Starsky & Hutch: The most memorable (and stylish) duo in TV history

Lemmon and Curtis, Lennon and McCartney, Gallagher and Gallagher… wherever there’s a duo, there’s a compunction to compare them. Rare is the person who won’t, when pushed, offer up a favourite, since it’s human nature to rank people, even - perhaps especially - when said people number only two.

Some of the most memorable pairings still elicit strong opinion, long after they’ve receded from our screens. At the apex of this category, surely, tower Starsky and Hutch, a duo so memorable that even those yet to be born when their eponymous show was on TV will likely have heard of them, if only because their mother has a dusty old David Soul album sandwiched between Bridge Over Troubled Water and Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy.

For the uninitiated, Starsky & Hutch was a US cop show that screened on BBC1 in the latter half of the 1970s, starring Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul, who would drive round Bay City in South California, slapping each others’ backs and solving crime, dressed in clothes that wouldn’t look out of place now, given we’re in the throes of a seventies revival.

It wasn’t mandatory to be in thrall to Starsky or Hutch in the 1970’s, but almost. This wasn’t 2023, when you could flick from Netflix to Disney to Sky to Amazon Prime in search of whichever plot and cast would take your fancy. When it came to cop shows - in fact, when it came to any shows - pickings were slim, less of a smorgasbord than a meagre set menu, with viewers forced to choose between BBC1 and ITV, or BBC2 if they were intellectuals. Yes, there were other police dramas - Z Cars, The Sweeney, The Saint - but there were no other cop shows, and certainly none as stylish, funny and exotically American as Starsky & Hutch.

Part of the appeal, perhaps, was that they didn’t look like cops. In fact, they looked like they could be in a band, albeit one more likely to play the West Holts stage than the Pyramid (David Soul, who played Ken ‘Hutch’ Hutchison, went on to have a successful singing career, including two worldwide number one hit singles with suitably cheesy names). Hutch was crush of choice for ladies and gentlemen who prefer blondes, a smooth-skinned, blue-eyed manchild who favoured polonecks, varsity jackets and buttery leather blousons.

For those who liked their men dark-haired and hairy-chested, there was Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser), the rougher and more rebellious of the two, who favoured dog-eared shirts and double denim. But even for those left cold by their charms, the show still had allure, namely in the form of Huggy Bear, a badass with a heart of gold played by Antonio Fargas. Huggy was cooler than Starsky and Hutch put together. And for anyone whose hearts failed to beat faster on account of these three, there was The Car: the duo’s Ford Gran Torino, a racy red two-door coupe customised with a white flash, and surely one of the coolest motors to grace the small screen.

As fashion icons go, at the time, Starsky and Hutch flew under the radar when compared to other 1970’s TV icons such as Purdey in The New Avengers, or Kelly, Jill and Sabrina from Charlie’s Angels. In the 1970’s, men’s fashion wasn’t picked over in the same avid way that it is today. More than 40 years later, it’s heartening to see that the Starsky & Hutch look is still relevant. The duo’s lumberjack shirts, cosy knits, beanie hats and leather jackets could still be worn today, while the flares they favoured have recently made a comeback. Most enduring of all has surely been the cream chunky-knit, shawl-collared cardie worn so magnificently by Starsky, its style not a million miles away from something you’d see on the catwalk at Dries Van Noten or Loewe. A slew of hand-knitted versions are also available on Etsy, perhaps crafted by the fair hands of those who still carry a torch for Paul Michael Glaser in the original.

News that a female-led reboot of Starsky & Hutch is in development has been met with mixed reviews. Described as a “modern reimagining” of the original, it purports to follow detectives Sasha Starsky and Nicole Hutchinson as they try to unravel the mystery behind their fathers being sent to prison 15 years ago, for a crime they didn’t commit. So far, so hokey; given their surnames, it’s a fair assumption that these are the daughters of the original duo, perhaps catapulted into their profession by the same nepo baby connections that have traditionally benefited so many models and actors. Why shouldn’t policing dynasties thrive alongside acting dynasties? Let’s look forward to watching DCI Kit Fleming solving the false imprisonment of his mother, Kate, in Line of Duty Season 33, and ‘our Ryan’ following in the footsteps of his granny, Sergeant Catherine Cawood, in Happy Valley.

Those for whom Starsky & Hutch wouldn’t be the same without the original stars need not despair. In what could be seen as either a triumph against ageism or white male privilege at its finest, the original Hutch, David Soul, greeted news of the reboot by offering to star in it. “Why not just reboot Paul and me - as a couple of old farts solving piddly-ass crimes at the assisted-living facility where we would now live?” he tweeted. “Who can do Starsky and Hutch better than him and me?” His tweet was liked 31K times. In 1977, Soul’s single, Silver Lady, reached number one in the UK. Will 2024 feature a remake entitled Silver Fox?