Season 1, Episode 0: The Greatest American Hero

Season 1, Episode 0: The Greatest American Hero

Original airdate: March 18, 1981

Ralph Hinckley (William Katt from Carrie and House) is an idealistic high school teacher. His ex-wife is seeking custody of his pre-teen son, and his attorney is also his girlfriend. He's just been assigned to teach a class full of the school's most troublesome punks, but he handles himself well in their presence. When one of them, Tony (Michael Paré from Bad Moon), threatens to beat Ralph up, he proposes a boxing match in the school gym. He'll earn the kids' respect by following through on this the next day, but for today he's planned a geological field trip to the desert.

After the field trip (we never see the field trip itself, but I assume this is after, because it's nighttime), the school bus mysteriously breaks down in the desert. Setting out on foot to find the nearest service station, Ralph encounters Bill Maxwell (Robert Culp from Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice), a no-nonsense FBI agent whose car breaks down too. The cause of these strange automobile malfunctions is typical for the era: UFOs.

As a flying saucer hovers overhead, voices on Bill's car radio tell the duo that they must decide whether or not to accept a "gift" and team up to "solve problems". The gift in question is a superhero suit which will give Ralph (and only Ralph) superpowers. The suit, in a black plastic case, is hand-delivered by the friendly reanimated corpse of Bill's dead partner, just to give the whole incident that extra boost of implausibility. After the aliens fly off, Ralph walks back to the school bus with the black case. The instruction book for the suit falls out of the case and onto the ground, but he doesn't notice.

Late for a court appointment after school the next day, Ralph decides to put on the suit and fly to the courthouse. The suit itself is very attention-grabbing: bright red spandex, with knee-high boots, a belt wrapped high around the waist, making the shirt piece look like a skirt that doesn't hang low enough to cover the crotch, and a short snap-on black cape that always seems to asymmetrically drape over one shoulder. And the logo on the chest… what is it?



Ralph manages to get into the air, but he can't steer, and crashes into a wall. Knocked semi-conscious, he's found by police and taken to a hospital, where his explanations fail to convince anyone that he's not crazy.

While his attorney-girlfriend Pam Davidson (Connie Sellecca from the TV series Beyond Westworld) visits him in the hospital, Ralph discovers another one of the suit's powers: clairvoyance. Specifically, he sees a vision of Bill getting kidnapped by the villains who killed his partner. This motivates him to break out of the hospital, with Pam in tow, and rescue Bill. After finally convincing the skeptical Pam that Ralph's suit really does give him super powers, the three of them regroup and work together to take down the bad guys.

And what villainous threat is important enough to concern extra-terrestrials? A crazy Christian cult called Gabriel's Army, manipulating the Vice President in order to take over the Presidency. The script wisely glosses over the details. After all, something that far-fetched could never happen in real life, amirite? (something something Dick Cheney)



I always appreciate the skill it takes to set up a high-concept premise. For me, that's the hook that makes me start watching a show like this: how can the writer make this work? It sounds like a sitcom: aliens give an ordinary man super powers, but he loses the instructions. Contemporary ads for this show always played up the slapstick silliness. Watch him fly awkwardly and crash into things! But the show wouldn't have lasted three seasons if there were nothing more to it than that.

I don't remember if I saw this pilot when it first aired, but if I did, the UFO scenes would have struck me as spooky and awe-inspiring. (I was less than 10 years old.) And then the aliens are gone, leaving the suit's super powers as the only unreal element in an otherwise realistic fictional world. What was amazing in the moment, seems silly when Ralph tries to share it with others. What would you do if the only path to being your best and most noble self, was to embarrass yourself in public? As a shy and awkward kid, I could relate to that.

The show's creator and head writer, Stephen J. Cannell, has always lightened his crime and action shows with character-based humor. Ralph is portrayed as idealistic without being naïve, wanting to bring out the best in his students when everyone else has rejected them. Bill is an old-school patriotic lawman with a bit of a chauvinistic streak, fantasizing about ways that Ralph can single-handedly defeat Russia. Pam's pragmatism works to keep the other two grounded. The comedy in "The Greatest American Hero" comes from how these ordinary people handle the weirdness that has intruded on their lives.

And also, a superhero that can't stop crashing into things.

Stray Observations:

- Nice touch: the kid giving Ralph advice on the rules of superhero flight.

- Have to mention the theme song, performed by Joey Scarbury, which made it to #2 on the Billboard chart in August of 1981. Curse you, "Endless Love"!

- Speaking of which: www.youtube.com/watch?v=caoYdiq3kak