THE EQUALIZER.

I’ve recently been re-watching the series that made Callan’s Edward Woodward a star in America. When us TV geeks heard in the 1980s that Woodward was heading back into the thriller genre, as an ex-intelligence agent disgusted with his former profession but unable to escape it, we got excited. Michael Sloan, The Equalizer’s co-creator, was a massive Callan fan and devised the series specifically for Woodward to star in.

The Equalizer isn’t Callan: the former was a fast-moving, filmed action series, while the latter was a character-based drama mostly recorded in an electronic studio. However, there were enough similarities in the spy content for Callan’s creator, James Mitchell, to have briefly considered suing (and the title character’s name, McCall, is almost an anagram of ‘Callan’). What The Equalizer really does is marry the loner cop/vigilante genre – Bullitt (1968), the Dirty Harry films (1971-1988), Death Wish (1974), even Taxi Driver (1976) – with, in Woodward’s performance, an English class, warmth and sophistication.

Callan hardly ever featured children. The Equalizer often does: their innocence, trust and occasional waywardness are an effective contrast to the violent, cynical world McCall moves in. McCall himself has family issues: divorce, a daughter, Cathy, who died in infancy, and an initially problematic relationship with his surviving child, Scott (William Zabka) – “I know what it feels like to disappoint your only son.” That relationship drama is hard to imagine in Callan, but it’s a strength of The Equalizer, as McCall deals with his own problems while dispensing familial wisdom as often as he dispenses bullets.

On the debit side, McCall’s never-ending list of associates-for-every-occasion is a bit convenient and, after a while, annoying. This cosy arrangement is the opposite of Callan, where the eponymous agent was completely on his own without his employers, apart from his lackey, Lonely (an aspect of the series that was one of its main attractions). And you can always spot Woodward’s stuntman in The Equalizer, as his wig was always fluffier than Woodward’s slick, grey thatch.

Filmed on the streets of New York, The Equalizer has an authentic sense of the city in the mid-1980s. At a time just before the Big Apple became gentrified, it put NYC’s tatty shops, graffiti, run-down tenements and breakdancing on international television – a sharp visual contrast to the city’s art galleries, neon nightclubs and concert halls. The sense of New York daily life in The Equalizer is so palpable it’s virtually a supporting character. Adding to the authenticity is real night filming, rather than the cheaper ‘day-for-night’ technique, the bane of film series in earlier decades.

Stand-out episodes in the first series include ‘Lady Cop’, which focuses on a female police officer, played by Karen Young (left), being intimidated by her corrupt partner. It’s co-written by Kathryn Bigelow, who went on to become a respected director, writing and helming the movie Blue Steel (1990), which refined the same basic scenario as her Equalizer script – a newly qualified, female NY cop being terrorised by a psychopath.

‘Reign of Terror’ is High Noon (1952) in reverse: a terrorised community turn out to support McCall in the face of a street gang – The Warriors, an influential film about NY gang culture, had been released in 1979 – and the resolution is achieved through passive resistance, not violence. It’s a commendably moral thing for an action series to do, but as part of The Equalizer’s appeal was its cinema-standard thrills and spills, it could only be done once.

Woodward had quality support on the acting front: the seasoned, eminently watchable character actor Robert Lansing as ‘Control’; Keith Szarabajka as Mickey Kostmayer, a troubled CIA agent; Mark Margolis – famous today as Hector Salamanca in Breaking Bad (2009-2013) and Better Call Saul (2016-2022) – as Jimmy, a grumpy fixer complaining about money (yes, shades of Callan’s Lonely) because he’s being “eaten up” by his divorce.

An unexplored direction for the series was McCall and his colleagues working as an ensemble. In ‘Dead Drop’, the Equalizer’s motley crew – Mickey, Jimmy, the cheerfully amoral Dana (Ray Baker), the junk food-fixated Sterno (Irving Metzman), and Ginger Brock (Robin Curtis) – team up to discover why an innocent man is being targeted by a spy ring. All the characters have potential, so – apart from Mickey – it’s a shame this aspect of the series wasn’t developed, particularly because the group’s friction with a CIA chief, Jason Masur (Saul Rubinek on fine, oily form) is so rewarding.

I’ll check in again after watching McCall’s adventures in Series Two. 

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