Going nostalgic with ‘Mod Squad’ DVD

The show was a hit for four seasons on ABC.

By FRANK LOVECE

NEWSDAY

It was originally to be called “The Young Detectives.” Maybe if it had been, it would have gone the way of the short-lived “The Young Lawyers” and “The Young Rebels” that soon followed.

But somewhere during the show’s development, in that halcyon year of 1968, the title got changed to the catchier, kitschier “The Mod Squad,” a name promising something other than young versions of our same old elders. Its first 13 episodes come out on DVD today, giving nostalgic boomers a chance to remember when they were The Young Whippersnappers.

A cop show for the counterculture, “The Mod Squad” starred Michael Cole, Clarence Williams III and Peggy Lipton as, respectively, a young white dude, a young black bro and a young blond chick working as a youth-culture undercover team for the Los Angeles Police Department. Tige Andrews played their police superior, Capt. Adam Greer.

Very loosely based on a 1950s LAPD narcotics squad headed by series creator Bud Ruskin, the show became a four-season hit on ABC. And for all its sanitized TV vision of hippies and Hell’s Angels, protesters and “pigs,” it broke ground in giving the screen its first lasting counterculture protagonists — something the ostensibly more sophisticated movies wouldn’t do for another year, with the breakthrough youth-culture film “Easy Rider.”

“It was one of the earliest attempts to deal with the counterculture and the disillusioned-youth sensibility of the time,” says David Bushman, curator of New York’s Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio). “It successfully drew in that young audience and made it feel it spoke to them — and did it without alienating older viewers, since it had the trappings of a police drama. ‘The Mod Squad’ was remarkable for its time in what it addressed and ... it deserves credit for taking on the issues it did.”

“We had shows about topics nobody was dealing with at the time,” says co-star Cole by telephone from Los Angeles, where he continues to appear occasionally on series including “ER” and in TV movies. While the early 1960s had seen such hard-hitting, topical dramas as “The Defenders” and “East Side/West Side” — what historians call “Kennedy-era” or “New Frontier” dramas — they had largely been replaced in mid-decade by escapist balm like “The Wild Wild West” and standard genre shows like “The FBI.”

“We did an episode on abortion,” Cole says. “Another on anti-Semitism. And, of course, we also addressed the Vietnam War and racism. It was pop culture-ish, but we were dealing with very serious situations. And Aaron had to fight to get some of those shows on.”

“Aaron” would be the late Aaron Spelling, early in his career before becoming a megaproducer of hits such as “Charlie’s Angels,” “Starsky and Hutch,” “Beverly Hills 90210” and countless other shows. Partnered with comedian-producer Danny Thomas in Thomas-Spelling Productions, Spelling contributed his singular combination of showmanship and sociological savvy, traits that helped him predict what people would want to see — even if people didn’t always know it themselves — and then sell it.

“When Aaron started to sell the show,” Cole recalls, “a lot of people thought it wouldn’t get an audience because [it teamed] a white, a black and a girl.”

Robert Culp and Bill Cosby pioneered integrated series leads with “I Spy” in 1965, Greg Morris was part of the “Mission: Impossible” team from the start in ’66 and Don Mitchell aided “Ironside” in ’67. But the first two were globetrotting secret-agent fantasies. “Mod Squad,” set here at home, was a cop show in form but thematically aspired to be a naturalistic drama. That made it the target of anti-integrationist ire.

“We got hate mail,” Cole says. “And the more we got, the more we knew we were on the right path — thanks to Aaron. He really stuck to his guns.”

Cole and Lipton (who was married to Quincy Jones for 16 years) appear in new interviews on the DVDs, as do “Mod Squad” guest stars Ed Asner, Tyne Daly, Lou Gossett Jr. and Lesley Ann Warren.