Knight Rider, season one (1982)

As I’ve mentioned before the 80s is a television decade that I more or less missed out on. Most of the classic 80s action adventure shows were until recently just names to me. All I really knew about such series was that that they had a reputation for being unbelievably cheesy and trashy. Knight Rider had a reputation for being particularly cheesy.

In fact it really is very cheesy. But, mostly, it’s cheesy in a good way. It’s cheesy in a good-natured way. It doesn’t take itself seriously and it doesn’t expect the viewer to take it seriously. It has a comic-book sensibility but with some humour..

The two-part pilot episode Knight of the Phoenix gives up the setup. Michael Long is an undercover cop and he’s on a big job involving very rich very powerful people sand the job all goes horribly wrong. Michael’s partner is killed and Michael is grievously wounded and very very close to death. He would certainly have died in a very short time but instead of ending up in a hospital he ends up in the hands of an eccentric billionaire. Wilton Knight (Richard Basehart) has plans for Michael Long. Michael is patched up, which is quite a job since his whole face had been blown off. Now he looks quite different, in fact now he looks like David Hasselhoff. Wilton Knight’s plan is that Michael, now renamed Michael Knight, will be a crime-fighter for the Foundation for Law and Government, a kind of private vigilante justice outfit but with Wilton Knight’s considerable wealth behind it. Michael has been given a second chance at life and the idea is that he’ll be sufficiently grateful to accept this deal.

They have also fixed his car for him. Actually they’ve done a little more than fix it. Michael’s Trans-Am is now the K.I.T.T. 2000, a computerised supercar. The car is practically indestructible and it has an artificial intelligence that makes it crash-proof and capable of doing everything except fly. And the car, or at least its artificial intelligence, can talk. And it can think. OK, this concept might not seem so startling today in an age of self-driving cars but in 1982 it was pretty darned exciting.

There are those who have been unkind enough to suggest that K.I.T.T. has more personality than Michael Knight. It’s certainly true that David Hasselhoff is a bad actor. But he’s a fun bad actor, and his acting is bad and fun in just the way the series needs. Edward Mulhare plays Michael’s boss, Devon Miles, as a prissy and disapproving comic relief character. The other regular character is Bonnie Barstow (Patricia McPherson) who is the engineer who keeps K.I.T.T. going and naturally has to be a beautiful woman.

Knight Rider is comic-book stuff in both style and content. That’s something you either accept about this show or you don’t. Knight Rider doesn’t have the edginess or the touch of cynicism that you’ll find in a series like Airwolf. Or at least it doesn’t have the same degree of cynicism. Not quite, but it’s still cynical enough in a low-key way. In all the episodes I’ve seen so far it never for one moment occurs to Michael or to his boss Devon that the police or other legal authorities might be trusted to deal with serious crimes. It’s simply taken for granted that the legitimate authorities are entirely useless. So I guess you could say there’s the same passive cynicism about authority that you get in The A-Team where anyone who has serious problems with criminals doesn’t bother with the police - they call in totally illegal private mercenary vigilantes who, unlike the police, will actually get the job done. And in Knight Rider the police aren’t always just useless. Sometimes they’re crooked. Judges are sometimes incompetent but sometimes dishonest. FBI agents are sometimes just over-zealous but sometimes they’re unethical.

We’re not quite in full-blown Fox Mulder paranoia territory in series like Knight Rider, The A-Team and Airwolf but the idea that the government is not your friend is always there as a subtext.

Glen A. Larson created Knight Rider and it follows the same basic formula as all his successful series - it has humour, it has lots of action but no graphic violence, it has likeable sympathetic characters, it’s generally upbeat and it qualifies as what used to be known as family entertainment. Larson’s 70s science fiction series Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century achieved decent ratings but were cancelled mostly because they were just so expensive to make. Knight Rider has the science fiction elements and the gadgetry but because it’s about a car rather than spaceships it was presumably not quite so expensive.

The one thing that all Glen A. Larson’s shows have in common is that critics hated them, which worried Larson not at all.

Episode Guide
Deadly Maneuvers is outrageously silly, but that’s not a problem for a Knight Rider story. There are shady goings-on at an army base. Shady is perhaps an understatement since there’s been at least one murder. The daughter of the murdered officer, who is a junior officer herself, persuades Michael to help her to find out the supposed accident that killed her father. They uncover a tangled web of corruption. This is an episode that has a bit more cynicism than you expect from Knight Rider. It also has a spectacularly crazy, ludicrous but thoroughly enjoyable action climax with Michael and his car up against half the U.S. Army!

In Good Day at White Rock Michael decides he needs a holiday and some rock-climbing is what appeals to him. The little town of White Rock is pleasant enough except for the sheriff. The sheriff wants to avoid trouble at all costs, in any situation that arises, and while that is often a wise approach in this case it seems to be a symptom of weakness rather than good judgment. And now the town is about to become a battlefield for a war between two rival biker gangs. The sheriff as usual thinks he can evade trouble but it’s clear to Michael that trouble is coming whether the sheriff likes it or not.

Of course the entire premise of Knight Rider is that the legitimate law enforcement authorities are not always adequate (and perhaps not always reliable) so sometimes Michael and K.I.T.T. are needed as a private vigilante force. In this case it’s obvious that the sheriff is incapable of dealing with the situation. Calling in the state police doesn’t seem like a viable option - at this stage the bikers haven’t actually broken any laws. The advantage of a vigilante force like the Foundation for Law and Government is that it can take pre-emptive action.

Slammin' Sammy's Stunt Show Spectacular is a family-run stunt driving show under threat from a crooked businessman. Michael has to save the show by taking over as the star driver. The bad guys are of course trying to kill Michael and sabotage K.I.T.T. and mostly the episode is an excuse for some cool stunt driving. It’s quite entertaining though.

Just My Bill has Michael acting as bodyguard to a crusading (and annoyingly self-righteous) state senator. This is a very poor episode, clumsy and uninteresting.

Not a Drop to Drink pits evil big rancher Herb Bremen against a bunch of virtuous little guy ranchers, the issue at stake being control of water rights. Bremen is prepared to take drastic, and violent, measures to break the good small ranchers. The Foundation is acting for the small ranchers. Michael’s job is to keep Herb Bremen at bay until legal measures can be instituted. This entails K.I.T.T. having to teach himself bull-fighting and fight several battles against heavy earth-moving machinery. They’re the fun parts of the episode. Otherwise it’s a standard western plot that threatens to become rather soppy but it’s OK.

No Big Thing is yet another example of one of the most tedious American TV tropes of all time - a city person ventures into the country only to discover that every single person in rural American is a knuckle-drugging redneck and every small-town sheriff is a vicious corrupt monster preying on innocent city folks. This time Devon Miles is the city person victim. A very poor episode.

Trust Doesn't Rust introduces K.I.T.T.’s evil twin, K.A.R.R., the original prototype on which K.I.T.T. was based. The big difference is that K.I.T.T. is programmed to serve and protect humans. K.A.R.R. is programmed merely for self-preservation. K.A.R.R. teams up with a couple of small-time hoods who then go on a crime rampage. Only Michael and K.I.T.T. can stop them. Fortunately Michael has learnt a thing or two about robot psychology. A good episode.

Inside Out is a heist story and it’s a good one. A crazy pensioned off U.S. Army colonel has assembled a crack team to pull off a huge robbery. Michael has infiltrated himself into the colonel’s organisation. The heist itself is clever and exciting and it’s the element that makes one of the best episodes of season one.

In The Final Verdict Michael has to find a witness who can provide an alibi for a girl charged with murder but the witness (a harmless inoffensive guy) has managed to get himself mixed up with all sorts of legal difficulties. It has a reasonable car chase but otherwise it’s fairly routine.

A Plush Ride has Michael infiltrating a school for bodyguards. One of the bodyguards is actually a terrorist planning to assassinate Third World leaders at a summit meeting but which one is the terrorist? The bodyguards school has a whole fleet of heavily armoured limousines so you’d expect lots of spectacular stunt driving in this episode. There is some, but it’s not as impressive as might have been hoped. A routine episode.

Michael has to prevent the assassination of a South American political leader in Forget Me Not. His best lead is a ditzy blonde who has the vital information he needs but after falling off a cliff she can’t remember it. It’s not brilliant but this is another competent and reasonably enjoyable episode.

Hearts of Stone puts Michael in the middle of a war between rival gun-running gangs and then he kind of loses $240,000 of the Foundation’s money so he’s in a pretty stock situation. An average episode, and enjoyable enough.

Give Me Liberty... or Give Me Death involves deadly shenanigans behind the scenes at an alternative energy car race. An OK episode.

The Topaz Connection is an attempt by a girlie magazine publisher to re-establish himself as a serious investigative journalist but the big story he’s working on, which he’s code-named Topaz, is a potentially deadly story. Another decent enough episode.

A Nice, Indecent Little Town is one of the better first season episodes. Alpine Crest is the most perfect town in America. It has virtually no crime. It’s so wholesome it’s scary. So what is a notorious criminal like Ron Austin doing there? And why is the CIA interested in Alpine Crest? The actual plot is not dazzlingly original but the subtle slightly odd atmosphere in the town is interesting. It’s also about the only episode in which someone gets the better of K.I.T.T.

Chariot of Gold involves the Helios Society, which is kind of like Mensa on steroids except with a whole lot of added creepiness and geekiness. Devon has applied for membership but much to his chagrin they accepted Bonnie instead. One of the Helios Society members involved in an archaeological dig has died in very suspicious circumstances. There’s also Aztec gold and nuclear war survivalism involved, as well as brainwashing. And we find out that a car is like a dog. It only has one master. This episode works by going over the-top, and Knight Rider is always at its best when it goes over-the-top.

White Bird is about a woman who has been set up by the crooked lawyer she works for and now the Feds are railroading her. The complication for Michael is that the girl in question is the girl to whom he was engaged to be married just before he got his face blown off. Now he has a new face and a new identity so naturally she doesn’t recognise him. But he hasn’t forgotten her. This is actually a very good episode. There’s a nice mix of action, suspense and romance and the romance angle is handled with surprising subtlety.

Knight Moves is a trucking saga. Independent truckers in New Mexico are being driven out of business by hijackings but it’s obvious there’s something more behind the hijackings. This is one of those episodes (you see a lot of similar episodes in The A-Team) about the little guy, the honest working-class guy, getting a rough deal from the big guy with the money. Lots of 80s CB radio nostalgia in this one! A fairly good episode.

Nobody Does It Better really lays on the 80s nostalgia extra thick. It’s all about video games! Somebody is stealing video game software. Unfortunately there’s a lady private eye involved in the case and while she can’t be faulted for her enthusiasm her competence is another matter. She thinks it’s just another divorce case. The plot isn’t very challenging but anyone with fond memories of 80s video games is going to be in seventh heaven. And it’s typical Knight Rider - it has enough energy and glitz to make up for any deficiencies in the script.

In the final episode of the first season, Short Notice, Michael gets mixed up with a woman who is mixed up with a biker gang and she has a kid and it’s the sort of situation that he should just stay right away from but of course he doesn’t and he thinks he can rescue her and even K.I.T.T. knows he’s crazy but he’s going to do it anyway, and since this is a TV show then maybe he really will be able to save her even though she would cheerfully have sacrificed him for her own ends.

Summing Up
Knight Rider is corny and it’s formulaic and it’s often predictable but it’s executed with enthusiasm and it’s unfailingly entertaining. The special effects may not entirely convince but they’re enjoyably outrageous. K.I.T.T. and Michael are a likeable team. It’s a formula that works. It doesn’t matter that you can’t take it seriously because you’re not supposed to.

For all its faults Knight Rider is thoroughly enjoyable television. It’s cheesy and trashy but in a totally good way. Highly recommended.

Airwolf season 1 (1984)

Airwolf sounds on the surface like a typical 1980s American action adventure series, with lots of explosions and a gleefully trashy vibe. Which is sort of what it is, except for the lead performance by Jan-Michael Vincent which makes it something else again, and some interestingly ambiguous political elements. This is the thinking person’s trashy cheesy action adventure series.

The setup would suggest that this is going to be Knight Rider but with an attack helicopter instead of a high-tech super-car. The helicopter is the Airwolf. It was designed by Dr Charles Henry Moffet (David Hemmings) and it was financed by the Firm. The Firm is clearly the CIA (popularly known as the Company) and the whole project has all the hallmarks of a CIA project. The Firm hasn’t bothered to let anyone else in the U.S. Government know anything about their new toy. They were kind of hoping to keep it to themselves but now they’re trying to come to some sort of arrangement with some Washington political deal-makers. The Airwolf is going to be put through its paces for the benefit of these political bigwigs, and Dr Moffet is going to act as test pilot.

The Airwolf is quite a toy. It’s a supersonic(!) armour-plated practically invulnerable attack helicopter and it’s armed to the teeth. It’s like a small air force in one package.

There is a slight problem with doing things in ultra-secretive and somewhat illegal ways. You often end up dealing with people who are not entirely honest and not entirely stable. Dr Moffet is not merely unstable. He’s a raving lunatic. In the pilot episode, Shadow of the Hawke, Moffet steals the Airwolf and takes it to Libya for Colonel Gaddafi to play with.

Now the Firm has to figure out away to get their toy back. There’s only one other man who can fly the Airwolf, and that’s Stringfellow Hawke. And that’s a problem. To say that Hawke is a difficult man to deal with is putting it mildly. Nonetheless Michael Coldsmith Briggs III, code-named Archangel and one of the Firm’s senior people (Alex Cord), sets off for Hawke’s remote cabin to try to convince him to help. He brings with him Gabrielle (Belinda Bauer) on the assumption that her feminine charms might do the trick.

Obviously the story is going to provide lots of opportunities for aerial action, explosions and general mayhem. And in fact it delivers these things in impressive quantity.

It’s the introduction of Stringfellow Hawke that marks this as an unexpectedly offbeat series. He doesn’t fit any of the accepted action hero stereotypes. He’s not a larger-than-life hero. He’s not an eccentric. He’s not possessed of boyish charm. He’s not a rebel with a taste for adventure. Stringfellow Hawke is a totally messed up human being. He’s moody, he’s taciturn, he’s morose, he’s chronically depressed, he’s anti-social, he’s rude, he’s just not fit for civilised society. He just wants to be left alone in his cabin in the woods where he can play his ’cello and try to make friends with the local sea eagle.

He’s obviously an unusual character but it’s Jan-Michael Vincent’s bizarre performance that makes him really fascinating. It’s a curiously detached and mechanical performance and it works perfectly. This is a man who has pretty much shut down emotionally. It’s not that he’s unemotional, it’s more that he has simply decided that he cannot deal with emotions any longer. Jan-Michael Vincent was probably already struggling with his own inner demons at this time, a struggle he was destined to lose, and perhaps that’s what gives his performance a particularly edgy feel. He was an actor with plenty of charisma but it’s an odd kind of low-key charisma that combines machismo with more than a hint of inner turmoil.

The obsessive, brooding and melancholy personality of Stringfellow Hawke is one of the key things that sets Airwolf apart from superficially similar 80s action shows like Knight Rider and The A-Team. There are other differences as well. Airwolf might seem like a show aimed at 12-year-old boys but it isn’t. It’s actually quite dark, with a pervasive sense of loss. Hawke has lost everybody he ever cared about. It’s not entirely clear what keeps him going, apart from a stubborn determination not to surrender. In The A-Team thousands of rounds of small arms ammunition get fired off in every episode but nobody ever seems to get killed. In Airwolf bad things happen to people. Bad things happen to good people. And there are seriously bad people who are more than just comic-book villains. There’s real evil in the world.

One of the things that keeps Stringfellow going is the hope of finding his brother St. John. The brother was shot down over Vietnam fourteen years earlier and is almost certainly dead but Stringfellow clings to the faint hope that he may have somehow survived. Vietnam was still a painful memory in the 80s and the issue of the possible survival of American prisoners-of-war was quite a big deal at the time. It’s a rather dark theme for an action adventure series but it’s typical of Airwolf.

And while Airwolf has a generally patriotic and occasionally embarrassingly gung ho tone it’s not entirely simplistic. While the Firm is a sanitised version of the CIA it’s still clearly an organisation that considers itself to be above the law. And the Firm’s operations are sometimes badly conceived and badly executed (such as their brilliant idea of infiltrating female agents into Libya in the pilot episode). The series, on the surface at least, goes along with the idea that it’s OK for the Firm to lie and cheat and kill ’cause they’re the good guys. Of course viewers of a more sceptical turn of mind might have had a few doubts.

Unquestionably the key to the success of Airwolf was the action, and the action sequences are impressive. They’re very impressive. The aerial shots are terrific.

Ernest Borgnine might seem like an odd choice to play veteran helicopter pilot and Stringfellow’s offsider Dominic Santini but it turns out to be successful casting. The voluble wildly extroverted Santini and the taciturn and painfully introverted Hawke make an interesting and effective combination.

Alex Cord is smooth and perhaps just the tiniest bit sinister as Archangel. The relationship between Stringfellow Hawke and Archangel is rather complex and it’s one of the elements that makes this series a cut above the average. There’s a degree of mutual respect, but Archangel sees Hawke as naïve while Hawke thinks Archangel is cynical and less than honest. They use each other, but they don’t trust each other too far. It’s not exactly a friendship but there’s some loyalty.

The Episode Guide
In Daddy's Gone a Hunt’n the KGB has come up with a plan to get hold of an example of the latest US fighter jet and the Firm wants Hawke to foil this scheme. Hawke doesn’t care much whether the Russians get the fighter or not but he does care about the fate of one small boy who is being used as a pawn in this dangerous game.

Bite of the Jackal adds some paranoia and treachery to the mix. One of Archangel’s underlings, Mitchell Bruck, has gone rogue and has cooked up a scheme to get hold of the Airwolf. This would be a bad thing for all sorts of reasons, but mostly it would be very bad for Archangel’s future career prospects. Archangel and Hawke are going to have to prevent Bruck from carrying out his plan and they’re going to have to rescue Santini and a stowaway he picked up. This is one of those stories in which the bad guys and the good guys are hard to tell apart.

In Proof Through the Night Stringfellow Hawke has to extract an American agent from Russia. There’s the usual gung ho action stuff but some serious moments as well, involving divided loyalties and the nature of treachery.

One Way Express sees Santini taking a job as a stunt pilot for a movie, which causes some tensions with Hawke. It causes some anxiety for Archangel as well - the movie’s producer is a guy named Philip Maurice and he has a colourful history which covers pretty much all bases - espionage, treason, sabotage, grand larceny. It’s more than that though - Archangel has a personal grudge to settle as well. Archangel has no idea what Maurice is up to but he is sure it has nothing to do with movie-making.

This is actually a pretty cool heist story with some impressive stunt flying. A fine episode.

Echoes from the Past starts with Hawke being offered information that could allow him to find his long-lost brother. On his way back to the cabin his helicopter crashes. He awakens in hospital to discover that he has missed out on some recent news. In fact he’s missed out on an enormous amount of news. He’s been in a coma for months and dramatic things have happened that change everything about the way he views the world. Hawke will do anything to find his brother. It’s his one weak spot. It’s a gripping episode and Jan-Michael Vincent gets to stretch his acting muscles a little.

In 1960s and 1970s action adventure television Nazis were everywhere. And if the episode Fight Like a Dove is to believed those evil Nazis were still around in the 80s! This episode combines vigilante justice and arms dealing and some CIA duplicity but it’s a fairly mediocre and predictable story.

In Mad Over Miami Dominic has become involved with anti-Castro groups trying to get political prisoners out of Cuba but there are multiple double-crosses and it gets very complicated. It gets even more complicated when Hawke realises that the Firm has spent a great deal of money arming rebels and establishing “Camp Freedom” but the rebels they are arming are nothing more than gangsters. So it’s a typical black op that’s gone bad and meanwhile Dominic and Hawke are caught in the middle. A pretty neat little episode.

And They Are Us takes Stringfellow and Dominic to Africa, to a nasty little war between North Limbawe and South Limbawe, one backed by the Soviets and one backed by the Americans. South Limbawe has the services of an attack helicopter squadron led by mercenary Colonel Vidor, an American renegade who’s been Hawke’s commanding officer in Vietnam. Archangel has talked Hawke into getting involved in this messy situation by suggesting that Vidor might know what happened to Hawke’s brother St John. Vidor was and is a great helicopter pilot but now he’s all messed up with self-contempt and cynicism and alcohol. A good solid episode with a bit of human drama, a bit of political cynicism and lots of aerial action.

In Mind of the Machine Dr Robert Winchester has designed an advanced Airwolf simulator. Winchester had almost been selected as the original Airwolf test pilot but lost out to Stringfellow Hawke and he’s still kind of bitter about this. He wants to settle the question of just how good he is compared to Hawke and he has a way of doing this - a double simulation in which he and Hawke can fight it out in a one-on-one aerial dogfight. While all this is happening there’s a very real and very dangerous plot afoot and Dr Winchester has discovered some secrets about Airwolf that were only ever known to its insane designer, Dr Moffet.

In To Snare a Wolf there’s some vicious infighting going on within the intelligence communities, and the obsessive and crazed D.G. Bogard (Lance LeGault) is out to get Archangel. Bogard is also out to get Airwolf and he has satellite surveillance with which to do it. It seems like there’s going to be no escape for Hawke this time. Bogard is ruthless and insane. What Bogard doesn’t realise is that in Stringfellow Hawke he is up against a man who is just as crazy as he is. Also caught up in the drama is out-of-work pilot Antonia Donatelli who is either a nice Italian girl trying to persuade Dominic to give her a job or she’s a treacherous operative working for D.G. Bogard. A fine episode with a good action finale and some intriguing insights into the backstabbing world of the intelligence communities.

Summing Up
Of the various American action adventure TV series of the 80s Airwolf is by far the most intelligent, complex and interesting. It’s also incredibly entertaining. It’s a truly great TV series and very highly recommended.

I've also reviewed the second season of Airwolf.

Time Travelers (TV pilot, 1976)

Time Travelers is more than a little unusual in being a collaboration between Irwin Allen and Rod Serling. It’s a TV-movie that was actually made in 1976 as a pilot for a TV series that never eventuated. Irwin Allen had had some success with his 1960s series The Time Tunnel. The Time Tunnel achieved very good ratings but was cancelled after a single season due to some rather unfortunate bungling by network executives. Irwin Allen clearly thought (probably correctly) that the time travel idea still had potential.

The script for the pilot was written by Jackson Gillis from a story by Rod Serling but in fact it’s obvious that Irwin Allen had considerable input since the end result clearly bears a fairly close resemblance to The Time Tunnel.

A frightening epidemic has struck the United States. The cause is obscure and the mortality rate is extremely high. It appears to bear an uncanny resemblance to a disastrous mid-19th century epidemic. Scientists like Dr Clint Earnshaw (Sam Groom) are convinced it’s the exact same disease. A Chicago doctor by the name of Joshua Henderson had apparently had some startling successes in treating the illness back in the 1870s. Almost all his patients recovered whereas almost all of every other doctor’s patients died. It seems that despite the primitive state of medical knowledge in the mid-19th century Dr Henderson had somehow stumbled upon the cure.

Sadly all of Dr Henderson’s records were destroyed in the infamous Chicago Fire of 1871, If only it were possible to travel back in time to talk to Dr Henderson! To his considerable surprise Dr Earnshaw is contacted by a man who claims that such a thing is possible. The man, Jeff Adams (Tom Hallick), gives the impression of being more of a cowpoke than a scientist. Jeff invites Dr Earnshaw to fly with him to a secret location where a top-security research establishment is to be found. Of course the man is obviously some kind of lunatic, but lunatics are not usually given access to jets by the White House and they don’t usually work at research institutions run by Nobel Prize winners. Maybe this guy isn’t a lunatic after all.

A few hours later Jeff and Dr Earnshaw are in Chicago, and it’s 1871. The only problem is they were supposed to arrive on October 4 but it’s actually October 7, so in just over 24 hours the whole city will be an inferno and any chance of contacting Dr Henderson or seeing his records will be lost. It’s a race against time!

Irwin Allen’s enthusiasm for science fiction was longstanding but this story taps into his later and even more famous obsession, disasters. In fact it’s as much a disaster movie as a sci-fi movie. The Chicago Fire of 1871 was a very big deal, raging for three days and killing 300 people.

My first impression is that the main set in the time travel complex in The Time Tunnel was much more impressive. The Time Tunnel’s control centre looked expensive and stylish and lavish whereas the equivalent in Time Travelers looks small and cheap.

The period stuff in 1871 Chicago is done reasonably well. As with The Time Tunnel Allen relies heavily on footage from earlier 20th Century-Fox movies, in this instance the footage coming from the 1937 In Old Chicago. The period scenes make very effective use of outdoor sets built for Hello, Dolly!

Sam Groom and Tom Hallick are quite adequate as the two time travelers. They’re totally overshadowed by Richard Basehart’s bravura performance as Dr Henderson. Richard Basehart overacting is always a particular joy to watch.

You’ll come across some people who will try to tell you that everything good about this TV-movie is due to the great Rod Serling, and everything bad must be due to the awful Irwin Allen. That’s plausible if you’re a true believer in the Rod Serling cult, which I most certainly am not. Serling has always struck me as a wildly overrated writer who took himself incredibly seriously and was over-praised by critics. I’m always inclined not to subscribe to the popular view that Irwin Allen was a hack. Most of his TV series actually started very well, with quite good concepts, and then got progressively ruined by ill-judged interference by network suits. Even Lost in Space was genuine science fiction for the first few episodes. The Time Tunnel had been a pretty decent series and Time Travelers is essentially a remake of that series.

Time Travelers deals with time paradoxes exactly the way The Time Tunnel dealt with them. It doesn’t agonise over all the scientific details but it does make it clear that you can’t change the past. Even when you think you can it turns out to be an illusion. History stubbornly refuses to get changed.

Time Travelers deals in greater depth with an issue that The Time Tunnel did touch upon in some episodes, namely the basic overwhelming tragedy of time travel. As a time traveler you’re interacting with people who are in fact already dead. You might grow to like them, you might even fall in love with them, but if history has doomed them there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t bring them back to the present day, and you can’t elect to stay in the past permanently yourself. It’s not just that the people you’re interacting with are long dead, it’s also that the societies you visit are long dead as well. You might think you’d like to stay in 1871 Chicago forever but you can’t. These things would clearly be a very major emotional issue for any real-life time traveler and Time Travelers deals with them sensitively but without wallowing too much in sentiment.

Time Travelers doesn’t have any actual action sequences but it has effective dramatic tension and it manages to achieve suspense even when you know, as the characters, know, some of what is going to happen. It has at least some emotional depth. It’s reasonably well thought-out science fiction. The premise that a doctor a hundred years ago had somehow stumbled upon a great medical breakthrough might be a little far-fetched but it has to be said that it’s developed fairly logically and sensibly.

In fact I get the feeling that this was the kind of reasonably intelligent TV science fiction that Irwin Allen was always hoping to do. He was destined always to be thwarted, always forced by commercial pressures and network interference to accept a massive dumbing down of his original concepts.

Unfortunately with Time Travelers he found himself thwarted once again with the network declining to pick it up as a series.

Rod Serling’s strength was his attempt to add psychological complexity to genre television but his big weaknesses were his tendencies towards manipulative sentimentality and preachiness. Fortunately Jackson Gillis’s screenplay mostly avoids excessive sentimentality and entirely avoids preachiness.

Time Travelers is offered as an extra on the Time Tunnel DVD set (at least it’s included in the complete series set although I’m not sure about the half-season sets). The transfer is not fantastic but it's perfectly watchable and since it's a free bonus feature I guess we shouldn't complain.

Time Travelers is on the whole surprisingly satisfactory. Recommended.

1990 season 1 (1977)

1990 is a dystopian drama series made by the BBC. The first season went to air in 1977 with a second season following in 1978. The series was created by Wilfred Greatorex who had a notable career as a writer and producer on British television from the 60s to the early 80s.

The first episode, Creed of Slaves, doesn’t give us too much information. It’s obvious that Britain has an increasingly totalitarian government and that the main agent of repression is the Public Control Department (PCD), operating as part of the Home Office.

Most of the media is controlled by the government but there are still a few independent newspapers and there are still a few journalists willing to criticise the government. The most notorious such journalist is Jim Kyle (Edward Woodward). Kyle is clever and cautious, he’s very tech-savvy (he has some useful little devices that make it more difficult for the PCD to keep track of him) and he has a highly placed source within the government. Kyle is a thorn in the side of PCD director Herbert Skardon (Robert Lang). At this stage Skardon is using one of his deputies, the glamorous Delly Lomas (Barbara Kellermann), to try to manage Kyle. The idea is for Delly to use her feminine wiles to persuade Kyle to moderate his criticisms of the government.

This is a Britain sliding towards totalitarianism but not yet there. It’s at the point where dissidents are subject to serious harassment and the freedom of the press has been somewhat curtailed.

Kyle is involved with a group that is trying to get people out of the country. Emigration from Britain is pretty much banned. Rather oddly the series chooses to focus quite a bit on this subject of illegal emigrants, but most of them appear to be middle-class people who simply want to leave Britain because they could earn more money in the U.S. and it’s hard to feel much sympathy for them. The idea of smuggling people out of the country does lend itself to some suspenseful situations which are handled quite effectively in episodes like Decoy.

The main interest is the series of overlapping power struggles. Delly Lomas wants Herbert Skardon’s job as Controller and she wants it now. The other deputy controller, Tasker, wants Skardon’s job as well.

Kyle is mixed up in these power struggles because he has very ambiguous but definite PCD connections. He has helped them in the past. In fact they’ve never been quite sure if he’s an ally, a potential ally, or an enemy.

And then there’s his ambiguous relationship with Delly Lomas. Not a romance, but perhaps with that potential. Not quite a professional relationship. Essentially they’re both trying to use the other without getting used themselves and without getting emotionally entangled. It’s a dangerous game and we wonder which of them is going to turn out to be the better player.

Delly is clever, ruthless and entirely lacking in any kind of moral sense. She is driven purely by ambition. Skardon isn’t much better but he does seem to have some vague belief in the necessity of the repressive system he serves. The only thing Delly believes in is Delly’s career. Or at least that’s what she had always thought but now there’s the troubling possibility that she may be getting emotionally involved with Kyle.

The acting is the greatest strength of this series. Edward Woodward is excellent. Kyle is an interesting mix of cockiness and extreme caution and he’s a decidedly ambiguous character. Is he a brave and dedicated fighter for freedom? We know he’s a journalist so we’re inclined to suspect that he has no actual morals, that it’s all a game to him. Woodward shows great skill in maintaining that edge of ambiguity.

Barbara Kellermann is extremely good also. Delly is more clearcut. Her motivation is ambition and she’s untroubled by moral considerations. She’s clever but the question is whether she has the experience to beat an old hand like Skardon.

Robert Lang always did sinister characters well and he does a fine job as Skardon.

One thing that is interesting is that this series makes no attempt to disguise the nature of the government. This is clearly a Labour Government. The vicious Home Secretary is a former trade unionist, obviously working class. This is quite explicitly a leftist totalitarianism. It is mostly an old-fashioned leftist totalitarianism, obviously modelled on the old Soviet Union. The series has quite an old-fashioned feel to it.

This is the grey depressing world of Orwell’s 1984. but without most of the really interesting insights included in Orwell’s novel. The repressive measures enacted by the government in 1990 seem crude and amateurish and unimaginative. The idea of using psychiatry for social control was topical in the 70s, being a method favoured by the old Soviet Union, but 1990 does nothing interesting with the idea. The third episode, Health Farm, deals with mind control verging on mind destruction but in a superficial kind of way without any of the refinements of evil that Orwell gives us in 1984. The final episode of the first season is pure Orwell.

The problem is that this is a future society that was very plausible in the 1940s when Orwell wrote 1984. It was perhaps still plausible, but only just, in 1977 when this series was made. To a viewer today however it seems very 1940s.

The fact that 1990 deals with a totalitarianism not yet firmly established does add some dramatic possibilities. The danger with dystopian dramas is that everything seems too hopeless, there’s too much wallowing in despair. But in this case the struggle is not entirely unequal. The PCD has wide powers, but they’re not unlimited. Skardon does have to be careful not to overreach himself. The press has been mostly muzzled, but not totally. Kyle does have the ability to make life miserable for the PCD and for the Home Secretary.

It’s also quite strong on the psychology of repression. The types of people who end up joining the secret police are always the same and in an episode like Whatever Happened to Cardinal Wolsey? we get an extraordinarily chilling example in the person of Inspector Jones (Frank Mills).

It’s intriguing to compare this series with the other notable 1970s British dystopian television series, The Guardians, made a few years earlier. The Guardians seems much less dated, much more complex and subtle and much more relevant to today’s world.

1990 has been released on DVD in Region 2. It's a series with some definite flaws but the acting is excellent and it's worth a look if dystopian thrillers are your thing.