T.J. Hooker Season 1 & 2 - DVD Review

I have to confess to getting goose bumps when the first chords of the T.J. Hooker theme song hit my ears again. For me, the Hooker theme song (along with Buck Rogers in the 21st Century) was one of the best, and the intro/credit sequence it accompanied was one of the best as well. The screen freezes on William Shatner staring intently at the camera. The screen turns blue and a gun sight forms on his eye. Cut to Hooker jumping on the hood of a speeding car. Cut to Hooker doing a swan dive off a three story building onto a fruit cart. It's nostalgia that guarantees a smile.

In these days of multi-season plot-lines, its refreshing to revisit old TV shows that consist of stand-alone episodes. Like a juke box, you can throw a DVD in and watch any episode without having to worry about what happened in the previous or subsequent episodes. And with a DVD like the recently released first and second seasons of T.J. Hooker, it’s like a juke box full of songs from the first four Black Sabbath albums. Hooker comes out swinging and doesn’t give an inch in the 27 episodes that constitute the first two seasons.

At the very beginning of the first episode, "The Protectors", Hooker delivers a no holds barred introductory speech to his fresh recruits, including his future partner Romano (Adrian Zmed), underscoring what policing means to Hooker (and what it better mean to them): “There’s a war going on out there on our streets. People are scared and they have a right to be. The body count is high. Homicide, assault, forcible rape, burglary, armed robbery, all up! Street savvy hoods have no fear. Not of the courts, not of prison. When a bust does stick, we house ‘em, give ‘em color tv and their wives on weekends. If that makes sense to you, then you and I are about to have a problem...” Hooker then gives force to his philosophy in hard-hitting episode after hard-hitting episode. In episode four, "Hooker’s War" (which could have provided an alternative title to the whole series), Hooker takes down an entire gun dealing motorcycle gang led by a corrupt cop, Hooker’s old partner (“You let me down, Pete.”) In the season two opener, “A Second Chance", Hooker takes down an old nemesis, Turkish serial killer “The Barber,” (a handlebar-mustached Robert Davi) while re-kindling a near romance from his married days with one of the Barber’s sexy targets. This episode also introduces Stacy Sheridan (Heather Locklear) to the cast, which alone makes it worth watching.

Probably my favorite episode from the three disc set is episode 16, “The Connection." Someone’s been dealing PCP to school kids and Hooker and Romano begin the episode by talking down an elementary school girl from the rooftop of her school. It seems the PCP she’s been given makes her think she “can fly like a butterfly.” The highlight of the episode is the PCP cam which periodically provides the viewer with a view of the world from the perspective of a user high on angel dust. The episode climaxes with the use of the cam when Hooker shoots a barrel of PCP sitting next to the fleeing dust dealer, Tootie. The ruptured barrel sends a healthy dose of the drug into Tootie’s face, giving him a taste of his own medicine and sending him and his vehicle over the side of a pier.

As is likely apparent, Hooker lives in a world refreshingly free of ambiguity. There are police, victimized citizenry and then there are...scumbags (sorry, after extended exposure to the show, one tends to think with...ellipses under the influence of Shatner’s characteristic...phrasing). That underscores one of the big differences between '80s television and television today. Compare a similarly themed show, Rescue Me, to Hooker. Rescue Me is a character-drama which is occasionally interrupted by action. Hooker is a show about action occasionally interrupted by character-drama. A typical episode of the show involves Hooker in more action than a seasoned police detective would likely encounter in a lifetime on the force: Hooker dives between two buildings in pursuit of a perp; Hooker jumps on the hood of a speeding car; Hooker (though armed) wrestles with an armed scumbag to take him down non-lethally. That’s the charm of the show, it dispenses with anything peripheral to Hooker and his one man war on crime and scumbags and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The only thing I would ask for is the rapid release of the other three seasons. It's good to have Hooker walking the beat again. (For one of the best fansites I’ve ever seen, be sure to check out tj-hooker.com, an excellent and entertaining collection of all things Hooker).