About

1975-1983

Hi, I’m Daisy. I first watched S&H when I was a kid, most likely in middle school around the age of 10 or 11, but I don’t exactly remember, on account of my memory sucks. I was 9 when it premiered in 1975, but because it aired at 10pm on Wednesdays, I doubt my mother would have let me stay up to watch it. So unlike many fans with better memories than me, I don’t know what year I first saw it, or what episode was my initiation, but I do remember that I had the single to “Don’t Give Up on Us” when it came out in 1977, and I had a mad crush on David Soul/Hutch. Still do. So maybe that’s when I started watching it.

As a pre-teen watching this grown-up TV show, I saw something special in the characters and their relationship that I couldn’t put a name to at the time. I vividly remember Starsky holding Hutch in his arms on the bed in the Fix and being astounded by the raw intimacy of it. And I don’t mean in a sexual way, because I had actually seen explicit gay porn (at a friend’s house when her parents weren’t home) and that was completely different.

To this day, I have never seen a scene like that in either a TV show or a movie. Have you?

I don’t remember talking about Starsky & Hutch with anyone else at the time, or anyone talking about it with me, and so I thought I was the only person who was touched by that scene and others.

For the next 40+ years, the image of them in that bed was imprinted on my mind, along with the tags of Starsky’s Lady and Sweet Revenge (another bed scene!) and the hug in Gillian.

And the thing is, I thought there was something wrong with me; I thought that I was the only one who “got” Starsky & Hutch, but I equally worried that perhaps I was the only one who didn’t “get” it.

S&H ran in syndication starting in 1979 or 1980 and I definitely watched it then, or in the early 80s, because it aired around dinnertime on one of our local TV channels, and I specifically remember an incident that happened while watching an especially tense episode where Hutch was in some kind of danger (one of my favorite types of ep).

I’m pretty sure it was either Survival or The Game. Then my mother called me into the kitchen for dinner in the middle of the episode. I asked if I could eat after it ended, because I needed to know what would happen to Hutch, but she said no and we got into a huge fight where I ended up upset and crying and not getting to see the ending. It’s one of the few childhood memories I’ve carried with me all these years. I guess bitterness and resentment are easily remembered, LOL.

1984-2018

I don’t remember watching S&H during these years, unless maybe I caught an episode here or there while flipping channels on cable, except for one day about 10 years ago, when I decided, out of the blue, to see if the episodes were on YouTube. They were, and I watched Survival.

Maybe that was the episode I fought with my mother about all those years ago, because I didn’t remember the ending when Starsky practically slams his body into Hutch and cradles his head and face in both hands, saying “We made it partner.” I’m sure I would have remembered that, because those are the types of scenes that S&H imprinted on me as a child.

When Miami Vice premiered in 1984, I was a freshman in college. I had moved on from Starsky & Hutch (it pains me to write that) and I watched MV specifically because it was a buddy cop show that I assumed would be similar to S&H, with the partners loving each other, the friendship, the physical affection, hurt/comfort, etc. And boy, was I disappointed! Although I loved the show in its own way, and had a poster of Crockett and Tubbs in my dorm room, the characters and their relationship never lived up to S&H in my mind. No characters ever have.

I was constantly disappointed, because Miami Vice lacked everything that made Starsky & Hutch special: the chemistry, the friendship, the physical affection, and the love. And to add insult to injury, I had heard that Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas didn’t even get along in real life and both were egotistical divas. Sooo much unlike our Paul and David.

I don’t remember if I knew at the time that Paul and David had directed episodes of Miami Vice, although I assume I knew, but I don’t think I realized, until I re-discovered S&H recently, that both Michael Mann and Anthony Yerkovich (creators of Miami Vice) had worked on S&H, with MM writing four episodes (Texas Longhorn, Lady Blue, Jojo, and The Psychic), and AY writing two (Quadromania and Murder Ward). AY must really like the name Switek because he used it in both Murder Ward and Miami Vice. And Philip Michael Thomas appeared in Quadromania.

No movie or TV show I’ve ever watched has compared to S&H in the love, friendship, or chemistry departments. But I think it’s because of watching S&H as a child that I’ve always been attracted to buddy shows and movies, whether the buddies are cops like in Lethal Weapon, hitmen like in In Bruges (director Martin McDonagh’s fantastically funny and poignant 2008 black comedy), or Robert DeNiro’s bounty hunter and Charles Grodin’s mob accountant in the wonderful 1988 road comedy Midnight Run, which always reminds me of the S&H episode The Bounty Hunter, for obvious reasons.

And in the “there really are six degrees of separation in Hollywood” department, John Ashton, who played a hilarious role as a rival bounty hunter in Midnight Run, also appeared in the S&H episode “The Committee,” as Willits the bad guy who they hide in Starsky’s bedroom, and also in “The Groupie.”

Also, both S&H and Midnight Run were filmed in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. I suppose that’s apropos of nothing, but I often find myself comparing S&H to everything else.

BTW, if you’ve never seen In Bruges or Midnight Run, I highly recommend them. I own them both on DVD and have watched them countless times. And part of the reason why I love them so much, besides how entertaining they are, is because of the buddy stuff.

But NO ONE has ever done the buddy stuff better than S&H.

So, getting back to what made the scenes between them so special, especially the H/C scenes: after reading some articles recently about the show which were written in the 70s and 80s, I realized that no one else could put it into words either. Or if they could, they weren’t comfortable doing so. Meaning, any magazine article that talked about The Fix, or Gillian, or A Coffin for Starsky, would talk freely about the car chases, the shootouts and fist fights, and the playful banter, friendship, and loyalty between the two partners, but when it came time to describe the hurt/comfort scenes, those were hurried past or glossed over, even by female writers.

For example, when describing the hug scene in Gillian, the author would write something safe and bland such as, “Starsky comforts Hutch when his girlfriend is brutally murdered.” And that’s it. No mention of Hutch crying his heart out in Starsky’s arms.

So it’s no wonder that, for decades, I thought I was alone in how I felt about those scenes. Until I discovered the fandom in 2019, I never knew that other fans felt the same way as I did. But many fans have told the same story: that they knew the show was special, that those scenes were special, but they couldn’t talk about it with anyone.

So when I found Survival on YouTube ten years ago, why did I only watch that episode and no others? Why hadn’t I bought the DVDs when the first season came out after that awful movie premiered?

To quote Hutch in Murder at Sea, “I don’t know.” I think that life just got in the way. My kids were young at the time, and for many years, I only watched children’s shows, even when they were asleep. It would be 11pm and I would be watching SpongeBob, Dora the Explorer, and Sesame Street by myself.

Yes, I’m strange that way.

I watched grownup shows, too, over the years, both before I had kids and when they got older. In the 80s and 90s it was Seinfeld, Friends, Law & Order, ER, and the Practice. I once saw the cast of the Practice at the airport. That was cool.

Later on, I watched the Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, and American Horror Story.

More recently it was Game of Thrones, the Crown, Stranger Things, and Orange is the New Black. And HGTV. Lots of HGTV.

Those shows were nothing like each other (apparently I have very diverse tastes) and certainly nothing like Starsky & Hutch, but I still enjoyed them in their own way.

I felt sad and empty when the Sopranos ended, and of course when James Gandolfini tragically passed away unexpectedly.

I cried during the entire final season of Downton Abbey (don’t laugh!) because I was convinced that my favorite character was going to be killed off (thankfully, he wasn’t).

I cried for three days when Game of Thrones ended (not an exaggeration), despite being disappointed with it, like so many other fans.

However, one of the parts I loved most in the final episode of GoT was Jon Snow and Tormund Giantsbane reuniting and riding off north of the wall together, as the best friends they are. That’s the kind of ending I imagine for Starsky & Hutch, as no one were better friends than they were.

But no matter how many of those other shows I enjoyed, I have no desire to watch them again, despite them being readily available on cable, Amazon, and Netflix. I write fan fiction exclusively for Starsky & Hutch and have no urge to read or write fan fiction about any other fandom, or to express my feelings about the characters or actors, except what I’ve already written here.

And I don’t just love the characters of David Starsky and Ken Hutchinson — I love them so much that they are as real to me as anyone else in my real life.

2019-Present

It was serendipity when I re-discovered Starsky & Hutch in 2019 (and discovered the fandom for the first time). I was looking for eps to watch on YouTube as I had done ten years earlier, but I couldn’t find any. Instead, I found all the wonderful fanvids, and I was instantly HOOKED. I bought the complete series on DVD and watched episodes I hadn’t seen in more than 35 years, feeling like a kid on Christmas morning, and then I watched the entire series in order. It was the strangest, most wonderful feeling, watching many S&H episodes for the first time, as if they were lost treasures found in a time capsule.

I mentioned the show to my mother and asked if she remembered the yelling incident all those years ago. She said she hadn’t, nor did she remember me watching Starsky & Hutch at all, but my mom’s memory is even worse than mine, and besides, the matter certainly would have meant more to me at the time than it would have to her.

Anyway, that same day (Mothers Day, as it happened), I showed her a photo of Hutch wearing his moon and star necklace which he wore in seasons 3 and 4, and mentioned that I really liked it but had trouble finding something similar on the Internet. She then decided to buy me (out of guilt, I suppose) an S&H t-shirt from Amazon and had it shipped to my house, and sent me links to various jewelry websites with variations on the moon and stars theme, none of which were quite right.

But then happily, an S&H friend on Facebook discovered the origins of the necklace, and guess what? You can still buy it today from the same jeweler: Christopher Miller at Pale Moon Creations. My mom bought it for me for Christmas, along with matching earrings. Thanks, Mom! I guess you’re forgiven now.

For more on Hutch’s necklace: read this.

When watching the DVDs in order, there were so many episodes that weren’t familiar to me, including Shootout, A Coffin for Starsky, and Bloodbath, to name a few, so I knew that I couldn’t possibly have seen them as a child or I would have definitely remembered Hutch cradling Starsky in his arms in Shootout and ACFS, the hand-holding scene in the squad room in ACFS, the terrifying menace of Simon Marcus in Bloodbath and the guys holding onto each other and crying tears of joy when they were reunited.

I recently asked my husband to find a Starsky & Hutch ringtone for my phone. I wanted to use one of the Tom Scott themes. Coincidentally, he had just found some old backups of our cell phone files from 2009 on his computer, when I had an old Droid Incredible 2, and it turns out I had a Starsky & Hutch ringtone on it then, which was the Tom Scott Season 2 theme. Strangely, I didn’t remember having that at all, and I don’t know when or why I stopped using it.

So here I am, more than 40 years after I first met Detectives David Starsky and Kenneth Hutchinson, and I’m just as madly in love with them now as I was then, probably even more so, now that I know so much about the actors and the background of the show that I was ignorant of as a kid.

Starsky & Hutch and David & Paul are different. They’re special. And only S&H fans truly get that.