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Bill Gillespie Biography & Facts

In the Heat of the Night is an American police procedural crime drama television series loosely based on the 1967 film and 1965 novel of the same title that starred Carroll O'Connor as police chief Bill Gillespie and Howard Rollins as police detective Virgil Tibbs and was broadcast on NBC from March 6, 1988-May 19, 1992 before moving to CBS, where it aired from October 28, 1992-May 16, 1995. Its executive producers were O'Connor, Fred Silverman and Juanita Bartlett. This series marked O'Connor's return to a series for the first time since the All in the Family spinoff Archie Bunker's Place ended in 1983. Premise The show is a sequel to the 1967 film, whose events are said to have occurred "a few years ago" despite the show being set in the 1980s-1990s contemporary to its broadcast. In the premiere episode, Philadelphia homicide detective and criminal profiler Virgil Tibbs (Rollins) has returned to his hometown of Sparta, Mississippi for his mother's funeral. He is persuaded by Mayor James Findlay to remain in Sparta as Chief of Detectives under Bill Gillespie (O'Connor), the white police chief with whom he fostered a relationship during a previous murder investigation in which he assisted. Mayor Findlay himself has an ulterior motive for hiring Tibbs: he wants to have some kind of record on civil rights to run for Congress and hiring Tibbs to integrate the all-white Sparta police department would not only help to overcome the local squad's reputation of being racist and underskilled, but also benefits him. Although the team suffers friction over Tibbs' dissatisfaction with the department's limited resources and racial attitudes and Gillespie is annoyed at the detective's condescending suspicions about his hometown, the two men prove highly effective in enforcing the law. At the beginning of the seventh season, Tibbs takes a leave of absence, moving to Jackson, Mississippi to complete his law degree on a compressed schedule. Upon his return to Sparta, he and his wife, Althea (Anne Marie Johnson), have separated and they later divorce. She moves back to Philadelphia with their twins to be near her parents. Through the hard work of Sparta Councilwoman Harriet DeLong (Denise Nicholas), Tibbs is able to retire, although two months shy of the qualifying period and keep his city pension. He begins practicing law upon accepting a position in Ben Taylor's law office. Rollins' final appearance on the series was February 2, 1994. Meanwhile, the Sparta city council dismisses Gillespie as chief of police, selecting Hampton Forbes (Carl Weathers) as his replacement and making him the town's first African American to serve in that position. Gillespie finds a new post of equivalent authority as county sheriff. The two senior police officials find that they get along excellently, in both professional and personal spheres. Themes The show dealt with a variety of issues, including racism, police brutality, interracial relationships, hate crimes, drug trafficking, drug addiction, alcoholism, AIDS, misogyny, incest, child abuse, sexual harassment, euthanasia, anti-Semitism, political corruption, prostitution, domestic violence, mental disorders, dysfunctional families, suicide, capital punishment, poverty and drunk driving. Season-by-season overview 1988 The first season was filmed in Hammond, Louisiana. Hammond was selected by Barrett to represent the small southern town of Sparta, Mississippi. The producers had difficulty finding usable filming locations, because other, more modern structures were close enough to be picked up in the images. Eight episodes were filmed—the two-hour pilot movie and six regular one-hour episodes. The series premiered on March 6, 1988, with the season finale airing on May 3. Many conflicts arose between Bartlett and O'Connor over the writing of the series. At first, she allowed him to consult on the series per his contract. After the pilot, however, she ordered scripts from her writers. O'Connor described these as "recycled material from other crime shows." He was disappointed in the writing, feeling that the writers were taking big-city stories and imposing them on a small town. He believed that the key to this show's success was to express its small-town locale and characters through the stories. Scripts would be given to him marked "FINAL: NO REWRITES", but O'Connor often rewrote scripts anyway, angering the production staff members, who felt they were burning up fax machines with the changes. O'Connor described Bartlett as a very arrogant person. If the show was going to be renewed, then O'Connor was not interested and threatened to quit the show unless Bartlett was replaced as executive producer. The early episodes were gritty, raw and considered groundbreaking for that time. There was an emphasis on grisly murders or other crimes, rather than the lives of the New South-era characters, for which the series later became known. 1988–1989 Season two premiered on December 4, 1988 due to a writers' strike; the season introduced a new look and set of executive producers, Jeri Taylor and her husband David Moessinger, with on-location shooting moved from Hammond, Louisiana to Covington, Georgia, which remained as the primary filming location of the show for the duration of the series. The season premiere was aired as a two-hour TV movie originally entitled "The Voodoo Murders", now known in syndication as "Don't Look Back". The plot revolved around a copycat murder of one that Gillespie had investigated 20 years earlier. Also, the Sparta city council was pushing Virgil Tibbs to run as a possible candidate for Chief of Police to replace Gillespie, but Virgil wasn't interested in doing so; regardless, a rumor begins that Tibbs is after Gillespie's job, causing dissension between the two men. Virgil's wife, Althea, who was a stay-at-home wife in the first season, is offered a position as a teacher and guidance counselor at local Sparta High School by city Councilman Ted Marcus (Thom Gossom Jr.). Gone was Christian LeBlanc, who portrayed Officer Junior Abernathy and added were two new regular characters-- Joanne St. John (Lois Nettleton), the chief's sometime girlfriend and owner of the local diner, The Magnolia Cafe; and rookie officer Wilson Sweet (Geoffrey Thorne), fresh out of the police academy. The season also introduced the first of several new recurring characters, including county coroner Dr. Frank Robb (Dan Biggers). "The Creek" saw the introduction of the first new police character and the second prominent Georgia performer to claim a regular role on the series, Officer Randy Goode (1988-1993) played by Randall Franks, who was cast following the show's move to Covington. "Gunshot", where Virgil experiences guilt and mental trauma after he shoots and kills a female robbery suspect, introduces a character with a criminal past who later becomes invaluable in supplying Gillespie and the Sparta P.D. with information, Jimmy Dawes (Afemo Omilami). Plots.... Discover the Bill Gillespie popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Bill Gillespie books.