Line #18 Series/TheStreetsOfSanFrancisco


1	[[quoteright:305:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/the_streets_of_san_francisco.jpg]]
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3	A crime drama series that ran on [[Creator/AmericanBroadcastingCompany ABC]] from 1972–77, produced by Creator/QuinnMartin Productions (with [[Creator/WarnerBros Warner Bros. Television]] in Season One) and shot on location in UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco.
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5	The series starred Creator/KarlMalden as Det. Lt. Mike Stone, a veteran homicide cop, with Creator/MichaelDouglas (in his StarMakingRole) as Det. Insp. Steve Keller, Stone's younger partner. Douglas left the show at the start of its fifth and final season, and was replaced by Richard Hatch as Det. Insp. Dan Robbins; this change was not popular with viewers (since ''Series/{{Battlestar Galactica\|1978}}'' hadn't been created yet), leading to declining ratings and the show's cancellation.
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7	Unique among crime shows since, the show's actors and writers took great pains to ensure an authentic portrayal of the San Francisco Police Department.
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9	A reunion telefilm, ''Back to the Streets of San Francisco'', produced by [[Creator/AaronSpelling Spelling Television]], the successor-in-interest to QM Productions, aired on NBC in early 1992.
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12	!!Tropes:
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14	* AccidentalMurder: [[spoiler:"Deadline", "The Runaways", "Once A Con", "Most Feared In The Jungle", "The Twenty-Five Caliber Plague" and "Bitter Wine".]]
15	* AnAesop: "Men Will Die" is very critical of how rape is treated both in terms of the victims and the criminals.
16	** "The Twenty-Five Caliber Plague" is almost an episode-length PSA on the dangers of easily gotten guns.
17	* TheAlcoholic: Officer Joe Landers (Creator/LeslieNielsen) in "One Last Shot", whose drinking leads to a botched arrest of a suspect and the accidental shooting death of his partner.
18	* AssholeVictim: The victim of the week in "A Trout in the Milk" is a womanizing artist.
19	* AlwaysMurder: Well, since Stone and Keller (and Robbins) work in the homicide division...
20	* AndStarring: Creator/MichaelDouglas gets "Special Guest Star" billing on his final episode(s) the two-parter "The Thrill Killers"; as does Creator/MarkHamill on the 1977 episode "Innocent No More" (''[[Film/ANewHope Star Wars]]'' opened several months ''after'' the episode first aired).
21	* AndThisIsFor: "Deadly Silence," "Monkey Is Back", "Poisoned Snow" and "Clown Of Death" (among others).
22	* BerserkButton:
23	** In "Dead Lift," making fun of fitness freak Josef or otherwise belittling him is a very good way to get yourself killed. As demonstrated in Act I.
24	** Retired teacher Leopold Summers took his job ''very'' seriously ("School Of Fear"). So when a teacher at the school he used to work at gets killed...
25	* BittersweetEnding: "School of Fear." [[spoiler: Two of the four kidnapped problem students return to school, [[TheSmurfettePrinciple the only girl]] amongst them drops out, while the remaining one might or might not come back. As a teacher points out to Stone and Keller in the Epilog, "you can't win them all."]]
26	* BerserkButton: ''Do not'' threaten Jeannie Stone (see PapaWolf below) as seen in "Beyond Vengeance"
27	* BookEnds: "The Thrill Killers, Part 1" starts with Steve arriving at a trial from a hearing where it's been determined he didn't go out of bounds in shooting a suspect. [[spoiler: It ends with Steve, having been shot himself by a suspect, en route to a hospital.]]
28	* TheButlerDidIt: [[spoiler: "Death and the Favored Few."]]
29	* CainAndAbel: Dimitri Kampakalas (Scott Marlowe) and his brother Jason (Creator/PaulMichaelGlaser) in the episode "Bitter Wine". Jason served a prison sentence for a double vehicular homicide that his brother committed, so that Dimitri could operate the family winery. When Dimitri carries out his plan to torch the winery for the insurance money and a security guard is killed in the process, guess whom he frames for the crime?
30	* CircusEpisode: "Clown of Death", where Stone and Keller investigate the murders of three performers in a traveling circus.
31	* CreatorCameo: Lawrence Dobkin, who played the villain in the series' pilot film, also directed two first-season episodes, "A Trout In the Milk" and "Act of Duty".
32	** Nicholas Colasanto was one of the main guest stars in the first season episode "Death Watch". He would return two seasons later to direct the episode "The Programming of Charlie Blake".
33	* CrimeAfterCrime: Too many examples to count but to supply one: in the episode "The Twenty-Five Caliber Plague", the titular "plague" is a tiny pistol that goes from one person to another after its original owner disposes of it in a trash can after blasting dead a bookie's goon that was beating him up, and they use it to shoot someone.
34	* CrimeAndPunishmentSeries
35	* DeathByFallingOver: In "Deadline", reporter Chris Bane (played by Barry Sullivan) knocks down his girlfriend during an argument on the beach, killing her.
36	** In "Most Feared In The Jungle", single young mother Barbara Talmadge (Kitty Winn) struggles with the matron at the unwed mothers' home where she lived before her baby was stillborn, she's convinced her baby's alive and was taken from her[[spoiler: (she's right)]]. Matron winds up on the ground. And that's all she wrote.
37	** In "The Runaways", George Morgan (Creator/LarryWilcox) breaks into a pharmacy to get medication for his sick younger sister. He's surprised by the pharmacy owner, who thinks he's a junkie and scuffles with him, causing the owner to fall and fatally strike his head on a weight scale.
38	* DeathOfAChild: One of the victims of the Saturday Night Special at the center of "The Twenty-Five Caliber Plague" is a little boy who's shot by of his friends who finds the gun and then pulls out the clip and thinks its empty. It isn't...
39	** In "The House on Hyde Street", one of the three boys who break into Harlan Edgerton's (Creator/LewAyres) house falls from a ladder and fatally breaks his neck. The boys lie to the cops, saying that Harlan caught and killed the boy. [[spoiler: Harlan, who's not all there, tells Stone and Keller, that his brother, who was killed in World War II, is the killer.]]
40	* DirtyCop: Several examples...
41	** Officer Andrea [=McCormick=] in "Shield of Honor", who helps to set up a police informant in protective custody to be killed.
42	** Inspector John J. Connor (Creator/LeslieNielsen) in "Before I Die", a dying cop who's out to assassinate the mobster he never was able to bust.
43	** Officer Jimmy Vega in "False Witness", who plants evidence to nail a pusher.
44	** Inspector George Turner (Creator/CluGulager) in "Poisoned Snow". His fiancée, who's a fellow narc, is fatally gunned down during a raid on a pusher. In revenge, he gets ahold of the pusher's stash and cuts it with strychnine, which results in a number of users falling over dead.
45	** Detective Eddie Boggs (Creator/NedBeatty) in "Hang Tough", another narc who plants a knife on a suspect he roughed up, to justify his actions.
46	* DisposableWoman: In "The Drop," the girlfriend of a kidnap victim is gunned down by one of the kidnappers (and later passes away in hospital), as the guy is taken, purely so that Mike Stone can be involved with the case (and the killer specifically wants Stone to make the drop so he can take revenge). The hostage ''never mentions her again''. Dude, your girlfriend was '''shot and mortally wounded in front of you'''!
47	* DoomMagnet: If Jeannie's in an episode with a friend from university, the friend is ''screwed''.
48	* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler: Jean (Stone's daughter)'s friend Nancy]] in "Men Will Die" [[spoiler: - she's raped by two men at the start of the episode, and the traumatized woman subsequently shoots and kills one of them - but because there isn't any conclusive evidence of her rape, she's eventually held for trial for murder... driving her to jump off a stairwell in the courthouse. Thankfully, she does recover. (And yes, the other guy does get caught.)]]
49	** [[spoiler: Boggs]] in "Hang Tough." [[spoiler: Unlike Jean's friend, he succeeds.]]
50	* DubNameChange: In West Germany, Steve was named "Heller", because there was already a "Kommissar Keller" (Erik Ode) on West German television.
51	* EverybodyLives: [[spoiler: "Who Killed Helen French?" and "Time Out."]]
52	* EverybodyOwnsAFord: The series was sponsored by Ford Motor Company, and half of the vehicles shown were new Ford cars. In the early episodes, Keller and Stone drove a brown 1971 Ford Galaxie four-door sedan and the entire SFPD cruiser fleet consists of Ford Galaxies.
53	* FramedFaceOpening: The TitleSequence has Detectives Stone and Keller over a blocky splotch design. Said design was also used for the guest cast montage.
54	* INeverSaidItWasPoison: [[spoiler:"Let's Pretend We're Strangers." Billy, who's suspected of murdering a young woman, has been gotten off by his legal aid lawyer - but then he tells her that he didn't kill anybody, and mentions the woman and another person (who he also killed because he spotted him leaving the scene of the crime) ''by name''... even though he shouldn't have known about the latter.]]
55	* IdiotBall: As demonstrated in "One Last Trick" - [[spoiler: on finding somebody's after her, Carol tells Joy to leave immediately and not bother to pack. She's next seen carrying a small case... had she taken Carol's advice she might not have been offed at the end of Act II).]]
56	* IncrediblyObviousBug: Seen in one episode. The tracking device is large and obvious (although not blinking or beeping), but it is planted on the back bumper of the car after the hero has gotten in, thus justifying them not noticing it.
57	* InSeriesNickname: Stone regularly calls Keller "buddy boy."
58	* InstrumentalThemeTune: Probably the funkiest outside of ''Series/BarneyMiller''.
59	* JustGotOutOfJail: In "Timelock", Bobby Jepsen has been released from prison, where he'd been serving time for manslaughter, with the proviso that he find a job within 72 hours. Shako, who'd been in prison with him, sees him on the street and presses him for information about a contract that was made on his life. Bobby, who doesn't want to be seen with him, as it would violate his parole, argues with him as they're standing on a street corner waiting for the light to change. Someone comes up behind Shako and shoves him into the path of a moving truck, killing him, and then vanishing. All of the witnesses on the corner I.D. Jepsen as the killer. He's arrested after running into a bar to make a phone call to someone who could help...Lt. Mike Stone, who coached him as a child in Little League.
60	* KilledOffForReal: [[spoiler: Steve in the ReunionShow]].
61	* NiceJobBreakingItHero: In "Dead Or Alive," the wealthy father of a young woman who's beaten, raped, and murdered offers a reward of a million dollars for the killer's capture. [[spoiler: The greed the reward generates results in three people being hospitalized, including the killer (who's shot by a shopkeeper with dollar signs in his eyes while trying to escape from Stone), and the episode ends without their fates known. It also results in a cop on the verge of retirement getting a friend of his involved in a scheme to catch the guy and split the reward, which winds up with the cop being kicked off the force and his friend being shot and killed. And the father may or may not be facing charges of complicity and involvement with murder himself, since it was basically his fault.]]
62	** In "Poisoned Snow," a cop's girlfriend is shot and killed by a junkie while she's trying to arrest him, which [[spoiler: drives the man to lace a dealer's cocaine with rat poison in hopes that the junkie who killed her will take a fatal dose. He does... as do many other junkies throughout San Francisco. Including his own son.]]
63	* MakeItLookLikeAnAccident: In "River of Fear", con artist James Cooper, posing as Dr. William Dunson, marries the cellmate of his widow (who died in prison under suspicious circumstances) in order to find out where he hid the fortune in cash he stole. He strikes her in the back of the head with a telephone receiver, then puts her in the bathtub to make it look like slipped, hit her head and drowned.
64	* NotMeThisTime: In "Let's Pretend We're Strangers," Billy (who has a record of petty crimes) insists that he wasn't responsible for killing a woman in her apartment. [[spoiler: [[BlatantLies He was]].]]
65	* ObfuscatingInsanity: In the episode "Asylum", Keller poses as a mental patient to enter a mental health facility where a couple of patients died mysteriously.
66	* OhCrap: The {{Jerkass}} DJ (Creator/LarryHagman) in "Dead Air", realizes too late his NiceCharacterMeanActor rant to his engineer about his audience has just become an EngineeredPublicConfession to all his listeners. [[spoiler: The end of the episode reveals he's working at ''another'' San Francisco radio station as a country music DJ.]]
67	** Jeannie has one in "Endgame". [[spoiler: when she's ''finally'' let in on the undercover assignment to smoke out a mob boss, with Mike Stone pretending to be a DirtyCop.. and thinks she's let slip to one of the Vice cops who are (rightly) suspected of being on the mob boss' payroll that Mike isn't really a dirty cop...]]
68	* OohMeAccentsSlipping: Meredith Baxter's Southern accent in "Deadly Silence" is a bit uneven.
69	* OneWordTitle: "Timelock", "Deadline", "Harem", "Inferno", "Commitment", "Rampage", "Solitaire", "Breakup" and "Runaway", "Endgame".
70	* OpeningNarration: In keeping with series from QM Productions, each one was episode-specific (although "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore" also has one at the beginning of the first act to set up the episode). Here's one for instance from season five (which runs so long the theme music actually ''goes back to the beginning and starts again''):
71	-->"''The Streets of San Francisco'', a Quinn Martin Production. Starring Karl Malden. [[AndStarring Special Guest Star]] Creator/MichaelDouglas. Also Starring Richard Hatch. With Guest Stars In Alphabetical Order: [[Creator/PattyDuke Patty Duke Astin]], Darleen Carr, Tina Chen, Jan Clayton, Creator/SusanDey, Norman Fell, Gary Frank, Paula Kelly, Jim [=McMullan=], Creator/DorisRoberts, James Shigeta, Creator/BarrySullivan, Dick Van Patten, Joseph Wiseman. Tonight's Episode: 'The Thrill Killers - Part 1.'"[[note]]And Part 2, as it happened.[[/note]]
72	* PapaWolf: Comes out when Stone's daughter starts dating a motorcycle cop in "Hot Dog."
73	* PilotMovie: Based on the novel ''Poor, Poor Ophelia'' by Carolyn Weston.
74	* PointyHairedBoss: Newly-minted Captain Keely in "The Glass Dart Board," whose chart-centric approach to his job interferes with Stone and Keller's search for a sniper randomly shooting at a high-rise - and Keely having a NiceJobBreakingItHero moment when [[spoiler:he personally ruins an operation to locate the sniper ''which would have worked if he hadn't come flying in'' (literally, in a helicopter). In fairness, Keely does eventually realize he's an embodiment of ThePeterPrinciple and returns to where he can be useful.]]
75	* PoorlyDisguisedPilot: "Superstar," about a New York cop who comes to San Francisco to find his partner's killer and sticks around - in other words, ''Series/{{McCloud}}'' in reverse[[note]]in more ways than one. People actually liked ''Series/{{McCloud}}''[[/note]] - led into the [[ShortRunner short-lived]] {{Spinoff}} ''Bert D'Angelo/Superstar''[[note]]just 11 episodes made.[[/note]] (which actually began its network run two weeks ''before'' the episode aired).
76	* PutOnABus: At the start of season 5, Keller leaves the force to begin a teaching career.
77	* PsychoLesbian: [[spoiler: "Once A Con."]]
78	* ReasonYouSuckSpeech: The title character of "Police Buff" is given one by a cop when he tries to express his sympathy over a killer going free (and gets berated for being a coward). The P.B. later gives a stronger variant to ''himself'' back at home - which leads to him taking actions into his hands...
79	* RecycledPremise: season 4's "Underground" essentially repurposes the 1975 unsold QM Productions PilotMovie ''Crossfire'' (in which a cop has to go to deep undercover on special assignment without other officers knowing.[[ItsPersonal The cop has personal reasons for taking the job]].
80	* ReunionShow: 1992's ''Back to the Streets of San Francisco'', with Karl Malden and Darleen Carr (who played the recurring character of his daughter Jeannie on the original series). Michael Douglas doesn't appear, although [[Film/BasicInstinct he did play a San Francisco cop in another production that year]]. [[spoiler: The hunt for Keller's murderer is a major plot element.]]
81	* RoguishRomani: In "The Year of the Locusts", a band of modern-day Gypsies descends on San Francisco, its aging patriarch unaware that the younger generation has moved on from the traditional flim-flam to million-dollar heists and murder.
82	* SerialKillingsSpecificTarget: In "Legion of the Lost", [[CorruptCorporateExecutive Roy Richardson]] is a {{greed}}y businessman who seeks to ensure that the rightful heir of his boatyard corporation, Paul Thomas, never claims his inheritance. Knowing that Paul is currently homeless and living among vagrants, Richardson has his hatchet man, Terry, go about [[DisposableVagrant beating homeless men to death]] over the course of several nights, leaving three bodies in his wake. Richardson then tries to have Paul himself beaten to death, hoping for it to look like just another serial killing, and Paul's best friend Jake is killed in the process.
83	* SettingAsACharacter: Quinn Martin called the titular city "the third star of the series".
84	* ShoutOut: Writer Rick Husky[[note]]would go on to create a successful cop show of his own in ''Series/TJHooker''.[[/note]] was a member of the "Memphis Mafia", the name for Music/ElvisPresley's close circle of friends, and he often used the names of other 'mafia' members for characters in his scripts. In his script for the episode "Target: Red", the villains are named Jerry Schilling and General Robert 'Red' West, after friends of his in the Memphis Mafia. Additionally, another character is named Myrna Schilling, after Jerry's wife, a background singer for Elvis, another character is named Lamar Fisk (there was a similarly named member of the Memphis Mafia, Lamar Fike), and yet another character in the episode is named Vernon Presley, after Elvis's dad.
85	** The front desk's Sergeant's name is Sekulovich. Karl Malden's real name was Mladen Sekulovich. His parents were so hurt that he changed his name for stage purposes, so he asked the series' producer if they could include a character named Sekulovich to honor his parents and they obliged.
86	* ShownTheirWork: The authenticity of the portrayal of the SFPD.
87	* SuspiciouslySimilarSubstitute: Inspector Dan Robbins, Richard Hatch's character.
88	* TimeMarchesOn:
89	** "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore" concerns a [[UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar Vietnam]] [[DraftDodging draft dodger]] back in San Francisco after running to UsefulNotes/{{Canada}}. In between filming of the episode and its first airing, then-President UsefulNotes/GeraldFord stated that amnesty would be given to such dodgers. As a result, the episode has a rare second voiceover from Creator/HankSimms specifying that the episode takes place ''before'' amnesty was declared.
90	** In-universe, [[DropInCharacter Roy Devitt]] - a lieutenant in the first season - makes captain by the final season.
91	* TitleDrop: "Rampage".

Context Series / TheStreetsOfSanFrancisco