 90s.
Starsky and Hutch doesn’t suffer from a dated premise, a dated setting, or dated social/political/economic views.
Oh no, it suffers from dated television industry formatting that the entire run of the series has to abide by. Granted, the show does bring back minor characters from previous episodes to help them, but it’s more so a nod to the audience,and less any kind of essential plotpoint carried over. Oh, and I’m sure it saves on casting costs to just reuse an actor again in a different episode.
On the positive side, the show hasn’t contradicted itself or rewritten continuity as of yet. They just haven’t explicitly acknowledged some major injuries, villians, or situations in later episodes.
It’s still fun as hell to watch, and what they manage to pack into a 50 minute episode is impressive.
The plots are very smart, with several running at once in a single episode. They have complex layers to them that will involve getting several bad guys and chasing witnesses to get to a main villain. There is plenty of smart and witty problem solving, mixed with awesome cheesy 70s action. There’s plenty of car chases, shootouts, and one-liners to make anyone smile.
They also have some really fun experimental episodes that throw a wrench into the usual formula. Granted they aren’t as wild as some of the best television episodes ever made (I’m looking at you, Community), they are still fresh and fun.
To wrap this entire retrospective/writeup, I wanted to say that the show aged much better than I expected. I think anyone at any age and demographic could watch this and really enjoy themselves. It’s eye candy for 70s fans, classic car fans, action movie fans, and police procedural fans. It really touches a lot of points for someone to find a bit of joy.
The show still has a fanbase, that isn’t as old as you would think. It’s pretty diverse, and that red Gran Torino is iconic in the car community.
I think the show would be fantastic for a period correct remake. The show had this great mix of serious and lightheartedness that it would need to capture. They weren’t hardboiled noir level cops. The 70s aesthetics are hilarious, cool, and colorful. I think proper continuity, character growth, and a little more modern television edge would be the right formula.
Listen, I know my reading audience just enough. Some of you guys are my conservative car loving crowd. Some may be more liberal university and gamedev colleagues. Some may just be a passerby or employer.
Regardless of your political opinions on police and authority figures, Starsky and Hutch offers a pretty fun and inoffensive adventure with two morally righteous dudes looking out for each other, and putting the bad guys away.
Really it’s like your favorite Marvel superhero or action movie.
I love edgy media. I love morally ambiguous characters, anti-heros, and hyper violence.
However, I love Starsky and Hutch, and it’s none of those qualities. It doesn’t have an edge on it. It’s smooth, groovy, and morally clear. Sometimes I like that change of pace. I have no idea why, but it just works. It’s the comfort food media I didn’t know I needed, but I admit it would be really cool to remake with some tweaks. Hell, do an animated series while the original actors are still around?
