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| An Overview of the The Mod Squad TV ShowThe Mod Squad is a television series that ran on the ABC network from September 24, 1968 until August 23, 1973. This series starred Michael Cole, Peggy Lipton, Clarence Williams III and Tige Andrews. The executive producers of the series were Aaron Spelling and Danny Thomas.  The Mod Squad TV show was a police drama that featured three young, hip crime fighters. One White, One Black, One Blonde, was the promotional hype-line. The casting for the Mod Squad television series was intended to appeal to a youthful audience. The basic premise of the Mod Squad television show was that the youthful investigators were offered work fighting crime as an alternative to being incarcerated themselves. The TV show's primary gimmick centered on the three cops using their youthful, hippie personas as a guise to get close to the criminals they investigated. The Mod Squad television show was moderately popular during its initial run of five seasons and 123 episodes. The show portrayed a multicultural society and dealt with issues of racial politics, drug culture, and counterculture.
The Mod Squad Television Season Episodes on DVD Amazon.com DVD Review - Revisiting this groovy, groundbreaking 1968 series is anything but a bum trip! The Mod Squad was a hip makeover of the traditional cop show. The Squad was comprised of three "lonely, angry kids," one black, one white, one blonde: "Linc" Hayes (Clarence Williams III), a soul brother from Watts; privileged rebel Pete Cochran (Michael Cole), who split from his 14-room home in Beverly Hills; and runaway Julie Barnes (quintessential hippie chick Peggy Lipton), described as "a "canary with a broken wing."
Their mentor is Capt. Adam Greer (the late Tige Andrews), who bucks his superiors to form the squad. "The times are changing," he argues. "They can get into places we can't," like a high school to solve a teacher's murder, an underground newspaper plagued by a bomber, and an acting class to flush out a strangler who preys on blonde actresses. The trio are perfectly matched, with Cole doing his tortured James Dean bit and Williams simply the coolest cat on TV (undercover as a high school teacher, Linc calms the unruly students by asking them how they want to learn about the Civil War: "the book version, or like it was?" Julie is all too often a damsel in distress when she's not being used as bait. The Mod Squad bridged the generation gap. Kids dug that the Squad walked the walk and talked the talk ("Solid"), didn't carry heat, and didn't bust their own. Adults dug Capt. Greer, who played "Mr. Tough Cop," but was more like a father figure, and was anything but square. "What do I have to do to win your trust?" he thunders in the episode "The Guru," "wear beads?" He does let his guard down in the memorable episode "The Price of Terror," in which he is being stalked. The Mod Squad got further cred from a roster of veteran character actors, many cast against type in villainous roles, including J. Pat O'Malley (the voice of Colonel Hathi in Disney's The Jungle Book) in "Bad Man on Campus." It's also fun to spot future stars, such as future Oscar-winner Louis Gossett Jr. as a falsely accused Vietnam vet in "When Smitty Comes Marching Home." And that uniformed cop who gets the drop on Pete in the pilot episode? An unbilled Harrison Ford!
There is no cast commentary, but this four-disc set contains new interviews with Cole and a still ravishing Lipton that put the show in pop-culture context. A warning: If you love The Mod Squad's classic theme song: It is used ad nauseum in one of the featurettes to punch up some 1968 factoids. But that's the only bummer in this otherwise far-out release. -- Donald Liebenson
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 Amazon.com DVD Review - It took only one season for old-school cop Capt. Greer (Tige Andrews), and his new-school undercover Mod Squad to bridge their generation gap. In the season opener, "The Girl in Chair Nine," a psychic tells Julie (Peggy Lipton) that she has two men in her life; that would be Pete (Michael Cole) and Linc (Clarence Williams III). But there is a third, she corrects him: Capt. Greer. And in the episode, "An Eye for an Eye," the trio get involved when Greer’s new girlfriend is kidnapped, culminating in an emotional scene in which Linc must stop him from crossing the line in confronting a suspect. Later, Greer thankfully proclaims of his young charges, "This is my family." Too touchy-feely? Not to worry; there’s plenty of groovy cop-show action in these 13 solid episodes. As Julie observes at one pont, "When something’s happening, you’ve got to go where it’s at," and the youngsters come to the aid of a Mexican urchin used by two thieves in a series of robberies, try to cool tensions when a black student is killed during a college protest, investigate the murder of a washed-up country singer, and expose a phony healer. One case hits real close to home when Pete is framed for murder. Two welcome returns in this season’s first half are Marvin Kaplan as kindly Sol Alpert (one of the passengers on the ill-fated airplane in the Season One episode, "Flight Five Doesn’t Answer"), whose cousin is revealed to be a bigoted slumlord in "In This Corner-Sol Alpert", and the trio’s trusty Woody station wagon, which has a heroic last hurrah in "The Death of Wild Bill Hannachek." Notable guest stars include Carolyn Jones (The Addams Family) as a woman traumatized by her husband’s suicide in "Lisa," Maurice Evans as a charming con man in "Never Give the Fuzz an Even Break," and a quite fetching Tyne Daly as a waitress in "Hannachek." From a Raquel Welch reference to covers of songs by Poco and Carole King, The Mod Squad is stuck in the ‘60s. But the seamless ensemble lifts it beyond time capsule status. As Capt. Greer says at one point, "Like the kids say, 'It’s something else.'" - Donald Liebenson
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