Kate Jackson: The Most Valuable Rookie of them All!
Title: The Most Valuable Rookie of Them All!
Source: TV Super Shows
Author: Unknown
Date: May 1977
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Kate Jackson first became a nighttime television star on The Rookies - an ABC cops-and-robbers series that chronicled life in a big-city police academy.
The Rookies, which ran for several successful seasons on the primetime TV tube, was part of a whole national rage in cop caper shows that started with Adam-12 and produced such weekly blue-boy ventures as Police Story, The Blue Knight, Joe Forester, Toma, Baretta, Police Woman, Starsky & Hutch and even the hit comedy show Barney Miller, which unlike any other cop show, dares to take a lighthearted look at big-city precinct life.
For Kate Jackson, The Rookies represented a big step forward in her professional career.
Prior to doing the how, she was a young and unknown aspiring screen actress who had come to Hollywood fresh from playing a gothic ghoul on the daytime suspense serial, Dark Shadows. By the time she left The Rookies, Kate was well-established as a major nighttime television person.
Cast as “Nurse Jill Danko” the wife of one of the show’s star rookies, Kate wound up receiving more fan mail every week than any of the four male leads. And her viewer popularity so impressed Spelling-Goldberg Productions - the creators of The Rookies - that when the show finally went off the air and into re-run syndication, they came up with the idea of Charlie’s Angels, specifically as a new TV vehicle for her.
Kate’s husband on The Rookies, “Officer Mike Danko” was played by Same Melville. George Stanford Brown as cast as “Officer Terry Webster”; Bruce Fairbairn portrayed “Officer Chris Owens”; and Gerald O’Laughlin filled the boots of “Lt. Eddie Riker,” the tough-but-tenderhearted commander of the police academy.