I finally got through the whole 5 seasons of 21 Jump Street. It took a while and I wasn't as interested by the end. I picked up a copy at Best Buy recently. I hardly ever go there anymore but I was looking for a dvd player with an S-Video connection for work. They don't make them with that connection anymore. Everyone has switched to HDMI. So while I was there I walked the dvd aisles looking for a bargin. They had marked the 5 season box set down to $30. It's not a show I had ever seen before but I was curious. I didn't watch them when they were new. The series started in 1987, ran 4 years on Fox and a 5th year in syndication before it wrapped. Later I started to notice Johnny Depp and became a fan. I was curious about his work in the show and finally it seemed cheap enough at $6 a season. There are 103 shows in the set with a running time of 78 hours and 52 minutes. For some reason one episode, the last show of season 4 Black Out got left off the Mill Creek dvd. There are still 103 shows in the box, after they added the Bookerpilot. That starts the story and it finishes in a crossover episode of 21JS. Richard Grieco joined the series and they spun him off into his own show. It only lasted a year and if the pilot and crossover shows were any indication I'm not surprised. The dvd set I got was the 18 disc set from Mill Creek Entertainment. You can still find the first series that came from Anchor Bay on Amazon from resellers. That series had 28 discs in the 5 sets with some commentaries and special features. There isn't anything extra in the Mill Creek set and they cram 5 and 6 shows on each dvd. You can see them on Hulu for free. That's where I'll be headed later so I can check out that episode that didn't make it to the Mill Creek set.
Johnny Depp plays a cop who gets assigned to the undercover group operating out of an old chapel on Jump Street. They mostly work in schools so they need young looking cops. Johnny's costumes and hair are half the fun watching the series today. Frederic Forrest is the captain but he's killed by a drunk driver in the seventh episode and Steven Williams takes over. I didn't recognize Steven but I had seen him many times in The Blues Brothers. I should have recognized that mustache. He's the state highway patrol man who's chasing the brothers. Holly Robinson, Peter DeLuise and Dustin Nguyen are the other undercover cops. Johnny and Dustin leave at the end of the 4th season, Peter LeLuise leaves after doing 7 shows in the 5th season. Holly and Steven stick it through to the bitter end.
Mostly the show is serious and sometimes way too serious. There is a good amount of comedy in the first couple of seasons but that dries up. I got to liking Johnny and Peter's characters and all this bad shit was happening to them each week. It got kind of tiring as the stories got more and most serious. One episode has some young guy on death row in the last day of his life. They even show the whole lethal injection scene and the guy dying. I have to admit for the time it was pretty tough topic TV and there is a chance they wouldn't do anything like that anymore. Both Johnny and Peter suffer when the girls they like are killed. That's the trouble with dating the main character on a drama. Sometimes it's a death sentence. I remember thinking this back in the early 70's, after seeing the women the Cartwright's were dating on Bonanza get slaughtered one after another.
The shows cover all sorts of troubles, stealin', porn, murderin', drugs, witchcraft, aids, you name it someone is dyin' from it. There are people to help and criminals to catch each week. I think it's more of a drama than a cop show. It's almost a soap opera so you wind up with a lot of shows where the characters have that real introspective shit goin' on. I have to admit I fast forwarded through some of that stuff in the last season. By then Johnny and Peter had left the series and the bloom was off the rose. It wasn't that much fun with the left overs and the new guy Michael Bendetti. Peter's brother Michael DeLuise joins the cast for the first half of the 5th season but I didn't cotton to his character as much. Their father Dom DeLuise was a guest star in an episode where he plays Peter's Uncle. It was already established that Peter's dad was dead. Lot's of sad shit on this show. Not one I'll rush to return to, and when I do, maybe I'll just watch some of my favorite episodes from the first two seasons, and wait on the others.
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