The Streets of San Francisco – The Second Season, Vol. 1

Inspectors 81 are back on the tough streets of San Francisco for a second season of gritty police work. Remember, these are the same streets Dirty Harry worked during the same decade. There are some memorable moments in this next half season release of “Streets”. Stone goes undercover as a Catholic priest to trap a serial killer who preys on priests in For The Love Of God. It’s a tough assignment in Before I Die. The pair must stop a terminally ill cop who decides to take justice in his own hands before he goes out. A Manson-like clan is led by a man who appears to have an almost magical spell over young woman, leading them into his prostitution ring in the very nice episode, Harem. Three seemingly unrelated murders connect the dots for the pair in No Badge For Benji. The three victims are a rich foreign entrepreneur, a street informant, and a Japanese industrialist. The set ends in The Victims, which finds three escapees from prison leaving a bloody trail everywhere they go.

In case you don’t know the show, here’s a rundown. Detective “Iron” Mike Stone (Karl Malden) is a seasoned veteran of the San Francisco Police Department. He’s an old fashioned no nonsense detective whose life has taken some bitter turns of late. Much to his aggravation, he gets partnered with Keller (Michael Douglas), a green detective who hasn’t lost his belief that he can make a difference. Together they just might be able to teach each other something. Before long the two develop a teacher/mentor relationship that works well enough to solve the cases and get the bad guys.

If you weren’t around in the 1970’s, you might be surprised to find out that film superstar Michael Douglas was once in a television cop show. It was this influential crime drama that allowed Douglas to show off the acting chops that would earn him a spot in the Hollywood elite for decades to come. It didn’t hurt any that he was able to team up with Karl Malden, an undervalued talent in his own right. The two of them literally bring the show to life.  The series was run by Quinn Martin, himself no stranger to groundbreaking television. Martin was the same talent who created the crime drama with The Untouchables. His uncanny ability to come up with a clever premise was responsible for such milestones in television history as The Invaders and The Fugitive. Later he would continue to shape the look of television with shows like Tales Of The Unexpected, The FBI, and Most Wanted. He was the Steven Bochco of his time. Long before NYPD Blue, Martin was able to make San Francisco, the city itself, an iatrical character for Malden and Douglas to interact with. The show had tremendous style, even if the cases were purely formula. Certainly you won’t find anything in these plots you haven’t seen a hundred times before. What you will find is a unique presentation that somehow makes even the most mundane story appear quite compelling. If you enjoy the Bochco and Wolf dramas or fall in with such classics as Starsky and Hutch or Miami Vice, you owe a tremendous debt to Martin for setting the table for all of those fantastic meals that would follow.

Video

Each episode of The Streets of San Francisco is presented in its original full frame broadcast format. Let’s be realistic here and admit that the picture is incredibly dated. There’s plenty of grain, and colors are often washed out. Still, you might be impressed with the level of detail the transfers are capable of. Nothing is really consistent here at all, but it holds up as well as you can honestly expect it to. Black levels might be the only real constant in each episode, holding steady, again making allowances for the 35 years of age. This isn’t going to dazzle anyone, but it is more than watchable, capable of delivering an entertaining experience if you are not too spoiled by the Hi-Def images delivered on a routine basis today.

Audio

The Dolby Digital Mono track serves merely as an adequate delivery system for sound. Dialog is clear and not at all distorted. Some of the music contains slight high end distortion which can be ignored without too much trouble. I also heard a bit of warble at times; that’s actually more common than you might expect even in far more recent productions. Again there isn’t anything high fidelity about this audio, but it does give you the bare essentials to enjoy a bit of classic television.

Special Features

Move along. Nothing to see here. You do get 13 episodes on 4 discs.

Final Thoughts

There’s nothing flashy about this series, and I think that’s what I love best. Like many of the shows it spawned, Streets was a down to earth drama. No fancy gimmicks and no flashy cars. The two leads worked well together, and by season two got into a nice rhythm with each other. When they made enemies, boy did they make enemies. “I don’t mean people who hate your guts. I mean people who wanna kill ya.”