6 Arresting Facts About ‘T.J. Hooker’
After starring in the original Star Trek series, William Shatner boldly went where many Hollywood men had gone before: to a TV cop show. That was T.J. Hooker, in which Shatner played the namesake Los Angeles County Police Department sergeant, who had given up his detective job and gone back on patrol with new trainees following the death of his partner. It also starred a young Heather Locklear and Gidget star James Darren along with Adrian Zmed.
T.J. Hooker debuted on March 13, 1982, and lasted for five seasons — four on ABC and one on CBS — but aired for many more years in syndication. (Executive producer Aaron Spelling called the show’s worldwide syndication success “the most amazing thing” he’d ever seen.) You may have caught the show during its original run or in reruns, but did you know the facts below?
1 The show was a family affair for William Shatner
Columbia Pictures Television/courtesy Everett Collection
Marcy Lafferty guest-starred in T.J. Hooker while she was still married to Shatner, playing four different roles in four different seasons. Plus, Shatner’s daughter Lisabeth wrote the Season 5 installment “Partners in Death,” an episode her famous dad directed.
2 Heather Locklear filmed T.J. Hooker at the same time she was filming Dynasty
Aaron Spelling Prod./Courtesy: Everett Collection
When Heather Locklear joined T.J. Hooker in the role of Officer Stacy Sheridan in 1982, she was already starring as Sammy Jo Dean in Dynasty. “I’d be in my police uniform, padded bra, all that s***, and then I’d have to be all glammed up, and they’d drive me to the Dynasty set, and so it kind of went back and forth,” she told fans at ’90s Con in 2024. “I just had two jobs! I had to learn this part, and then I had to learn this part, and this part’s a little lady-like, and this part isn’t, so it was pretty easy to differentiate.”
> Heather Locklear Says She Ate a Hot Dog Every Day While Filming ‘T.J. Hooker’
3 Adrian Zmed was concerned about being a “piece of meat”
Columbia Pictures Television/courtesy Everett Collection
In his role as Officer Vince Romano, Adrian Zmed was often in states of undress. Romano strips down to his monogrammed briefs in the first four minutes of the T.J. Hooker pilot, for instance. And in Season 3’s “Death Strip,” Romano poses as a male stripper as part of a drug investigation.
In a 2008 fan Q&A for Entertainment Weekly, Zmed said he “absolutely, all the time” wanted Shatner to be the one dancing in his underwear. “I never understood why I had to always — I didn’t want to do that because I didn’t want to be considered a piece of meat all the time and get that syndrome that goes along with it,” he said. “It was why I was hired, too, so I went along with it. But believe me, I tried it: ‘Hey, Bill, you get up here and take off your shirt.’”
4 William Shatner said the show didn’t achieve its original premise
“T.J. Hooker could have been a wonderful show,” Shatner said in a 1999 Television Academy Foundation interview. “It was a terrific show. I loved doing it, and I ran up and down the streets of Los Angeles for 5 years and I had a great time, but because it’s television, it couldn’t fulfill the original premise.”
That premise, Shatner said, had an older cop having trouble adjusting Miranda rights era. “That frenzy, that rage that was in him was the pull and the tug the push and the pull that should have been there all the time. It was only there occasionally. … I wanted that. Everybody wanted it, but, you know, you can’t get great scripts all the time.”
5 CBS saved the show from cancellation — with a budget cut
© Columbia Pictures Television / Courtesy: Everett Collection
When ABC canceled T.J. Hooker after its fourth season, CBS resurrected the series but only agreed to pay a fraction of the licensing fee that ABC paid, per the Orlando Sentinel. As Columbia Pictures Television looked to chop the show’s budget by $100,000 per episode, Shatner agreed to a cut to his $60,000-per-episode paycheck. But the actor was also getting a share of T.J. Hooker’s profit, and the move to CBS helped bolster its syndication chances.
6 A movie adaptation was in the works but now only lives on as a Charlie’s Angels gag
In 2009, Variety announced that a T.J. Hooker movie was in development, with a focus on the title character’s relationship with his father.
That big-screen adaptation never materialized, but the 2000 film Charlie’s Angels — produced by the T.J. Hooker executive producer Leonard Goldberg — included a fictional T.J. Hooker movie as part of a tongue-in-cheek gag. Seeing T.J. Hooker: The Movie offered as in-flight entertainment, LL Cool J’s character sighs and says, “Another movie from an old TV show.”
T.J. Hooker currently airs weekdays on MeTV+ and is streaming on Tubi.
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