The Rookies – ‘Blue Christmas’ (1974)

               I usually dislike clever nutshelling of pieces of entertainment by describing them as combinations of other works. “Monk” is ‘Rain Man’ meets “Sherlock Holmes,” that sort of thing. It’s usually lazy thinking. The problem is that “The Rookies” really is “Adam-12” meets “The Mod Squad” because that was literally the intention behind the producers, combining the supposed realism of the former with the melodrama and focus on contemporary issues of the latter. I really should have known what to expect when I saw Aaron Spelling’s name in the opening credits. We might as well dig into his background because I’m going to be watching quite a few shows with his involvement this month.

              I’ve mentioned prolific producers before in Jack Webb and Quinn Martin, but it’s no shame to either of them to say there really is no comparison between their careers and that of Aaron Spelling. He was hugely successful in four different decades (depending how generous you feel like being you could argue for five) and was unironically referred to as ‘the king of television’ by people who wouldn’t usually write such a stock phrase. He got his start as an actor with minor roles in shows such as “I Led Three Lives” and “Gunsmoke.” After he sold a script to “The Jane Wyman Show” in 1956 he started working full time as a writer on the Western anthology series “Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theatre,” which is such a great title. He then helped produce the Western detective series “Burke’s Law” for Four Star television, a show which was one of the first to rely on a guest-star each week. You can draw a direct line from this series to later Spelling efforts such as “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island.”

              In 1965 he set up Thomas-Spelling Productions along with comedian Danny Thomas. In addition to “The Danny Thomas Show” they made “The Guns of Will Sonnett,” “Rango,” and their breakout hit “Mod Squad.” They also produced a number of insane sounding tv movies, such as 1969’s “The Pigeon” starring Sammy Davis Jr., the tagline for which reads, ‘He's been beaten up, almost run over by a car, accused of an inter-racial romance, and beaten up again...all for a client he doesn't even have.’ There was also 1970’s ‘The Love War’ starring Lloyd Bridges and Angie Dickson, the summary of which is ‘Aliens from two planets at war come to Earth, assume human form and continue their battle.’ The latter is up on YouTube, the latter is up on one of those sketchy Russian streaming sites. You’re welcome.

              In 1972 Spelling set up a different company, Spelling-Goldberg Productions along with Leonard Goldberg, then an executive at Screen Gems.  Their first show out of the gate was “The Rookies” and it would later produce “Charlie’s Angels,” “Fantasy Island,” and a bunch of tv movies including “Satan’s School for Girls.” Another company of his, Spelling Productions, later to be renamed Spelling Television, would go on to make “Dynasty,” “Beverly Hills 90210,” and some unexpectedly highbrow efforts like the 1993 HBO film adaptation of “And the Band Played On.” To give you some idea of the size of his influence in the industry of the entire list of 31 different television shows I’ll be looking at this month he was directly involved in six of them.

What a lovely decade.

              With all this talk about Spelling, though, I’m in danger of overshadowing the actual creator of the show, Rita Lakin. Lakin was the story editor and head writer of “The Mod Squad” and has the story credit for the tv movie-of-the-week pilot episode of “The Rookies” which was broadcast on March 7, 1972. She also created a couple of other, shorter-lived series such as the prime-time soap “Flamingo Road” and the medical drama “Nightingales.” According to the wiki she’s credited with 464 episodes of television, eight tv movies of the week, and two miniseries. She also wrote a series of mystery novels starting with Getting Old is Murder in 2005.

              The pilot movie had the same basic premise as the show but with some cast changes. The movie featured five brand new officers while the show pared it down to three, ditching the characters of Jared Whitman and Kevin Lassiter. The other three were kept, those being Mike Danko as played by Sam Melville, Terry Webster as played by Georg Stanford Brown, and William Gillis as played by Michael Ontkean. Ontkean left after the second season and his character was replaced by Chris Owens as played by Bruce Fairbairn. The character of Mike Danko was the only married officer and in the pilot his wife, Jill Danko, was played by Jennifer Billingsley, but was recast for the series by a pre-“Charlie’s Angels” Kate Jackson. Their commanding officer, Eddie Ryker, was played in the film by the great Darren McGavin but was recast for the show with Gerald S. O’Loughlin.

              Functionally the show was just “Adam-12” with another half an hour added to the episode to focus on the personal troubles of the cast members. The premise of the show was to follow a number of rookie cops just out of the academy as they experienced life as beat cops, all the while being sternly mentored by their boss Lt. Ryker. The idea was to focus on a new generation of young people entering the service with different backgrounds from previous cop shows, involving such things as the Vietnam War and civil rights protests, while also digging into contemporary social issues that the Webb-produced shows were completely uninterested in. Format-wise this meant the show could continue the more-or-less random series of incidents approach to episodes based on supposedly real police cases but could also have the kind of soapy interpersonal conflicts that Spelling’s productions would come to be known for. It was a decent enough formula that worked for four years and 93 episodes. On a side note this is one of the few successful Spelling productions that doesn’t seem to be available for streaming in any way. It also only received a DVD release for the first two seasons so unfortunately the third-season episode rip I’m working from was obviously taken from a relatively recent broadcast, channel overlays and everything. I’ve worked with worse.

              This particular episode takes the format I’d described above, one half random vignettes and one half interpersonal melodrama, and separates the cast very neatly between the two. It’s Christmas Eve and the department has allowed all of the married officers to take the night off to spend with their families while the others have to work OT to make up for it. This means that cast members Mike and Jill Danko get to spend the episode dealing with her never before (and never again) mentioned sister and niece and their family drama while officers Webster and Owens get to have a normal episode of the show with a Santa hat tossed on top. We also continue the tradition of seeing LA in wintertime, and I have to admit that all of the California jokes I complained about in those old celebrity Christmas specials are starting to make a little more sense.

              Let’s focus on the family drama first because while it’s interesting it doesn’t really have much to say about the role of cop shows in contemporary culture. It’s mostly just a pretty standard episode of 70’s soapy ‘issue’ television. Jill’s sister and niece, Amanda and Tori (they don’t have credited last names), are visiting for the holiday as Amanda has recently separated from her husband Paul. This makes both of them fairly depressed about it and so Mike and Jill spend the episode trying to cheer them up. This eventually involves roping in their stuffy and prickly boss, Lt. Ryker, into playing Santa for Tori’s benefit. He eventually agrees but in the end it’s the errant husband Paul who turns up in the red suit for a supposedly joyous family reunion.

              For anyone else who perked up at the niece’s name, yep, Tori Spelling was born on May 16, 1973, about a year and a half before this episode aired. I think it was just a production in-joke or maybe even a complete coincidence, I can’t find any real parallels between the episode and anything in Aaron Spelling’s life. What’s interesting about this part of the episode is that it’s about the concept of divorce and not in any way about this specific divorce since they never actually say what the conflict between Amanda and her husband is. It’s implied that he works too much and she mentions that he’s been difficult to get in contact with since they officially separated about a week before the episode starts but that’s as detailed as it gets. Mike and Jill are hopeful that they’ll reconcile and neither says anything bad about him, so it’s at least implied that it’s nothing too bad. In a way I’m not surprised that none of these people have last names because they’re not really characters, they’re just placeholders for the ideas of Wife, Kid, and Husband. The show bends over backwards to avoid giving any specifics and even things that are problematic on their face aren’t seen as problems, such as that joyful family reunion taking place at around one o’clock in the morning because that’s when Lt. Ryker found the guy lurking outside in the hallway of the apartment building. The show isn’t actually interested in having an episode that looks at divorce, it wants to have A Divorce Episode. I found the simple assertion that any couple having problems just need a few days apart to realize how much they love each other somewhat lacking.

Pfft, silly woman, people in their forties can't be sexy!

              The other half of the show is the usual series of wacky hijinks for the other two series regulars with occasional tonal whipsaws as it randomly decides to work in some death and darkness to keep the audience on its toes. The first stop on their shift is answering an alert at a bar when a guy quietly drinking had suddenly started yelling and throwing stuff around. After they calm him down he apologizes and says he just got laid off two years shy of his pension and couldn’t handle going home to break the news to his family. The owner of the bar decides not to press charges since nobody got hurt and the guy’s so relieved he thinks he can go home to face his family now. This section is fine. In the next vignette they spot a kid working as a charity Santa on a rough street corner and stop to talk to him. He says he’s filling in for his dad who took a few bucks from the kitty to go buy “his medicine.” I didn’t realize that any shows ever actually used that euphemism for drinking, so points for that I guess. They escort him home off screen. In the next one they respond to a distress call from some other officers who are dealing with a crazy, shouty guy in a church. They quickly restrain him but one of the officers is extremely distraught, shakily talking about the things the guys was saying, about how he’d killed God and other blasphemous things. I was confused about why he was so upset until he and the camera dramatically swing around to show a priest shot dead on the floor, DUN!

              Next they respond to a report of a prowler by entering a little old lady’s apartment with guns drawn and pointed forward, which I’m going to question as a policy. They even keep the guns out as the woman pokes her head around a doorframe. It quickly becomes apparent that she was depressed about not getting a phone call from her son  who lives in New York, where it’s already 1am. They comfort her a little and as they’re leaving her son does indeed call, which is nice. Next they pull over and arrest a drunk driver in an uncharacteristically aggressive way, only revealing at the very end of the scene that the guy had just run someone over a couple of blocks before, DUN! Then they answer a disturbance call at a low-rent strip club, which you could show on network tv by 1974, apparently, which quickly devolves into a joke about how old the exotic dancer is. Nothing interesting to say here.

Sure, end on a slasher killer, why not.

              The last segment’s a doozy, though. The two officers respond to another call about a prowler, this time outside of a sorority house. They quickly roust a middle-aged guy hiding in the bushes who admits he was peeping. He starts insinuating to the officers that he just likes to watch, like with those movies, and that it’s no big deal. I guess they can’t say the word ‘porno’ just yet but they make it clear that’s what he’s talking about, and as his insinuations gets sleazier and sleazier the officers get more and more uncomfortable. One of them rustles around in the bushes and finds a sack containing gloves, a ski mask, and a big butcher’s knife, which means that one of the final segments of this Christmas episode shows the main characters interrupting a psychopath just before the start of an incidence of spree killing. I’ll point out that seminal proto-slasher film ‘Black Christmas’ was released in the US just four days after this episode broadcast, so I guess something was in the air that year.

              The show ends on a happy note, with the weary cops returning to their shared apartment the morning after their shift to find Mike and Jill already there with breakfast waiting for them. They explain that after Amanda and her husband reconciled they let them stay the night at their apartment and thus had to find somewhere else to crash. The breakfast is by way of apology. Webster drops his usual wiseguy persona to give everyone a heartfelt “Merry Christmas” and the episode ends on a group hug.

              This was not a bad episode of television, but it’s also not something I have any interest in watching again. Everyone on the show was fine with the possible exception of Bruce Fairbairn as officer Owens, who I thought was a little weak. The only actor that popped for me was Georg Stanford Brown as officer Webster, and while it’s hardly a shame that he later moved into becoming a very successful television director I feel that he really could have anchored a more grounded dramatic show if given the opportunity. While it only lasted four seasons and has basically been forgotten by the larger public I can tell when a show has decent bones. This is the kind of ensemble crime show that’s going to show up again and again as I go through this month and it’s a bit of a shame that it’s as inaccessible as it currently is.