Week of 4/23: TV's Best First Responders: "Emergency!"

By Sylvia Gurinsky

First responders, including firefighters and paramedics, were crucial in the lives that were saved last week in the terror attack in Boston and the explosion and fire in Texas.
New attention is being paid to their work.

That has also generated focus on the television shows that have highlighted first responders. Because of the cost of creating fire and disaster scenes, there have been relatively few such programs in TV history. Today, NBC features "Chicago Fire," created by Dick Wolf, who also created the successful "Law & Order" franchise. "Chicago Fire" is typical of many of today's drama series - soap opera elements mixed with action. But it's one of the few current successes on the network.

One of the fire trucks is Engine 51. No doubt that is a tribute to what is still the greatest first responders show ever - "Emergency!" which also ran on NBC from 1972-79.

"Emergency!" (created by Robert Cinader) is the third show in the Jack Webb trilogy that also includes police shows "Dragnet" and "Adam-12." It's considered a semi-spinoff of "Adam-12," but actually owes its creation more to the real-life struggle that was going on in California during the late 1960s over the creation of a paramedic program to assist hospital emergency rooms.

In fact, the pilot movie, "The Wedsworth-Townsend Act," deals with that struggle; the episode is named for the bill that California Gov. Ronald Reagan signed into law creating the paramedic program. The pilot is terrific, a great way to introduce viewers to the core characters: Fireman/paramedics John Gage (Randolph Mantooth) and Roy DeSoto (Kevin Tighe) and staff members at fictional Rampart Hospital: Nurse Dixie McCall (singer-actress Julie London, once married to Jack Webb); Dr. Kelly Brackett (Robert Fuller) and Dr. Joe Early (composer-musician-actor Bobby Troup, who was married to London in real life). Here's the scene in which Gage and DeSoto meet:

Emergency! The Wedsworth-Townsend Act

The series would add the supporting staff of Gage and DeSoto's Station 51 - including real-life firefighters Dick Hammer (in Season 1) and Mike Stoker - and Rampart's Dr. Mike Morton, played by Ron Pinkard.

"Emergency!" continued in the tradition of other Webb shows of taking rescue situations from real life. It also played a role in the evolution of television into the ensemble cast (10 in all, including the Station 51 and Rampart supporting characters) and featured increased diversity (Mantooth is Native American, Pinkard is African-American, and Marco Lopez, who played a firefighter with the same name, is Hispanic.).

One of the appealing characteristics of "Emergency!" is how it mixed serious rescue situations with humor - often at Gage's expense. The show's core audiences were usually younger than 21, and Mantooth became a frequent presence on the cover of teen magazines. The show generated collectibles such as lunch boxes, comic books and action figures. Mantooth and Tighe also appeared as animated versions of Gage and DeSoto in "Emergency +4," a Saturday-morning action series featuring four rescuers who were children, from 1973-76:

Emergency + 4: S.O.S. Help Us!


Here are two clips from one of the best rescue scenes, from the Season 3 episode "Snakebite." Among other things, Gage is rescuing himself, with the help of the Station 51 crew (minus an anxious DeSoto, who is at Rampart after rescuing teens from a car crash):

Snakebite 1

Snakebite 2

There are numerous rescue workers across the United States who are in their profession because of this show. It is seen daily on ME-TV at 5 p.m. Eastern time, and the entire series is available on DVD.

See you next week. Until then, Happy Viewing!