Dirty Harry for TV - Sometimes Watchable

JasonDanielBaker

Rugged anti-hero/loose cannon Los Angeles cop Sgt. Rick Hunter (Fred Dryer) didn't get into law enforcement for the meagre paycheck, or the long hours or the instability in his relationships, or the constant threat of death. He got into it because there are some bad guys out there who need to get taken down hard and he is just the bucko ta do it! Hunter's original arrangement with partner Dee Dee McCall (A trigger-happy, Lynda Carter lookalike referred to as "The Brass Cupcake" by her more sexist colleagues) was that they would be partners in name only .

Since neither could keep a partner and they both worked better on their own the arrangement appeared to make sense. They would sign each other's reports and vouch for one another conducting investigations separately.

But each brought out the best in the other making inroads into crime heightening the danger with their very progress. They would come to need each other's presence up until they acknowledged they really were partners.

There was big money in the vigilante cop formula and Hunter which ran for 152 episodes didn't disappoint giving audiences their fix of gritty cop show action. Hunter was essentially "Dirty Harry for TV" and was cast with ex-pro football player Fred Dryer who sort of resembled Clint Eastwood though unlike Eastwood Dryer couldn't act and was balding even more rapidly than Eastwood.

Dryer actually appeared to be affecting an impression of Eastwwod with an angry glare and clenched teeth sneering his lines early in the series. Hunter had the same trigger-happy gunslinger attitude as Dirty Harry and the familiar difficulty dealing with a police bureaucracy obsessed with public relations, red tape and prospects for career advancement.

Hunter also famously had a habit of physically abusing suspects of African-American, Asian and Latino persuasion. Hunter's partner Dee Dee McCall often came close to being raped and murdered on a show which narrowly avoided being classified as the most violent on network TV simply because Miami Vice and the A-Team (NBC took over from ABC as the network with the most violent programming) were still on the air. Think of all of that what you will.

Very little of what was shown in the murder mysteries was all that complicated and the one-dimensional characters never challenged audiences much. The quality of the production actually deteriorated as it went. There was never an examination of light and shade in the characters. There was not the slightest hint of moral subjectivity in the performances. There was merely good destroying evil.

The Hunter character was much like those portrayed by John Wayne or Randolph Scott in Westerns; One who exerts brute force in the same way a bullying thug might but is insulated by his own righteousness. It is of little challenge to an actor and as such Dryer was much more effective early in the series when he was not called upon to emote on camera.

Reviews of this show at the time it came out were almost uniformly negative. Nobody liked this show...With the exception of the actual public.

score /10

JasonDanielBaker 4 September 2012

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2669087/