LONGSTREET

"She was like the revolutionist at fifty:  not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades"--Main Street

What am I watching on Youtube these days? (I refuse to spell it "YouTube"!) The 1971 TV series Longstreet, about a blind detective in New Orleans. (It requires some suspension of disbelief...) 

The show's as much about Mike Longstreet's PTSD struggles and his need to be a big achiever as about the insurance investigation mysteries he solves. He hires Bruce Lee--yes, that Bruce Lee!--to teach him martial arts. There's an episode or two where a tough guy attacks him but he turns the tables by putting out the light!  The bomb that was meant to kill him only killed his wife and blinded him, so he clearly has a "survivor's guilt" issue. (Back when I was little I remember seeing a promo for the pilot  episode with this really sad scene where he's in the hospital after the explosion, his eyes bandaged, and he jumps out of his bed and makes a scene, drawing in a crowd of orderlies.) 

The show was developed by Stirling Silliphant, who won an Oscar for his In the Heat of the Night script but ended up writing disaster movies for Irwin Allen.  The TV networks in 1971 were making a belated effort to look "relevant" in the wake of '60s social change, and even the unsuccessful shows back then tend to sound more interesting than most of the stuff on today's broadcast networks.  This one lasted just one season because the too similar hit Ironside, with Raymond Burr as the crippled detective, got moved to the same time slot.

But I find it a remarkably good show, more mature than the usual middlebrow detective fare.  I saw a few Youtube episodes of it a few years back before the copyright police removed it, and I hope I can see the rest of it before it gets removed again.  James Franciscus was hardly the biggest talent around, but he has his best role here.

Just today I saw a particularly good episode, despite using the voiceover flashback cliche too much.  Mike goes undercover to investigate robberies at an electronics plant, getting hired through a program the factory started for hiring handicapped people and living in a group home with other "differently abled" hirees.  The robberies have all been accompanied by distracting sabotage explosions in areas where the hirees work, putting them under suspicion and the program in danger of cancellation.  (Spoiler:  it turns out to be the work of the woman supervising the hirees!)

As I said, the show's about Mike dealing with his handicap and his need to excel.  In an early scene his supervisor warns him, "You're out if you can't cut it," and he says, "I'll cut it." (That could be Mike's motto!) He has a hard time getting friendly with the other hirees in the home, partly because of the investigation but also because, as he admits, he's in a bit of denial about being handicapped himself.  At the end, when they thank him for solving the case and saving the program, he refers to the handicapped as "us," a step forward for him.

This got me thinking about my Asperger's Syndrome.  I don't like to think of myself as autistic, since my problems pale next to what low-functioning autistics have to deal with.  But maybe I should think of autistics as "us" too!