Back in the ever so Orwellian year of 1984, a new cop came to the small screen to entertain audiences across the mighty continent of North America courtesy of those fine network executives over at NBC. That cop was Rick Hunter (played with mucho machismo by former football player Fred Dryer), and his show, aptly titled Hunter (it just sounds tough, doesn't it?) lasted a mighty seven seasons until it finally bid a found adieu in 1991.

Owing a little bit to Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry character, Rick Hunter was a cop who patrolled the mean streets of mid-eighties Los Angeles with a vengeance. The punks, criminals and gangsters who he was out to take down were tough, and Hunter knew in order to make it, he'd have to be tougher. He had a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later (or sometimes not even ask questions at all), and his methods of upholding the law oft times found him in hot water with his commanding officers. It's because of this that sometimes Hunter isn't give the respect or gear that he needs to get the job done – his car is a perfect example, as it was rarely working right. He's a man who's struggling inside a system that's trying to keep him from serving justice the way he sees fit. The police force wants to paint a friendlier image and do things by the book, and Hunter just wants to stop crime by whatever means necessary.

When the series begins, we find Hunter being teamed up with his new partner, the lovely and talented Detective Dee Dee McCall (played by Stepfanie Kramer, and again, shades of a certain Clint Eastwood film are shining through…). Hunter has a long history of getting his partners into trouble, and sometimes into traction. A lot of them get hurt on the job because of his 'cowboy' tactics, and he's hesitant at first to accept her or work with her, but she soon proves to be a lot more resilient than she looks and he soon warms up to her fine detective skills and penchant for tough undercover work.

That's more or less the setup for the series. Two cops who took their oath to sever and protect seriously are working in a system that doesn't allow for their brand of justice. While Hunter is a lot more of a loose cannon than McCall, she does see things his way sometimes and the two end up developing a solid working relationship and quickly develop a mutual respect for each other.

While the show followed the standard TV cop show formula, the characters made Hunter worth turning into. Just when you thought that Hunter had gone too far, that he was truly a lose cannon interested more in violence (of which the show had plenty of, causing some problems for it early on in its run) than truly serving his community, they'd slap you with a surprise turn of events and show you his more humane, even sensitive, side. As Rick's relationship with Dee Dee grew stronger, so did their team work together. This relationship developed as the show did – it started in it's first two seasons as a pretty much straight ahead action series, and morphed into more of a police procedural towards the final seasons, and it made sense for this change to occur, at least in terms of how the characters grew.

Plenty of shoot outs, car chases, brawls and explosions made Hunter exciting on a visual level, and the characters made it interesting on more cerebral level – not that the show was any form of deep philosophical statement on the way police evolve in terms of the environment in which they serve, it wasn't – it was straight ahead entertainment. But it was entertainment worth returning to each week, and this had a lot more to do with the on screen chemistry between the two leads and the strong writing and interesting plots in each episode than the shoot outs or the explosions.

The episodes on this set, which compiles each episode from the first season including the ninety-minute long pilot in which we're first introduced to Hunter and McCall, is as follows:

Disc One: Pilot Episode, Hard Contact, The Hot Grounder.

Disc Two: A Long Way From Los Angeles, Legacy, Flight On A Dead Pigeon, Pen Pals.

Disc Three: Dead Or Alive, High Bleacher Man, The Shooter, The Garbage Man.

Disc Four: The Avenging Angel, The Snow Queen (this was the first two part episode of the series, both parts are on this disc), The Beach Boy.

Disc Five: Guilty, The Last Kill, Fireman, Sniper

Video:

The 1.33.1 fullframe image, which is the original aspect ratio for the series as it was broadcast that way, generally looks very good. There aren't any serious problems with edge enhancement (you've really got to be looking for it in order to spot even a minor instance of where it occurs.

Colors are lifelike and natural looking, black levels stay pretty solid from start to finish, and there are no shimmering effects noticeable at all. There's a surprisingly high level of detail present throughout the episodes on this set and print damage is almost non-existent. The only real problems are the second and fifteenth episodes in the set that look kind of blurry in a few spots leading one to guess that there's possibly a progressive scan issue. Other than those two episodes though, things look very nice on this set indeed.