Two years before Hill Street Blues redefined the cop genre as a mesh of overlapping storylines and workaday frustrations, Aaron Spelling's Starsky & Hutch capped a five-year run (1975-1979) portraying LA's finest as madly heroic creatures of reckless determination and physicality. The Complete First Season reminds us how startlingly brutal this primetime series could be while maintaining a delightful, often incongruous, self-deprecating humor.

From the series pilot on, partners and best pals Starsky and Hutch work a fine line between predator and prey, relentlessly pursuing suspects while also snared by crime chieftains or short-sighted superiors. In "The Fix," Hutch's secret romance with the former girlfriend of a mafia boss (Robert Loggia) results in the lawman's kidnapping and forced addiction to heroin. Similarly, in "A Coffin for Starsky," a mad chemist injects the wisecracking cop with a slow-acting but lethal poison. "Jo-Jo," written by Michael Mann, finds our guys at loggerheads with federal officers over a dumb deal the G-Men make with a serial rapist.