Cancelled Childhoods: 21 Jump Street (1987-1991)

There’s been a lot of talk of cancelling childhood at the moment

With the conversation about Enid Blyton and even Dr Seuss’ forays into racism, sexism and other problematic isms, there has been some anger from people who feel their childhood enjoyment of something is being threatened by an honest appraisal of these works with a modern lens.

I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of talking about why Cancel Culture doesn’t exist and how being honest about a text changes nothing about your childhood. But it does make you wonder how you’d respond to watching a beloved childhood TV series as an adult.

These musings inspired me to go and check out a much-loved show from my youth. A show about young cops who go undercover in highschools to solve youth crime. Yes, it’s the original 21 Jump Street.

Starring a baby Johnny Depp – presumably, at this point, sane – and an equally-young Peter DeLuise, as well as Richard Grieco and Holly Robinson, the show ran for five seasons and was definitely one for which I have some youthful nostalgia. It spawned in 2012 a ghastly film version and an even more ghastly film sequel – 21 and 22 Jump Street respectively.

At the time they aired, I did not feel the films captured what I remembered most loving about the show (and no I don’t mean Dustin Nguyen on whom I had a huge crush – as much as or even more than my crush on Ben the Vet who was in Australia’s long-running soap opera, A Country Practice around the same time).

Be still my pre-teen heart.

No, what I remember about 21 Jump Street was in fact its earnestness and its progressiveness. I do remember it having a slightly after-school special vibe but also being an action-packed ensemble drama with black and Asian leads, a strong female character and an emphasis on current social issues. It’s in the latter that I expected the show may fall down but I was nonetheless looking forward to diving back in.

Well, the two-part pilot of 21 Jump Street starts with a cold open so problematic that watching it from 2021 is almost shocking. Produced in the same year as the police murder of the unarmed black man, Anthony Griffin, this episode starts with heavily-armed black men terrorising a white suburban family gathered around the breakfast table.

The acting is almost as bad as every part of this coding: the cliche of black urban violence reaching into the white suburbs due to inadequate policing – a narrative that very much underpins the white middle class support for aggressive racialised policing.

From the beginning of its very first scene, 21 Jump Street – despite its representative cast – is busy selling well-worn racist narratives. These continue into the next scene where we meet young rookie cop Officer Tom Hanson (Johnny Depp). Officer Hanson wants to do ‘proper’ hands-on policing. He wants to dive into the fray and protect innocent women from armed thugs. While he doesn’t spell it out, the dialogue in this scene links us mentally to the one before this: in our head the armed thugs are already black and the innocent woman begging for help is a white suburban housewife.

We don’t police like this anymore, explains his world-weary partner – only a few months from retirement and therefore definitely about to be murdered. Policing is ‘scientific’ now and, faced with the kind of violence Hanson just described, the cops will and should simply run away. It’s not like the good old days of policing when they were allowed to go to town on suspects, now they might be up for an assault charge.

As well as establishing that Hanson is a rebel and a maverick, we also establish that his father was killed on the job.

We’re only five minutes into my nostalgic childhood and already 21 Jump Street has positioned itself for its white middle class audience. The thugs are black, they’re armed, and they’re ready to burst into your suburban mansion at any time. The cops are too scared or too hamstrung to do anything about it. And those that try are killed on the job.

Hanson and his partner are called to the palatial home to interview the family who were robbed. The highschool-aged son seems to owe these men money, which is why they came collecting. Whatever caused the incident, he’s definitely involved. And yet the petulant teen is treated with kid gloves until he storms into this bedroom out of anger.

One can only imagine the kind of treatment that would been meted out to a black teen in a similar situation. But in this case:

The worst thing is – they really are.

We’re now only 10 minutes in and we get treated to our second crime for the night. And, you guessed it, it’s another black guy with a shotgun. This time he’s robbing a convenience store manned by a white clerk.

Now, this guy has three (unarmed) white accomplices. Nonetheless, for those keeping count, our proportion of black men who are heavily armed criminals is 100%. Our count for cop heroes is two white guys. And our count for female characters is two white victims. And somehow we’re only just beginning.

Hanson and his partner’s attempt to arrest these convenience store robbers ends in tears and bloodied noses. It does not, to my surprise, end in his jovial six-months-from-retirement partner’s death. However, it’s enough to get Hanson pulled from patrol. He’s too hot headed, too green, too good looking and, more pertinently to the plot, too young.

The Captain pulls him in for a straight talking conversation about this future. But first he lights him a cigarette so they can have a smoke. You know – man to man.

Yikes.

After laying down some homespun truths, he packs Hanson off to a new assignment – a specialist team that goes undercover in highschools. It’s at the Jump Street Chapel. And after some pensive bare-chested flashbacks to his dead father, Hanson decides to take the offer and shows up to the church the next day.

There he meets his new teammates in all their United Colours of Benetton glory.

Penhall (an exuberant Peter Deluise) lets us know straight up that he’s Jewish. We meet the (still so hot) Dustin Nguyen and OMG his character’s name is H.T (Harry Truman) Ioki and I don’t even know where to start with that. Maybe with his character apparently being Japanese despite the actor being Vietnamese. I have no memory of this.

We then meet Captain Jenks and for some inexplicable reason he’s played like a 70s stoner with a boner for Hendrix and an emotional attachment to Woodstock. I have no idea why except that somebody thought a character like this would be hip to the kids these days and who knows, in 1987 maybe he would have been. I was about 10.

Finally, we meet Sergeant Judith “Judy” Hoffs ( Holly Robinson) and hallelujah, it’s a black character who’s not a criminal. But judging from the way that Hanson’s sizing her up, she’s destined for will-they-won’t-they Love Interest and she spends the first segment of her appearance giving him a makeover. I could complain about the show having a grand total of one female character but I won’t be so uncharitable. Black female leads are still hard to come by in TV land and so far Hoffs is a stereotype-busting competent cop so we’ll just choose to be happy.

Hanson gets drafted into his first case and of course loses his temper and blows both it and Penhall’s cover. His trigger is any reference to his baby face and his desire to prove himself a ‘real cop’ like the patrolmen he wanted to be. Considering going from patrol officer to undercover detective is actually a massive promotion, this is a somewhat bizarre philosophy but we’ll just roll with it. It makes no sense but it’s the show’s premise and that’s the world we’re working in.

But before Hanson can be busted back to… whatever is below a beat cop (nothing is below a beat cop)… the friendly neighbourhood suburban white kid criminal we’re supposed to emphathise with pulls a snatch and grab on a jewellery store. Coincidentally his thugs go to the same school that Hanson’s been sent to. No, really, those Jag-stealing, shotgun-wielding guys from the first scene are apparently highschool kids and they show up to school with a stolen Ferrari but nobody bats an eyelid.

As the second hour unfolds, we’re treated to more of the same underpinning philosophy that started this episode. Hanson’s job isn’t just to police the school. It’s to ‘save’ the poor white kid from being taken off the path by these bad influences.

Kenny Weckerle, son of the clarinet-playing insurance salesman, is portrayed with increasing sympathy while the black students remain one-dimensional and utterly without context. They’re wannabe gangsters eventually apprehended in a violent shootout while Kenny is packed off to rehab with a heartfelt thank you to the cops that rescued him.

The show’s violence is what I have most forgotten about 21 Jump Street. The show and the policing it portrays is extremely violent and that violence is portrayed as necessary and proportionate. But it is almost never directed to students like Kenny, despite him being a drug user whom police witnessed committing several smash and grabs.

Ironically, what I remember about the show’s overarching message is still here and it’s still good. Good policing is not about arresting the first person you see committing a crime. It’s about considering the whole crime, tracking it back to its roots and most of all protecting juvenile offenders from being drawn further down the path towards a criminal life.

21 Jump Street was about looking for alternatives to incarceration for young vulnerable teens and policing in a hands-on and empathetic way. It’s what I remember loving about the show and it’s still here. What I had forgotten – or probably not even noticed with my pre-teen middle class white eyes – was how discriminatory that philosophy is. This pilot’s ‘bad guys’ were also teenagers in highschool. But no attempt was made to apply this style of policing to them.

As the first two hours end, I realise that my initial count still stands. The proportion of black men in this show portrayed as violent heavily-armed gangsters is 100%. There’s one black female character who is extremely under-utilised (Hanson is most definitely the main character) and she has been marked for Love Interest. I’d take bets on whether the show had the guts to portray a multi-racial romance but I imagine nobody would take it.

It’s a shame that what I remember about the show’s multi-racial cast and progressiveness is mere window dressing. This is a show that does nothing but pander to a white middle-class’ fears and prejudices.

Consider my childhood cancelled.