Shark Bytes

I don't think this show ever jumped, but it was never "great" either. Even at it's best there was a lot of cheesey schmaltziness, stereotypical shallow characters & plot holes. It was an OK show to watch, though & preferrable to most of the crap today. The worst episode was the one where John Davidson played a female impersonator who lived in an old house formerly owned by some theatrical actor & he becomes this Carol Channing type character who begins to believe he's really her & kills people. Really dumb plot & a turgid performance by Davidson.

This show was great because the cops weren't just right wing jerks, who thought all criminals were garbage. There was a real intelligence to this show that you don't see anymore. Stone's best line, "spook stories and spankings. that's the way to raise a kid." A great show.

mickeba

I just watched the pilot, in 2007. I was prepared to hate this cop drama. After all, Quinn Martin, 1972. Of course it would suck. Surprisingly, it did not suck too bad. A lot of outdoor shots on location, a real surprise. Malden and Douglas were good.
The show jumped in the pilot, tho, when the bad guy told Douglas to drop his weapon or else. He does. Only on tv would something so stupid happen.

The show hit an all time low when they hired 13 year old talent free Dawn Lyn (Dodie from My Three Sons) to play an 8 year old. There couldn't have been a worse guest star.

When Michael Douglas left who cared any more??????

The Streets of San Francisco" took a mini-jump when Michael Douglas left. The show was still good in the final season, but was lacking that incomparable chemistry between Douglas and Karl Malden. I thought that Bill Tanner (played by Reuben Collins, a great actor!) should have been "moved up" to a more prominent role instead of bringing in a new actor. "Streets" is one of the best television shows ever-the acting and writing were top-notch. I also loved how San Francisco itself was used to its fullest potential.

Never jumped! I didn't realize how good this series was until I moved to San Francisco. Their geography was a little off (getting from the Marina to Potrero in, like, 2 minutes!) but all the local touches of the world's most unique city made the stories real and interesting. I actually had to walk up to Mt. Davidson one weekend after seeing that episode, just to see it for myself.

This show NEVER EVER jumped. Yes, the episodes with Michael Douglas are the best, but I would kill or die for a current cop show nearly as good as an average Richard Hatch episode. I just finished watching the episode with Ahnoldt as the psycho bodybuilder. It's with Hatch and I'd rate it among my favorite Streets episodes period.

THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO was one of my favorite shows of the 70's. Karl Malden was great as Mike Stone, the tough, chili dog eating cop, as was a young Michael Douglas as the hip Steve Keller. They had great chemistry which made the show believable. When Douglas left for the big screen- a wise career move, to be sure - he was replaced by the hapless Richard Hatch. This was not a good idea. It's always amazing how the wrong actor can ruin the best of shows.

This series needed to be completely reinvented when the great Michael Douglas left, if it was to have a chance of succeeding. I would have fired the wonderful Karl Malden and started over with a new detective team, a man and a women. My choice of new casting would be Michael Parks and Diana Muldaur. I also would have looked for new writers. But I would have kept the San Francisco location shooting and the beautiful photography. But by this point, Quinn Martin Productions seemed to be completely out of creative energy. Too bad because the show still had a lot of potential.

I never again watched this show after the one in which Bill Bixby guested as a vigilante who wore a motor cop's uniform, sort of like we saw in the Dirty Harry flick, "Magnum Force." I don't know which came first, but I'm not really thinking ripoff here; as good as the movie was, David Soul and Robert Urich were nothing but cold-blooded revolutionaries. In this episode, there's a scene where a crying Bixby scoffs at what looks like a uniformed motor cop standing partially hidden in shadow. He demands of it, "What good are you?" and is obviously a tortured soul, as well as a little mad; and when we see him eventually don the uniform, this show gets downright chilling. Of course he has to die in the end, and there's a dramatic scene wherein Michael Douglas pulls the badge off Bixby's corpse, not bothering to mask his contempt. This episode was chilling and disturbing and even sad to watch, it had everything, and I knew the series had nothing better to offer me afterward, so I never watched it again. I wanted to remember it as being that good.

Michael Douglas Out--Richard Hatch In. That's when the theme from Jaws started to play. I loved this show as a kid in the 70's. Couldn't wait to see it each week (also had a crush on Steve Keller). I remember one Thursday night as I anxiously awaited the start of the show, an ABC Special Report came on, preempting the program. Something about President Nixon announcing his resignation...

Great show, Malden and Douglas were excellent and captivating use of San Fran locales. In the 1974/75 season there was a JTS moment-Brenda Vacarro played Keller's latest girlfriend who was surprise-A MAFIA HIT WOMAN. This was the pre-Hatch nadir. From what I've read Douglas wanted out of his contract in 1975 and you could tell in his last season-75/76 that the spark was gone.Catch the early episodes (1972-74)for a superior cop drama.

A couple of years ago one of the stations here in Phoenix was showing The Streets of San Francisco reruns, but they would show any with Richard Hatch; they'd just go back to show several repeats of the earlier episodes. And Richard Hatch sucked in Battlestar Galactica, too.

Didn't jump at the Hatchetman, but in the last year, when Stone's daughter (played by Darlene Carr) went from scolding deer-in-headlights babe to short-haired esoteric woman of the late 70's, the charm was gone from this quaint slugfest.