There’s crime to be solved in 1960s San Francisco, and Karl Malden and Michael Douglas are not yet ready. Yes, I was binge-watching Ironside on my recent medical leave.
As a show about representation, it was quite progressive for the time, with speaking roles for disabled and black characters, and on occasion showing the barriers they face in modern society.
It has the typical Raymond Burr issue of the overbearing protagonist, speaking as a Perry Mason fan. The wheelchair has not humbled him. It is not so much that he is smart, but that he has unique information that no one else could possibly have.
The show also has the typical TV police procedural problem of “this time it’s personal”. Far too many crimes involved the officers’ friends and family for comfort. The key lesson is don’t befriend a cop.
Ironside addressed pressing issues of the day like Racism and Vietnam and Drugs and Hippies and Defendants Rights and University student gun clubs (with clock tower shootings alluding to recent events in Texas) and Back Alley Abortionists and Rioters and Nazis. There were only 30-40 murders per year in San Francisco in the late 1960s, so there was more crime on the show than in reality. Ironside is not as bad as Longmire in this regard, but clearly gives TV viewers a distorted picture of criminal violence, when most of the crime is petty theft (as I personally observed in 2024). It is thus complicit in the collapse of trust.
Robert T. Ironside was Chief of Detectives before being shot at the opening of every episode to a great theme by Quincy Jones, forcing him to use a wheelchair. His new role as Special Consultant let him work whatever cases he wanted. Mark Sanger is Ironside’s aide, though not an officer, who Ironside rescued from the streets and a life of crime. Sanger is attending law school. Officer Eve Whitfield (a woman cop too, adding to representation), and Sgt Ed Brown (as white and male as they come) are his police staff. Ironside works from home, which is to say, strangely, he lives at the police station and has an office in his “living room”. He rides around San Francisco in a converted police paddy wagon (and later a van, as I assume an automaker paid for placement), driven by Mark when he is not pushing the wheelchair.
The University of California, Berkeley sometimes serves as their advanced crime lab in a precursor to CSI.
The show also has guest appearances of actors who later become famous like Harrison Ford, David Carridine, Gavin MacLeod, Ricardo Montalban, Martin Sheen, and Gary Collins among others, and some who had some experience like Bill Bixby, Burgess Meredith, Robert Alda or Anne Bancroft.
Relations with Mexico seemed favourable and friendly here (similarly with a similar period Bewitched episode I watched in hospital), where have we gone wrong?
In the first season, it mostly falls under the category of competence porn, with some occasional incompetence thrown in, especially when it’s personal. (Unfortunately it’s always personal, and every member of the main cast has been kidnapped, or held hostage, or both, more than once). The problem as always in Hollywood is bad (uncreative) writing, probably because that’s what the studios want, probably because they think that’s what audiences want. Who am I to say what the US broadcast market c.1968-1974 wanted? And kidnapping and bombings in San Francisco were ripped from the headlines, if too often. Later seasons show a deterioration in competence, correlated with the deterioration in writing. To be clear, the first season is the best so far, the rest is just obsessive completionism, it’s not like modern TV with much of a story-arc, though occasionally some characters reappear, and there are a few special episodes..
FIN