And then there's Kojak.

Yes, I'm winding down my weekend by further indulging my rather unseemly Hulu habit.

Now maybe it's because I grew up in the seventies, and there was a bunch of stuff I wasn't allowed to watch on television in those days, but it makes me enormously happy that some of the true gems of 1970's TV are enshrined at Hulu for all to enjoy and revel in. Like the Rockford Files. Or Kojak.

I've never actually seen an episode of Kojak. I'm in the process of watching the pilot now, and had to stop and blog about it. Partly because Harvey Keitel was apparently a guest star in the first episode. Also because of the kind of amazing graphic design that went into the opening credits. I mean yeah, it looks cheesy as all git-out now, but back in the day, that was cutting edge stuff. And the way the NYC skyline gets rotated and morphed into an extruded rendition of the show title at the end? Dang. You gotta love that shit.

Or maybe you don't. But I do. So. Back I go.

Speaking of opening credits, incidentally, it's worth having a look at the ones for Murder One (which I actually did wind up watching through the entire first season, and it was actually fairly decent), because this was a show created when CGI was first coming of age for network TV, and the credits are like the video graphix equivalent of the [BLINK] tag or the Photoshop "Poster Edge" filter--stuff that looks like fun until you remember that design is supposed to be in the service of the product that the design is supposed to promote, and then you realize that there is nothing in the world that could ever be well-served by that kind of design. So.

Anyway. Back to Kojak. Tra la.