Samuel L Jackson picks his all-time favourite cop show
Jackson shoots so many movies at such a pace that he hasn’t taken his talents to television anywhere near as often as many of his contemporaries, probably because he doesn’t have the time.
In fact, ever since he first became a star in the aftermath of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, changing the face of American cinema in the mid-1990s, he’s barely appeared on the small screen at all as fictional characters, even less so when animation is removed from the equation.
Since playing Reggie Jenkins in three episodes of the children’s mystery series Ghostwriter in 1992, Jackson’s live-action TV outings have been very few and far between. In fact, he’s only notched three multi-episode credits in the three decades since, and two of them saw him reprise his role as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Nick Fury in Agents of SHIELD and Secret Invasion, in addition to his status as the executive producer and leading man of miniseries The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey.
Not that he’s against the idea of television, but he’s always been more pre-occupied with cinema, which has led to one hand feeding the other in perpetuity as he went about becoming the single highest-grossing actor in the history of the moving image. An impressive achievement, but Jackson did manage to find the time to indulge in some childhood wish fulfilment.
When he signed on for 2003’s action thriller SWAT, he did so more as a fan than a performer, admitting to the BBC that he “used to watch the TV show in the ’70s”. Not only that, but he called it “the best cop show at that time,” which wasn’t an easy accolade to gather when the decade was absolutely flooded with procedurals focusing on law enforcement officials rounding up criminals on a weekly basis.
Inheriting the role of lieutenant Daniel ‘Hondo’ Harrelson from Steve Forrest, Jackson brought his gruff-and-grizzled side to the fore by marshalling a ragtag band of recruits and whipping them into shape as the titular unit, with his charges including Colin Farrell, Michelle Rodriguez, and LL Cool J.
A workmanlike and formulaic actioner that nonetheless cleared $200 million at the global box office, SWAT was nothing to write home about, but the brand continued well after Jackson had seized the opportunity to live out his childhood fantasies by headlining the silver screen reinvention of a show he avidly watched as a youngster.
SWAT ended up giving rise to a pair of straight-to-video spinoffs before being rebooted once more and heading back to TV under the stewardship of The Shield creator Shawn Ryan, which saw Shemar Moore take on the role of ‘Hondo’ that Jackson himself had taken on from Forrest.
