The Fates of Mel and Martin

The backlash against actor Mel Gibson, following his arrest last Friday in Malibu, California, for drunk driving and the anti-Semitic tirade it precipitated, has been swift. This morning, Disney-owned ABC-TV announced that it was summarily yanking a miniseries about the World War II-era Holocaust that it had been working on with Gibson’s Icon Productions. (However, Disney is apparently still planning to release Gibson’s Mayan-language film, Apocalypto, in December. See the trailer here.)

How Gibson’s reprehensible display of bigotry will affect his future movie career is anybody’s guess at this point. Which is sad, because he’s put in at least two performances that I’ve enjoyed in the past, in Maverick (1994) and Braveheart (1995).

But also interesting in the short run is the question of how this incident will influence voters in the Sleuth Channel’s Web survey to find the most popular film and TV detectives of all time. Among the 25 nominees, after all, are partners Martin Riggs (Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) from the Lethal Weapon films. I am not privy to any inside information about the Sleuth survey, but I’d guess that the Riggs/Murtaugh pairing might have had a decent shot at top-10 status, prior to Gibson’s meltdown. Now, though, those two Los Angeles cops might be lucky to attract more votes than Lieutenant Tony Baretta, who was portrayed on television by another actor known for his self-destructive behavior, Robert Blake.

READ MORE: “Mel on the Cross,” by Neal Gabler (Salon).