The Mod Squad
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about the television show. For the movie, see The Mod Squad (film).
- For the group from the Christopher Buckley book, see Thank You For Smoking: A Novel
| The Mod Squad | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Police Drama |
| Running time | 1 hour |
| Creator(s) | Bud Ruskin |
| Starring | Michael Cole, Clarence Williams III, Peggy Lipton, Tige Andrews |
| Country of origin | Image:Flag of the United States.svg United States |
| Original channel | ABC |
| Original run | September 24, 1968–August 23, 1973 |
| No. of episodes | 123 |
| IMDb profile | |
The Mod Squad was a television police drama from executive producers Aaron Spelling and Danny Thomas in the United States, that ran on ABC from 1968-1973.
It was a police show that featured "hip" young crime fighters: one African-American, one street kid, and one blonde woman. The demographic indexing involved in the casting was intended to appeal to the newly recognized counter-culture in the US. The basic cop-show was updated with young, troubled investigators, who were, in the premise of the show, offered work fighting crime as an alternative to being incarcerated themselves. The show's primary gimmick centered on the three cops using their youthful, hippie personas as a guise to get close to the criminals they investigated. The show was moderately popular, running for five years, airing 123 episodes. Tige Andrews (Captain Greer), Michael Cole (Pete Cochran), Peggy Lipton (Julie Barnes), and Clarence Williams III (Linc Hayes) starred. During its run, the show portrayed a multicultural society and dealt with issues of racial politics, drug culture, and counter-culture.
The show was loosely based on Police Officer Bob Ruskin's experiences in the late 1950's as a squad leader for undercover narcotics cops, though it took almost 10 years after he wrote a script for the idea to be given the greenlight by ABC television studios.
There is a rumor that the name proposed for the series by ABC executives, who didn't like the name, was the decidedly non-hip "The Young Policemen."
The Mod Squad, a 1999 film, attempted to update the show's premise, making the young detectives more "edgy".
