Picking a role to follow up after becoming a household name is serious business for an actor, especially when the character you’ve spent years playing is ingrained in the pop culture zeitgeist. That’s exactly what happened for William Shatner after serving on the Starship Enterprise in “Star Trek,” and there are so many ways that choice could have gone for the TV favorite. Luckily, Shatner found the perfect project to maintain his status in the public eye with “T.J. Hooker,” and the cop show ended up being a nice pivot for the household name after a massive stint on “Star Trek.” Now, with some help from free streaming services, you can catch “T.J. Hooker” for free on Tubi.
Shatner’s stint with the “Los Angeles County Police Department” saw him become Sergeant Thomas Jefferson Hooker in the five-season run on ABC from 1982-85, and then CBS to close things out for one more year. Hooker gets drawn out of work as a non-patrol police officer after his partner is killed, which drives him to try and make sure that kind of tragedy never happens to someone else. He adopts a squad of recruits to “clean up the streets,” and this motley crew includes Kelly Harmon, Richard Lawson, Brian Patrick Clarke, and Adrian Zmed. In particular, Hooker’s working relationship with Zmed’s overeager Officer Vince Romano provides a lot of the series drama near the beginning of the show’s run.
There’s no doubt that Shatner’s recent history being an authority figure on the Enterprise helped prime audiences to see him in charge of a crew, albeit on a very different kind of mission than the one that the Federation had him on in previous years. Still, five years running on regular TV is nothing to sneeze at, and people look back on “T.J. Hooker” very fondly. The addition to a free streaming catalog is well worth the binge-watch.
Shatner has been very open about the need to have more creative control in the projects he selects, and “T.J. Hooker” definitely gave him that platform. The actor got to get behind the camera and even help in the writers’ room on occasion, which definitely allowed the star to scratch that itch. Talking to The Hollywood Reporter about his career, Shatner mentioned that “T.J. Hooker” was an experience that he appreciates in hindsight. A large part of that warmth probably stems from being looked to as a leader, rather than just the guy in the chair while the cameras are rolling in the early days of “Star Trek.”
“It was a terrific show. It had all kinds of drama. I got to direct several of the episodes. And some of my shots are in the opening,” Shatner revealed. “I was totally involved, committed to the writing, committed to the directing. You’re running all the time. You’ve got to make decisions, and you don’t have enough money.”
“T.J. Hooker” might feel like a random pull right now for a streaming service, but a lot of old TV dramas are having their day in the sun on platforms like Tubi. For example, “Gunsmoke” hit the Nielsen charts for the first time decades after the show originally aired because of reruns on free streaming platforms. One thing modern viewers have been crying out for is longer shows, but broadcast dramas about cops have retained the ability to run for more seasons than most of their contemporaries. Even so, this model of TV-making has retained its ability to bring in an audience alongside the latest entries to the genre. Make no mistake, people are out there watching these older programs in droves, and you just have to be aware of that fact.
Tubi, in particular, has to get some credit for keeping shows like this in the zeitgeist, as Gen Z and younger audiences are only exposed to something like “T.J. Hooker” through streaming services these days. Preservation remains elusive for a vast majority of shows that ended up on broadcast TV before 1985, and with physical media printings a bit more scarce these days, places like Tubi, Pluto TV, and Roku Channel remain important despite streaming detractors’ various arguments against their utility.
So, if you’re looking for more Shatner, or you’re just in the mood for some classic TV, you can get your fill of “T.J. Hooker,” and you won’t have to spend a fortune to do it.