21 Jump Street

Background: Originally published August 30, 2006.

     The latest trend appears to be making a movie based on the premise of television series from long ago. There was ABC's Starsky And Hutch, CBS' The Dukes Of Hazzard, and most recently NBC's Miami Vice. So I shouldn't have been surprised when I was reading Parade magazine's Q & A page this past week, and discovered Stephen J. Cannell is currently producing film versions of NBC's The A-Team and Fox's 21 Jump Street.
     Part of me is relieved. The few time in my life that I have mentioned 21 Jump Street in conversation, people would give me a bewildered look. It was as if I had mentioned some obscure television show from thirty years ago that nobody had ever heard of, like Lotsa Luck or Aloha Paradise, a spin-of from The Love Boat.
     But 21 Jump Street was different, or so I thought. People have heard of Johnny Depp. And 21 Jump Street was where Depp made a name for himself; the television series served as a springboard for Depp's movie career.
     21 Jump Street was not a favorite show of mine. But it brings back fond memories for me nonetheless. It reminds me of my news internship at Fox-affiliate KLSR-TV at the station's original location at Eighteenth and Oak Streets in downtown Eugene. 21 Jump Street aired every Monday at 8:00p.m. The television series Alien Nation followed at 9:00p.m. A person couldn't ask for better lead-in programs for KLSR's Prime Time News at 10.
     I remember when station workers cheered when the ratings book showed KLSR's 10:00p.m. news pulling in more viewers than KMTR's 11:00p.m. news. And this was back when KLSR didn't have an equal coverage area with the other Eugene stations, and lacked the cable TV penetration in outlying areas, including Sutherlin-Oakland.
     Fox network programs initially aired only on Saturday and Sunday nights. 21 Jump Street was one of the original six programs that launched the Fox network. With the exception of another inaugural series, Married With Children, 21 Jump Street aired the longest of the six original series and the re-runs eventually went into syndication. When Fox expanded to a third night of programming on Monday nights, Fox moved 21 Jump Street from its weekend slot to Mondays, to draw in viewers to the new night or programming.
     The premise of the show was about a group of young police officers who worked a variety of undercover assignments: people in their twenties who looked like teen-agers and could blend in with a group of minors. At least that's how Depp and his fellow actors looked during the first season or two. After that, 21 Jump Street fans just accepted the premise of the show as it was, and still pretended the aging actors looked the part. Kind of makes one think about another eight-year long Fox show about teen-agers, That 70s' Show.
     In one episode, the 21 Jump Street unit infiltrated a group of rich, thrill-seeking teen-agers who committed burglaries and other daring stunts just to relive their boredom. It's somewhat predictable that near the end of the show, one of the teens played Russian roulette with a loaded gun and lost.
     21 Jump Street always had a lesson in each episode. In one episode, the cops went undercover at a high school where a discipline-at-all-cost principal was violating the civil rights of students. And in the episode "A Big Disease With A Little Name," Depp posed as a high school student while he's assigned to bodyguard another teen-ager who had AIDS. One lesson that Depp (and the audience) learned from that episode: It's safe to drink milk from the same carton as someone who is HIV positive.
     As the 21 Jump Street actors grew older, they moved from fighting crime in high schools to college campuses. In the episode "Hell Week," they went through the initiation process at a fraternity, in order to find evidence of fraternity members who were raping girls at campus parties. Such were the bubble gum plots of 21 Jump Street during its heyday in the late 1980s-early 1990s.
     At one point, producers become concerned about Depp, who was becoming somewhat reckless and overbearing with his employers. That's when the writers brought in heart-throb Richard Grieco (who?) and added him to the cast to let Depp know that he was not indispensable. However, Grieco was so successful on 21 Jump Street that writers eventually cast him in his own spin-off series, Booker.
     Yes, I'm happy to learn that a film version of 21 Jump Street will soon come to local theaters. If for no other reason, people will at least know what I'm talking about now, if the name 21 Jump Street should ever come up in conversation. But, I'm also curious to see how they will condense the series into the plot of one movie. Will it take place on a high school campus? An amusement park? A paint ball range? A combination of all of the above? Will Depp make a cameo appearance? Or if Depp wants too much money, will Richard Grieco (who?) be enough of a box-office draw?
     When 21 Jump Street debuts in southern Oregon, I'll probably wander into the theater right before the movie starts, and take a back seat so that nobody else sees me. But more importantly, the question that weighs most heavy on my mind: When will they make a film version of Lou Grant?