How to Make ‘Positive Moral’ Blaxploitation: Shaping the Black Female Detective in Get Christie Love!

by: Catherine Martin , June 14, 2021

When ABC field-tested Get Christie Love! (1974-1975) as a Movie of the Week pilot in January 1974, audience feedback was mixed. The Blaxploitation-style detective series measured ‘in the average to below average range on virtually all of the critical test measures,’ including believability, originality, and the quality of its supporting characters. (Rubin 1974) However, the test audience, and especially Black viewers, responded positively to star Teresa Graves’ humour, humanity, and the novelty of a Black policewoman. Apparently seeing potential for a ‘fresh,’ ‘original,’ ‘fast-paced,’ ‘action-packed’ program about a ‘warm,’ ‘humorous’ female police detective, ABC greenlit the series. (Rubin 1974) The September debut of Get Christie Love! marked two firsts: Graves was the first Black woman to headline a primetime drama on US network television, and the first of three professional female investigators to headline a network crime series in 1974, nearly a decade after the last one had gone off the air. Of the three policewomen who debuted in 1974, however, only Police Woman (NBC, 1974-1978), starring Angie Dickinson as the sexy, blonde, and compliant Sgt. Pepper Anderson, lasted to a second season. NBC cut short Amy Prentiss (1974-1975), starring Jessica Walter as San Francisco’s first female chief of detectives, after only three episodes. ABC gave Get Christie Love! slightly more time, but trade magazines like Variety were openly predicting its demise by March 1975, and it was officially cancelled in April. (Variety 1975) Unlike Amy, who dared to command men, or Christie, who defied her white male superiors, Pepper and her successors ‘incorporate[ed] signs of ‘the new woman’’ feminists advocated into existing patriarchal relationship structures. (Fiske 2006 [1987]: 38) Even a mid-season revamp that partnered the previously independent Christie with a white male partner, and forced her to prove herself to a demanding superior on a weekly basis could neither contain nor defuse the threat that a Black woman posed to one of the most significant and enduring bastions of white, patriarchal power: law enforcement.

Since the 1970s, Get Christie Love! has largely disappeared from the popular cannon of female detective series. The few scholarly accounts that exist treat the series as representative of US network television’s haphazard, ultimately halfhearted, efforts to include Black Americans in their audience without alienating white viewers. (Acham 2004; Lehman 2011; Chung 2014) Most recently, Hye Jean Chung scrutinised the series’ racial and gendered ‘identity crisis’ through production documents from producer David Wolper’s archives. (Chung 2014) Chung concludes that Get Christie Love! was doomed by poor writing, a ratings system that discounted Black viewers, and Graves’ religious conversion as a Jehovah’s Witness, after which she refused to swear, tell a direct lie, engage in excessive violence, or be overtly sexualised on screen. These factors certainly hurt the series’ chances. However, the argument that Graves’ refusal to be objectified doomed the series accepts the industrial ‘common sense’ that sex and violence were necessary elements of a successful crime drama, especially one adapted from Blaxploitation films. (Chung 2014: 216) As scholars like Carol Stabile and Alfred L. Martin Jr. point out, industrial common-sense narratives almost always warrant re-examination, especially those deployed to absolve mostly white, male media executives of responsibility for the ‘failure’ of Black and/or female-focused texts. (Stabile 2018; Martin 2021a) Many factors contributed to Get Christie Love!’s quick demise, but I argue that the most important was the producers’ inability to integrate Christie’s revolutionary potential into a model of intersectional feminine agency that engaged Black and white audiences without seriously challenging the status quo.

Building on work by Blaxploitation scholars like Yvonne Sims, this paper situates Christie within the broader pantheon of 1970s Blaxploitation heroines who fought—both on screen and behind the scenes—to expand the ‘array of blackness’ available in mainstream popular culture. (Sims 2006: 111; Dunn 2008: xi) Drawing on Wolper’s archives, contemporary reviews, and nineteen available episodes, I argue that Christie can be seen as a test case demonstrating the limits of broadcasters’ ability to reconceive intersectional power relations in the 1970s. The idea of a swinging, sexy Black female crime fighter appealed to television producers and network executives struggling to adjust to changing audience demographics. However, Blaxploitation’s more revolutionary challenge to white male dominance threatened to undermine the power structures from which those same producers and their desired audience, mostly white men, drew their own cultural authority. Moreover, the image of a hypersexualised Black female cop threatened to expose white America’s prurient fascination with Black women’s bodies during a period when the major networks were trying to establish themselves as racially conscientious. Get Christie Love!’s producers tried to have their cake and eat it too by incorporating select signs of Blaxploitation—a black female investigator and cursory mentions of inner-city poverty and drug use—into the existing cop show framework, which presented police as dedicated servants solving problems and enacting justice for a mostly white public. This model pleased almost no one.

Few viewers were familiar with Get Christie Love! by 2012, when Kerry Washington made a splash in Scandal (ABC, 2012-2018) by becoming the first Black actress to headline a network television drama series ‘in recent memory’ (Ford 2012), playing hyper-capable political operative, Olivia Pope. Mainstream reviewers who referenced Graves used Get Christie Love!’s short run to heighten the sense that Washington was breaking barriers and presenting a revolutionary vision of Black femininity on television. This erasure is partly due to Get Christie Love!’s limited availability. The stand-alone Movie of the Week pilot is the only episode available on DVD. The full series was most recently syndicated on Centric, a cable channel targeting Black women (now rebranded BET Her) in 2014.[1] This erasure is emblematic of media industries’ propensity to ‘forget’ Black audiences and Black-focused texts once those industries cease to see Black audiences as economically viable. (Martin 2021a: 74) As I have argued elsewhere, the same is also true, though to a lesser extent, for television series featuring female detectives. (Martin 2020)

Many, including network program executives, took Get Christie Love!’s apparent failure to mean mainstream white America was simply not ready to watch a Black woman exercise legal authority on the most mass of mass media. However, as Martin Jr. argues, failure is never so simple as white-dominated industry discourses frame it to be, particularly when Black-identified texts are involved. (Martin 2021a: 61) Get Christie Love!’s production was complicated by conflicting cultural currents and economic forces that undermined its efforts to appeal to either audience. ABC executives saw the series as an opportunity to attract youth audiences and differentiate their programming from that of larger competitors, NBC and CBS, by merging social issues with sexual exploitation. (Levine 2007: 30) However, the network’s ability to fully exploit their young, attractive, and popular star was limited by federal prohibitions on obscenity, industry self-regulation, genre trends, and pressure to present a more respectable image of Black femininity. This pressure came from civil rights activists, government bodies like the 1968 Kerner Commission, and Graves herself.

Contesting the Patriarchy: Female Detectives on Television

Looking back at the 1974-1975 television season, The Washington Post’s television critic, Lawrence Laurent, characterised Christie Love and her fellow female police officers as part of a ‘great [and failed] move to liberate TV heroines’. (Laurent 1975) Without directly blaming the networks, Laurent noted they had done little to support their leading ladies. Amy Prentiss’s three episodes were ‘hardly a fair test of popularity’. (Laurent 1975) Likewise, ABC put Get Christie Love! at a competitive disadvantage from the beginning. After the series came in third in the ratings opposite two male-led police dramas, the network ‘assured [its] quick, painful death’ by swapping its time slot with that of the similarly low-rated male cop drama Baretta (ABC, 1975-1978) mid-season. (Laurent 1975) This move saved Baretta, but forced Christie to compete with the better established and higher-budgeted Police Woman. (Variety 1975) Despite its second season order, Laurent was not optimistic about Police Woman’s long-term chances. He lamented its ‘determinedly hackneyed’ writing, predicting it would suffer from increased competition from CBS. (Laurent 1975) Police Woman ultimately lasted four seasons, and went on to establish the standard for female detectives for the rest of the decade: they could be smart, brave, and active, but only so long as they were also sexy, dependent on male authority, and—if they could possibly help it—blonde. This archetype climaxed with Charlie’s Angels (ABC, 1976-1981), where the eponymous Angels used their sexuality to serve the anonymous Charlie and his clients.

The triumph of the sexy blonde was not a foregone conclusion, however. Throughout the 1974-75 season, producers, networks, advertisers, critics, and audiences debated the merits of the varied models of femininity presented in the season’s three female cop shows. The Los Angeles Times’s Cecil Smith praised Amy Prentiss as a ‘highly competent, responsible executive’ who happened to be ‘a cop [rather than a businesswoman] because cops are what television buys these days’. (C. Smith 1974) Still, he took the time to applaud Amy for affirming her femininity by choosing skirts over slacks, in contrast to the ‘sexy sirens that Angie Dickinson and Teresa Graves play, luring rapists and other wrongdoers to justice’. (C. Smith 1974) As Smith’s comment implies, mainstream white reviewers took Christie and Pepper less seriously than Amy. The New York Times called Police Woman ‘persistently dull, despite the help of several bloody killings and a couple of rapes’. (Broadcasting 1974b) In a trend that extended to Get Christie Love, reviewers were kinder to Dickinson than Police Woman as a whole, lamenting that ‘the pedestrian script…doesn’t do right by title star’ Dickinson and that viewers ‘learned almost nothing about the lady cop on whom we’re supposed to centre our interest’. (Broadcasting 1974b) Similarly, early mainstream reviewers complained that Get Christie Love!’s ‘writers try to combine sitcom with police action and don’t do a very good job of either,’ and hoped that ‘Policewoman Love gets better assignments from what must be white, male-chauvanist (sic) writers’. (Broadcasting 1974a) These reviews indicate that some female and male reviewers hoped the two series would inspire a broader array of representations on television. As I detail below, reviewers in the African American press were similarly split over Christie’s potential to advance representation and the series’ poor writing and assimilationist politics. Award shows were also intrigued by the women in blue. Walter won the 1975 Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series for Amy Prentiss. Graves was nominated for the 1975 Best Actress Golden Globe, but ultimately lost to Dickinson. This loss presaged Police Woman’s ratings triumph, and further elevated Dickinson as the model for future female detectives who blurred the line between empowerment and sexual exploitation. (Press 1991: 35)

Even as Pepper and her sexy, white progeny fought crime, they were always presented as being one step away from becoming victims themselves, thereby reaffirming men’s dominance over policing. John Crank argues that ‘the paternalism associated with the traditional American male role, intensified through the lens of police culture [is] a guiding principle of social order and control’ that shapes, and is perpetuated by, popular representations of policing. (Crank 2014: 230) This white, paternalist bias has made it difficult for women to find a consistent foothold in broadcast crime drama. Female investigators were a small, but significant, presence on network radio, especially in the decade after World War II. However, as I argue elsewhere, networks cut female detectives from their schedules during the postwar transition from radio to television because such women threatened to undermine the patriarchal social and political order pushed by vocal conservatives and anticommunists in the Cold War-era US. (Martin 2020)

Nevertheless, by the mid-1960s network executives felt rising pressure to appeal to growing youth audiences—and especially young women—with more empowering representatives of femininity. Honey West (ABC, 1965-1966) tried to balance its female private eye’s assertiveness with actress Anne Francis’s blonde sex appeal, to mixed results. (D’Acci 1997: 85) Francis insisted Honey West was cancelled because ABC saved money by importing the UK-produced The Avengers (ITV, 1961-1969), which partnered an assertive female investigator with a male superior. (Fredriksen 2009: 12) Still, executives and advertisers—mostly white men—were reluctant to portray women as capable and independent from men. The perception that Honey West was ahead of its time, and Francis insufficiently ‘feminine’ because she used judo to take out larger men, quickly became conventional wisdom. (Haber 1969) For the next decade, women were largely relegated to supporting roles alongside male investigators. Even when female sidekicks were more competent than their male partners, men’s control over investigations reaffirmed their authority over the machinery of justice, and with it, civil society.

By the 1970s, however, the networks could not ignore the criticism that their programs were out of touch with the nation’s evolving population. By 1970, the industry-standard AC Nielsen Company had revised its ratings sample, shifting focus from the older, rural-dominated radio homes that had dominated viewer measurements since the 1940s, to highlight younger, more urban, slightly more ethnically diverse households. (Meehan 2003: 75) In 1976, the Nielsen ratings finally began measuring working women, a demographic broadcasters had noted but largely ignored since the late-1950s. (The Billboard 1957; D’Acci 1994: 72) As the networks re-geared their programming to attract these audiences, many paired socially relevant narratives with more permissive sexual standards, mimicking what viewers could see in more risqué film productions. CBS embraced politically relevant sitcoms by producers like Norman Lear, who used comedy to open discussions about race, gender, and sexuality. Meanwhile, ABC, the smallest network with the youngest audience, embraced more overt sexuality. (Levine 2007: 30)

Sex was risky on television, which lacked film’s First Amendment protections against censorship. However, broadcasters saw risqué content as a way to hedge their bets on programs appealing to female and/or minority audiences. Like Civil Rights activists, who I discuss in the next section, second-wave feminists agitated for more representative and empowering representations of women throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Regardless of their growing interest in women and—to a lesser extent—Black audiences, broadcasters still prioritised the white male viewers who tended to have the most disposable income. Programmers attempted to balance these competing interests by merging female empowerment with hypersexualised images of women, thereby signaling that even the most apparently-independent female leads remained available—and subservient—to men, both on-screen and off. (Levine 2007: 54) This is clear from the difference in NBC’s treatment of Police Woman and Amy Prentiss. Both series originated as spin-offs from male-headed cop dramas—Police Story (1973-1987) and Ironside (1967-1975), respectively. However, where NBC initially passed on Amy Prentiss and only greenlit the series as one of a rotating core of The NBC Mystery Movie (1971-1977) after its Ironside backdoor pilot garnered ‘excellent ratings’ (Wright 1974), the network actively pursued Dickinson for Police Woman. Producer Douglas Benton later recalled that NBC demanded that Police Story producer David Gerber ‘deliver Dickinson’ after her Police Story episode garnered high ratings. (Benton 1999) Gerber protested that Dickinson ‘was unbelievable as a cop, too pretty, and better suited to comedy than serious drama’ but the network refused to consider other actresses. (Benton 1999) Tellingly, Benton acknowledged that the series targeted men and ‘it was just a lucky break that Angie was a performer that women liked too’. (Benton 1999)

By spring 1975, the model for future female detectives was largely set. NBC’s decision to cancel Amy Prentiss before it had a chance to find an audience, while keeping Police Woman, helped affirm that female investigators must defer to male superiors and be sexual—and sexually available—objects. As I explore below, Get Christie Love! challenged both of these requirements. Despite her clear physical appeal, Graves’ race and refusal to be overtly sexualised made this difficult. White supremacist ideology might assume that Black women’s bodies are always available to white men, but broadcasters did their best to obscure any hint of actual miscegenation on screen. Moreover, while Christie’s status as a Black woman theoretically gave her more room for independence than a white woman might have, it also re-framed her tendency to rebel against her superiors—almost a prerequisite for male investigators—as a direct threat to white patriarchal power.

Black Women on 1970s Television

Producers at Wolper Productions, the independent production company that developed Get Christie Love! and sold the series to ABC, were aware from the beginning that the show was a risky production. The initial script, written by George Kirgo, was adapted from Dorothy Uhnak’s book The Ledger (1970). Kirgo converted Uhnak’s semi-autobiographical novel, which followed white female NYPD detective Christie Opara as she took down a drug syndicate, into a Blaxploitation narrative. As an anonymous script reader warned in an initial report on the feature-length pilot script,

CHRISTIE LOVE is a fast action-fastmoving story with plenty of excitement especially because the cop is a girl with a quick tongue and because the girl is black and very good-looking … It would do well at the box office but with all that is being said about making the ‘black-scene’ and extorting it with films that don’t depict things as they are … one would have to seriously consider the intentions of this plot … It could be very good … it could be terrible. (Wolper Productions 1973)

As this quotation implies, white male television producers struggled to effectively address race in the 1970s. They had particular trepidation about representations of Black social and political life. Still, as the reader notes, and audience testing affirmed, Get Christie Love! had the potential to set the network apart from its competitors by providing a new representation of Black femininity, breaking with television’s long history of representing Black women as mammies, nagging wives, or hypersexualised objects. (Smith-Shomade 2002: 9) Indeed, despite later criticism of the series, an early reviewer hailed the MOW pilot as ‘one of the best things that’s happened to television in years’. (Garland 1974)

Get Christie Love! was one of the last in a cluster of series broadcasters created or revised after the 1968 Kerner Commission criticised US media for exacerbating racial divisions by ‘bask[ing] in a white world, looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and a white perspective’. (Kerner et al. 1968: 213) Media historians have shown how network executives attempted to assuage this criticism by adding Black characters to existing programs in the late 1960s. (Bodroghkozy 1992: 143) However, most of those characters fell into the category Martin Jr. has designated as ‘surplus Blackness,’ intended to attract Black audiences to projects ‘designed for broader, mainstream (read: white) appeal’. (Martin 2021b) Even active characters like Mannix’s (CBS, 1967-1975) secretary Peggy Fair (Gail Fisher) were largely peripheral to episode plots, and few provided specific representations of contemporary Black life. Network executives also treated the few programs centring Black characters as ‘surplus,’ or as PR moves. Aniko Bodroghkozy argues that NBC was surprised when Julia (NBC, 1968-1971), its sitcom about a Black nurse and single mother (played by Diahann Carroll), did not ‘die a noble, dignified death, having demonstrated the network’s desire to break the prime-time colour bar,’ especially after executives scheduled it opposite the highly-rated Red Skelton Show (NBC, 1951-1953 & 1970-1971; CBS, 1953-1970). (1992: 143)

Julia did not die, but it—and other black-cast sitcoms—did attract significant criticism from Black viewers objecting to its title character’s white middle-class lifestyle and lack of racial signifiers, as well as the absence of a father figure. Critics included Julia’s star Diahann Carroll, who was outspoken in pushing producers to include storylines addressing Black issues. (Bodroghkozy 1992: 147; Acham 2004: 117) Carroll also publicly repudiated narratives coding Black militant groups as dangerous, and dismissing Black Americans’ concerns about racism and desire to preserve Black culture as ignorant and/or stuck in the past. (Acham 2004: 125) At the same time, white housewives castigated producers for depicting Julia’s white middle-class housewife neighbour as less capable and attractive than Julia, thereby uplifting Black women at the expense of white women. (Bodroghkozy 1992: 153) As I detail below, Get Christie Love! attracted similar criticism from Black critics. Sandra Haggerty, the Los Angeles Times’ first Black female columnist, lamented that Christie embodied ‘image-degrading myths of black womanhood’ with her ‘hip-swinging, wisecracking…flippant’ persona. (Haggerty 1974) Still, many viewers and some critics praised Christie’s agency and intelligence, even as they decried the series’ poor writing and confused racial politics.

The core of Get Christie Love!’s identity crisis lay in its effort to merge two fundamentally contradictory genres: the television cop show and Blaxploitation. As I have already noted, American police culture is inextricably bound up with white patriarchal norms, both on screen and off. This was reinforced by the National Association of Broadcasters’ self-regulatory Television Code, which mandated that law enforcement be treated respectfully and criminals be punished. (Jaramillo 2018: 192) Because audiences knew how ‘the epic struggle of good and evil’ that crime dramas purported to present would end, David Marc argues such series are better understood as character studies, both of cops and criminals. (1996 [1984]: 68) However, as I detail below, Get Christie Love! spends much more time exploring the motivations and trauma of its mostly white victims and criminals than it does its Black heroine. Get Christie Love! was also one of a number of cop dramas in the 1970s that attempted to bridge the gap between older and younger viewers by pairing rebellious youth with more experienced authority figures whose mentorship would bring the youth into the proverbial fold. (Marc 1996 [1984]: 88) This dynamic echoes Hollywood’s appropriation of Blaxploitation tropes into white-dominated productions, even as it contradicts the rebellion underpinning Blaxploitation’s appeal.

Scholars debate whether Blaxploitation is best understood as a genre or a movement. While Blaxploitation films comprehend a range of genres, they are united through their appeal to Black audiences, focus on strong Black protagonists, Black-dominated urban settings and storylines, sexuality, and violence. Most importantly, Blaxploitation films ‘challenged Hollywood’s racist status quo’ by showing Black characters triumphing over white villains, especially corrupt and powerful white male authorities. (Lawrence and Butters 2019: 745) Blaxploitation films gave Black women more agency than previous film representations had, but most often expressed it through women’s ability to exact vengeance for crimes like rape, which films often showed in graphic detail. Stephane Dunn argues Blaxploitation largely replicated the Black Power movement’s patriarchal organization, with most women restricted to sexually objectified and/or subservient roles. (2008: 4-5) Still, Blaxploitation heroines like Pam Grier and Tamara Dobson have arguably had a more enduring cultural impact than most of their male contemporaries. (Sims 2006: 4) Likewise, Get Christie Love!’s impact has endured beyond her brief network run.

Despite network executives’ burgeoning interest in female investigators, Get Christie Love! is a surprising choice for mainstream US television. Hollywood studios may have embraced Blaxploitation as a cheap vehicle for attracting Black audiences to ensure their survival in the early 1970s, but independent Black heroines—who necessarily challenged both racist and patriarchal social norms—seem to have been a bridge to far for the major studios. Instead, empowered Black women were predominantly the province of exploitation studios that were more willing to risk capitalizing on controversial and/or progressive cultural trends. (Sims 2006: 16) Television producers, on the other hand, may have felt more comfortable representing Black women on screen because they saw them as less threatening than Black men, or because they wished to avoid accusations of perpetuating stereotypes about Black male violence. Indeed, as contemporary critics and scholars pointed out, the networks typically limited Black characters to comedy series. Gladstone Lloyd Yearwood argues that series like Get Christie Love! reinforced Black women’s power through denigrating images of Black men. (1979: 191) Like Julia, Christie has few Black peers in her series. The one regular series exception is Doug (Julian Christopher), a Black male reporter friend who appears in one mid-season to hype Christie’s successes—much to her new captain’s annoyance—and help her earn the trust of a white criminal’s wife. (1.13)

Graves seems an unlikely choice for a Blaxploitation thriller heroine. While she had established her sex appeal on Martin & Rowan’s Laugh-In (NBC, 1967-1973), she was mostly known as a comic actress. Before Get Christie Love! she starred in a failed Black-cast sitcom for NBC, and in the Harlem Globetrotters’ short-lived syndicated series. In addition to Get Christie Love! Graves also starred in the British Dracula spoof, Vampira (Donner, 1974) with David Niven. Graves was cast after the studio’s original choice, Cicely Tyson, withdrew due to injury. Comedic framings are typical for representations of female detectives—and other rebellious women—because they help contain otherwise rebellious characters within a carnivalesque frame, apart from ‘official’ culture. (Wexman 2003: 62) However, comedy fit awkwardly with the more serious tone of 1970s police dramas.

Get Christie Love! was not the first Blaxploitation television series, but it was the first originated for television. In 1973, Richard Roundtree starred in a brief television adaptation of Shaft (CBS, 1973-1974). In keeping with the TV Code, the series depicted Shaft on friendly terms with the police, and toned down the film’s violence and politics, even minimizing an allegorical lynch mob operating in New York City. (Murray 2011) Or, as the New York Amsterdam News’ Angela Smith put it, television transformed Shaft from ‘the ‘baddest’ thing ever to hit the screen’ to an apolitical and ‘pathetically deheroised … Ivy League type of detective who cultivated as much impact and excitement as an ally cat’. (A. E. Smith 1974) Just as NBC did with Amy Prentiss, CBS scheduled Shaft as one of two wheel series in its rotating The New CBS Tuesday Night Movies (CBS, 1971-1974). While this designation might be understood as an effort to elevate the series’ prestige, or work around its star’s schedule, the limited episode order also allowed the network to capitalise from the popular title while minimizing risk. Shaft was awkwardly paired with the night’s other wheel series; Hawkins (1973-1974) starred Jimmy Stewart as a country lawyer, reprising his earlier hit movie, Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959). The contrast likely made it hard for either series to attract a regular audience, and both were cancelled by the end of the season.

Adapting Blaxploitation to Television

By 1974, critics in the African American press were lamenting the decline in Black television shows. In May 1974, the New York Amsterdam News’ Billy Rowe warned that ‘[a]s far as the tubes are concerned there isn’t much of a fall in-store for Bro/Sis’ after NBC and CBS cancelled a number of shows featuring prominent Black actors. (Rowe 1974) Still, he evinced moderate hope for the upcoming season of Get Christie Love! As early as January, critics encouraged ABC to greenlight the series; The Los Angeles Sentinel’s Gertrude Gipson had ‘nothing but raves, raves over’ the pilot, hailing Graves as ‘a real dynamite lady’. (Gipson 1974) Critics continued to note the series and its ‘statuesque’ star throughout the summer, but by October, their goodwill had begun to sour. (Downings 1974a) The New York Amsterdam News’s Angela Smith described Christie as ‘cute, vivacious and glamorously trashy,’ and worried that ‘her cuteness may be the downfall of the series because this type of behavior quickly becomes overplayed and boring’. (A. E. Smith 1974) By November, the Chicago Defender’s Charlie Cherokee noted the series ‘may be an early nominee for the worst new TV series of the 1974-75 season’. (Downings 1974b)

So, what happened to thwart Christie’s revolutionary potential? Like most series, Get Christie Love! underwent numerous changes on its way from pilot to series. Some of these were based on the audience research report, which noted that audiences were most interested in Graves’s warmth, and least interested in the program’s ‘sexy or risqué tone’ and excessive ‘violence and vulgar dialogue’. (Rubin 1974) Part of this reaction may have been aversion to the flirtation between Christie and her boss, Captain Casey Reardon (Harry Guardino). Test audiences complained that his ‘seedy’ attempts to seduce Christie undermined his authority and added an objectionable ‘racial significance … to their relationship’. (Rubin 1974) Producers answered this criticism by re-writing Reardon as a paternal mentor who wanted to protect Christie from herself. They further distanced the new Reardon from his ‘seductive’ origins by recasting the role with Charles Cioffi, who had previously appeared as Lt. Vic Androzzi in Shaft (Parks, 1971). At the same time, they also began transforming Christie from a Black female detective to a female detective who just happened to be Black. This shift was gradual, and never fully completed, but in reducing Christie’s race to a gimmick, and then trying to ignore it altogether, Christie’s producers minimised her chief appeal.

Audience aversion to the Get Christie Love! pilot’s sexuality and violence points to the fact that audiences were growing bored with Blaxploitation. The genre’s popularity declined as cheap productions flooded theatres, and many Black critics and viewers agitated for more diverse representations. However, instead of embracing audience and reviewer calls for a series that would make good use of its star’s warm, upbeat affect, professional demeanour, and comedic timing, producers Wolper and Paul Mason stuck to their initial Blaxploitation framework, and insisted that Christie should be a Black sexpot, a la Pepper Anderson. (Mason 1974a) Wolper’s files contain repeated memos with suggestions for ‘sexy background[s]’ and plots, including roller derby, women’s prisons, and rape, and Mason frequently complained about the series ‘being so diluted by Broadcast Standards’ that it would not ‘pique the interest of an audience seeking action/adventure entertainment’. (Wolper 1974a; 1974c; Mason 1974b) The result was a poorly written series that awkwardly melded action and comedy, and avoided delving into complex racial issues.

As so many producers before them had done, the white executives at Wolper Productions and ABC attempted to avoid backlash for exploiting the ‘Black-scene’ by keeping their treatment of race at surface-level. This process began with revisions to the MOW pilot script, which made Christie’s Blackness a central part of the narrative. The initial script draft opens with Christie going undercover to catch the Black-Lash killer, a white man who rapes and murders Black prostitutes. (Kirgo 1973a) As in other Blaxploitation narratives, this killer rides the fine line between exploiting Black women’s sexuality and acknowledging the threatening situations they faced due to their economic and social precarity. Successive edits transformed the Black-Lash killer into an equal-opportunity prostitute murderer, thereby preserving the sexual exploitation while removing the racial commentary. (Kirgo 1973b)

In addition to the Black-Lash killer, script edits also removed the official police racism that Kirgo’s original script acknowledges. In a press conference held after Christie captures the killer, the police commissioner praises Christie as being ‘a credit to our city, to the force, and last but assuredly not least, to her race’. (Kirgo 1973a) When a Black reporter asks if she agrees with this statement, Christie appears to reject the racial designation and embraces a gendered one, responding ‘I sure do. The female race’. However, after a reporter pressures the commissioner into giving ‘her a peck on the cheek,’ Christie calls out his reluctance as racism by telling him ‘Go ahead Commissioner. A little steel wool and it comes right off’. (Kirgo 1973a) None of this exchange survived to broadcast. Instead, the racism that Christie combats in Get Christie Love! is located safely outside of the official police hierarchy. In ‘Pawn Ticket for Murder’ (1.04), she foils a maître d’s effort to prevent her from entering an all-white club’s dining room to question a criminal by threatening to make a scene. After questioning the criminal, she further mocks the maître d’s polite racism by advising him to check the racial status of a couple she overheard ordering watermelon, implying the club has already been infiltrated by white-passing Black people. (1.04) Intriguingly, the episode bears signs that Christie was initially supposed to combat racism from a senior police officer. While she ostensibly accepts the man’s assertion that he objects to Christie’s gender rather than her race, Christie evokes anti-segregation language when contesting his efforts to sideline her, and mockingly asserts that if he refuses to work with her, they will each investigate independently in a ‘separate but equal’ partnership. (1.04)

Throughout promotion for the series, Teresa Graves declared that her goal was to represent Christie as ‘a natural normal lady’ based on the ‘genuine’ experiences of Black NYPD officer Olga Ford, who advised producers early in the series. (Calloway 1974) While Graves expressed her desire to make a positive, moral program in terms of her recent baptism as a Jehovah’s Witness, she was not the first Black actress to use her television platform to push for better representations of Black Americans. However, unlike Carroll, Graves repudiated racial consciousness in promotion for Get Christie Love!, instead preferring to emphasise her apparent optimism for a race-blind future. The mainstream Chicago Daily News’s Robert Rose assured readers ‘the show will not make a big thing out of her being black.’ Rose further quoted Graves as saying ‘I see [racial discrimination] on television now and it’s garbage … I’ve never, never, never, never had any problems because of race’. (Rose 1974) This reflects her character’s attitude in the series. In ‘Fatal Image’ (1.08), Christie laughs off a police public relations writer’s suggestion that she has encountered racism on the force. Citing the Black women who blazed the trail for her, she argues that all she sees is ‘opportunity’. (1.08) Christie further underscores this sunny outlook by telling the story of a female police officer who showed mercy when a juvenile Christie got into trouble with a group of friends. Instead of ‘running us in,’ Officer Iris Alexander bought the group hot dogs, then showed them around the precinct the next day. (1.08) ‘After that, [she] was hooked’ and determined to become a cop herself. (1.08)

Christie’s apparently well-adjusted racial outlook is further affirmed when we learn that the blonde PR man, George Lomax (Jared Martin), is actually Bo Johnson, a Black man apparently driven mad by his decision to pass for white. Lomax/Johnson was played by white actor Jared Martin. The episode’s exploration of passing is confused, to say the least. Near the end of the episode, Johnson describes himself as ‘a genetic misprint’ who ‘took the easy way out’ by passing for white after a childhood of beatings from Black and white children who ‘hated him’ for his white skin in his native Mississippi. (1.08) However, the narrative never coherently explains how Johnson’s trauma inspired the murders he commits to avenge the murder of his sister, a Black model who was killed after learning too much about her white gangster boyfriend’s business. As he dies after taking a bullet for Christie, Johnson tells her that ‘with your help, I think I might’ve [been ok],’ but never elaborates on how her sunny attitude and denial of racism could have helped him to overcome his decades of abuse. (1.08) Indeed, the episode ends on a pessimistic note, with Reardon comforting Christie by arguing that Johnson was beyond saving: ‘He was a man on the edge of a precipice. It was only a matter of time before he fell in’. (1.08)

Despite her assertion that she joined the police force to help people, Christie is rarely shown helping Black victims. Aside from the doomed Bo Johnson, the only available exception occurs in the episode ‘Too Many Games in Town’ (1.14), in which Bobby (Erin Blunt), a young Black boy, approaches Christie to help find his older brother and caretaker, Jack (Otis Young). While the episode does touch on Black distrust of the police—Bobby tells Christie that he heard she was ‘a cop a guy could trust’—it also frames Bobby as a budding young criminal in need of Christie’s good example. (1.14). Jack clearly loves Bobby, but the episode questions his fitness as a father figure, first by showing Bobby’s criminal proclivities, and then when his effort to blackmail a gambling syndicate puts Bobby in danger. Jack’s brush with death and Christie’s intervention appear to scare the brothers onto a law-abiding path, but the episode does little to disrupt stereotypes of Black male criminality. Furthermore, while some viewers may have cheered Jack’s efforts to extort the white gangsters, the episode completely elided the economic factors that might force him to resort to such measures.

For the most part, the series avoided representing Black characters positively or negatively by displacing racially coded inequalities onto partially assimilated white ethnic minorities. In ‘My Son, the Murderer’ (1.17), Christie defies her superior and delays multiple court appearances to stop a childhood friend, the ethnically Russian but thoroughly assimilated Barney Oblonski (Michael Parks), from killing the man who sent him to prison. (1.17) ‘For the Family Honor’ (1.06) capitalises on the concurrent interest in organised crime to dramatise a dispute between one of Christie’s Italian fellow officers and his more traditional father, whose loyalty to the customs of the ‘old neighbourhood’ leads him to pressure his son to steal evidence to cover up for a mobster’s crime. (1.06)

The little we see of Christie’s private life indicates that, in common with other Black women on television, Christie lives a middle-class lifestyle. Indeed, at first glance, only her natural hairstyles and African-inspired decorations differentiate her from her white competitor, Pepper. Both live in large apartments surrounded by white neighbours who treat them respectfully. However, where Pepper is shown caring for her autistic younger sister, or spending social time with her boss, Get Christie Love! largely avoids Christie’s private life. The few scenes located in Christie’s apartment revolve around work, or other characters’ private lives. (1.14; 1.21)

Despite efforts to downplay race, however, Christie’s Blackness is a significant feature of the surviving regular-season episodes. Yearwood situates Christie within the tradition of the mulatto, noting the lack of ‘legal’ signifier ‘for a person who, literally, is not white or black’ activates cultural paranoia over changing racial norms. (Yearwood 1979: 182) Christie is indisputably Black, but her racial status is troubled because her occupation gives her access to the official reins of power. Moreover, Christie enjoys more freedom to exercise that power. Police Woman blunts Pepper’s power through constant reminders of the physical and sexual dangers she faces in the field. Where Pepper depends on her male partners for rescue, Christie always holds her own in a fight. Moreover, instead of a romantic partner who might limit her actions, producers initially gave Christie a supportive mentor in the form of Reardon. This reaffirmed white men’s authority within the police system, and their traditional prerogative over shaping moral values. Giving Christie a Black male superior would have avoided the problem of miscegenation, but it would have created a larger problem by elevating a Black man over the white male officers whose ideological viewpoints were the ‘stable position from which other [characters’] positions [were] charted’. (Yearwood 1979: 189)

However, casting Christie’s superior as a father figure also allowed Christie to adopt the humorous, transgressive role of rebellious daughter. Indeed, this change made it harder to fold Christie into the white patriarchal status quo Reardon represented. Intergenerational conflicts were a staple of 1970s socially relevant sitcoms like All in the Family (CBS, 1971-1979), where they made room for debates about contemporary social mores. However, where viewers who identified with Archie Bunker’s (Caroll O’Connor) often racist and misogynist views saw him as a hero tearing apart his foolishly liberal son-in-law, who Archie derided as ‘Meathead,’ Christie was almost always proven right. White men may have represented established social norms, but Christie’s repeated investigatory successes showed those norms needed re-examination.

Could Sex Have Saved It?

By the middle of the 1974-1975 season, Get Christie Love!’s slumping ratings had prompted producers to make significant revisions in order to save the series. To this day, Mason remains convinced that Get Christie Love! failed because viewers wanted more sex and violence. However, ABC’s audience report indicates viewers who enjoyed Get Christie Love! were not necessarily looking for those qualities. Moreover, Graves was not the only one restraining the program’s sexuality. Blaxploitation’s emphasis on sex and violence dovetailed with the emerging network consensus that female detectives should be sexual objects, but the genre posed significant problems for ABC. As Wolper’s script-reader notes, producers were well aware of charges that Hollywood had coopted Blaxploitation and by 1973 was using it to misrepresent and abuse Black people. Wolper’s producers removed much of the script’s sexually explicit content in preparing it for television. ABC appears to have been uncomfortable being seen as exploiting Graves’ sexuality as a Black woman, either because they did not want to raise the spectre of miscegenation, or because they worried about criticism from Black viewers.

Regardless, Mason did not manage to introduce more sex and violence into the series in the mid-season revamp. Instead, he replaced Christie’s supportive mentor, Reardon, with a demanding new superior, Captain Arthur Ryan (Jack Kelly). Unlike Reardon, who trusted Christie’s judgment and let her take the lead, Ryan emphasised the importance of police procedure and interdepartmental teamwork. In the process, he repeatedly sidelined Christie, dismissing her detecting skills as attention-seeking. Perhaps in order to downplay the idea that Ryan was racist, the new captain was even more mocking toward Christie’s new partner, the supportive but comic Sgt. Pete Gallagher (Michael Pataki). Gallagher’s presence ostensibly limited Christie’s independence, but his frequent reminders that she was about to go against the captain’s orders mostly reinforced her rebellious streak.

Conclusion

Still, how much of Christie’s failure had to do with her lack of sexuality and how much can be ascribed to the producers,’ network, and/or audiences’ failure to—to borrow Yearwood’s phrasing— ‘get’ Christie Love? (1979: 180) Certainly, her writers were ill-equipped to balance her contradictory meanings. As a Black female police officer, Christie simultaneously upheld and violated the white patriarchal status quo. Despite her beauty, recorded by a voyeuristic camera that attempted to constitute her ‘for and by the male view,’ she resisted the expectation that she consent to be both hypersexualised and passive. (Yearwood 1979: 190) Despite her outward allegiance to a white male hierarchy, she insisted on actively pursuing her own lines of investigation. And, perhaps most damagingly, despite her condemnation of racism and sexism against herself, she helped perpetuate police violence against her Black peers. This last seems the most explicitly meant as a sop to traditional television values, and it points to white-dominated commercial media’s inability to adequately address progressive social change.

Black critics lamented the series’ poor quality, but most reserved their rancour for the show’s writing rather than its star. Even The Black Panther was careful to specify that its critique of the series as ‘the phoniest, most unrealistic piece of police propaganda imaginable’ was not ‘a personal attack against Miss Graves’. (B.B. 1975) Black critics’ chief complaint was that, as Soul’s Cynthia Kirk put it, ‘Black TV shows are still programmed for whites’. (Kirk 1975) Christie might be ‘as representative of the ‘new’ Black woman as you’re ever going to find on TV,’ but the series refused to show ‘how a middle class Black woman copes with the problems of racism or sexism,’ or even depict ‘her lifestyle away from the job’. (Kirk 1975) Instead, it paid lip service to racial issues by confining racist sentiments to a few token side characters who Christie easily dismissed or manipulated. At the same time, the series elided the very real discrimination that a Black female cop like Christie would have faced on and off the job, and absolved the police hierarchy of racism altogether.

Christie’s network run may have been brief, but her cultural impact as a representation of empowered Black femininity has endured. As Stephane Dunn recounts in the preface to Baad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (2008), seeing ‘pretty, chocolate-skinned Christy smiling and kicking butt’ fed her desire to see herself in popular culture. (xii) Moreover, Christie helped set the stage for future action heroines to mix beauty, brains, and brawn in a way that was forbidden to white women in the 1970s. Infinitely more capable than her white contemporaries, Christie existed in a charmed, ultimately imaginary space. Her race placed her outside of the category of ‘lady,’ thereby freeing her from the expectation that she would depend on men to save her. (Higginbotham 1992: 255) At the same time, her status as a ‘respectable’ representation of Black femininity protected her from the all-too-real physical, sexual, and economic violence experienced by Black women who were denied the protections traditionally accorded to white women. This industry-required bifurcation certainly reinforced harmful stereotypes about Black women. However, as Dunn and others have pointed out, Christie’s very existence opened viewers’ eyes to the possibility that the fantasy she represented could become reality. This possibility threatened to undermine racial and gendered power relations in a way that major US networks are still reluctant to approach.

Yvonne Sims argues that Christie and other Blaxploitation heroines helped develop the template for white female action heroes in films like Alien (Scott, 1979) and television series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB/UPN, 1997-2003). (Sims 2006: 6) It follows that Christie is also an early model of what has come to be known as ‘the strong female lead’. (Marling 2020) She is resilient, direct, physically strong, and, while empathetic to others, apparently unbothered by emotional conflicts that might interfere with her dedication to doing the right thing. These qualities are associated with have long been associated with Black women. Christine Acham argues that Black women’s central position in the Civil Rights movement—and especially images of strong Black women like Rosa Parks and Shirley Chisholm pushing against legal segregation and political boundaries—helped cement associations between Black women and ‘connotations of strength and empowerment’. (Acham 2004: 111) However, this assumption of strength is also rooted in Black women’s historical exclusion from definitions of respectable womanhood, which reserved features such as protection from physical and sexual violence, economic support, and social status for white women. (Higginbotham 1992) Given this history, it is notable that these attributes were later passed on to the heroic white women who followed, further reinforcing the division between persistent feminine ideals and the levers of justice. Even as Black women are gradually admitted to the ranks of female television investigators, they are expected to balance white patriarchal law-and-order justice with overt displays of beauty, empathy, and quite often trauma in order to stake their claim to femininity.

Notes

[1] Over almost a decade of searching, I have collected 18 episodes from the series’ 22-episode regular season run from internet collectors. Most carry on-screen graphics indicating they were recorded from Centric’s 2014 airing, and very few are available through widely accessible sources like YouTube.