Two years before Hill Street Blues redefined the cop genre as a mesh of overlapping storylines and workaday frustrations, Aaron Spelling's Starsky & Hutch capped a five-year run (1975-1979) portraying LA's finest as madly heroic creatures of reckless determination and physicality. The Complete First Season reminds us how startlingly brutal this primetime series could be while maintaining a delightful, often incongruous, self-deprecating humor.
From the series pilot on, associates and excellent pals Starsky and Hutch work a fine line between predator and prey, relentlessly pursuing suspects while in addition snared by crime chieftains or short-sighted superiors. In "The Fix," Hutch's secret romance together with the former girlfriend of a mafia boss (Robert Loggia) outcomes in the lawman's kidnapping and forced addiction to heroin. Similarly, in "A Coffin for Starsky," a mad chemist injects the wisecracking cop together with a slow-acting but lethal poison. "Jo-Jo," written by Michael Mann, locates our guys at loggerheads together with federal officers over a dumb deal the G-Men do together with a serial rapist.
The 23 episodes in this set are all fun, if sometimes shocking, viewing. Expect every character to get as much abuse as he dishes out. Still, the comic sight of Starsky and Hutch (in "Death Notice") trying to conduct business amidst busy strippers is well worth the surrounding violence. --Tom Keogh