I’m not into basketball. Never have been. Maybe it was because I was the fat kid in school and contributed more on the court in terms of sweat than points on the scoreboard. For whatever reason, my indifference to basketball contributed to me not watching “The White Shadow” when it first aired in the 1970s.

Now that the series is being released on DVD, with the first season available in stores now, I’ve had a chance to watch this classic series.

And aside from my continuing indifference to the sport, I have to say this wasn’t a bad show. Oh, it had its corny moments, and it definitely preached a lot. But it wasn’t a bad show. The characters were fun and original, although they seemed to fit into the standard archetypes you’ll find in the teacher-of-the-year films that filled the 1980s and 1990s.

“The White Shadow” was the legacy of Bruce Paltrow, a mid-list television director who gained more fame first from his marriage to Blythe Danner and second from his daughter Gwyneth. The show follows the career of former professional basketball player Ken Reeves (Ken Howard), who left the NBA after a knee injury. He gets a job coaching basketball at an inner city ghetto high school in L.A.

Reeves inherits a rag-tag team of misfit basketball players, who often have worse problems off the court than they do on the court. He finds the good in the kids and helps them with their struggles during high school. The show has a bit of a “issue of the week” feel to it, but that’s what you should expect.

Topics covered include teenage alcoholism, teen pregnancy, stealing, betting, murder, gang violence and homosexuality. Of course, like any “issue of the week” show, things miraculously wrap up in under 50 minutes.

The DVD includes selected episode commentaries by director Jackie Cooper (whom you might remember as Perry White from the original Superman movies) and producer Mark Tinker as well as actors Ken Howard and Timothy Van Patten.

On the fourth disc is a featurette called “More Than Basketball.” This featurette includes interviews with cast and crew from the show, looking back at this groundbreaking show. Like the show itself, the featurette focuses a lot on basketball, but also explains how basketball became a conduit to talk about the issues of the day.

For whatever reason, the discs are encoded as single layers, double sided. This basically means that about two hours of information can be fit on a side, so while each disc has four episodes on it, you’ll have to flip it half-way through. Sigh... at least you don’t have to flip in the middle of an episode.



Specifications: Dolby Surround. Fullscreen (1.33:1). Spanish subtitles. English subtitles for the hearing impaired.