The Jesse Stone movies with Tom Selleck are good. There’s 9 available. I think they went beyond the books. Parker died before very many were written.
Parker put a dysfunctional relationship in that series too.
I’m watching Sea Change on Pluto tv tonight. I found three Jesse Stone movies available.
That was a problem for me also. Parker just didn’t have a whole lot of range in his writing. Spenser, Jesse Stone, Sunny Randall were all basically the same character. You could have swapped characters in any of his books and it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. Spenser in the big city, Spenser in a small town, Spenser as a woman.
I am almost tempted to seek out the show just to see a pre-Law & Order Carolyn McCormick. But I just have never, ever had any use for Robert Urich. He has always rubbed me the wrong way.
and Susan in all of them!! I found it strange (hypocritical) that she’s counseling others about reluctance to commit when she had the same problem
There were 4 made-for-TV movies with Urich. One of which had topless strippers, etc., which was something of a surprise after seeing the TV shows.
And three movies with Joe Mantegna, and various other people as Susan, Rita, Frank and Hawk. Which I completely forgot as soon as I finished them.
Ernie Hudson as Hawk? Nope. An Sheik Mahmud-Bey was terrible.
Just my opinion, but it’s a waste of time.
ETA: sorry, that was supposed to be a reply to " No idea how faithful or enjoyable it is, but there was also a Netflix movie a couple of years ago."
Norm Montegna as Susan would be worth watching.
After being unavailable to stream anywhere for a couple of years, Spenser: For Hire with Robert Urich has now recently become available again. It’s on Tubi which is a free ad-supported streaming service. I haven’t streamed this show on Tubi yet, but the number of ads on other shows I watch there isn’t too horrible. A Man Called Hawk is also available there.
I started streaming Spenser a couple of years ago when it was on a different service. I found it fairly watchable but not brilliant. It was yanked from that service before I could finish the series.
The series was cancelled after only three years despite good ratings, because of high production costs. Most of the exterior scenes were filmed on location in and around Boston. They had to bring in filming crews from Los Angeles and put them up for months at a time. It avoided the absurdity of shows like Banacek, which depicted palm trees growing in Boston, but it made the costs unsustainable.