Just Like A White Shadow
I finally finished Netflixing all 15 episodes of THE WHITE SHADOW's first season. It's marvelous television, originally airing during the 1978-79 CBS season, and I'm looking forward to the impending DVD release of Season Two.

It reminds me of how diverse network television used to be. Today, when you turn on prime time, all you see are cops and lawyers and doctors, for the most part. Where are the TV series about teachers and basketball coaches and restaurant owners and spies and private detectives and firemen and reporters and, hell, anybody who doesn't wear a badge? There are two shows about psychics who are really cops (MEDIUM and GHOST WHISPERER) and one about a coroner who is really a cop (CROSSING JORDAN, which used to co-star Ken Howard as the lead's father). Two new SF shows, INVASION and the cancelled THRESHOLD, were about cops. There's nothing wrong with many of these shows (and there are a few WEST WINGs and LOSTs and other series out there that are doing something different), but it would be nice to have something else too.

I've always loved cop shows, but the number of stories that, say, LAW & ORDER can tell is finite due to its format and structure. THE WHITE SHADOW used its backdrop of a tough but caring white basketball coach in a Los Angeles ghetto high school and his twelve diverse players to examine social issues of the day. The show also comes from a period when television dramas were about something. I watch and enjoy several contemporary dramas, but few of them really tackle important issues the way THE WHITE SHADOW did (THE PRACTICE was one that did for awhile, until David E. Kelley let the series degenerate into banal shock effects and awkward black comedy).

The latter half of the first season found Coach Ken Reeves (Ken Howard's best role to date) belting one of his students in self-defense, point guard Thorpe (Kevin Hooks, now an in-demand director) dating a white girl with a loose rep, insecure Jew Goldstein's (Ken Michelman) attempt to fit in with his hip black teammates, and a new player (Peter Horton) dealing with his homosexuality.

You may remember that I wrote a bit a few months back about DAVID CASSIDY--MAN UNDER COVER. Well, now I have a full run of the series to look at, the first time I've seen it in many years. Through the first three episodes (I think nine is all they did), it's not really any worse than most typical cop dramas of the period. Sure, the ludicrous title sinks it, but with a better one, probably no one would remember the show at all.

Former PARTRIDGE FAMILY frontman David Cassidy is Dan Shay, a young and, more importantly, young-looking undercover police detective who uses his deceptive looks to infiltrate criminal organizations. In "Baby Makes Three", he becomes a college student in order to be recruited by an oily mastermind who assigns young men and women--strangers to one another--to sleep together and make babies for him to sell to childless couples. "Cage of Steel" found Shay in prison to expose Lobo (Frank Converse), a crime kingpin who ordered the murder of Shay's colleague.

Aside from its title and the dullest opening-title sequence any cop show ever had, DAVID CASSIDY's main stumbling block is...David Cassidy. He looks like he stands about 5'5" (co-star Simon Oakland as his boss, Sgt. Abrams) and certainly doesn't have the sand to walk tall against some of the baddies. In fact, he looked downright fey bashing a chair over the head of a scoundrel in the prison laundry.

It at least possesses solid production values, a good amount of action (something else sadly missing from current crime dramas) and the realistic cinematography common to NBC cop shows. It was executive-produced by David Gerber and produced by Mark Rodgers and Mel Swope, all veterans of POLICE STORY, an anthology series about policemen that was one of the '70s top dramatic series. With a pedigree like that, you wouldn't be wrong to expect more from DAVID CASSIDY--MAN UNDER COVER, but with its title and star, you wouldn't be wrong to expect less either.