Today, we spotlight a classic Hill Street Blues episode that shows a Good Samaritan fall victim to the system.
This is “All the Best Things,” a spotlight on the best TV episodes, movies, albums, etc.
This is a Year of Great TV Episodes, where every day this year, we’ll take a look at great TV episodes. Note that I’m not talking about “Very Special Episodes” or episodes built around gimmicks, but just “normal” episodes of TV shows that are notable only because of how good they are.
All this month, I’ll be spotlighting great Black-centric TV episodes.
When it comes to Black-centric episodes, Hill Street Blues is a bit of a tricky show. A. It’s one of my all-time favorite TV series, B. It did well with Black topics, particularly for the era, and two of the most heroic characters on the series, Bobby Hill (Michael Warren) and Neal Washington (Taurean Blacque), were both Black men. However, it was also an ensemble show with mostly a White cast. So I feel a BIT weird spotlighting it this month, but like I said, the show DID handle Black topics better than most shows, so I think it wouldn’t be unreasonable to feature a Hill Street Blues episode this month.
The episode I’m choosing is one with the great Black character actor, Art Evans, in a major role. Something that Hill Street Blues did very well was often turning the spotlight for an episode on a guest star who played an “ordinary” citizen who was suddenly thrown into the middle of a criminal situation, and then seeing how they handled it (there’s a classic episode where Henry Goldblume (Joe Spano) tries in vain to help a woman suffering from domestic abuse, and when that ends tragically, he throws his whole body and soul into protecting a local grocer whose son killed a gang member in self-defense, and who refuses to be driven out of the city he has called home for his whole life. Here, though, it is almost more demented (although obviously much less tragic than someone being murdered, of course), as there is no reason why this guy should be involved with the cops in this episode at all!
Season 2’s “Chipped Beef,” from 1981, sees Evans playing William Teacher, a truck driver who gets into a traffic accident due to a guy who is high as a kite driving through a stop sign. When Officers Hill (Warren) and Renko (Charles Haid) arrive on the scene, Teacher is arguing with a White woman who had hit Teacher from the other side when he is hit by the druggie’s car and pushed forward into the traffic, so she hit him. She’s being EXTREMELY disrespectful to this poor truck driver who didn’t do anything wrong. She’s calling him “boy” and it is so messed up.
Hill and Renko start to sort things out (making sure to tell the lady to cool it with her BS), with Renko pulling the druggie from his car. Renko is then distracted by some lookie-loos checking out the accident, and he misses that the druggie has picked up a pipe. The druggie goes to brain Renko, but Teacher shouts at Renko to look out, and the officer misses possibly being killed. Renko is obviously very grateful to Teacher, but it turns out that when they check everyone’s insurance, Teacher’s driver’s insurance is out of date because of a company snafu.
Grateful for Teacher’s help, Renko allows him to bring the insurance info by the station later that afternoon. However, when Teacher’s information is later entered into the system, it turns out that he has an open warrant out from Kansas City. So Detectives LaRue (Kiel Martin) and Washington (Taurean Blacque) head over to pick him up. They catch him trying to leave town with his family. The crowd there is not happy about the cops trying to bust a decent family man like Teacher over some nonsense, and things look like they might turn ugly, but Teacher tells the other people to calm down and let the cops do their jobs.
So now all of the cops pretty much love Teacher, they think he’s citizen of the year, as he has now saved Renko AND possibly LaRue and Washington, but he still has that warrant, so he’s in a holding cell. Teacher explains that it is from some trumped up assault charge where it kept getting rescheduled, forcing him to miss work and lose jobs as he kept coming to court for the constantly delayed hearings. He eventually just gave up and left KC and started a new life here (they never say where “here” IS on Hill Street Blues, but it’s definitely not a coastal city…even though you’ll occasionally accidentally see a palm tree).
Renko pleads with Captain Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti) to cut Teacher a break, but Furillo turns him down. In the end, though, Furillo throws his men a bone by “losing” Teacher’s paperwork, letting him go. Evans is so charming in the episode that you absolutely feel for the guy and want him to have a happy ending.
Washington also has an interesting subplot where he discovers that his girlfriend, Jill (the gorgeous Lynn Whitfield), who told him she was out of town, was actually out on the town with some other guy. They have a heart-to-heart, and end up reconciling. It’s sweet.
There are various other plots, of course, including a compelling bit where newly transferred Officer Jerry Nash (Stephen McHattie), who knew Hill from a previous precinct that they both worked, uses excessive force, but Hill convinces Renko and Officers Lucy Bates (Betty Thomas) and Joe Coffey (Ed Molinaro) to cover for Nash. Furillo breaks them down, though, and gets to the truth, leading to Nash quitting the force.
Okay, if I’m going to have 321 more of these (and 13 more this month), I could use suggestions, so feel free to email me at brian@poprefs.com!
