Virgil Tibbs - Television

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:

    There was a girl who was running the traffic desk, and there was a woman who was on the overnight for radio as a producer, and my desk assistant was a woman. So when the world came to an end, we took over.
    Marya McLaughlin, U.S. television newswoman. As quoted in Women in Television News, ch. 3, by Judith S. Gelfman (1976)

    What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.
    Salvador Dali (1904–1989)