Joe Spano is the officer who would rather talk than shoot. Across seven years of Hill Street Blues and two decades of NCIS, he has made institutional decency look like a working method rather than a soft touch, and he is worth watching for it.
Fi1m perspective
Put Joe Spano in a police station and he will find the quietest chair in it. As Henry Goldblume on Hill Street Blues (1981), the precinct's hostage negotiator and its officer for gang relations, he spent seven years standing between armed men and the people they were frightening, and his weapon was his voice: low, patient, and slightly worried that the plan would not work. The series was crowded with officers defined by what they would do in a fight. Goldblume was defined by what he would say to avoid one.
The career around that part is a stage actor's career that happened to be filmed. Spano helped found Berkeley Repertory Theatre in the late 1960s, and came to Los Angeles at the end of the 1970s for guest parts and small film roles, among them Vic in American Graffiti (1973). Hill Street Blues made him a regular, and when it ended in 1987 he went back to episodic television, Murder One and NYPD Blue, then in 2003 to NCIS as FBI agent Tobias Fornell, the lead's counterpart and friend, a part he has kept up for more than twenty years. Between them are the features: NASA Director in Apollo 13 (1995), Captain Stenner in Primal Fear (1996), Judge Pincus in Fracture (2007). He has never been the lead on screen. He has often been the person the lead has to convince.
Gregory Hoblit has used him in three features, and the two go back to Hill Street Blues, which explains it. In Primal Fear Stenner is the police captain running the murder investigation, and our review of that film found a machine so smooth that the parts were hard to see; Spano is one of those parts, and that is the job. He gives a thriller the sense that behind the star there is a department, with forms and a chain of command, and that somebody in it has been doing this for years. Nobody comes out of Primal Fear talking about the captain, and our own review did not either. That is roughly the point of him.
We admit to a soft spot. Watching Goldblume try to talk a frightened man down, when the show around him kept offering louder and quicker ways to end a scene, we found ourselves hoping the talking would work, and minding when it did not. The compassion our review found in Hill Street Blues has a face, and much of the time it is his.
The limit is plain. The film parts have stayed small and stayed official, and a viewer who knows him only from features could be forgiven for thinking he plays one thing. Television has given him the hours to show the one thing has depths, which is why Hill Street Blues is where to start. He has said of the seven-year run that it got "a hell of a lot of things, but never boring". On the evidence of the screen, it never got lazy either.
Biography
Joe Spano is an American actor. Born Joseph Peter Spano on 7 July 1946 in San Francisco, California, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and began his career in theatre, co-founding the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and appearing in productions including Romeo and Juliet.
Spano gained prominence for his role as Lt. Henry Goldblume on the series Hill Street Blues (1981–1987). He has appeared in films including American Graffiti (1973), Apollo 13 (1995), Primal Fear (1996) and Frost/Nixon (2008). Since 2003 he has played FBI Special Agent Tobias C. Fornell on NCIS. He won a Primetime Emmy Award for a guest role on Midnight Caller.
