2 days ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
What's the best San Francisco TV show of all time? Chronicle readers (mostly) agree on this classic
Asked to choose the greatest San Francisco television show of all time, Chronicle readers picked an overwhelming favorite that has it all: a banger theme song, a future movie star, propulsive crime stories and location scouting that seemingly used every square inch of the city.
But the poll, launched with my story lauding 1990s radio host detective show 'Midnight Caller,' says as much about Bay Area TV viewers as it does about the shows they voted for.
Locals feel the deepest connection to programs that were filmed here instead of Hollywood or Vancouver. They don't share the world's love of 'Full House.' (Easily the most zeitgeist-y show on the list, the sitcom received less than 1% of the vote.) And they wrote in a lot of more obscure names, getting behind a 1950s program that wasn't on our master list.
With 304 readers weighing in, there was a clear winner: the 1970s drama 'The Streets of San Francisco' with 37.5% of the vote. Commenters said the show, featuring a young Michael Douglas and Karl Malden as San Francisco Police Department homicide detectives, put in the work in San Francisco.
'Only this show placed the city up-front in its title,' said reader Mike Drew. 'The others were only incidentally set in San Francisco, but they easily could have been anywhere. (Producer) Quinn Martin made San Francisco a member of the cast and deserves all the credit here.'
Reader David K. watches the show specifically for the locations. 'It's fascinating to see what neighborhoods like Dogpatch and Potrero Hill used to look like in the 1970s,' David wrote. 'I can't help pausing the show to see if I can recognize a particular corner.'
'The Streets of San Francisco' also received the single best comment, from an anonymous reader who voted for the show 'because I was on an episode as a casual street walker."
Coming in second place was 'Tales of the City' (16.1%), based on Armistead Maupin's eponymous Chronicle column about a newcomer and her group of friends in San Francisco, which ran on PBS as a miniseries in 1993, then returned with sequels on Showtime in 1998 and 2001 and Netflix in 2019. Readers were passionate about the gay characters and authentically eccentric San Franciscans who weren't represented on network television.
'It so perfectly expresses the zeitgeist of the time and the innocence of its characters who moved to San Francisco seeking personal freedom in an era that was closeted, constrained and demanded conformity,' wrote reader Joe Grubb.
The third highest poller was the 1996-2001 high-revving cop drama 'Nash Bridges' (8.9%), which despite middling critical appraisals was fiercely defended for its strong filming presence in the city. Rounding out the bottom of the list were 'Midnight Caller' (7.6%), the 2000s detective series 'Monk' (5.2%), recent sleuthing comedy 'A Man on the Inside' (4.3%) and 2010s HBO gay relationship drama 'Looking' (3.2%). 'Party of Five,' 'Charmed' and 'Full House' each received less than 2% of the vote.
But the biggest surprise was a write-in candidate that wasn't included in our poll: 'The Lineup.'
The 1950s cop show garnered 13 votes; enough to place it tied for sixth. Fans credited its use of locations throughout the city and close cooperation with the SFPD.
'They looked like cops. They acted like cops,' reader Bill Wilson wrote. 'And it's (San Francisco) in the 1950s. Classic.'
One common theme among the comments: Several readers admitted to watching old episodes of San Francisco-based television shows just to reminisce about bygone eras. Others said 'Streets' and other shows were their first look at the city from afar.
Sherwood Crump, for example, gave 'Streets' his vote, 'because it was filmed in San Francisco and it created in me, a 9-year-old boy in Detroit, a desire to travel to S.F. and see what the city was really like.'
