21 Jump Street: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

Text © 1997+ Cyndi Glass

The Good: Things that made it fantastic, wondrous and fun

• Getting to know the characters - the best parts of the episodes, in my opinion, are the parts where they’re not working, just hanging out together. How else would we know that Penhall likes cartoons? That McCann likes video games? That Hanson likes to read?

• The Penhall pendant - Doug wore it in memory of his dead parents, and when he left town, he gave it to Joey. When Joey was in a lot of stress, he held the pendant, messed with it, rubbed it, anything to try to figure out what he should do, maybe what Doug would do.

• Hoffs was an equal - this was no damsel in distress. Hoffs was smart and feisty, never backing down in the face of a nasty fight against injustice or mistreatment. When the officers (except Hanson, who had just been released from prison) took their test to get promoted to detective, Hoffs was the only one who actually made it. She was often the one to show the most empathy with the victims, and she often solved the cases before anyone else. The best thing was that they resisted the urge to make her a couple with any of her fellow officers, though she didn’t seem to have much luck in her love life outside of the office.

• Just when everything got too serious - along came a humorous episode, or at least one that wasn’t very serious. Any time Hanson’s friend Russell got involved (#25 "Fear And Loathing With Russell Buckins" and #47 "The Dreaded Return of Russell Buckins"), things got out of control. In #27 "Chapel of Love," the officers share stories of past romances (well, it gets serious toward the end). #46 "Woolly Bullies" is a priceless look back at the childhood bully experiences of Fuller, Banducci, Hanson, Booker and Penhall. Booker brings a hysterically funny moment to an otherwise serious moment in #51 "High High" when he delivers his performance art poem, complete with smashing several televison sets, and the other characters are also fun, as Ioki learns to film, Hanson jams with the band and Penhall gets a very tough acting lesson. A Halloween episode (#61 "Old Haunts In A New Age) has them dressed up for a costume party. In #70 "Back From The Future," they’re all aged 50 years and encouraged to reminisce about their years on the Jump Street unit - we find out what happened to them in the future and see tons of great clips from the past, though I really don’t believe that Hanson stayed on the force 40 years. "How I Saved The Senator" was perhaps the most entertaining, though, as the actors themselves got to choose how their story would be told - Sal’s story was a horror/sci-fi piece, Hoffs was a torch jazz singer in hers, Ioki solved his case with martial arts and bad subtitles, Penhall became a spoof of James Bond, and Hanson solved the case in a black and white 1920’s silent film. These humorous episodes provided respite from the other episodes, which pulled no punches in showing the consequences of crime.

• Doug, trying to find a home (episodes 45 and 50). When Dorothy kicked him out, he first tried to stay with Hanson. "Don’t you think our friendship could survive us living together?" Penhall pleads. Hanson looks at him doubtfully. "Do you?" He’s on his way again, in the rain of course, carrying his suitcases while the "Odd Couple" theme plays. He goes to Booker’s, and he’s there with some girl. So off he trudges, to Ioki’s place. Ioki’s neat, clean, tidy, super-organized place. Ioki agrees to let him stay, and it’s delightfully disastrous, as Penhall takes over the apartment with his messes and noise. Finally, Ioki tells him he has to leave, and he has nowhere to go, so he goes to a bar. In what might be the funniest scene I’ve ever seen on 21 Jump Street, he wakes up and slowly realizes that he’s in one of his former apartments, in a bed - and he’s naked. There is a lovely little gay man bringing him breakfast in bed. Penhall is shocked, asking quickly what had happened (nothing, it turned out). He had gotten raging drunk and come to a place he used to live, and there had just been no turning him away. Finally he gets his own apartment.

• El Salvador was real. In so many shows they will make up some mythical country to be the bad guy or provide a tense setting for an episode, but instead of doing this, the Jump Street writers chose El Salvador. Once you watch "Come From The Shadows" and "La Bizca," you’ve been educated about the all too real civil war in the 1980’s, with all of its tragic consequences and atrocities committed by the El Salvadorean government, which was U.S.-backed. You might think they made a lot of it up, but if you go read about it, you’ll see it was all too true to life.

• Season 5 winning us over - At the beginning of Season 5, I didn’t know what I would do not being able to see Hanson or Ioki anymore, and the Dean/Kati episodes didn’t really do it for me. Hoffs was cool, but I didn’t appreciate what seemed to be a lot of episodes in a row about people I didn’t know and didn’t really care about. McCann was next, and he was such a little snot to Hoffs and Penhall that I disliked him right away, and it didn’t help that he seemed to have been cast solely for his resemblance to the departed Hanson. But I was slowly won over by a few genius strokes. First, they made McCann realize that he needed to respect Hoffs and Penhall. Then they focused the next few episodes on Hoffs and Penhall, with McCann there in a few scenes. The next step was casting Michael DeLuise as Joey Penhall. Joey was new, but he had strong ties to Doug, and he didn’t seem quite as jarring a change. For the next few episodes, we fans were treated to these wonderful episodes with Doug and Joey, interrupted only by #89 "The Girl Next Door," in which Mac was featured. Suddenly we saw that he had a heart that was close to the surface, easily touched. After the next two episodes, which concentrated on Doug and Joey, Doug was gone, and we had been subtly hooked into the tight new group: Hoffs, McCann and Joey. They still focused on Hoffs and Joey for a couple of episodes,and then McCann got two episodes in a row where the show was mainly his - #95 "Film At Eleven" and #96 "In The Name of Love," in which he showed his compassion yet again and we got to meet his ex-fiancee and hear more about his past in Newark. Surprise - this time I cared very much.

• Captain Fuller's wisdom - he didn't often preach at his young officers, but his advice was usually sound. He felt for them, part of him went on assignment with them every time, and he tried to help them all he could. Part of the fun of every episode was wondering what Fuller would have to say about how the officers handled things.

• Doug & Judy's final scene together - "Even on the worst day, you could make me laugh," Judy says, her eyes full of tears. For once a departure was handled with dignity and with the significance the characters deserved. When Doug leaves, Hoffs is the only original Jump Street member left, and you can tell it's upsetting her.

• Dennis Booker - Just when everyone got comfortable and let down their guard, along came Booker, and the reactions of the different characters were very telling, bringing out even more character development. Hoffs befriended him, Ioki withdrew from the group more, Penhall tried not to take sides but usually sided with Hanson, while Hanson seemed to resent his presence. Simply put, Booker was a breath of fresh air in a show that was becoming formulaic. With Booker, you never knew what he was going to say or do next. He worked to bring down Raymond Crane even though he wouldn't have had to. After years of working alone, he learns how to work on a team.

• Doug & Joey - even though it didn't last very long, the run of episodes featuring the two of them acting as a team breathed new life into Season 5. Doug's gradual acceptance of his younger brother wasn't overnight, it wasn't sappy, and none of the episodes ended with a hug. The stunning episode that introduced Joey, #87 "Brothers," instantly introduced this guarded cocky little guy who wanted so much to be loved and accepted by his older brother, and in only five episodes, these two made an impact.

• The show’s overall messages - I think Johnny Depp was wrong sometimes about 21 Jump Street. In his interviews he called the process of putting undercover police in high schools "fascist" and said he didn’t believe in it, and he said that the show didn’t delve enough into the social issues. He said that what he thought Hanson should do is go completely insane. In the third and fourth seasons, according to his interviews, he showed up and knew his lines, but didn’t even bother to read the rest of the script most of the time, and I think maybe if he had read them, he would have seen that the show was sometimes doing exactly what he thought it should be doing (he has said in interviews also that he has only seen a few of the finished episodes). There were even many episodes in which the characters questioned what they were doing, whether it was right to trick other people, whether it was right to encourage people to commit crimes that they might not otherwise have done (in particular, there is one boy in #51 "High High" who says that this drug deal that Hanson wants will be his last one, and that he had quit dealing but would for Hanson because he was such a good friend). The characters weren't always perfect - they screwed up cases, they got out of control sometimes…Booker even kept silent and let someone else get killed rather than blow his cover (#49 "Nemesis.") But the way these things were handled showed the consequences, and that is where the real message lies. Booker says racist things on the radio and grows to learn that even his casual semi-racist attitude he had previously had was wrong. You have to have dramatic situations, and if no one ever messes up or does anything wrong, there just aren’t any, and it’s boring to always have the guest stars make the mistakes while the shining upstanding officers save the day.

• The basic decency of Doug Penhall - this is one guy that you can depend on to do the right thing, yet he never seems boring. In the beginning he seems like a macho thug, but as the shows progress, we get to know him better. He gets angry, he even gets violent, but it's always for a good reason. He’s a slob, but somehow it doesn’t really matter. He screws up, but he tries to fix it. He tries to dislike his brother, but he just can’t. He falls in love with Marta and marries her after knowing her for a matter of days, and he tries to save her, and when he can't, he goes to El Salvador to try again, ultimately adopting her nephew. He quits the police force when Clavo is terrified that he will lose Doug too.

• Speaking of Clavo, he was really a little delight. Just a beautiful little boy, and Tony Dakota was a great little actor, particularly in scenes with Peter & Michael DeLuise.

• The friendship between Capt. Fuller and Judy Hoffs. Of all of the officers, she is the one who has earned his respect the most. By the end of the series, he was firmly entrenched in her life, looking out for her and acting as a protective and loving older brother.

• Hanson's plotline continuity - whatever else can be said about the shortcomings of the continuity in this series, they did get one character right - Tom Hanson. From the very beginning, we knew his father had been killed in the line of duty and that Hanson had his Mustang. He tells Capt. Jenko not to call him "Sport." In #6 "The Worst Night Of Your Life," Hanson, while undercover, has to attend a prom at a Catholic girls' school. He won't dance and seems very nervous. Later, in Season 2, we find out in #27 "Chapel of Love" that the night of his prom was when his father was killed. We also hear his father calling him "Sport." Little things like this really make a show worthwhile.

The Bad: Things that really could have been a little better

• When Penhall left, sure it broke the unwritten TV rule that every episode should end with everything all neat & tidy, and with hugs all around, but I think he could have given Joey a hug.

• In #74 "La Bizca," Marta is killed, and this was broadcast in early 1990. In #91 "Number One With A Bullet," which was broadcast in December 1990, Doug Penhall is shot & almost killed, and he talks to Marta in Purgatory, saying that it had been two years since she was killed. Huh?  

• In the 1987 pilot, Tom Hanson is supposed to be 21, so he would have been born in 1965 or 1966. Yet he tells Jenko he wouldn't know anything about Woodstock (1968) because he was five at the time. Johnny Depp was born in 1963, not Tom Hanson. (thanks to April for sending this one in).

• In #73 "A Womp Bomp Aloo Bomb, Aloop Bam Boom" Penhall gets an address for where Sal is staying, and he writes it down on a piece of paper for Hanson to see on a bulletin board. When Penhall reaches Sal’s house, the house number is completely different from what he wrote down.

• In Season 5, there are several episodes that (in the FX reruns, anyway) so sloppily edited that a scene from the middle of the show is accidentally tagged on at the beginning, and then we see the opening scene, and then the theme song. Later in the episode, we see the accidental scene again, where it is supposed to be. Oops.

• I often wonder: how is it that they are hardly ever recognized from a previous case? The two exceptions have been used very well - Ioki being recognized when he uses his credit card three years after a case (#76 "Things We Said Today") and Hanson being taken hostage in #23 "You Ought To Be In Prison" by Waxer, whom he had arrested in his first case, in the pilot episode. Yet, beyond that, they don't seem to worry about it. They make a big deal out of not being filmed or photographed, yet Fuller went on TV, not objecting when the reporter said "you're the captain- you don't go undercover" - though he had in the previous episode and does so frequently throughout the series. They seem to take cases in cities around a major metropolis - yet always within close distance of the Chapel so they can come and report back to Fuller at will. People move, people graduate from high school and go to college, people go to parties, people hang out with people from other schools, people have relatives, etc. The only time I ever heard of any preliminary precautions being taken were when Hanson, Ioki, Booker and Penhall were placed in the juvenile detention center and they made sure none of the kids had been busted by any of the four. But - Hoffs has successfully prosecuted her rape case, and Hanson’s made the news and been in prison. I realize, dramatic license has to exist, but I just wonder sometimes. Especially since Hanson usually drives that very conspicuous and very cool blue Mustang.

• Near the end of Season 5 Joey disappears with no explanation - well, he had mentioned wanting to take some vacation time to go to Philadelphia to see Doug. Didn’t he ever come back? Wouldn’t his vacation time have been over during Judy’s court case (#99 "Crossfire")? I admit - it is in character. He's very spontaneous. And he loves his brother and his primary goal was to be with Doug, not to work for the Jump Street program. Still, it would have been nice to have some kind of closure there.

• In #17 "Two For The Road," Capt. Fuller gets arrested for drunk driving. The officers and even Captain Fuller don't seem to think it's all that big of a deal. What about Capt. Jenko?

The Ugly - Things that got inexplicably left out and messed up (the How Could They?? list)

• When Penhall left in #91 "Number One With A Bullet," he got a beautiful scene with Hoffs, to say goodbye. Hanson and Ioki weren't even given as much as a ten second explanation by Fuller about why they were gone. There are lots of moments in the first ten episodes of Season 5 where it would not have been only easy, but it would have enhanced the scene, to mention Hanson and Ioki. McCann and Joey were new and inexperienced, and Fuller could have used stories about Hanson and Ioki in training them. The most jarring thing we are asked to accept is that Doug Penhall seems agitated and depressed during some of these episodes, and he never once mentions that maybe he misses his best friend. He was so broken up about Marta that he risked his life to try to find her - he adopted her nephew, wore his wedding ring and called her his wife. They had only known each other for five days. And we are supposed to believe that he doesn't even miss Hanson, a guy who was his partner for 4 years and his best friend besides? He about went out of his mind when Hanson was sent to prison - and now he's gone? Or are we to believe that Hanson's working there still (his car's there, see next item) but we just don't see him? It just doesn't make any sense. Or - maybe Hanson sold the car to the police department and took the money to open a bowling alley in Philly? That's the best explanation I've heard.

• In Season 3, Richard Grieco got equal, if not more, airtime than Johnny Depp. So why didn’t they ever add him to the opening theme? He was relegated to guest star status without even a photo, just a name run across the screen with all the guest stars who appeared in the show. Seems to me he was pretty important - it’s a shame he wasn’t added.

This page ©1997 by Cyndi Glass, constructed with Microsoft Office/Word 97.