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:
“Cultural expectations shade and color the images that parents- to-be form. The baby product ads, showing a woman serenely holding her child, looking blissfully and mysteriously contented, or the television parents, wisely and humorously solving problems, influence parents-to-be.”
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“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 ... 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)