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Based on the Academy Award®-winning 1967 movie,
In The Heat of the Nigh is one of those rare translations of a popular movie to the small screen. In the film, Sidney Poitier played Virgil Tibbs, a big city homicide expert forced to help a small Mississippi town's bigoted police chief (Rod Steiger) investigate the murder of a rich industrialist. That basic premise remained the same for the television series, though many things changed.
All in the Family star and series executive producer Carroll O'Connor overtook Steiger's role as Chief Bill Gillespie, winning an Emmy® in 1989 for his relaxed portrayal (O'Connor would also sometimes direct, and write episodes under his pen name "Matt Harris"). Oscar®-nominee Howard Rollins
(Ragtime) replaced Poitier as the perceptive Detective Tibbs and
would, like O'Connor, go on to make the role his own. Unlike in the movie, the series dictated that little racial animosity would exist between the two
characters. Instead, Tibbs and Gillespie worked in harmony; albeit
sometimes shaky; to combat drugs, racial tension, petty politics,
and crimes of passion in their hometown of Sparta, Mississippi.
The series often strayed from the minutaeof police work, though, and delved into the personal lives of Sparta's finest. It paid close attention to how Virgil's violent profession affected his beautiful wife, schoolteacher Althea Tibbs (Anne Marie Johnson). Meanwhile, at the end of the show's sixth and final season in 1994, Chief Gillespie left his prejudices behind and, after a
discreet but controversial affair, married black city councilwoman
Harriet DeLong (Denise Nicholas), who also served as a writer for
the series).
Besides interracial relationships, the series faced other hot topics such as
domestic abuse, AIDS, alcoholism and drug abuse. But, in tackling these
issues, the show would often center in not on Tibbs or Gillespie, but on
the lives of their law enforcement cohorts, including Alan Autry
as the hulking Sgt. Bubba Skinner, David Hart as sensitive Deputy
Parker Williams, Geoffrey Thorne as Deputy Willson Sweet, and
Hugh O'Connor as Deputy Lonnie Jamison.
Rollins left In The Heat of the Night in 1993, with the explanation that Tibbs' was departing Sparta to get his law degree. That same year, Carl Weathers was introduced as Hampton Forbes, a former FBI agent who became police chief when Gillespie stepped up to the post of sheriff of Newman County. The
show continued in '94 and '95 with a string of four TV movies reuniting
the cast and crew. First filmed in Hammond, Louisiana upon its debut in
1988, the In The Heat of the Night production team soon moved to Covington, Georgia, former home of cult TV classic The Dukes of Hazzard. The many guest stars that appeared during the show's 140-episode run included Burgess Meredith, Iman, Robert Goulet, Victoria Jackson, Joe Don Baker, Marla Gibbs, Tippi Hedren, Stella Stevens, O.J. Simpson, Diane Ladd, Louise Fletcher, Bobby Short, Karen Black, Lois Chiles, Peter Fonda and Jean Simmons.
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