Despite winter leaving this region a week ago, it was another chillier-than-usual late night in this part of Southern California. I was working the night watch out of the TV-shows-on-DVD division of Movie Gazette Online in front of my 46-inch widescreen TV. The boss is Rebecca Wright. My name’s Aronsky. I carry a pen and a notepad for watching and reviewing DVDs.
A case had come in of two cops patrolling the streets of Los Angeles, an Officer Pete Malloy (Martin Milner) and an Officer Jim Reed (Kent McCord). They were on their 7th and final run, overseen by Webb, a friend to law enforcement with his Dragnet efforts, and emergency personnel with Emergency!. The case, Adam-12: The Final Season, was presented by a pop culture DVD outfit called Shout! Factory. Law-abiding people, at least, with a clear love for the programs that people liked to watch in their childhoods and wanted to see again. Without them, Adam-12 might never have continued to live on.
Webb, also a perpetrator in the Copper Clapper Caper with a partner named Johnny Carson, co-created Adam-12 with R.A. Cinader, and obviously kept close watch on it, just as he did with his other productions, including three feature films. In this series, save for the pilot and an episode he directed in 1974, Webb left the directing and writing to others, though his influence is apparent throughout, as the plots and dialogue get straight to the point. Adam-12 is not meant to satirize Los Angeles or show more than necessary. It’s just Los Angeles. And Officer Malloy and Officer Reed are just two of the myriad police officers assigned to protect it and its people.
Adam-12: The Final Season is, just like previous seasons, an historical time capsule. Besides various backlot shots at Universal Studios, Malloy and Reed stop at various streets and neighborhoods in Los Angeles that are a close study of city architecture in all its forms, in parking garages and houses and somewhat disturbing helicopter shots of Reed and Malloy’s patrol car which pan up to reveal just how far houses stretch to the skyline of downtown Los Angeles. One wonders how anyone can live there and hope to find anything to claim as their own. It seems to me that all one can claim of Los Angeles as a resident is their job and their family and their hobbies. Los Angeles doesn’t have a clear identity. It can be anything, which makes it so attractive for Adam-12 and its progeny, such as The Shield, and movies like L.A. Story and Collateral.
There are two aspects of Adam-12 that stand out solemnly for inspection, a testament to the care Webb put into his shows. First are the performances not only by Milner and McCord, but also William Boyett as Sgt. MacDonald, and guest actors that run the range from being there in the hope of getting more visible roles (the actor in the “Roll Call” episode who robs pizza deliverymen of the money they carry, who Reed encounters in playing a pizza deliveryman in order to arrest the guy), or simply being a part of this fictional, yet not so fictional, Los Angeles, such as Don Diamond, who, in the episode “Lady Beware,” plays a supermarket clerk who tells Reed and Malloy of someone stealing things from the supermarket. Diamond’s clerk is just part of what makes Los Angeles run each day. He’s one of the good, hardworking people for whom Reed and Malloy are there to do the necessary work of enforcing the law every day.
The second aspect of Adam-12 that stands out is how so much is packed into one episode. For example, in “Excessive Force,” which involves the search for a missing six-year-old girl, Malloy chases down the man who took her, which takes a few minutes, and by the time Malloy catches up to him and slams him against a wall and nearly chokes him in pure anger, 18 minutes have passed. Even though that’s not the entire story from the beginning of that episode, it’s still a lot in a short amount of time, which keeps the viewer fully in thrall to the action. It’s all in service to portraying the reality of the Los Angeles police department. There may be some dramatic flourishes taken, but one can easily imagine, and hope for, cops like Reed and Malloy patrolling their beat in Los Angeles.
The biggest change in the season, despite such storylines as hostage-taking, and an old man who doesn’t know the world he’s come back to after 30 years in prison and just wants to go back, is the two-part series finale, “Something Worth Dying For,” in which Reed decides to join the narcotics unit in order to try to prevent more cases like Sparky, a drugged-out woman (Sian Barbara Allen in a fascinating performance). At first, the toughest part of the episode is Norman Alden as Sgt. John Hardwicke, since it was hard to determine where I knew that voice from, though the answer appears to be Lou in Back to the Future. Then it’s the whiplash change in style, with Reed as part of this narcotics unit, and then deciding in part two whether to be an investigator in order to keep regular hours and quell the worries of his wife, who’s unhappy about his job. Webb, the actors, the writers, the directors, and everyone else involved show these drug cases to be what the future holds for law enforcement circa 1975. These cases, while they have been there before, will likely become more prevalent. It’s dirty, it’s dangerous, and it’s heartbreaking. But in a city like Los Angeles, with such a large population within its borders, it’s to be expected.
The final scene of the series is appropriate, honoring the heroism of the Los Angeles police department and, by extension, other police departments throughout the country. Though there are instances in the season in which watching Reed and Malloy’s day-to-day work feels tiresome, it is what’s necessary for the safety of a city, and it has always been shown with the greatest of respect throughout the run of the series. It’s disappointing that no extra features are included, no audio commentaries by Milner and McCord, but perhaps this Los Angeles of the ‘70s needs no voices thinking back to that time. It’s here for us, in all its realities, to see it however we wish.
