Night Watch: The White Shadow

POSTED: Saturday, April 11, 2009, 1:00 AM

Filed Under: Night Watch | TV Watch

Like you, I've been suspicious of all this Hulu business. TV already encroaches too much on my life. And then late one night I found myself taking this Mental Floss quiz on The White Shadow, which was one of those shows I remember digging as a kid; white NBA player (Ken Howard) suffers a career-ending knee injury and, as a favor to an old Boston College teammate who's now a princpal at an inner city LA High School, becomes the school's basketball coach. And then I realized that nearly all three seasons of the critically acclaimed, ahead-of-its-time show, are available, instantaneously and for free, on hulu. Let's just say I've been watching a lot of White Shadow in the last few weeks. All I really remembered about the show was that there was a guy named Salami, a guy named Goldstein, a guy named Coolidge, a guy named Hayward and that they all sang in the showers after games.

Back row (l to r) Jackson, Coolidge, Goldstein, Reese, Coach Reeves

Front row (l to r) Gonzalez, Thorpe, Hayward, Salami

What's kind of amazing, watching this show some 30 years later, is how frank it is about issues that start with race and class but which extend to religion, rape and even homosexuality (there's an episode early in season one that features an introverted preppy kid whose parents transfer him to Carver in hopes that the rough, inner-city school will toughen him up, essentially beat the gay out of him).

It's all a little clunky, in that way where 70s and 80s dramas hadn''t yet figured out that you can block a TV show like a movie, and yet the writing's pretty ace, even if the young actors ' the most famous of whom were Timothy Van Patten (Salami) and Byron Stewart who improbably reprised his role as Warren Coolidge on St. Elsewhere ' are occasionally figuring things out on camera. The show's pilot is above; "Just One of the Boys," the episode dealing with homosexuality, is after the jump.

Oh, and the show has what's got to be one of the top-five television theme songs ever.

The White Shadow on Hulu.

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