Here's why I'm doing this blog.
NBC's Adam-12 combined three things I like:
A good cop show + a good cast with lots of guest stars + vintage Los Angeles locations.
My primary interest is in seeing the Los Angeles I missed. A lot of it was still there in early 1981 when my family relocated to the once-golden state, but most of it's long gone now.
Los Angeles is all about hideous new construction and demolition of anything that stands in the way of more McMansions or other massive monstrosities. [One of my lesser blogs: Monsters Ate LA.] All of the Googie-type restaurants and courtyard motels were demolished long ago. Thus, Adam-12 is a time travel show for me.
Despite being a big fan of police and detective shows in my childhood, I never watched Adam-12 at the time, or I don't remember it. [It was on opposite Sonny & Cher, the most likely reason why our TV was never on NBC at that time!] I started watching it decades later to see Los Angeles Past, especially the Valley.
Reed and Malloy largely patrol the southeast side of the Valley: North Hollywood, Studio City, and Toluca Lake. When their Code 7 meal break gets okayed, they chow down at mid-century locations that made it to 1968 but are only the memories of older people now.
They get sent to real street names, but not streets that actually intersect, which never ceases to crack me up. Sometimes they visit actual businesses. Other times fake signage has been put over the real name. All but a few of these places are long gone now.
Much of the time they patrol the Universal backlot near the Munsters house. I kept waiting for a Munsters meets Adam-12 crossover, reuniting bartender Grandpa Munster with acid-tripping Tod, but it never happened.
On occasion they have Out-of-Valley-Experiences [OVEs -- my dad used to say that], like to Griffith Park, Venice, or Long Beach. Long Beach is a separate city!
I never have gotten a handle on their patrol district ["Central Division" indeed!] or why their "barn" is way downtown on West Temple when there was a perfectly good NoHo station. I like it when they pull out of the West Temple location and get to Toluca Lake five minutes later. Temporary suspension of disbelief wormhole stuff for Angeleno viewers.
For non-Angelenos, please note that North Hollywood and Hollywood are two distinctly different places, and they are not even adjacent. NoHo is in the Valley, and the Valley is looked down on by those who don't live there. Studio City and Toluca Lake are wealthier areas, and Toluca Lake is adjacent to Burbank, where NBC studios are as well as Warner Brothers and Disney. Burbank is a separate city from Los Angeles. Adam-12 was produced by Universal, which has its own city (just kidding, but it actually sort of does). Universal City is partially City of Los Angeles and partially unincorporated LA County. Adam-12 mostly patrol the Colonial Street part of the Universal backlot, so we'll assume that falls under LAPD jurisdiction. 😎
Everything has changed significantly since the days of Adam-12. Technology, demographics, and media coverage: News choppers weren't following Reed and Malloy as they did a PIT maneuver on Salvadoran gang members leading umpteen squad cars on a high-speed chase until the stolen vehicle ran out of gas. Officer Reed did most of the tackling like he was still playing high school football. They didn't send in the K-9 unit. There were no bodycams and no crowd of onlookers all getting video on their phones. Reed and Malloy weren't dealing with endless homeless camps or "woke" politicians who kept trying to defund them. We never find out what happens to the people they arrest. That's a whole other ugly topic in modern Los Angeles. [Spoiler: Nobody gets prosecuted for anything in 2021.]
Reed and Malloy had their adventures when there were still gasometers downtown.
I am grateful that this show captured all that it did on film, to be savored decades later.
One further note: Why do people who live in Los Angeles, hell that it is, get excited about seeing it on TV? It's a thing. There's even a documentary called "Los Angeles Plays Itself," which I think was aimed solely at local people who get this thrill out of seeing the empty concrete of the LA River on the screen.
Personally, for me it's not about seeing Los Angeles. It's about seeing North Hollywood in 1968. For all the hundreds of TV series filmed in Los Angeles over the decades, surprisingly few ever shot anything outside of the studio gates. They were all like the Twilight Zone, expediently confined to soundstages and the backlot. Adam-12 drove around the city [read: North Hollywood] and captured it on film. Sure wish more shows had.
PS I was surprised to learn Kent McCord had been close friends with Rick Nelson. His chorus is my motto for all my endeavors: "You can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself."
Must-see views of the San Fernando Valley from mid-century.
