History Series / AdamTwelve

* YouAreInCommandNow: In "Light Duty", Malloy and Reed are working the front desk at the station after Malloy injured his wrist chasing a robbery suspect. When a potential riot starts brewing, Mac pulls every able-bodied officer (including Reed) out of the station to respond and tells Malloy that he's the acting Watch Commander since everyone senior to him is at the riot scene.
** In both "Gus Corbin" and "Dana Hall", Malloy is made acting Watch Commander for the shift after Mac is called away for "special assignment".

* WavingSignsAround: In "O'Brien's Stand," Malloy's titular elderly landlady feels the police aren't working hard enough to find her missing purse, so she gets a group of old women whose purses have also been stolen to wave signs like "Protect Our Purses" and "We might be senior, not senile."

** Gus Corbin, a rookie Reed is saddled with in the episode of the same name, has some of these tendencies. He gets chewed out twice for taking reckless chances and "playing with the Academy's money" - once for exploring a building where a suspect was holed up without waiting for backup, and again for chasing an armed suspect without backup ''and'' without his gun.

* HippieVan: In "Training Wheels," Malloy and Reed pull over a van with stars, planets, flowers, and a bird stenciled on it. The driver accuses them of harassing hippies for no reason; when they explain that they're not going to give him a ticket, a bird starts yelling "Down with the pigs!" from the backseat.

* TheSeventies: What happened to your hair, Reed? [[FashionDissonance Ah.]]

* EcoTerrorist: In "The Ferret," the titular vandal attacks companies that damage the environment, doing a JanitorImpersonationInfiltration to get inside. He has enough fans that Reed becomes the subject of an unflattering newspaper article for trying to arrest him. When he finally gets caught, he gives a speech about pollution while he's being led away.

* ChristmasEpisode: In "Log 122: Christmas - The Yellow Dump Truck," Reed and Malloy pull over a drunk driver yelling "MERRY CHRISTMAS" out the car window, try to resolve a domestic dispute caused by the husband's Christmas splurging, and search for a stolen car containing a poor family's presents, including the titular dump truck.

* FiveFiveFive:
** A form of: LXI 483 seems to be the license number of a ''lot'' of cars in Los Angeles. It's the license number the dispatcher checks in the opening credits of the first two seasons and of several cars over the course of the series.
** Suspect vehicles had license plates where the third letter in the three-letter sequence was I, O or Q. California did not issue license plates with those letters in that position because they could be confused with numbers, and reserved those combinations for Hollywood's use.
** One of the things Pacific Telephone had set up in Los Angeles County was a fake phone number in every exchange, consisting of the exchange number, the digit 1, and the exchange number, so a phone number like 282-1282 or 772-1772 would be a fake number. At least one guy asked for his phone number by the police gave a number in the exchange-1-exchange format. Of course, this was back when Los Angeles consisted of just area code 213, not the current 10+ area codes it has now.

* ChristmasEpisode: "Log 122: Christmas - The Yellow Dump Truck."

* DaChief: Mac essentially fills this role for Pete, Jim and the other uniformed officers, although in one or two episodes, we also saw the Captain pop up. Mac is more positive than a lot of other examples of this trope, though—more of a ReasonableAuthorityFigure sort.

--->'''Malloy:''' Who do you think you are, Sergeant York?
--->'''Reed:''' Got in behind them. Nothing to it, really.
--->'''Malloy:''' Really. You could have been killed. [[TranquilFury When I give you orders, boy, you obey them. Understand?]]

* CannotTellAJoke: Reed. He spends a good portion of the finale of season one trying to tell Malloy a joke about ... a dog... and paint... or ''something'', suffering constant interruptions from calls (not his fault) and his own disjointed retelling (totally his fault), and then he's crushed when Malloy doesn't laugh, invoking SoUnfunnyItsFunny. Also, Reed obsessing over Malloy's failure to laugh, to the extent that he [[DontExplaintheJoke explains the joke]] and is ''offended'' that Pete doesn't find it amusing, is completely {{Adorkable}}.

* EvilHasStandards: In "Log 122: Christmas - The Yellow Dump Truck," the man who's stolen a car with a colour TV on the back seat in appalled when he discovers he's accidentally stolen the gifts (for a needy family) in the trunk as well.[[spoiler: Because the gifts weren't his target, Reed and Malloy are allowed to return the gifts instead o having them impounded as evidence along with the woman's car and TV.]]

** Code 4: Do not respond to reported incident; assistance no longer needed.[[note]]Officers occasionally flash four fingers at each other to quickly show that a scene is clear[[/note]]

* {{Blackmail}}: The appropriately titled "IAD-Blackmail" has Pete discover that a fellow officer is blackmailing a witness to keep quiet. The officer tries to get Pete on his side after having saved Pete's life earlier in the episode, but Pete just gets ticked off about having his name drug into it.

* BrokenPedestal: A cop saves Malloy's life, but Malloy later learns that [[spoiler:this cop is as twisty as a corkscrew]].

** In the episode "Training Division," Wells was actually saddled with a "know-nothing know-it-all" rookie officer. Naturally, the rookie officer didn't last long on the force, and Malloy for once felt sorry for Wells, who laid out the rookie's problem dead-serious to [=MacDonald=]: "''The kid's a hot dog: wants to be a ten-year cop in six months''" (Several other episodes dealt with "know-nothing know-it-all" rookies and the consequences of their mistakes.)

** Within the show, Mac and Lt. Moore fill this role for the officers - they will enforce discipline and lecture their men when necessary, but they also give them a lot of leeway to try unconventional ideas when they seem like they might work.

* YouOweMe: In "Blackmail", another officer saves Pete's life during a shootout in the beginning of the episode. Later, Pete discovers that the officer was taking bribes from a witness in another case being investigated. The cop tries to throw it back and Pete when confronted, and say that Pete owes him for saving Pete's life, but naturally, Pete doesn't go for it and just gets more ticked off.

** Code 4: Do not respond to reported incident; assistance no longer needed.

* CallBack: In an episode where two guys are fighting over a boat, Pete recalls buying one and that it "nickled and dimed him to death". This is referring to "A Fool and His Money", where Pete wins $10k in a contest and wants to buy a boat, despite Jim's urging to invest the money.

** "Pressure Point":

* EagleEyeDetection: Arguably what makes Reed a very strong officer – his ability to observe, pay attention and analyze almost instantly what's going on. He can easily spot license plates that belong to wanted cars, to determine whether someone is a suspect (just by how he's behaving) ... to the very last episode, where the last case involves him cracking a typewriter theft ring by spotting the serial number and matching it with an advisory on the thefts. Malloy, too, in his own way. His experience helps him pick up on tells, missed details, and other clues. One good example of how both work is in "The Beast". They're told to investigate a warehouse with unusual activity. They arrive to see a bunch of men apparently loading boxes. Each has his own way of sensing something's amiss. Malloy noted the manifest he was given was two weeks out of date. Reed noticed the workers had unwrinkled clothes despite having supposedly drove in from some distance away.

* NiceJobFixingItVillain: In one episode, Malloy is injured in a crash, and the radio is hors de combat. Then a murderer with nothing to lose happens by, and, not realizing the radio is kaput, pulls mike out. Malloy is able to cross the now-exposed wires to signal [=***---***=] in Morse Code.

** While Malloy and Reed were both professional about their duties and kept their cool, Malloy blows it once in the season seven episode "X-Force," where he is accused of roughing up a child molester he just arrested (after the creep had made a snide remark); Malloy is suspended for four days without pay for his mistake, and it is suggested that it may hinder his chances for promotion to sergeant.

* ThePrecariousLedge: In one episode Reed and Malloy encounter [[TalkingDownTheSuicide a jumper on one of these.]] Malloy goes out on the ledge to pull him back in. The sergeant gives him a massive chewing-out for this.

** In "X-Force", Malloy allows a SmugSnake child molester to get him riled enough to use excessive force. The long dénouement is about the consequences.

* BoringInvincibleHero: Averted. Malloy is a veteran officer with good instincts, but even he makes mistakes and gets chewed out for breaking policy or protocol.

* TheAllegedCar: Malloy and Reed are assigned "The Beast," a patrol car only 300 miles away from its mandatory retirement, in the episode of the same title. It's so awful, Malloy even "lets" Reed drive for one of only a handful of times during the course of the series.

* OldCopYoungCop: Malloy's not ''old'', but he is a seasoned veteran with many years experience as a patrolman working with a fresh out of the Academy rookie who he has to put through his paces and see if Reed will measure up.

* ShownTheirWork: As mentioned in the main description.

* AmmunitionConservation: Malloy tries to teach Reed to spare his ammunition, and shoot only when told to, or when he has a clear shot, especially since taking time to reload would put one in a vulnerable position, as shown when Malloy takes on a group of burglars.