KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2)

By: Dan Reines
April 4, 2022

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite TV shows of the Seventies (1974–1983).

THE WHITE SHADOW | 1978–1981

When Bruce Paltrow created it in 1978, The White Shadow immediately occupied the outer borders of TV drama — a program about a washed-up white NBA journeyman who takes a coaching job at a South L.A. high school, with episode descriptions that read like a list of after-school specials: Does Jackson have a drinking problem? (He does.) Is academic probation sending Gomez back to gangbanging? (It is.) Did Thorpe give Coolidge’s girlfriend syphilis? (Amazingly, yes.)

In three short seasons, the Carver High School varsity basketball team generated multiple drug storylines, including a fatal heroin overdose in one episode, and a player drinking a beer spiked with angel dust in another. We got teen pregnancy, teen sex workers, shady sports agents, point-shaving, students hitting teachers, teachers hitting students, teachers seducing students, a kid sexually assaulting the vice principal. One player suffers an aneurism and dies on the court. Jackson, memorably, is murdered in a liquor store hold-up the same night Carver advances to the city championship.

Heady stuff for the time, especially on Monday nights at 8 on the Tiffany Network. Morris Thorpe / has VD / Hayward’s cousin just OD’d / Cletus gave Phil PCP / now he’s naked in a tree / We didn’t start the fire…

I was 7. I can’t believe my parents let me watch, but that’s what happens when there are only three channels. It was that or Little House.

Today it would have a whole different vibe – more The Shield than Friday Night Lights. Kenny Reeves, the eponymous coach (the nickname is given to him by point guard and STD-conduit Morris Thorpe), is of course a classic white savior role. But even in 1978, they scuffed him up — he regularly called his (mostly Black) players “animals” and fought physically with both players and parents — and both habits carried consequences. In the HBO version, he’d be an antihero, swimming in demons and drugs, with a sordid backstory. The writers would dare you to like him.

I’m sure it would be great. But it would be so dark. Improbably, The White Shadow was always light, even when it dealt with the heaviest subjects. The post-credits button, a take-off on the MGM lion, featured a kitty dribbling a basketball. It never felt out of place.

Of course, writing good TV has never been easy, and by the third season, whole episodes were being given over to Shower of Power, the team’s outdated-even-then doo-wop group. Bill Russell shows up in a cameo. Elgin Baylor. Mickey Mantle. Ella Fitzgerald. Because it’s the ’70s, so do the Globetrotters (twice).

And even then, halfway through Season 3, Thorpe gets shot in the chest by a trigger-happy cop for reaching into his jacket for a pen. The cop gets three weeks of unpaid leave. This show is 40 years old, and yet it still feels depressingly relevant.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2)

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