At My Whit’s End: Harley Gets Cancelled

(Photo: Harley appears as a ghost. Yet again, this does not happen in the episode we’re covering. It does, however, occur in about 150 episodes from now. WHAT IS THIS SHOW?! Artist Unknown, Focus on the Family. Image Courtesy of eBay user LeAnnSomethingForYou.)

We’ve crossed the rubicon. We’re finally talking about the real, the true, the proper Adventures in Odyssey. But in that crossing we were always going to lose something. So far every iteration of this franchise has left remnants scattered in its rushing wake. The adult morality plays of the proto-pilots. The anthology format of Family Portraits. The rap music of Odyssey USA. So what did we lose once finally stepping ashore to the prophesied land of AIO?

Episodes 25-26: Harley Takes the Case Parts 1 and 2

Can Officer Harley find a missing boy and uncover why he ran away from home in the first place?

Across our coverage of Odyssey USA we’ve noted how uncomfortable Officer Harley is as a character. Actor Will Ryan brings a lot of comedic humor to the part but anytime I find myself laughing at or with Harley? I’m reminded he’s a cop. Sometimes you can almost forget it, like when he’s just telling jokes to kids at Whit’s End. More often though he’s bumbling around, coming across as a man playing cop than actually being one.

Tom Riley: “Well, what's going on out here, Officer Harley?”

Harley: “I apprehended a culprit in the act of pilfering the fruits of your labors.”

Tom Riley: “In English, please.”

Harley: “I caught Scott Williams trying to steal your apples. He broke your fence too.”

Tom Riley: “Stealing my apples?! And for that, you needed a SIRENE? Well you about scared the wits out of me!”

Harley: “Uh, sorry. Well, actually, Scott just wanted to hear what it sounded like. Pretty dramatic, huh?”

Tom Riley: “Sure was. You actually saw Scott taking the apples?”

Harley: “With both hands tied behind my back. I mean, with both eyes.”¹

Given cops in the real world receive little and/or bad training, this hits a little too close to home. In real life if cops are as bad at their jobs as Harley is? It’s no joke. That’s not to say you can’t mine humor from law enforcement, system of powers are ripe for satire. Harley’s status as resident clown could be viewed as the series poking fun at the kinds of authority James Dobson spends way too long fantasizing about at night. Harley play acting at cop is akin to James Dobson playing at being a spiritual leader/“psychologist.” It has the potential to be especially subversive for an Evangelical series.

But that’s putting a lot of faith in the writers, faith that’s blown up in my face multiple times now. I’d be a fool to think Harley’s part of some stealth war against Dobson. These creatives love sucking up to authority and reminding listeners why, actually, you’re garbage, and a filthy sinner. So where does that leave Harley if he’s not a satire on police officers? What does his being a police officer add to the series?

Odyssey’s a town with no visible crime. The most “police work” Harley gets up to is writing parking tickets to himself. He doesn’t teach kids lessons, a critical role for all adults on Odyssey. His jokey status undermines the “respect authority” thing Dobson would love in police officers. This leaves Harley as a problem, one that doesn’t work in the conservative world AIO is meant for, but also doesn’t go far enough to be subversive.

A show all about morals just doesn’t have a place for a funny cop that isn’t meant as satire. AIO needed to either go sharper with the police satire or find another occupation that better fit Harley’s comedic leanings.

“Harley Takes the Case” aims to fix this core issue, or, as Phil Lollar described it, “to show everyone that Officer Harley wasn’t a complete buffoon.”² At this point Odyssey was still rushing to complete episodes so it’s no surprise the show would take 20 episodes to realize this character wasn’t working and desperately try to fix the problem as it goes. The first step this two-parter takes is giving Harley actual cop work to do.

Steve Larson, a young boy, has gone missing and the police force can’t find him. Steve’s father leads a citizen search party across Odyssey, from the deserted woods to a packed carnival, but fails to find any leads. Everyone believes Steve was kidnapped but Harley focuses on the possibility he ran away. This case isn’t without danger, what with wild dogs near the woods and the mere possibility of a kidnapping. It’s the first time an AIO story has had real tension. Well, tension that isn’t “will Whit come at a kid with a steel chair?” This is an actual ADVENTURE in Odyssey! Sorry guys, Whit threatening to fire Connie for reading horoscopes to kids isn’t what I’d call an adventure. (Yes, that did happen in an episode I skipped.)

Steve’s father refuses to believe Harley’s growing evidence that Steve did run away from home, leaving Harley to search the woods alone. While this could have been an opportunity to retcon Harley into a more serious police officer, the writers instead tweaked his buffoonish nature and make it an asset. Harley’s basically a goofy “big kid” so he’s able to easily think like a kid. He physically gets down Steve’s height and notices a disturbed path in the woods that leads him to an old barn. There he spots a raccoon with a clue in hand.

Harley: “Imagine that. A raccoon munching on a cupcake in a barn in the middle of nowhere. Now, where do you think he’d get a name-brand cupcake? The local raccoon convenience store on the corner of Oak and Maple? I know you're in here, Steve. Come on out. This barn isn't very safe!”³

Harley has little to offer as a typical cop in a town with no crime. However, in a town where kid’s problems are at the center of events? The fact he thinks like them means he can offer insights no one else in the main cast can! This role should really be served by Connie but the show’s too busy judging her every move to allow that. Tom Riley’s a sounding board for the other characters. Whit’s the all knowing demon puncher, he can’t be on the kids’ level if he’s the one teaching them lessons. Silly as Harley is he could function as a bridge between the kids and the adults. It doesn’t fix the implications that being a cop would still carry there, that being “law enforcement are your friends and are just like you” when they aren’t. But this is a decent first step to making Harley a viable character in the long term while not totally abandoning what had already been established.

Harley finds Steve just as the barn caves in and they’re both trapped. The two have a heart-to-heart where Steven admits he ran away from home because his parents, particularly his dad, hate that he reads so many books.

Steve: “My dad gives me a hard time about it. He says I should be outside playing games and sports and stuff instead of sitting in and reading all the time. He said I'm going to grow up to be a four-eyed wimp. He pushes me and pushes me, and I hate sports!”⁴

This is a perfect opportunity for the creative team to develop Harley as that bridge between kids and adults. Have him, despite his police background, actually care about kids and want to make a better life for them in Odyssey. He could listen and advocate for them, positioning Harley in direct opposition to the authority he works for. It would add heart and warmth to the character and go even further in fixing this core issues.

Steve presents a pretty easy case for this compassionate route because his dad sounds like an abusive asshole. How else are we supposed to interpret the “pushes me and pushes” bit as anything other than physical abuse? This should open and shut for the more compassionate Harley. Instead he asks, “Did you ever talk to your dad about this?”

No. No. No. NO. Do not put this on Steve! It is not a child’s responsibility to make their parents realize the consequences of their monstrous actions. How is that conversation supposed to go? “Gee, son, I guess I couldn’t see how depressed and miserable you were as I physically assaulted you. If you hadn’t told me I would have kept it up since that would have been a tacit endorsement of my actions.”

Harley doesn’t go quite that far but he does chide Steve, calling him stupid for running away and causing all this trouble! All the people looking for him are missing the carnival because of you! My guy, have you considered that Steve knows all that and still chose to run away from home, thus making it clear how bad it must be there? Harley shares that he also ran way from home because of a troubled relationship with his own father, who wanted him to become a “rich and famous doctor.” Instead of talking to his dad he ran away and even now puts all the blame on himself.

I hate this so much. The “it takes two to tango” philosophy applied to parents and young children arguing is a joke. Kids’ brains aren’t fully formed, they can’t and shouldn’t be treated on the same emotional level as adults! But no, this story is about how you, the child listener, are at least partly responsible for your parents actions. It pleads to think better of your parents when they hurt you, not “your parents should be held responsible for intentionally hurting you.”

It’s the ultimate Evangelical parent fantasy. You were doing everything right, it’s your kids that are wrong. Harley, who for a brief moment had found a workable path forward, reverts to being what his job implies. He’s authority and, as Dobson-sempai decrees, authority must be respected at all times. Not even the warm performances of Will Ryan and Dave Griffin as Steve can disguise the rotten core of this sentiment. It comes off as the writers having major unresolved issues with their own fathers. Blaming themselves for why their fathers were terrible. With everything we’ve seen from Focus on the Family and Dobson in particular, it’s no surprise this would bleed through into Harley.

There is something to be said for a story that follows an adult coming to understand the difficult their parents went through in raising them. Even if you ultimately don’t end up forgiving them for it, that understanding can still bring some level of catharsis. But expecting a child to do that? Nah, bro.

A core tenant of AIO, and Whit’s End for that matter, is to create a place where, “kids of all ages can just be kids.” Yet this episode tells Steve, “stop having your own feelings, idiot. Grow up and mature ASAP so you can forgive you father and he doesn’t have to feel bad.” It’s beyond mean-spirited. It reveals a dark and twisted side to the writers’ insistence that AIO not talk down to kids.

After scaring off the wild dogs, Harley reunites Steve with his father. Grateful, Steve’s father apologizes… But not to his son. He only apologizes to Harley for being rude earlier. The only comfort he offers Steve is that they’re going to have a “good long talk” about their “argument.” The chief police offers Harley a celebratory cup of coffee but Harley has something he needs to do first. Call his dad. He’ll be proud of him now, right? Saving a kid is kind of like being a doctor, right?

Gross. Disgusting. Vile. It’s a complete waste of a potentially killer arc for the episode. Harley, in uncovering why Steve ran away from home, could have reflected on his own relationship with his father. Calling on that “kid logic” to find Steve would put Harley in touch with the more difficult parts of his youth. Hearing why Steve had no choice but to run away from home would let Harley realize just how bad his own dad was. It’d make him want to protect Steve not just from wild dogs but from an abusive father. Harley could have realized, as AvidMC beautifully conveyed in his song “Confidence.”

It doesn't take the blame away
When you do exactly what they say
But hiding hurts more in the end
When all you do is play pretend

Now that’s what I call not talking down to kids! It’s not perfect, this idea still puts too much emphasis on the kid audience being the conduit through which adults resolve their emotional issues, but it’s something. Better than an earnest attempt to fix Harley’s issues getting completely derailed by the same adherence to authority that was holding him back in the first place.

With the tension of Harley’s character unresolved, it’s no surprise the episode ends with a clunky voiceover from Whit, informing the audience that Harley’s been offered a new job that’ll take him away from Odyssey. I don’t believe this two-parter was originally conceived to write Harley out of the show, since it was meant to fix the problems with the character. Instead it feels like a last minute decision was made to get rid of Harley and the Whit voiceover was a hurried addition. The fact Harley doesn’t even get a big farewell scene lends credence to that idea.

As much as I like Will Ryan in the role, and all my problems with this episode, this was a smart call. Harley just didn’t work and it’s admirable the writers were willing to cut their losses and write him out after devoting a good bit of time to establishing his character. For a deeply conservative show like AIO it’s weirdly ahead of its time to recognize the problems with a cop character and write him out. This show was doing ACAB before it was cool!

Excuse me, what was that? They didn’t write him out because being a cop is problematic(TM)?

Wait, they did believe it was problematic? Then what’s the issue?

The TROUBLE With Harley

Back in my post about “Lights Out at Whit’s End” I discussed how that episode was banned and buried in the archives but it wasn’t the only one. In total ten episodes that featured Harley, including this two-parter, were banned. A few episodes that only featured brief Harley scenes replaced him with other characters. All of the banned episodes, bar “Lights Out at Whit’s End” and the anti-fat “Addictions Can Be Habit Forming” were later remade with different characters.

So why? It’s not easy to trash and redo that much material, especially so early in the shows run. Did they realize Harley was that bad? Are they so ACAB they didn’t just write the gut out but nuked his entire existence from canon? Damn, most modern shows with cops haven’t gone that far! Good on ya, Odysse-

-A voice chuckles from the darkness-

“Just like God, I’m always here.”

Oh f-

-Dobson chokeslams me to the floor-

“No naughty words, now.”

“Tch, you thought I’d allow these writers to do anything subversive? Pathetic.”
(Photo: Author photo from The Strong-Willed Child, Tyndale House Publishers, 1985.)

The creatives of AIO loved Harley’s comedic potential but, “not everyone felt the same way.”⁵ Parents wrote in to complain, criticizing the series for portraying police officers as “buffoons”⁶. In direct response to those criticisms, “Dr. Dobson insisted that Officer Harley disappear from the show.”⁷

My anime arch-nemesis returns to enact his will upon the show. We know how much Dobson loves authority so this shouldn’t be a surprise. The man considers the appropriate response to a child’s “stiff-necked rebellion” is to inflict pain. After all, pain is a “marvelous purifier.”⁸ He openly brags that police thank him for his sick assaulting children skills.⁹ So of course AIO having a bumbling police officer would be a big no-no for Dobson. Making fun of a cop is basically the same thing as making of Dobson- I mean, God, or something.

Evangelicals always tell on themselves and this is a prime example. As much as they preach kindness, generosity, and support for all people? They really see themselves as strict rule enforcers, delivering the pitiful “common folk” from their worst excesses, and any method in achieving that is acceptable. They vaguely gesture to “God” as permission to do this but, let’s be real, it’s because they’re on a power trip.

You can feel that fear (boot-licking) in producer Steve Harris’ reaction to being forced to write Harley out.

“At the time, we were working day and night to get the program on schedule. I'm sure my fatigue contributed to my temporary frustration with the decision to take Harley out of the show. In hindsight (there's nothing like 25 years of experience to change your perspective!), Dr. Dobson was absolutely right. We needed to be proactive in teaching respect for legitimate authority. Looking back, I can see that God definitely had His hand in that whole situation."¹⁰

To be blunt? This sounds like an abused person excusing their abuser. Harris blames himself for his frustration when commanded to write Harley out. Just like how Steve was told to empathize with his father and not pay any attention to his own emotions. Harris bends over backwards to justify Dobson here, going as far as attributing Harley’s exit to God instead of the actual man who made the decision. It’s not God, Steve, it’s Dobson. IT’S ALWAYS DOBSON.

This is a horrible sign for AIO going forward. At any time noted kid-soul-breaker Dobson can sweep in and kick out anything from the show he doesn’t like. Any creative choices the writers make are just a Dobson suplex away from being removed from the show. Nothing’s on firm ground. The same could be said for any executive overseeing a regular show, but they rarely force the creatives retcon a character out of the show so hard they end up remaking episodes that character starred in.

It says nothing good about the morals driving AIO. We know they’re rotten, but the fact an episode like the anti-fat “Addictions Can Be Habit Forming” were pulled not because of atrocious morals but because it made a cop look silly? That’s disturbing. Even more so that the actual child-beating episodes of AIO are considered a critical part of series canon but the Harley episodes are locked in the vault, only available to those willing to pay for AIO’s online streaming service.

The “canceling” of Harley also signifies another critical point in the evolution of AIO. If parents wrote in to complain, that means the show has listeners. Involved listeners willing to contact the company making it. Enough that James Dobson was forced to look up from his baby kicking lunch break to take notice. AIO doesn’t only have a fanbase because of its 30+ year longevity. It had fans right from the start.

(Photo: Fan Letter to AIO¹¹)

It was one thing when Family Portraits received feedback as that was tied so heavily into Dobson’s main broadcast, but this was something else. Before this point AIO’s creatives had no idea if anyone was even listening to the show. Steve Harris was shocked when he checked the data on sales of the first AIO album and discovered it was bought by thousands of people.¹²

Not only was this an endorsement of AIO itself but a boon to Focus on the Family. As Harris recalled, Focus on the Family was primarily funded through listener donations but AIO wasn’t going to fit that model (aka asking for donations constantly.) The only way the show would be seen as valuable to Focus would be through sales of the episodes and that proved to be a success.

AIO was making money. It had fans, some with massive conservative sticks up their asses, but fans none the less. AIO was no longer an experiment. This was, by Focus’ standards anyway, a hit. Where does AIO, now without Officer Harley, go from here?

We’re going to find out. There’s so much Adventures in Odyssey ahead of us and even I’m not sure where it’ll lead us or what aspects of it I’m going to cover. We’ve reached the promised land but the journey has only just begun. The only thing I know, and I’m appropriating Christian singer Steven Curtis Chapman here, is that,

“Sink or swim I'm diving in.”

Next Time: AIO takes on a new format along with new main characters!

Note: Friendly reminder to all the readers, I have a Patreon where you can support the show! You can either pledge $1 a month or simply sign up for free to get reminders of when the blog updates in your email. I’ve also posted some exclusive mini essays, rambles, and other little tidbits there as well. Thank you for checking it out!

Sources:

The Quality of Mercy: Written by Paul McCusker, Directed by Phil Lollar and Steve Harris, Production Engineer Bob Luttrell, Focus on the Family, 1988.

(1)

"The Complete Guide to Adventures in Odyssey” by Phil Lollar, Focus on the Family Publishing, 1997.

(2) Page 55

(6) Page 46

(11) Page 50

Harley Takes the Case Pats 1 & 2: Written by Paul McCusker, Directed by Phil Lollar and Steve Haris, Production Engineer Bob Luttrell, Focus on the Family, 1988.

(3)

(4)

“Adventures in Odyssey: The Official Guide 25th Birthday Edition” by Nathan Hoobler, Tyndale House Publishers Inc., 2012.

(5) Page 89

(7) Page 89

(10) Page 89

Dare to Discipline by James Dobson, Tyndale House Publishers, 1970.

(8) Page 27

(9) Page 41

“Rewind from 1000 to 0001 with Steve Harris and Phil Lollar,” The Official Adventures in Odyssey Podcast, Focus on the Family, 2024.

(12)