If I ran the network, part 7

If you've seen the 1982 version of I, the Jury, starring Armand Assante as Mike Hammer, you probably remember the scene in the restaurant where Hammer grabs a man trying to kill him and slams the man's face onto a sizzling hot grill, replete with the sound of searing flesh and the pained cries of the would-be killer.

If you've seen the 1955 movie Kiss Me Deadly, starring Ralph Meeker as Hammer, you probably remember several scenes in which Hammer more or less beats the hell out of an assortment of bad guys, slamming on of them into a wall before throwing him down a flight of stairs.

If you've read any of Mickey Spillane's Hammer books, you'll know that these scenes are pretty faithful to the tone of the books, but, if anything, they're a little toned-down from what Hammer does on the printed page. You'll also know that Hammer has no compunction about killing, especially when it's done in a righteous cause.

If you've seen any one of the several versions of Mike Hammer that have appeared on television over the years, especially the ones with Darren McGavin and Stacy Keach, you probably know that, while both of them play Hammer as a pretty tough dude, neither of them comes close to capturing the essential violence of the man: quick, primal, explosive, and relentless. Hammer may not kill every bad guy he encounters, but he seldom ever leaves them standing.

One of the problems I've had with Hammer on television—and I particularly liked Stacy Keach in the role—is that the action seldom ever reaches the potential carried within the character. Back in 1984, when Keach first started playing Hammer, it would have been highly unlikely to see a scene similar to the restaurant brawl I mentioned earlier. It would have been unthinkable to allow Hammer to essentially kill someone in cold blood, even if they had it coming. (It would also have been unthinkable to show the sex scenes that littered I, the Jury, but that's a question for another day.)

Television has changed a great deal since then, and while I don't think these changes have, for the most part, been for the best, in the case of a Mike Hammer revival—which is what I'm pitching here—it can only be a plus. You see, Mike Hammer without that extreme level of violence is not Mike Hammer. At best, he'd be a slightly more violent version of Joe Mannix. 

There's a visceral thrill involved in reading a Hammer novel, and I've read most of them. Spillane crafted his villains well, and while you might or might not agree with Spillane's basic contention that it's better to kill a vicious criminal than risk having him set free by a lenient court system, there's something profoundly satisfying about it when it happens. And because television has always softened Hammer (not only his violent nature, but his rough edges as well), it's always failed to capture the essence of the man. 

And so my concept for "The Real Mike Hammer" (working title, obviously), is to give us the Hammer we deserve, the Hammer of the books, the Hammer that stands apart from other private detectives. There's no reason why we can't have that Hammer, at least on prestige streaming; I can't really think of many scenes from the books that couldn't be done on television nowadays, at least in some form. 

The trick, of course, is in finding someone to play this half-man, half-animal, a tough, morally ambiguous detective fueled by rage and patriotism. I'm so far out of touch with so many of today's stars that I don't know where I'd begin to cast Hammer; I've been told that Jon Bernthal and Ryan Hurst would be two good choices, and frankly I'm in no position to disagree. (Besides, it's much more fun to speculate on who'd play Velda.) 

Whoever it is, though, I think it's time to break out of the cookie-cutter mold that marks private detective series, either past or present, and return the genre to its pulp roots. And for me, that means going back to the future, with the real Mike Hammer. TV