The death of the rugged Starsky and Hutch actor leaves us with the memory of an all-consuming pop culture phenomenon
Trying to explain the appeal of Starsky and Hutch to the younger generations, one often falls back on: well, we only had three channels then. With the death of David Soul, aged 80, it’s tempting to repurpose that to explain his popularity, which at times was so intense as to cause a Beatlemania-style moral panic, the New York Times worrying in 1977 that his audiences emitted a “continual squealing”. It was the 70s, and we only had four types of men then: classically handsome, ruggedly handsome, special-interest handsome and funny.
Soul was rugged, a man with the kind of face that didn’t stop to think about what would happen to his nose when he threw a punch. So was his co-star, Paul Michael Glaser, and it mattered to their vibe that they were so evenly pitched; if you walked into a bar with your best friend, you wouldn’t have a fight about who got which. They pretty much invented the detective bromance, their easy physical affection as novel to the genre as their hipster dress sense and unrufflable side-eyes. There was a rumour, of which Soul said in a documentary in 1999 he’d got wind of, that people in the industry called them “French-kissing, prime-time homos”, a more or less perfect epithet for the challenge they posed to the genre: suck it, grandad. In 2021, Glaser put a throwback pic on to Instagram of his Starsky and Soul’s Hutch, walking down a beach, holding each other by the butt-cheek, wearing matching Husky and Starch T-shirts, so close they’d melded with their roles and, more to the point, each other.
