With a crime-wave sweeping the city, a new Police programme has been formed to fast-track recruits to get them patrolling on the streets, and it's up to tough veteran cop Sergeant T.J. Hooker to bring them up to scratch. Trying to cope with his recent divorce and money problems, Hooker struggles with a job that he can't get away from. Meanwhile, the spate of crimes, including robbery, murder and a sniper is quickly getting out of hand. Only Hooker can train the eager but inexperienced young recruits as he leads them in bringing peace back to the streets, but the pursuit of the two murderous armed robbers at the head of the crime-wave inevitably leads to an explosive confrontation...

While hunting for a mugger who attacks women and leaves a Bible at the scene of his crimes, Hooker and Romano have to escort an overeager, aggressive newswoman. But the reporter's involvement just serves to complicate matters further...

When a school-mate of Hooker's daughter is found dead, after being pumped full of drugs and pushed off a roof after threatening to expose a drug runner's racket, Hooker realises that it could just as easily have been his daughter, and is determined to nab the culprits...

After Hooker and Romano foil an armed robbery committed by a family of robbers, which leaves the father wounded in hospital and the daughter held in custody, the two sons take the hospital wing with their father on siege, holding Hooker's ex-wife Fran, Stacy, a little girl urgently needing heart surgery, and a whole floor of patients hostage...

Hooker holds himself personally to blame when a female rookie cop that he trained is seriously wounded in a confrontation with a pair of fleeing gun-shop robbers. With the officer needing her leg amputated as a result of the wound, Hooker and Romano, with help from Stacy and Corrigan, investigate the gun thieves, who are selling their hauls to a back-street crime baron...

Despite being undercover dressed as Santa Claus, Hooker is finding it hard to get into the Yuletide cheer faced with his first Christmas away from Fran and the children; Stacy too, is low on Christmas spirit, after splitting up with her boyfriend. The Christmas blues set in even deeper when a drug stakeout doesn't go to plan, allowing the main target to get away. Later, after Stacy witnesses an armed hold-up by a man and woman connected with the wanted dealer, the woman is forced to abandon her young baby at a local church. As they try and get a lead on the offenders, Stacy looks after the young baby, but Hooker, Corrigan and Romano become concerned that she may be coming to attached to it too want to give it back...

Dani Starr is an attractive Hollywood Detective who lives alone, dresses snazzily, and always gets the job done. While en route to Hollywood to deliver a captured jewel thief, Hooker and Corrigan are ambushed by the thief's men, who free their leader. Hooker teams up with Dani Starr to find the sprung thief, who is the prime suspect in the murder of a porn film producer. As they search for leads, they find that there is a Mob connection; Hooker learns that Dani's husband was previously murdered by the Mob, and she is determined to find those responsible...

Hooker's children come to visit their father, but the vacation is interrupted after Corrigan and another Officer unwittingly disrupt an armed race-track heist, which leaves Corrigan's fellow Officer dead. The robbers were under the pretence of being ambulance attendants, and Hooker has reason to believe that the robbery was an inside job; but the case means that his time with his cherished kids is limited...

The State Department asks Hooker's help in tracking down a man whom he served alongside in Vietnam - a disillusioned, mentally unstable trained executioner – who is planning to assassinate the head of a visiting Russian trade delegation...

When a female attorney is murdered by a shotgun-wielding killer, the third woman attorney to be killed in similar such fashion, Hooker, Stacy and Corrigan search out the killer - who is actually a man who's become embittered after his girlfriend was deemed mentally unstable and dropped from attorney school...