CHiPs (2017)

This film was a personal attack on my childhood.

Once upon a time, there was a new genre of television show called the Service Procedural, which sought to portray the everyday lives of police and first responders in a grounded, civic-minded, and often optimistic way.

The best and earliest examples of this include the Jack Webb universe of shows beginning with Dragnet (1957), and continuing with fare like Adam-12 (1968), and Emergency! (1972). They helped set the blueprint for the modern police and medical procedurals we still enjoy today. But more importantly, each of Webb’s shows shared an earnest desire to depict first responders with what was, at the time, unprecedented realism.

No one is above the law, kid.

Behind each show was a purposeful intent to humanize police and emergency personnel as an essential and necessary part of our community. Cops were not just scowling goons with guns and badges; they were men – and occasionally women – with their own lives, families, and personal frailties just the same as the rest of us.

And then came CHiPS (1977), which was NOT a Jack Webb show, but it did tread upon similar ground.

For those not in the know, “CHiPs” is a contrived acronym that stands for “California Highway Patrol.” Every state has a highway patrol, but every state isn’t sunny California, where motorcycles look extra cool on open highways against the ocean backdrop. The real-life CHP not only endorsed the show but also contributed to its production, lending the project an incredible degree of authenticity and gaining the state of California invaluable institutional publicity at a time when public trust in the establishment was at an all-time low.

Fronting the show were Larry Wilcox as Officer Jon Baker and Erik Estrada as Officer Frank “Ponch” Poncharello. Wilcox was a former US Marine and a highly respected character actor with a reputation for professionalism. Jon Baker was made of the same stuff. Estrada played Ponch as a joyful ladies’ man, deeply devoted to his partner and his job. His breakout performance was a brief cultural sensation. And as actors, the real-life (and often chaotic) chemistry between Wilcox and Estrada mirrored their characters, lending the show its central source of charm.

Your daughters were safe.

CHiPS was not great television. There was action, but rarely actual violence. There were radio calls, criminal threats, and an exasperated Captain pounding his desk, but it was underpinned by a lighthearted sense of community confidence. There was just enough procedural detail and grounded structure to give the illusion that you were watching something real unfold. But the draw wasn’t accuracy; it was pure idealism. Jon and Ponch weren’t gritty antiheroes or flawed crusaders. They were shining examples of public service with great hair, mirrored shades, and a moral compass you could set your watch by.

The show was a ride-along fantasy in a world where institutions worked, influential people actually cared about the less fortunate, and society was still worth saving. Jon and Ponch were guardians of a civic ideal who never once drew their weapons on-screen. That promise placed CHiPs in spiritual line with the much grittier Jack Webb universe, even if it wasn’t an actual part of it. CHiPs could stand shoulder to shoulder with better shows like Emergency! and Adam-12, all of which worked to remind us that public service wasn’t just a job—it was a noble calling.

I repeat, your daughters were safe.

CHiPs the movie has no such ambition. Writer/director Dax Shepard (Idiocracy, Parenthood) plays Jon Baker as a vapid former motocross racer turned middle-aged rookie cop. He is devastated by injury and utterly dependent on pharmaceutical drugs to maintain his quality of life. Shepard’s Jon is a nervous, drug-addled wreck in need of redemption – the polar opposite of the original character.

Michael Peña (Crash, Narcos) plays Ponch, except he isn’t Ponch. This is part of an unnecessarily convoluted backstory created for these characters that not only abandons the source material but also aggressively rejects it. CHiPs positions itself as IP-based entertainment, but in reality, it is a trap, baited explicitly for idealistic Gen-Xers hoping to relive a glossy, near-forgotten experience from their youth.

Instead, what they received was a loud, cynical, and chaotic love letter to legacy action comedies like Lethal Weapon or Bad Boys. But while those “buddy cop” franchises were built fundamentally on heart (and a heaping helping of testosterone), CHiPs chose to even more directly emulate the equally out-of-date idiom of the ironically self-aware reboot. That balancing act worked, admittedly, for such comedies as Starsky & Hutch (2004) and 21 Jump Street (2012) – both films I enjoyed at the time. Even Dragnet itself received the treatment in a questionable 1987 two-hander with Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks. However, while all those parodies correctly share a reluctant admiration for their source material, their sneering humor has not aged well and now seems out of place.

Is a hat on a wig the same as a hat on a hat?

However, CHiPs was a mean-spirited misfire from the start. Even the welcome presence of Vincent D’Onofrio as the villain (and my God, he is good) cannot save this project from abject disaster. CHiPs does not honor the source material, it does not succeed on its own terms, and it’s not even incidentally funny often enough to be worth your time.

CHiPs is Highlander II (1991) bad. It’s Blues Brothers 2000 (1998) bad. It’s Battlefield Earth (actually 2000) bad, but without the morbid self-seriousness that makes John Travolta’s riotous fever dream well worth hate-watching. The basic plot of CHiPs is a somewhat sound good cops vs bad cops yarn, but there is so much energy and anger devoted to deconstructing the original material that CHiPs effectively serves as evidence against its own existence.

This movie actively hates itself, and therefore can’t help but invite you to do the same. There was plenty of room to poke fun at the idea of a family-friendly police drama that relied on slow-motion car crashes and disco music for tension while still honoring the show’s earnestness. Something new, funny, yet still fun, could have been built upon the same spiritual scaffolding as the original.

Instead, we have ninety minutes of the tonal opposite – darkness, sexual depravity, and angry cynicism.

CHiPs may have scratched Dax Shepard’s itch for riding motorcycles – and I am all for creatives following their muse – but when you grab the handlebars of a franchise, you are beholden to an audience whose expectations are larger than your own ambitions. You are asking for their acceptance, and you are offering them the chance to experience something once familiar in a new and appealing way.

Whether you want to or not, you’re signing a contract, and CHiPs violated that contract.

It cannot and must not be forgiven.

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