Maddyclassicfilms The Streets of San Francisco was created by Edward Hume and produced by Quinn Martin. The series stars Karl Malden, Michael Douglas, Richard Hatch and Darleen Carr.Filmed on location in San Francisco this series follows Lt Mike Stone (Karl Malden)the wise and decent older detective who's paired with the young and eager Inspector Steve Keller(Michael Douglas). The pair work well together and over the years become close friends too. The stories are interesting and there's lots of action too but the highlight of the series and the real key to it's success is the friendship between Stone and Keller.Malden and Douglas have great chemistry and you believe they like each other, which helps you believe the friendship between the pair. Stone and Keller are completely dedicated to the job but make time to have some fun to help them cope with the dangers and dark times they often face out on the streets. They regularly tease one another and bicker but always have each others back.The series ran from 1972 to 1977. Douglas left at the end of season 4 and went on to become as bigger star as his father Kirk. Season 5 saw Stone paired with another officer Inspector Dan Robbins(Richard Hatch). Hatch is good in the role and season 5 has some good stories,unfortunately the relationship between Stone and Robbins is nothing like the one between Stone and Keller and it feels like something is missing, the series ended after the fifth season.Many famous actors and future stars make guest appearances in this including Martin Sheen(Karl Malden guest stars in an episode of Sheen's series The West Wing), Edward Mulhare, Joanne Linville, Dean Stockwell, Brock Peters, Andrew Robinson and Leslie Nielsen.Darleen Carr made regular appearances as Stone's daughter Jeannie. The pair have an interesting relationship, Stone raised her on his own following her mothers death and Jeannie always calls him Mike instead of dad(she only calls him that when she's worried about him or something bad has happened).The pair are not just father and daughter but best friends too and Malden and Carr have lovely chemistry.The other star of the series is of course the city of San Francisco itself and there are many beautiful shots of the city and the bay. A great series that's highly recommended.

captgage-1 I remember occasionally watching this show with my parents back in the day. I lived in San Jose at the time, and we loved going on day trips to San Francisco. I often still was nostalgic about the Bay Area, and when I've caught this show in reruns over the years, and the San Francisco scenery brings back memories. Just being in The City has always been a high for me. It may be stressful living there, but visiting is at once exciting and relaxing.I remember bits and pieces from the show's first-run days. I believe it was the episode "Letters From (Beyond?) The Grave," which began with a skeleton being dug up at Alcatraz. My sister was like, "Oh, my god." I believe it was another episode of the same series when the cops confronted a woman who took off all her makeup and turned out to be ugly. "She's gross!" my sister said. The woman started yelling at the mirror, "I killed you!" I think it was when I caught some reruns in the '80s that a suspect smiled and said he was at a local porno house a the time the cops said there was a crime they were investigating. They found out otherwise and just laughed at the suspect LOL.Last Sunday I caught an episode on MeTV that was a not-bad morality tale involving a murder suspect, his employer, and the employer's son, who didn't get to spend much time with his dad. There was a lot of love among them, and the cops justly investigated. Kind of touching how all of the above characters went to bat for him.I'll be watching some more reruns, including the pilot movie, be it on You Tube or MeTV. The chemistry between Michael Douglas and veteran actor Karl Malden was a fond memory of '70s TV.Look for a guest appearance by a pre-Miami Vice Don Johnson as the title character of the episode "Hot Dog."

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU This couple of cops are mythic, Detective Lieutenant Mike Stone and his partner Inspector Steve Keller are not walking but rolling the streets of San Francisco chasing not petticoats or petty criminals but real hard core criminals who are ready to kill anyone, including their husbands or friends, though essentially weaker people, for a handful of dollars, for sums that today sound small but in those days sounded great like a few hundred thousand dollars or half a million dollars. It seems with these criminals the risk they take is more important than the profit they make. Yet they make that profit, or at least try to, they run their risks and they get caught by the "villainous" cops who are only there to get their heads, or at least their mugs, on their walls over their fireplaces, if they have a fireplace, because what's more these cops are poor and badly paid. Why on earth do they track boys and girls who make more money in one month than they do in a couple of decades? Because these cops are perverts and that is obvious from the very start. You have to be a pervert to arrest a criminal and find pleasure, pride and even fame in doing that. But these cops are bringing to the profession another dimension, a human and even humane dimension. They are moved into action by the suffering of the people, by the social dimension of their cases, by the emotional and even sentimental sides of their situations. There is always a lot of love lost somewhere that is found again, or a lot of love that could have been lost and is retained. There is also a lesson about Pearl Harbor and about all kinds of jingoism or sectarianism or segregation or racism, or whatever that makes life and humanity dirty looking and mean sounding. Those two cops seem to be trying to create harmony, to be scoring some music and tuning all the voices of the big social choir to the one single pitch that could please human ears and from time to time divine ears, but not too much nor too many. The 50 odd minute episodes are not too long but are short enough to be packed and dense and that is an advantage, a good asset. The structure in four acts and one epilog is also rather nice though of course the format is becoming a limitation little by little. Some more complex cases cannot be solved in four little acts and one short epilog and fifty minutes is rather short on TV. But that was the format on TV in these late 60s and early 70s when color TV became popular. My first color TV in 1969 with Bonanza, Mission Impossible, Love American Style and so many other programs. That sure was another time and television was not an isolating tool yet but rather a machine around which people gathered and enjoyed some time together every night. A tremendous leap forward toward a culture for all and a social reflection for everybody and with everybody. So these programs had to be popular and police drama had to be close to people, close with a city like San Francisco that has always had a reputation to be friendly and easy going, with simple people who are severely hurt and maimed by crime and with some other people who suffer tremendously because of the consequences of the actions of criminals. That reveals though another type of courage, the courage to suffer in order to bring about justice and simple people who are the victims of such crimes are often willing to help justice rather than to get a vengeance. And Bonanza was the same and Mission Impossible was the same and Clint Eastwood and his spaghetti westerns were the same. It is not so much the cops themselves that bring peace to the community but the victims of crime that do and when one becomes a stray cat of justice and wants to be a vigilante or a pistolero or a gunslinger, then the whole universe reacts and brings that lost sheep back into the corral. OK Corral of course and more than Dead or Alive we want the criminals alive for the court and the judge and the jury. This series is still quite viewable and decent, and even emotional and at times slightly poignant. Quite different from the police dramas of today that are even shorter and definitely a lot gorier.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID

deefee Please make a DVD package available for Streets of San Francisco!! This series was one that our family dropped everything to sit and watch together. Drama, suspense, great characters and plot lines and clean language all wrapped up in a 1-hour weekly show. How could you miss having a faithful audience? In 1973 my infant daughter became a (family) star on the episode titled "Most Feared in the Jungle." How many moms can say that they met Karl Malden and Michael Douglas, who commented on how cute the baby is?? I would LOVE to have a copy of it, along with the rest of the series. To whatever powers that be, I sincerely request that Streets be put on DVD. Thanks for listening!