Mod Squad, i ragazzi di Greer

YOUTHFUL-LOOKING, telegenic cops head undercover, infiltrating schools and their peers’ hangouts to bust the bad guys. Mention that plot, and the first response will be “21 Jump Street,” the ’80s drama that gave the world Johnny Depp. But the founding father of that premise was “The Mod Squad,” the ABC series from the late ’60s and early ’70s in which three young counterculture delinquents sought to redeem themselves by joining the police force.
In the case of “The Mod Squad,” whose first season (1968-69) is now on DVD, the unit featured the most attractive outcasts imaginable. Pete (Michael Cole) was a hunky Beverly Hills misfit who always looked as if he had just eaten bad food. Julie (Peggy Lipton) was the gorgeous, emotionally bruised runaway often deployed to do undercover work that required her to don bikinis and miniskirts. And with his glasses and gap-toothed grin, Linc (Clarence Williams III, recently in the film “American Gangster”) was the world’s nerdiest Black Panther.
Produced by Aaron Spelling, “The Mod Squad” desperately wanted to prove that it wasn’t the work of the network TV establishment, even though it very obviously was. It was happy to exploit the ’60s underground much the way “Hair” did on Broadway during the same era. In the first season extras in noticeable hippie wigs are omnipresent, and the scripts are stocked with period phrases like “gas” and “drag,” “mellow” and “groovy.”
To express their hippie-era sensitivity, the three never carry guns, and many episodes end with them gathered on a pier, staring wistfully toward the water and comforting one another with lines like “Love’s the only thing that kills an angry man.” (The show spawned a fleeting vogue in kids-are-all-right programming like “The Young Rebels,” essentially “The Mod Squad” during the Revolutionary War, and “Storefront Lawyers,” which was “Mod Squad” reimagined as young, white lawyers working in a ghetto.)
Still, the sneaky pro-establishment message of the show was hard to miss. “The Mod Squad” was television’s way of reassuring adults that not every kid wanted to take drugs and listen to Jefferson Airplane. (It’s telling that the only time the squad members get stoned is when a villain slips a hallucinogenic into their drinks.) The show also sought to prove that adults could be groovy too. The trio’s gruff but compassionate boss (Tige Andrews) sported a semimod Caesar haircut and chewed over lines like “If only kids would learn to run to a cop instead of running from one.”
As much as it tried to reverse the supposed decline of civilization — the drug-bust episodes are just shy of “Reefer Madness” territory — the series was, to use another phrase of the time, pretty heavy. During the first season the squad is dispatched to go-go clubs and alternative arts schools as often as to grown-up bars.
Along the way the three discover that the Man isn’t the only villain; their peers are pretty suspect too. A suspected murderer is one of Linc’s African-American school friends. A woman who stands to infect all of Los Angeles with meningitis works as a folk singer. A car theft ring is the work of a flamboyant high school student. Pete’s own cousin kidnaps her baby brother to spite her uptight parents. No wonder that halfway through the first season the three characters already seem worn down by what they’ve witnessed.
In the way it threw a big, wet blanket over the counterculture, the most revealing first-season episode is “The Guru,” in which the three cops infiltrate an underground newspaper to uncover why it’s being bombed and harassed. “We’re not selling papers, we’re selling ideals!” the hunky, long-haired editor tells his staff. Sure enough, the bomber turns out to be none other than the editor himself, who is using the publicity to bolster both circulation and his own power in the community.
“I just can’t believe it,” Julie sighs, trying to comprehend how a peer could be so corrupt. Although she was talking about the newspaper, she was implying more: the demise of the ’60s dream, a slow death that “The Mod Squad” came to embody. Talk about a drag.
Da The New York Times, 3 febbraio 2008