S.W.A.T. -
The Complete First Season
S.W.A.T. DVDs
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Tough but not swaggering, serious but not solemn, S.W.A.T.
won over its 1970s television audience with several unexpectedly
interesting elements: A degree of storytelling sophistication;
visually exciting, guerrilla-like street violence; and a subtle but
determined fascination with the psyches of the show's five principal
characters. To a non-viewer, S.W.A.T. looked like a fatuously
reassuring, law-and-order shill in the aftermath of the Vietnam war
and Watergate. In reality, creator-producer Robert Hammer (a Peabody
Award winner for the 1979 POW TV drama, When Hell Was in Session)
managed to make an ideal, mid-'70s Aaron Spelling cop show with an
extra emphasis on the human factor in peacekeeping.
Spun off from an earlier Spelling series, The Rookies,
S.W.A.T. was the story of Special Weapons and Tactics, an elite
branch of the Los Angeles Police Department assigned the most
critical cases of urban violence in an American era of cult
terrorism, snipers, assassinations, traumatized war veterans, and
organized crime. Considering what the S.W.A.T. team is up against in
every episode--shooters with sophisticated weaponry, psychotic
revolutionaries, vulnerable takeover targets (nuclear reactors,
etc.)--one might have expected the show to be swallowed up in
gadgetry and fancy police protocol for extreme emergencies. But from
the pilot (technically, a two-hour Rookies episode not
included in this set) on, S.W.A.T. was clearly much more
interested in the way team leader Lieutenant Dan "Hondo" Harrelson
(Steve Forrest), Sergeant David "Deacon" Kay (Rod Perry), and
officers Street (Robert Urich), Luca (Mark Shera), and McCabe (James
Coleman) tried to understand the modern world even while keeping its
meanest tendencies in check.
Inventive stories with occasional twists and appealing guest
stars (James Keach, Cameron Mitchell, Annette O'Toole) keep one
glued to the 13 episodes contained here. Among the best: "A Coven of
Killers," starring Sal Mineo as a Charles Manson-like monster;
"Jungle War," featuring Mitchell as a career cop and war vet facing
an emotional breakdown; and "The Bravo Enigma," an apocalyptic tale
of a curiously likable hit man (Christopher George) unknowingly
spreading a plague through L.A. --Tom Keogh
