Television
In the NBC/CBS television series In the Heat of the Night, Tibbs was depicted as a native of Sparta, Mississippi who left the South and eventually became a police detective in Philadelphia. During a visit to his hometown, he worked on a murder case with Sparta police chief Bill Gillespie (who was a bit more racially tolerant than in the novels or the film). After the case was solved, Tibbs was hired as Chief of Detectives, making him second-in-command in the Sparta Police Department. Thus, he left Philadelphia and moved back to Sparta, bringing his wife Althea with him.
Tibbs was portrayed in the series by Howard Rollins, who had garnered critical acclaim for his work in the film A Soldier's Story, and for his Academy Award-nominated performance in the film Ragtime. However, because of consistent substance abuse problems, Rollins' appearances on the series began to decrease. Eventually, he was fired and the Tibbs family was written out of the series.
Read more about this topic: Virgil Tibbs
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“There is no question but that if Jesus Christ, or a great prophet from another religion, were to come back today, he would find it virtually impossible to convince anyone of his credentials ... despite the fact that the vast evangelical machine on American television is predicated on His imminent return among us sinners.”
—Peter Ustinov (b. 1921)
“So by all means let’s have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn’t it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)