Dig Watching Some of the old Wild Wild West Episodes

[mnaz]

Watching Night of the Death Masks now (Season 3). You can tell that some of these episodes were influenced by mid-to-late 1960s drug culture. There's a similar episode I remember from Season 1 (1965) about LSD-like mind control. (Which I understand the CIA studied extensively in the '50s.)

[sasha]

I've been watching the old 70s show "The Rookies" - never watched it when it was fresh. Pretty standard tv cops & robbers stuff, rife with period slang - but seems to be making an attempt (however self-consciously) to acknowledge people of color as... people. It's a bit preachy, but that the writers felt it had to be so baldly stated says something about the time.

[mnaz]

I remember that show. My dad watched it. I was in grade school, so I don't remember much about the show, though I seem to recall that among other things it was also trying to help patch up the relationship between cops and the public-- show cops as more "human."

My dad's favorite was "The Streets of San Francisco." Every week he watched Karl Malden and "Buddy Boy" Michael Douglas get the bad guys. And I thought it was cool when they stuck a portable flashing cop light on the roof of their brown Ford sedan so they could drive as fast as they wanted to. (The cops always had Ford sedans in those Quinn Martin Productions.)

[sasha]

It seemed to be trying to be a cop show for the Aquarius generation. I find it interesting that despite its progressive aspirations, most of its perps were killed before they could be brought to justice.

I liked "Streets" too, and its theme song, with that howling guitar line. You can catch a few episodes on YT, but whoever uploaded them did so in no particular order, & doesn't seem to have kept track of which ones they've already posted, 'cause there's a lot of duplication.