REVIEW: Spenser for Hire: The Complete Series

Dick Giordano was a major Robert B. Parker fan, which is how I first learned of him and his creation, Spenser. In fact, I once spent a lengthy lunch hour in line at the Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble to get the latest release autographed for Dick. From there, I began reading the books and fell in love with them, reading his oeuvre until Parker’s passing.

As a result, I missed the ABC adaptation Spenser for Hire, which aired from September 20, 1985, to May 7, 1988, and only knew it as the show where fans first discovered a pre-Star Trek: DS9 Avery Brooks, who played Hawk.

Thankfully, Warner Home Entertainment has now released the three-season, 66-episode series in a DVD box set, basically collecting the previous DVD releases with no new extras and not even a Blu-ray upgrade.

Robert Urich played the eponymous lead, backed by Brooks, Richard Jaeckel, and Barbara Stock (whose Susan Silverman was only in the first and third seasons). The ever-growing rich supporting cast of the novels was still developing at this stage, so they are absent, although a few of the existing ones (i.e., Henry Cimoli or the other cops) could have been used to enrich the show.

John J. O’Connor noted at the time in The New York Times, “Not surprisingly, many of the plots are merely serviceable, dotted with the perfunctory shoot-outs and car chases. Nevertheless, the series has managed to establish a distinctive personality. The key characters are well conceived, as are such regulars as the police lieutenant (Richard Jaeckel) and the police sergeant (Ron McLarty). Furthermore and not least, a good deal of the location shooting is actually done in Boston, lending the shows a precise and well-defined sense of place, which is rare in American prime time.”

Apparently, the ratings were good despite ABC’s persistence for moving its air dates, and it was finally felled by the expensive location shooting in Boston, which is a shame since it is basically an entertaining private eye show.

While the cases are fine, the real fun is in the chemistry between Spenser and Hawk, two badasses who are complex figures in their own right. When Susan gets pregnant, she considers abortion, something the Catholic Spenser could not abide, and she departs. As a result, during the second season, ADA Rita Fiori (Carolyn McCormick) becomes a potential romantic interest. In both cases, the women were not written as strongly as the men.

None of the novels was used as source material, something that happened in subsequent adaptations, although none have captured the spare writing style that was uniquely Parker. (For the record, Ulrich and Brooks made four telefilms for A&E, none of which are included.)

Had the writers and showrunner John Wilder hewed closer to Spenser’s worldview and avoided case-of-the-week syndrome (still the standard in the 1980s), it could have developed a far more distinctive personality.