"I seem to remember that there was a Shaft TV show that was part of the CBS Mystery Theater (or whatever the hell it was called).

"Can you shed any light on it? Was Richard Roundtree in it? How could he possibly portray Shaft in the "Mofo-less" environment imposed by TV censorship?"

- Joe Jasmine

Richard Roundtree as television's Shaft

The Fall Preview for SHAFT

TV on DVD
Holiday Specials on DVD
TV Commercials on DVD
TV Shows on BLU-RAY

by Billy Ingram

In the early-seventies, the hottest shows on television were detective shows. It's hard to believe, but by 1973 there had been every kind of detective that you can imagine on TV - young, old, fat, thin, rich, poor, smart, dumb, uniformed, undercover, slacker, hipster, befuddled, cowboy, Indian, computerized, paralytic, Polish, Italian, bald - basically, everything but black.

A TVparty! reader tells us:

"Shaft's mission was to "protect the values of ghetto life"? What in the world does that mean? Crooked cops? Don't remember a single one in the flick. As I recall, the only "crooked" characters were the mafiosi, of course, and Bumpy, who Shaft (or maybe Ben) openly derided for selling junk to his own people. In other words, he was no better than whites. Bumpy's lame defense was (to paraphrase), "everyone's sellin' somethin' - you sell blue sky and revolutionary dreams, I sell what I sell. It's all the same."

"Ernest Tidyman, who created the character and wrote the book on which the movie was based, was a neighbor of mine in Mill Valley, and here's his explanation of what was being dramatized: As of the late 1960's, perhaps as a result of the influence of the Panthers, a new conception of "masculinity" had sprung up in non-middle class black life. That conception was that a real man doesn't take orders from anyone, especially anyone white. Instead, he freelances through life, making his own rules.

"So if you're like Shaft and you're a healthy, intelligent black man who's relatively untouched by the deprivations of ghetto existence (i.e. you have an education, clothes and enough to eat), who can speak standard English and therefore could make it in the white business world without undue trouble, what you do is - turn your back on it. In real life Androzzi would hire Shaft and promote him to detective in a minute. But see, if you're black you don't want to "sell out" by joining a white organization. And since you also don't want to destroy your own people like Bumpy, this means you become a street dick mediating between the players of the various street hustles.

"Now, one would have to say that this Shaftian definition of black masculinity has had tremendous influence. It cannot be gainsaid that most blacks retain precisely this definition of masculinity today. The big joke is that while corporate America bends over backwards to usher blacks into the economic mainstream, creating and enforcing affirmative action programs on their own initiative that have no government impetus behind them whatsoever, they can't find anyone to hire because black males, finding the idea of ever working below a white man as intrinsically demeaning and punk-like, turn their backs on the education that constitutes the first step of the process or, if they do join up, end up declaring that the white business world is polluting their black "essence."

"Whatever that is.

"Here we are past the year 2000 and no black person has yet explained explicitly what it is about white life that's so corrosive to that essence. In the Wall Street Journal in 1998 one guy, who'd left IBM, said that the problem was that he was required to be "nonthreatening." So maybe that's it, people in the business world like going to to work without being threatened. I could see where that would be considered unreasonable."