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Sledge Hammer! (Season One, Disc One)

How triggerhappy is Sledge Hammer?

* He talks to his .44 Magnum and sleeps with it cushioned on a pillow next to him.

* In the pilot episode, he's delayed in his drive to work because a sniper has started shooting at people from the top of a building. Hammer nonchalantly opens the trunk of his rolling-wreck road-barge, pulls out a bazooka, blows up the building, and drives on in to work.

* Also from the pilot episode:

Sledge Hammer: The two men then pointed their shotguns at the clerk, so I took out my magnum and shot and killed them both. I then bought some eggs, and milk, and some of those little cocktail weenies.

News reporter: Inspector, was what you did in the store absolutely necessary?

Sledge Hammer: Oh yes, I had almost no groceries at all.

The humor in this 1980s comedy is frequently about as subtle as its namesake, and the constant reiteration of one key comic concept (a snarling, hypermasculine, hyperviolent police detective whose preferred solution to any problem is ALWAYS violence, preferably as loud and destructive and gratuitous as possible) can get old rapidly when several episodes are viewed in quick succession.

However, it is a fun show, largely because it has sharp writing and gleefully goes out of its way to offend just about everyone. Jonathan Rasche plays the off-the-wall protagonist without a shred of visible irony, looking for all the world like the world's angriest Angry White Male, nostrils flaring, eyes staring in cold blue fury; an authoritarian-minded Aryan ubermensch gone completely berserk. In the best cliched tradition of cop shows, he has a harassed precinct chief who hates him and repeatedly suspends him but never quite gets around to firing him, an ex-wife whom he constantly gripes about, and an assigned female partner ("Dori Doreau") who is gorgeous, brilliant, and able to karate-kick evildoers into next week.

The show satirically targets not only the cliches of the Dirty Harry/Die Hard genre, but the whole genre of police-related movies and television programs. One episode on this disc -- titled "Witless" -- parodies the 1985 movie Witness; another, "Dori Day Afternoon", revisits the scenario of 1975's Dog Day Afternoon.

But, believe it or not, there's a degree of subtlety as well. Some of the funniest bits are casual, throwaway, split-second gags that many viewers will miss. Check out the, er, checking-out scene in the pilot episode. Or the casual reference to the protagonist's father in They Shoot Hammers, Don't They?. Yes, it was inevitable that he would be named Jack, but the comment's made in such a casual, passing manner that its very non-jokiness becomes a kind of joke for whoever's paying enough attention to catch it.

Some episodes may evoke a different feeling today than they did originally. I'm thinking particularly of an episode in which passengers of an airliner (led by Our AntiHero and his fetching partner) beat up a criminal who's holding them as hostages, after which Hammer storms the cockpit. (He doesn't know how to fly the plane, but, typically, that little matter doesn't occur to him until later...) It's typical of the series' blatantly irreverent and blackly-humorous take on things that the episode ends with the airliner crash-landing in the middle of a giant billboard proclaiming "Third World Airlines : We Covet Your World!", after which the surviving criminal leaps from the airplane, only to be run over by a truck on the highway beneath. Hammer observes, in his customary deadpan tone, that "you really are safer in an airplane than on the highway."

The writers of the series clearly had some fun seeing how far they could push the eccentricities of their absurd main character, too. Instead of a silencer, he uses a "loudener"; he thinks the death penalty is too lenient because "there's always the possibility of reincarnation"; he vacations in Beirut; and so on.

And, amazingly, the show IS still fun, largely because the durable cliches it mocks are still with us.