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:
“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)
“It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create “one world.” Instead of one world, we have “star wars,” and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“Television is an excellent system when one has nothing to lose, as is the case with a nomadic and rootless country like the United States, but in Europe the affect of television is that of a bulldozer which reduces culture to the lowest possible denominator.”
—Marc Fumaroli (b. 1932)