Justice & Law Quote by Paul M. Glaser

Glaser’s complaint lands because it’s so aggressively un-mythic: the “striped tomato” isn’t a sexy symbol of justice, it’s a gag on wheels. Coming from an actor who helped define the slick, two-cop cool of late-70s TV, the line punctures the fantasy with consumer-grade irritation. He’s not critiquing policing or masculinity in lofty terms; he’s saying the prop looked stupid and the brand felt wrong. That’s the point. In pop culture, taste is politics by other means.

The specificity does most of the work. “Undercover police guys” signals a show’s premise built on invisibility and swagger, then the image of them cruising in something that screams for attention exposes the contradiction. Calling the car a “striped tomato” reclassifies it from aspirational machine to novelty produce: bright, bulbous, embarrassing. It’s a comic metaphor that lets him resist the marketing machine without sounding self-serious.

Then he twists the knife with “I’ve never been a big champion of Ford.” That’s not just brand snobbery; it’s an admission that authenticity, on-screen, is often negotiated between sponsors, studios, and performers who don’t want to look like walking billboards. The subtext reads like a small rebellion: if the car is a character, he’s arguing it’s the wrong casting choice.

Culturally, the moment captures how TV “cool” gets manufactured - and how the people inside the machine can still roll their eyes at the parts that feel too loud, too toy-like, too corporate to pass as real.