S.W.A.T. - The First Season

Author's Rating:  

I grew up during the 1970s, watching a lot of TV crime shows, but never caught an episode of S.W.A.T. Apparently, it ran for only one calendar year, spanning two TV seasons. I ended up with the Season 1 DVDs by accident and only recently watched them. I was very pleasantly surprised. This was no silly, insubstantial Starsky & Hutch, another show I had not seen until recently but had a very different reaction to.

I do not remember seeing Steve Forrest in other shows or liking what I did see. He made a believer out of me in his role on S.W.A.T. He does a terrific job as the strong, smart, dedicated, professional leader of the team. Rod Perry is also a stand-out. As Forrest's highly skilled, trusted right-hand man, Perry has great chemistry with Forrest and is very good at playing both light and serious scenes (though the twang in how he says his boss's nickname "Hondo" can be distracting; and where does the nickname come from? The bare-bones disk set, which does not even have chapter breaks within each episode, omits the pilot episode). James Coleman conveys quiet strength and expertise as the team's sniper.

The professionalism, training, equipment, teamwork, and seriousness with which the men approach their work, reinforced by the dramatic opening and powerful theme music, capture the imagination. In the show, the police engage in training exercises, test new machinery, are pro-active (as when an armored car is stolen and the team immediately begins trying to figure out how and where it might be used), and outsmart and out-maneuver, as well as out-gun, the villains. The show uses the technique of featuring multiple crimes in one episode, which is also used to good effect in all of the various CSI series. Somewhat like "Old West" feel of The A-Team, there is real fun and interest in seeing S.W.A.T. go up against the bad guys, who usually have skills and elaborate plans of their own.

Showing a specially skilled S.W.A.T. team gave Aaron Spelling and people behind the series a standard of quality they had to aim for, which was good discipline and pushed them to more serious work. Spelling should have embraced this, rather than reportedly disowning the show, preferring pure fluff programming. The best episode in the 13-show set is probably the one in which the team protects a mobster turned government witness in the hospital. Both the police and the criminals are smart, there is suspense and a twist, and Mark Shera shines, with an opportunity to show feeling in serious, well-crafted scenes. The episodes about a jewelry theft from a beauty pageant and a coin heist are also above-average.

It is easy to criticize the show. Of course, there are repetitious gun-rack-emptying, running, and driving scenes when a call comes in and the team has to "roll." But routine and procedure are part of police work.

Setting the series in the fictional "WCPD" does not help authenticity. The plain, baggy, baseball-style caps that the men wore may be authentic, but it does not help the dramatic effect of the opening freeze-frame shots to have Mark Shera's and Robert Urich's deadly serious but small-looking faces peeking out from under the caps like mice. Sometimes the series and Shera seem to be trying too hard to show off his character as the team clown. Urich is completely wasted by the series, coming off as wooden, self-conscious, forced, and extraneous. Rose Marie's appearances as a hawker of cheap pastries and sandwiches at the police station, obviously meant to provide some color and humor, can get tiresome.

The dialogue and interactions can be stiff and the characters and stories shallow. This is often true of scenes with Forrest at home with the wife and kids and of the story-lines with "personal" angles. Like Hawaii Five-O, S.W.A.T., at its best, is proof of a basic point. If a show is done professionally, it can be entertaining to watch the characters for what they do on the job, which is how the public and peers see them in real life, and there is no need to constantly delve into personal subplots.

Two shows are particularly disappointing. In "Time Bomb" (included in the disk set as a first season episode but according to episode guides not aired until the second season), the criminal's plan never gets off the ground and much time is wasted on chase scenes around a movie studio backlot. In "Blind Man's Bluff," Forrest is wounded in an unconvincing, sloppy way; he responds unprofessionally and out of character; his replacement appears once, in one exaggerated, talky scene as a jerk, and is never seen in action; the role of the rest of the team is weak; and little goes on during the episode.

Although the team responded to some interesting individual incidents, the episode in which a reporter was following the team around did not make much of that plot line. The episode in which S.W.A.T. tracked an international hit man (played with gusto by Christopher George) suffered from the distracting complication that he was infected with a deadly disease and from an anticlimactic end confrontation. Also, too often, as when a basketball team is taken hostage, the crooks put themselves in a box with little realistic plan of escape, making themselves too easy pickings and not enough of a challenge for S.W.A.T. Regardless of these and other possible complaints, it is still fun and interesting to see how the team sizes up and responds to each situation, with Hondo barking out orders and the men expertly deploying their skills, weapons, and tactics to solve the particular high-stakes problem.

Overall, the shows in the DVD set are good entertainment. As to the hatchet-job review that boasted "non-fan, fresh eyes," as though it was entitled to some special weight just for not having seen the show when it originally aired (neither did I), all it had to offer were stale, obvious, superficial criticisms and inapt comparisons to other shows, without any attempt to appreciate what S.W.A.T. does well. (What could be easier than ridiculing the show for featuring a "Charles Manson type" as the villain one week, as though it was supposed to be taken seriously as the real thing, and with no mention of Sal Mineo's live-wire performance?) Another review that trashed the series sounded like canned comments written without even watching the show. For example, the review announced self-importantly, without any explanation or support, that the series showed no regard for police procedure and, except for "one time," always shot first and asked questions later. This is absurd; time and again, the episodes showed far more understatement, skill, intelligence, and discipline in response to a crisis than I had expected.

If you watch the show for yourself, you will find that it had something special. Even if, as some say, the quality declined in the second season, I hope some day (soon?) myself to be able to see the rest of the episodes of the series.
Jun 29, 2007