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Degrowth In Action
Ambitions of quality cut against prevailing attitudes in network television at the time. Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul often fought with their “Starsky & Hutch” producers. Just like their characters, they worked as the yin to the other’s yang in such confrontations. Glaser told the Archive of American Television that he was the vocal, confrontational one with producers while Soul was the friendly, agreeable one. But they were united in an “us against the establishment” mindset that Glaser felt helped their characters. If their ultimate impact on the scripts was limited, he reasoned, their personal chemistry came to more than the sum of the written material.
But while Glaser and Soul worked well together in front of the camera and in discussions with the producers, they initially found it difficult to relate outside the professional sphere. “Off camera, we didn’t have a whole lot to talk about,” Glaser told the Archive. He attributed this personal distance to both of them feeling uncomfortable with opening up to each other at that point in their lives. As the show went on, however, it became easier to acknowledge their affection for one another.
They were good friends by the series’ end and much more comfortable sharing that friendship. In interviews and on social media, they even joked about the homoerotic subtext sometimes read into the series (via Glaser’s Instagram). Shortly before his death in January 2024, Soul declared that Glaser “is and will always be my best friend, my brother” on X (formerly Twitter).
