Pop culture icon William Shatner — beloved by generations of fans for his role as police sergeant TJ Hooker in the eponymous '80s TV show — will appear at Melbourne's Oz Comic-Con in July.
The series premiered in 1982 and ran on the ABC network until 1985, when it was cancelled. After an outcry from dedicated fans, some of whom went so far as to learn the language of the various street gangs Hooker clashed with, the show was revived for a fourth season by CBS.
A TJ Hooker motion picture, Blood Sport, was also made, but it was much maligned by fans for its slow pace and lack of action sequences. In recent years, there has been talk of a TJ Hooker reboot, with actor Chris Pine — best known for his roles in Unstoppable and This Means War — rumoured for the lead role.
After the immense success of TJ Hooker, Shatner experienced some difficulty finding work, as he had been typecast in the role. He struggled with his relationship with fans of the show, famously telling them to get a "get a life" in a 1986 Saturday Night Live sketch and refusing lucrative offers to attend fan conventions.
"I didn't want anything to do with a group of obsessives who paid to get together to talk incessentaly about a TV show that had been cancelled," he once told The Daily Mail. "It wasn't logical."
(Shatner's use of the word "logical" is, of course, a reference to the cold, no-nonsense approach of Captain Dennis Sheridan, the character played by Richard Herd on TJ Hooker.)
Eventually, Shatner embraced his cult following, and developed an eccentric on-screen persona that deliberately contrasted with his straight-faced portrayal of Hooker. Shatner's wacky approach saw him land a career-reviving role in Boston Legal, written by David E. Kelley, who often wrote sly metatextual references to Shatner's past work as Hooker into the show.
Of course, we'd be remiss not to mention that Shatner is incredibly popular with sci-fi fans — this dates back to 1962, when he starred in the classic Twilight Zone episode 'Nightmare At 20,000 Feet'. He also guest starred in an episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. with Leonard Nimoy (of Transformers fame), with whom he would develop a close, if at times adversarial, relationship.
Shatner is also the author of the popular Tek War series of sci-fi novels, based on journals his character was often seen writing during the quieter moments of TJ Hooker.
