Quincy M.E. season 2 (1977)

There’s considerable disagreement whether the 1977 second season of Quincy M.E. really does constitute a second season or whether the first and second seasons should be regarded as a single season. The exact point at which season two begins could also be debated. What matters is that there certainly were some significant changes that roughly coincided with the switch from feature-length to one-hour episodes.

Quincy’s girlfriend Lee (Lynette Mettey) disappears fairly early on. I think that’s a pity. Her presence served to make Quincy a bit more sympathetic and human and added a much-needed lighter touch to a series that often takes itself much too seriously.

Much more signifiant is Dr Asten’s personality change. Dr Asten is Quincy’s immediate boss at the Coroner’s Office. In the first season he was a somewhat contemptible figure, a typical careerist who was more worried about not rocking the boat than actually finding the truth. He was a bit of a weasel and a bit of a moral coward. In this second season he becomes a much more complex and nuanced figure, a man genuinely struggling with the difficult task of watching the budget, dealing with political pressures and ensuring that the job of properly investigating suspicious deaths gets done properly. He has mysteriously grown a backbone and is on occasions prepared to back Quincy even when it might entail risk to his own position. I think this change is a welcome one. The new version of Dr Asten is quite an interesting character.

The other supporting characters remain substantially unchanged. Sam Fujiyama is still the loyal but long-suffering assistant to Quincy. Lieutenant Monahan is still bad-tempered, overworked and constantly exasperated by Quincy. Danny is still the faithful friend who just wishes Quincy wouldn’t park his car, with Coroner’s Office prominenty displayed on the door, outside his bar.

At this fairly early stage in the series (which eventually ran to eight seasons) some major problems are already starting to become apparent. There are already too many episodes that seem much too much like lectures rather than entertainment. There’s too much of a tendency to allow the focus to shift away from forensic pathology into social crusading.

The biggest problems are Quincy himself, and Jack Klugman’s performances. When Quincy is doggedly following a chain of tenuous forensic clues his abrasiveness and obsessiveness can be quite enjoyable, but when he dons his social crusader’s cap he can become irritating and even obnoxious. And Jack Klugman’s acting is not exactly subtle. A little bit of Jack Klugman tends to go a long way.

Episode Guide

Quincy is attending a convention of forensic pathologists in a resort hotel when the guests start to succumb to a mysterious illness in Snake Eyes. Quincy’s main concern is that whatever the illness is it could be infectious but the hotel management are more concerned about a panic among their guests. It’s a good episode with the focus firmly on forensics.

Even better is ...The Thigh Bone's Connected to the Knee Bone... in which Quincy has one bone with which to work. From that bone he intends to identify the victim, discover how he died and who killed him. This is Quincy M.E. at its best with Quincy doggedly following a tenuous trail of evidence.

In Visitors in Paradise Quincy and Danny take a fishing vacation and Quincy finds himself trying to solve a previously unsolved case but someone is determined to stop him. A reasonably good episode.

The Two Sides of Truth sees Quincy pitted against his old mentor, a brilliant man but Quincy suspects that he’s sold out. Not a particularly good episode.

Hit and Run at Danny's concerns a hit-run case and a body pulled from a car that ended up in the sea. The identity of the victim is kind of complicated. And Danny could lose his liquor licence as an indirect result, which strains his friendship with Quincy. A fairly decent episode.

Has Anybody Here Seen Quincy? is a Quincy M.E. episode without Quincy and not surprisingly it doesn’t work at all.

A Good Smack in the Mouth is another misfire. Quincy suspects that a child has been abused. Quincy goes into full-on social crusader mode and it all gets very preachy and very contrived and very tedious. This series is always at its best when the focus remains on forensic pathology and unfortunately there’s virtually none of that in this episode.

The Hot Dog Murder makes four lousy episodes in a row. The ingenious murder method isn’t ingenious at all and it’s revealed right from the start. In fact everything is obvious right from the start. Quincy not only gets preachy but indulges in some ethically very dubious practices. A failed episode.

An Unfriendly Radiance is a welcome return to form. Quincy is faced with a very odd death. The man died of radiation poisoning but there was absolutely no way he could have been exposed to radiation. This one works because it concentrates on forensics and on crime investigation rather than social crusading. A very good episode.

Usually it’s Quincy trying to convince Lieutenant Monahan that a case is worthy pursuing but in Sullied Be Thy Name the shoe is on the other foot. A priest is found in a hooker’s bed, dead of a heart attack. Since the priest is an old friend of his Monahan is keen to clear his name. Quincy is faced with a lack of evidence but presses on regardless. This episode has a genuinely clever plot and lots of good forensics stuff. A very fine episode.

Valleyview is a sanitarium and there seem to Quincy to be just too many unexplained deaths of patients there. When a nurse dies suddenly as well Quincy is convinced his suspicions were justified. A good mystery plot here with some effective misdirection. Very good stuff.

Unfortunately it all starts falling apart again with the final episode of the season, Let Me Light the Way. Quincy is determined to bring a serial rapist to justice. The story is not necessarily bad but the treatment is heavy-handed and manipulative and Quincy’s crusading zeal becomes embarrassing and very irritating. It’s all rather unconvincing and contrived.

Final Thoughts

I’m afraid that Quincy M.E. is a series about which I have increasingly mixed feelings. There are some very good episodes here but alas there are just as many clunkers.

And when this series is bad it’s very very bad. The tendency to preachiness is something that afflicts most American television of this era to some extent. In Quincy M.E. that tendency gets out of hand rather too often.

My biggest issue with this series is that Quincy as a character rubs me up the wrong way. I find it hard to be too sympathetic towards him since he alienates people in unnecessary ways, even people who are actually well disposed towards him.

Although it’s by no means all bad I would definitely recommend renting a few episodes first before risking a purchase.

McMillan and Wife, season 3 part two (1973-74)

Edward D. Hoch was a prolific writer of mystery stories. While most people have never heard of him he has a very strong following among fans of classic puzzle-plot mysteries. One of his specialties was impossible crime stories, of which he wrote vast numbers. Several of Hoch’s stories were adapted for the very popular 1970s NBC mystery series McMillan and Wife. Two of Hoch’s crime stories were adapted for the third season, Freefall to Terror and The Man Without a Face.

Freefall to Terror features a spectacular impossible crime. Billy Calm (Dick Haymes) is an old friend of McMillan’s. He’s a very successful and very ruthless businessman and his methods have become steadily more ruthless. And he’s accumulated a lot of enemies. It comes as a surprise when Billy commits suicide by throwing himself out of his 17th floor office window. When Commissioner McMillan and Billy’s private secretary Maggie Miller (Barbara Feldon) burst into Billy’s office after hearing him threaten to kill himself they find the office empty. The window has been smashed. Obviously Billy has either hurled himself out of the window or he’s been pushed. The puzzler is that there is no body. No-one on the ground saw a body exit through the window. No body landed on the pavement. So is Billy dead or not?

When that question gets answered it just makes things even more puzzling and even more impossible.

The problem with locked-room and impossible crime mysteries is that the solutions do often turn out to be either excessively far-fetched and improbably contrived or wildly implausible. In this case, while the setup seems bizarre the solution is quite simple and elegant and it’s perfectly plausible.

Overall it’s a very successful and very clever episode.

The Man Without a Face is a spy thriller story. Mac gets a very cryptic message which turns out to be from an old colleague from his intelligence days. Those days are in the distant past, or are they? Maybe the past isn’t really gone, or maybe it has left some ghosts behind. And maybe the past can still kill you.

Now there’s a murder to be investigated but not everyone wants that to happen. There are people who need to be told things and there are other people who don’t want them told. The trouble with spies is that you just can’t trust them, even when they’re on your side. In fact especially when they’re on your side. And even when a spy isn’t lying he’s likely to tell the truth in a misleading way, merely by habit.

There’s a very cool, and very complicated, dying clue in this tale.

A bonus is the carnival background to much of the action. There’s a nice scene involving peril on a ferris wheel and knife-throwing plays a important rôle as well. So there’s plenty of fun here.

This is a very complex plot with roots going back decades and with double-crosses that might go back just as far.

So two interesting Edward D. Hoch adaptations, and now for the final two episodes in this season.

Reunion in Terror is a reunion of a college football team in which Mac had played. It seems that the members of that team have suddenly started dying violently. In fact it appears that someone might be intending to kill the whole team.

But why? It’s unlikely that the murderer could be an outsider - it surely has to be a member of the team. Who else could have a motive? But what kind of motive would explain the slaughter of a whole football team?

It also seems possible that the members of the team are not being killed randomly but according to a pattern.

The guest cast is headlined by comic Buddy Hackett and whether you enjoy this episode will depend a lot on how well you tolerate Buddy Hackett. I can’t tolerate him at all so this episode was at times a bit of an ordeal for me. It’s also an episode in which the McMillan’s housekeeper Mildred plays a more prominent rôle than usual. I find that a little bit of Mildred goes a long way.

On the plus side Michael Ansara, one of my favourite character actors of this era, is also in the guest cast but unfortunately he’s not given enough to do.

The plot is OK with some reasonably decent misdirection.

Overall this is not one of my favourite episodes. It’s not terrible but it’s not overly interesting.

Cross & Double Cross makes use of one of the most tired and overused of all plot devices, the double. That’s bad enough, but McMillan and Wife has already used this idea in season two and with Rock Hudson playing identical dual rôles.

Commissioner McMillan has to assume the identity of his exact double, a charming hoodlum, in order to infiltrate a gold smuggling racket. Rhonda Fleming, a competent actress in her heyday, plays an ageing femme fatale who seems to be the key to the racket. McMillan gets to jump out of an aeroplane a couple of times but enough that doesn’t generate sufficient excitement to save this one.

There’s nothing wrong with Hudson’s performances in his dual rôles, it’s just that the basic idea has been done way too often and there’s nothing here to add any worthwhile original twists to the idea.

Season three really is all over the place. The first four episodes are all very good and very enjoyable but then it ends with two real turkeys. If you’re a fan of the series then the four good episodes are enough to justify picking up the season three set.

Man with a Camera, season one (1958-59)

Man with a Camera is a half-hour crime series that ran on the American ABC network from 1958 to 1960. In those days a typical season comprised at least 30 and often as many as 39 episodes. There were however only two shortened seasons of Man with a Camera with a total of 29 episodes being made.

This series gave Charles Bronson his first starring role. Bronson plays photographer Mike Kovac. Of course a series about a photographer going around taking photos wouldn’t be all that exciting. Obviously he has to get mixed up in crimes and other dangerous activities. But at the same time photography has to be a key element on those crime stories. Man with a Camera manages to do these things fairly well and it makes an interesting variation on the usual private eye series. Kovac spends so much time unravelling crimes that he might as well be a private eye.

Bronson already has his screen persona pretty well set. He’s a tough guy with a rather forbidding manner but there’s also a surprising degree of rough charm. Bronson could adapt this persona for playing heroes or villains. In this case he is obviously very much a hero.

The Episode Guide

Second Avenue Assassin reunites Mike Kovac with an old friend, but the reunion does not go smoothly. Joey Savoyan is a boxer and within the next few days he’s going to get his shot at the title but he’s earning himself an unsavoury reputation. In fact there’s something sinister going on at Joey’s training camp and only a photographer can hope to uncover the truth. Not a bad way to start the series. It establishes that Kovac is very tough, very stubborn, rather impulsive and completely honest.

In The Warning Mike is manipulated into photographing a murder. And then the police manipulate him into being bait for a trap, something that makes him very unhappy. A solid enough story.

Profile of a Killer is bizarre but intriguing. Kovac gets kidnapped by an armed robber who wants him to take his publicity photos. This young hoodlum is totally looney tunes and his ambition is to be famous, even if he’s only famous as a killer. This is a fine example of the clever way this series uses the photography angle and there’s another great example at the climax. A strange one, but on the whole this is an excellent episode.

Closeup on Violence is quite clever. Kovac is taking pictures at a fire only he’s more interested in the spectators than the fire. He takes a picture of a very striking girl (she’s very striking because she’s played by Angie Dickinson) and then his camera gets stolen. It’s something to do with that girl, and with a bunch of young hoods only there’s no obvious connection between these cheap punks and such a classy young woman. The makeshift composite photo idea is cute. A very good episode.

In Turntable Mike gets mixed up in a battle between a crooked gambling house operator and a crusading politician. It all hinges on some very innocuous photos Mike took, and the far from innocuous composite photos someone else made from them. Another solid episode.

In Double Negative a murdered woman is still alive and Mike has the photo to prove it and to save a man from being convicted for her murder. Photos can be faked but Mike took the picture himself so he knows it’s genuine. And yet something doesn’t add up. A pretty good story.

Another Barrier is presumably an attempt to do something slightly different. It’s a non-crime story in which photography plays only a very peripheral part. I prefer the crime/photography oriented episodes but this is an OK story about a test pilot.

Blind Spot has Mike doing his own private investigation into the death of a fellow press photographer and old friend. It appears that the friend was involved in some shady activities but Mike can’t bring himself to believe it. Not a bad story and the hidden camera (which the viewer knows about from the start) is quite nifty.

Two Strings of Pearls sees Kovac taking photographs at a garden party. The hostess is a charming young lady with whom Kovac had had a romantic entanglement but she claims that she’s never seen him before in her life. There’s some kind of con going on but Kovac just can’t see how it can possibly be worked. It doesn’t make sense. A very clever little story and very well executed.

Six Faces of Satan is a silly hysterical story about mob violence. A terrible episode Excruciatingly bad and embarrassing.

In Lady on the Loose Mike has an almost-romance with an heiress who is running away from, well she’s running away from being an heiress mostly. The romance angle doesn’t really convince and the episode has not much else to offer.

The Last Portrait demonstrates that maybe the camera can’t lie but it can certainly kill. In this case a camera is used to assassinate an Arab leader and Mike is caught in the middle and the only person who can help out of the mess is a faded movie star. A good episode.

The Face of Murder is the face of a convicted killer about to be executed. Everyone says that Bray is one of those rare criminals who is absolute evil with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Mike Kovac isn’t so sure but he wants Bray’s picture anyway. Bray has been a loser his whole life but he’s prepared to try one more throw of the dice, which could get a bunch of other people killed, including Mike Kovac. A fairly good episode even if it tries to get a bit philosophical at the end.

Mute Evidence is totally crazy. There’s a crazy reclusive doctor who has taught a deaf girl to talk using a camera. And there’s his crazy assistant. When the craziness leads to murder the only witness is the mute girl Susan and she can’t communicate without her camera. All Mike knows is that Susan is the key. I wouldn’t say this is a good episode but it’s fascinating in its weirdness.

In The Big Squeeze Mike gets on the wrong side of big-time gangsters by trying to help out the widow of Johnny Rico, a small-time hood who’s just had an unfortunate encounter with a guy with a machine-gun. Mike ends up with some photos that are dynamite but they’re more likely to get him killed than make him famous. The girl could get him out of this spot but she’s too busy with her own agenda of revenge. The pressure is on everybody - everybody is squeezing everybody else. A pretty decent episode to end the season.

Final Thoughts

This is a clever inventive series that deserved to be a bigger success. Bronson already shows glimpses of the qualities that would eventually make him a huge star.

The first half of the first season is particularly stronger with some very clever plots. Overall Man with a Camera is a fine series and is highly recommended.

The Saint revisited - six B&W episodes

The Saint is in my view a more interesting series than it’s usually given credit for. One of the reasons it’s interesting is that the source material is so fascinating.

The Simon Templar of Leslie Charteris’s stories is unique among fictional action-adventure heroes in the extent to which he evolves over time, and the extent to which his evolution is logical and plausible. Superficially the Saint of the later adventures is still a young man but if you look at his behaviour and his outlook on life he clearly matures.

William Vivian Butler in his marvellous book on gentleman rogue action-adventure heroes identifies no less than five distinct phases through which the Saint passes.

The most intriguing is what Butler calls the Mark V Saint who made his appearance in 1949 in Saint Errant. He is clearly a very different man from the Simon Templar of the early tales but he’s also clearly a logical evolution of the young Templar. He is now older, wiser and a tiny bit sadder, and somewhat lonely. The early Saint had a collection of pals who functioned as his assistants/accomplices/partners-in-crime/disciples/followers or whatever you might like to calk them. They don’t all appear in every story but you can be sure that at least one will up up in every story. And the young Simon Templar has Patricia Holm, the Great Love of his Life, his perfect woman. All these supporting characters disappeared during the course of the 40s and by the time Saint Errant appeared the Saint was entirely alone, and remained alone.

The character in the TV series is based entirely on the Mark V Saint. Now while I would dearly have loved to see a series based on the Mark II Saint of the early 30s it could only have been done as a period piece. There were very sound reasons for choosing the Mark V Saint. What’s really cool, if you’re a fan of the books, is that the TV series captures the tone of the later Saint stories remarkably well. The TV Simon Templar has friends, but no close friends. He has women, but he doesn’t have the one woman who mattered to him. There is the subtle touch of melancholy that you find in the 1950s Saint stories and there is the slight sense of less and loneliness. Roger Moore captures these qualities in the character surprisingly well.

The other important thing about the Mark V Saint is that he was a man out of his time. The devil-may-care adventurer of the 1930s found himself in a world that had no place for devil-may-care adventurers. He was also a restless rootless character, a citizen of the world who was truly at home nowhere. The Saint of the TV series is definitely a man slightly out of place in the 1960s. He is dashing and debonair, but in a decidedly old-fashioned manner. He is a gentleman in a world that no longer has any respect for the code of the gentleman.

Since I’ve just finished reading Saint Errant and I’m just about to post my review at Vintage Pop Fictions and since no less than six of the nine stories in the collection were adapted for the TV series I thought it would be fun to review those adaptations.

Judith

Judith retains the Montreal setting of the original story, the first in the collection. Montreal’s richest citizen, Burt Northwade, is about to become even richer by selling an important new invention to a major car maker. There does however seem to be some dispute about whether the invention is actually Burt Northwade’s to sell. Morally it seems that the invention should belong to his brother Frank, who was actually responsible for the invention. Frank’s daughter Judith certainly thinks so and she’s planning a spot of larceny to put things right.

Judith is just the sort of woman Simon Templar likes. She’s young and beautiful and she’s criminally inclined (she is played by Julie Christie, just a couple of years away from major cinematic stardom). No self-respecting buccaneer could resist volunteering to carry out the burglary for her. Of course it’s going to turn out to be far less simple than Simon imagines. It’s a neat little story with a rather nice twist at the end.

While the story has had to be expanded a little the essentials are pretty much unchanged. And it’s one of the TV episodes that shows the Saint quite unequivocally carrying out a crime, even if it’s ultimately for a good cause. The tone of the episode matches that of Charteris’s story pretty well - lighthearted and witty. A very good episode.

Iris

Iris is an actress in a play that is about to open. The only reason the play is going to open at all is that Iris’s husband Rick has put up the money for it. Rick, being a successful gangster, has  plenty of money. Rick does however have a problem. He is being blackmailed by Simon Templar. This is news to Simon Templar. Not only is he not the blackmailer, blackmail is something of which he very strongly disapproves. He is determined to find out who the real blackmailer is.

The television adaptation moves the scene of the action from Chicago to London. It also makes Rick a slightly less colourful character. Unfortunately it also makes Mr Stratford Keane, the director of the play, much less colourful. Patricia Holm is of course eliminated from the story. The Saint of the TV series has to remain a loner and cannot possibly have a full-time lady love. On the plus side Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal is added to the story.

Iris was not one of the better stories in the Saint Errant collection and it isn’t one of the stronger episodes of the TV series. It’s OK, but not great.

Lida

The first obvious change from the Lida short story is that the scene of the action has been moved from the Quarterdeck Club in Miami to Captain Kidd’s Club in The Bahamas. The second change is that the Saint’s long-time lady love, Patricia Holm, has disappeared from the story. The adaptation also adds some action, obviously essential for TV.

Joan Wingate is worried that her sister Lida Verity is in trouble and asks Simon Templar to help her. Unfortunately it’s too late. Lida Verity is found dead, of a gunshot wound. The universal assumption that it must have been suicide does not satisfy the Saint. Lida had a very wealthy husband. Any gambling debts incurred at the club would have been of little consequence to her. He is convinced the answer can be found at Captain Kidd’s Club.

The sequence of events has been changed a little and some extra characters added. One of them is played by the always entertaining Aubrey Morris, this time playing a more sinister character than usual. The original story has had to be expanded quite a bit but this is done very successfully. The vital plot elements are still those of Charteris’s short story and they still work. A very fine episode.

Jeannine

Charteris’s story Jeannine takes place in New Orleans but Terry Nation’s teleplay moves the action to Paris. A glamorous but apparently murderous female head of state, Madam Chen, owns a very very valuable pearl necklace. The police assume that the Saint will try to steal it. The Saint is most interested to find out that Madam Chen’s PR lady is none other than Judith, a beautiful but extremely larcenous young lady he has encountered before, but now she calls herself Jeannine. He assumes that Jeannine is going to try to steal the pearls and he’s right but in fact it seems like every second person in Paris is trying to steal that necklace.

It’s unfortunate that Julie Christie was by now becoming too big a star to reprise her rôle as Judith. Sylvia Sims however does a pretty decent job. Jacqui Chan does some glorious scenery chewing as the cruel but lecherous Madam Chen.

The twist ending which Leslie Charteris pulled off so adroitly in the short story is still there in the TV adaptation and it still works but it’s not done with Charteris’s skill. The subplot involving the opposition to Madam Chen is entirely Terry Nation’s invention but it does provide an echo of Simon Templar’s motivation in the original story. It’s still a very good thoroughly enjoyable episode.

Teresa

Teresa is set in Mexico, as was the original short story. Like most of the stories in Saint Errant Teresa was a fairly brief and deceptively simple short story with a clever sting in the tail. A woman, Teresa, is searching for her husband who disappeared a couple of years earlier. For TV the story had to be expanded very considerably with scriptwriter John Kruse adding a backstory in which the husband has carried out a failed assassination attempt on the President of Mexico. He’s also added a fun circus background. The extra material is effective and entertaining.

Eventually right at the end we get to the core of Charteris’s story, with Teresa and Simon Templar finding the bandit El Rojo who holds the key to the mystery.

The episode works extremely well and it’s a fine example of the successful and almost seamless integration of library footage (the circus scenes) with new material. There are a couple of dodgy process shots but for me that adds to the fun.

Luella

Luella is a tale of blackmail. The action is moved from Los Angeles in the original story to London. Big-time American banker Bill Harvey and Simon are old friends. While Bill’s wife is in Paris he decides to sample the London night-life and gets himself set up by blackmailing gang. Luella (played by the luscious Sue Lloyd) is the bait in the trap. Worse is to come when Bill’s wife finds out about his little misadventure. Somehow Simon has to come up with a scheme to get Bill off the hook, and put the blackmailers out of business.

One interesting feature is that the original story specifically mentions the Saint’s practice of returning stolen or extorted money to its rightful owners, less a commission for himself. That commission is not mentioned in the TV episode - it would after all have made the Saint appear to be profiting from crime.

While a tongue-in-cheek flavour is fairly standard in this series this episode is rather startling and unusual in that it’s played as out-and-out farce (and with occasional forays into slapstick). It works more successfully than one might have expected although I’m glad it was an experiment that wasn’t tried too often.

As was the case with Lida Patricia Holm is eliminated from the story in the TV adaptation. Since she played an important part in the story the plot had to be altered so that Bill Harvey’s wife Doris becomes the Saint’s accomplice in his plan to checkmate the blackmailers.

David Hedison, who later the same year (1964) would achieve major TV stardom in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, guest stars as Bill Harvey and displays a totally unexpected enthusiasm for farce.

Final Thoughts

These are all fairly brief short stories which rely on having one really effective twist at the end. Leslie Charteris happened to be rather good at providing such twists. All six stories had to be expanded for television, in some cases dramatically expanded, and in general the additional material is entertaining even if it sometimes slows the pacing a little.

The more I see of this series the more I grow to like it, and the more I find myself appreciating Roger Moore’s performance. These six episodes range from fairly good to extremely good.

Diagnosis Murder season 1 (1993)

One of the more interesting of American pop culture phenomena of the late 20th century was the geriatric television detective series. Or perhaps it would be kinder to speak of senior detectives. This particular craze probably began with the hugely successful Barnaby Jones series. There were other key series, like Matlock, but the most successful of them all was Murder, She Wrote, one of the most popular crime series of all time. A late entrant in this genre was Diagnosis Murder which premiered on CBS in 1993.

Dick Van Dyke is the star and the cast includes his real life son Barry Van Dyke, playing Dr Sloan’s cop son Steve. I don’t think anyone is going to argue that Dick Van Dyke is a great actor but what can’t be denied is that he is a star. He’s very much like Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote - he has the charisma and he has the likeability and he has the same compulsive watchability.

There’s also Scott Baio (from Happy Days) as the cheerful Dr Jack Stewart who gets roped into crime-solving as well. He’s surprisingly good but there is one slight problem. Baio is Italian, he looks Italian and he sounds Italian. Who on earth decided to give him a Scottish name?

Dr Sloan seems to spend more time investigating crimes than treating patients and he gets plenty of help from both Dr Stewart and Dr Amanda Bentley.

The plots are not always brilliant or staggeringly original but they’re generally pretty solid and they’re executed with conviction.

The most difficult things to get right in a series like this are the tone and the balance. It has to be light-hearted enough to be fun but it must not descend into parody or out-and-out farce. There has to be humour but it must not be allowed to overwhelm the plots. And Diagnosis Murder mostly does get these things right.

It’s also refreshing to find a series made as recently as this (it ran from 1993 to 2001) that eschews graphic violence, gore and bad language. Although they’re both series about crime-fighting doctors Diagnosis Murder is noticeably less gruesome than Quincy, M.E., made fifteen years earlier. Diagnosis Murder is a reminder that a television series can be wholesome and still be very entertaining.

The Episode Guide

The season one opener is Miracle Cure. This is an inverted mystery story. We know who the killer is right from the start. We don’t know why a priest would be a killer. It’s actually a hit-and-run incident that would not never have attracted the attention of the police except that Dr Mark Sloan is puzzled by the death of the hit-and-run victim. He’s not surprised that the victim died but he is surprised, very surprised, that he seems to have died of heart failure. That just doesn’t make sense. And when things don’t make sense Dr Mark Sloan gets rather curious and starts poking about in matters that don’t concern him.

Amnesia involves a professional hit woman who wants to become a patient at Community General so she can carry out her assassination. Since there’s a senator in the hospital it seems reasonable to assume he’s the target. The plan is just about perfect, if only Dr Mark Sloan hadn’t started asking awkward questions and if only Dr Jack Stewart hadn’t noticed some some odd things about a certain female patient.

Telethons were one of the more bizarre manifestations of 20th century popular culture and they still survived in 1993. And in Murder at the Telethon a telethon provides a pretty good opportunity for a murder. The murder victim is Buddy Blake (Dom DeLuise), a has-been comic. Everybody who has ever met Buddy Blake has a motive for killing him. This is an episode that is totally excessive and outrageous but it works extremely well.

In Inheritance of Death Mark’s rich 93-year-old cousin wants to leave his vast fortune to Community General Hospital but he also believes that his three children are trying to kill him. Mark is inclined to think the old boy could be right. The gimmick here is that Dick Van Dyke plays the 93-year-old and the three possibly murderous children. He of course hams it up. The results are silly but reasonably amusing.

In Vanishing Act Steve Sloan has his suspicions that some of the detectives at the 15th Precinct are corrupt. He makes a report to an Internal Affairs officer but then everything goes wrong and Steve finds himself facing a murder charge. This is a two-parter and while it isn’t a bad story I don’t think it’s the right kind of story for this series. It’s a hardboiled tale of crooked cops and gangsters. It seems to be two completely different productions. It’s as if Dr Sloan and his son along with Dr Jack Stewart and most of the guest cast are making a tough gritty cop show while the various regular cast members at the hospital are making a broad comedy and then somebody has spliced the two together. The two halves are just too discordant. And Dick Van Dyke does not belong in a hardboiled gangster story (Scott Baio on the other hand manages quite well). It’s an interesting episode because it seems like it may have been intended as a bit of an experiment but for my money it doesn’t quite come off.

The 13 Million Dollar Man is much more the sort of story that suits this series. A patient named Dale Harlan dies of gunshot wounds and leaves Mark Sloan with a winning lottery ticket, worth 13 million dollars, and instructions to use the money to do some good. There are however three other people who believe that the ticket should by rights be theirs. And Mark suspects that one of those three people murdered Harlan. Mark comes up with some clever schemes to unmask the killer. There’s plenty of fun, some effective humour and a very neat plot. And it’s all extremely well executed. An excellent episode.

Shanda's Song is another case of a fairly clever plot but again a story that doesn’t seem quite right for the series. Someone is trying to murder rock star Shanda. Had it been an ageing rock star from the 60s it might have made sense but Shanda is supposed to be the latest thing among trendy twenty-somethings. Which kind of suggests that someone thought the series should try to to appeal to trendy twenty-somethings, a remarkably optimistic idea.

In The Restless Remains investment guru Robin Westlin arrives on Mark Sloan’s doorstep and promptly dies. By the time the ambulance arrives the body has disappeared. Since Mark had just been to the dentist and had a head full of nitrous oxide everyone assumes he was hallucinating. Mark thinks so too, until he finds Westlin’s diary under his couch. Now he has to prove that Westlin is dead and then find out who did it. This is a tightly constructed and very entertaining story.

I just love murder mysteries dealing with stage magic and Murder with Mirrors is a good one. An extremely unpleasant magician named Madison dies performing his most famous trick. There are four people with very strong motives for killing him and three have unbreakable alibis. The fourth is Madison’s partner and also an old friend of Mark’s so he’s naturally arrested but Mark is determined to prove his innocence. The solution is very simple and obvious once it’s revealed but it’s one of those simple solutions you’ll almost certainly  be fooled by. Which is a fine recipe for a murder mystery plot. An excellent episode.

Flashdance with Death is much more far-fetched but it is ingenious and it has a rather unexpected twist. It’s another murder with a theatrical background (which gives Dick Van Dyke the opportunity to show off his tap-dancing skills). There’s murder at a dance studio and Steve Sloan’s girlfriend is a suspect. A solid episode.

It seems like all of Mark Sloan’s relatives and friends are going to end up being murder suspects and in Reunion with Murder it’s Dr Amanda Bentley. Since she’s one of Sloan’s crime-solving buddies he’s naturally anxious to clear her. It seems that in college she was one of the mean girls who made life hell for Nancy Barlow. Now Nancy is out for revenge and she has some very juicy dirt on all her former tormentors. It’s no surprise that this leads to murder. A decent episode.

In Lily Jack’s old friend Sandy Hoyle has become a high-class call girl with a sideline in blackmail. It’s a dangerous game to play, and it’s especially dangerous for someone as foolish as Sandy. Predictably she gets herself murdered. The police write it off as an OD but Jack and Dr Sloan have come across some very interesting clues that point unequivocally to murder. A decent episode.

In Guardian Angel the mayor gets murdered. There’s an obvious suspect but Mark is sure that he didn’t do it. He has his own ideas about the actual identity of the killer. There’s an alibi that is just too flimsy and there’s a red car that was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A routine episode.

Nirvana is quite enjoyable although seasoned mystery buffs will probably spot the surprise twist fairly early. Yet another of Jack Stewart’s disreputable friends has landed himself in trouble. It’s the sort of trouble that is likely to lead your body being found in the burnt-out wreck of a car. The car happens to belong to Dr Jack Stewart. Dr Sloan checks in to the Nirvana health farm looking for clues (that’s where Jack’s friend used to work). Both Dr Stewart and Dr Sloan end this story battered and bruised, for very different reasons, and Jack gets a chance to play the hero. Excellent episode.

Broadcast Blues  is an impossible crime story. Convict Paul Dunbar is taken to Community General for tests that cannot be performed at the prison hospital. He escapes and takes a hostage, and demands to speak to TV anchorman Jordan Sanders. Sanders agrees to meet him. Shots are fired through a partially opened door and the end result is both Dunbar and Sanders dead. It is absolutely clear what has happened. Dunbar killed Sanders and then killed himself. There is no other possible explanation. Until Mark Sloan realises that it simply could not have happened this way.

The solution is fairly simple but it works. The key to the success of the plot is that what we actually know is not quite the same as what we’re sure of because it must have been that way. A very fine episode.

There are lots of things to worry about when you’re in the middle of an earthquake so you normally wouldn’t have time to think about committing a murder. But in Shaker a murder des take place during an earthquake. A solid episode.

Hitman Bruno Crespi is a really sick guy. Now even hitmen can get sick but it’s the nature of the illness which is unusual. Bruno Crespi has bubonic plague. So The Plague is a medical disaster tale but there’s a crime element as well, centring on how exactly Crespi managed to get infected. Another solid episode.

Sister Michael Wants You is a very light-hearted tale of murder in a nunnery, with a hardboiled Mother Superior and a missing clue that has to be somewhere in the nunnery but repeated searches have come up blank. A fun story.

Final Thoughts

My main doubt about Diagnosis Murder is that I get the feeling that no-one was quite sure exactly which demographic they were trying to chase. Mostly they seemed to be after the demographic that had made Murder, She Wrote such a huge hit. Which would have been a very sensible strategy. But then you get episodes like Vanishing Act and Shanda’s Song that seem to be chasing a totally different audience. If Murder, She Wrote sometimes errs by being just a bit too cosy Diagnosis Murder makes the opposite mistake by occasionaly not being cosy enough.

Obviously it’s a series that to some extent recalls Quincy, M.E. but despite the latter’s pretensions to being more scientific Diagnosis Murder is generally less far-fetched. Not that Quincy, M.E isn’t a fine series but at times it stretches credibility a little.

The Region 4 DVD release includes as a bonus the Jake and the Fatman episode It Never Entered My Mind which featured Dick Van Dyke and was in effect an unofficial pilot for Diagnosis Murder.

On the whole though this is a thoroughly enjoyable series and much better than I’d expected. Recommended.

Columbo, Now You See Him / Last Salute to the Commodore (1976)

The final two episodes of Columbo season five, screened in 1976, were the excellent Now You See Him and the controversial Last Salute to the Commodore.

I’m particularly enamoured of murder mysteries that involve stage magic. Magic and murder just seem to go so well together. Now You See Him is a very good example of this sub-genre.

The celebrated illusionist the Great Santini (Jack Cassidy) has a pretty good alibi for the murder of his business associate Jesse Jerome. At the time of the murder Santini was locked in a metal trunk suspended in a tank of water. That’s pretty much the ultimate alibi. Except that, as Santini cheerfully admits, how much store is anyone going to put in an alibi for an illusionist. Maybe he was in the trunk during the trick. Maybe he wasn’t. He’s an illusionist, so really he could have been anywhere!

In fact the method by which the trick is worked is a fiercely guarded secret. Apart from Santini himself his daughter Della (Cynthia Sikes) knows the answer. And neither of them has any intention of revealing the secret. So Columbo has a suspect who may or may not have an airtight alibi.

Jack Cassidy was an extraordinary larger-than-life style of actor and in this episode he gives a particularly extravagant performance. Which of course is exactly as it should be. Santini is a very smart guy, his professional career (and a very successful career it has been) has been based on his ability to fool people and he has also been able to guard some very deep and dark personal secrets. He’s exactly the type of hyper-confident and fiendishly clever suspect that we love to see matching wits against Columbo.

The magic tricks are not there just to provide an exotic background. They’re an integral part of the plot. Michael Sloan’s script works perfectly. Everything in this story works perfectly. Now You See Him is a delight.

Last Salute to the Commodore wraps up the fifth season. Commodore Otis Swanson (John Dehner) owns a boat yard. A very big boat yard. He is a celebrated yacht designer and his business is worth a very great deal of money. His son-in-law Charlie Clay (Robert Vaughn) takes care of the day-to-day running of the business but increasingly the Commodore and Charlie have not been seeing eye to eye. Charlie may be on the way out. In fact the Commodore has had just about enough of his whole family, including his permanently drunk daughter Joanna (married to Charlie Clay). The Commodore seems to have been contemplating some major changes that would have been rather disagreeable to almost everyone.

It’s not a great surprise that the Commodore meets with an accident. It’s one of those accidents that you can kind of see coming.

Both Columbo and the audience learn quite a few things about yachts in this episode. Things like self-steering vanes and gybing. Gybing was probably the cause of the tragic accident that cost the Commodore his life. Assuming of course that it was an accident, and Lieutenant Columbo assumes no such thing.

Patrick McGoohan directed this episode and it’s definitely an attempt to do something different with the established Columbo formula. It’s stylistically different, with some eccentric framing and some offbeat pacing and some odd acting performances. There’s a subtle difference in the tone - a bit more edgy and a bit more histrionic.


This is also a departure from the usual formula in that Columbo is given a sidekick. In fact he’s given two sidekicks! A sergeant plus a young up-and-coming detective who is imposed on Columbo by someone very senior in the department.

There’s also a great deal of humour. Some of the humour works very well, some doesn’t.

The differences are not just stylistic although I can’t say anything more than that.

This is a rather controversial episode that is strongly disliked by most Columbo fans. In fact it’s strongly disliked by almost everyone. The script was written by Jackson Gillis but I’m inclined to think that the episode’s peculiarities were mostly the work of Patrick McGoohan. It really does have McGoohan’s fingerprints all over it. This is the McGoohan who was responsible for The Prisoner and it has so many of the characteristics that distinguished The Prisoner - the same anarchic quality, the uneasy mixing of black humour and drama, the odd pacing, the very experimental feel, the touches of self-conscious artiness, the hints of the surreal (very strange in a Columbo episode), the wilful and deliberate eccentricity, the staginess, the bizarre acting performances.

It’s a risky approach and you can’t help expecting that at any moment it’s going to crash and burn. And that’s exactly what happens. It really is very much like the less successful episodes of The Prisoner, especially the disastrous later episodes of that series. It’s a slow-moving trainwreck but it’s a fascinating trainwreck. It’s not all bad. It’s a mixture of very bad ideas and very good ideas. McGoohan was a genius but he was a very flawed genius. It has to be said that he never lacked the courage to push things to an extreme. Having decided to do a very different kind of Columbo episode he can’t be accused of half-measures.

The fifth season really did have some strange moments. Some superb episodes and quite a few that were intriguingly offbeat. There was obviously a feeling that steps needed to be taken to keep things fresh. It’s an uneven season but overall it’s surprisingly strong. Highly recommended.

The A-Team, season 2 (1983-84)

Season two of The A-Team aired in 1983-84 and it’s pretty much the formula as before. And this is a very formulaic series. That should be a problem but it isn’t really - if you have enough energy and style you don’t need to worry too much about being dazzlingly original. In fact the familiarity of the formulaic elements becomes an asset - they’re things you look forward to seeing in every episode.

I don’t think anybody ever watched this series for the tight plotting. The plots, such as they are, are an excuse for lots of cartoonish action, lots of gags and and for the actors to have some fun playing the outrageous larger-than-life characters who comprise the A-Team. It was all about fun. If you expect more from television than fun then The A-Team is not for you. But if you’re satisfied with fun then this series provides it in copious quantities.

And for a series that seems on the surface to be unbelievably violent it’s actually good clean fun suitable for all the family. Despite the expenditure of thousands of rounds of ammunition every episode no-one actually gets hurt and you know that nobody is going to get hurt. There’s also (compared to contemporary television) a refreshing lack of moral ambiguity. There are bad guys and they get what’s coming to them, and there are good guys and you know they’ll come out of it OK. Moral ambiguity is all very well but it’s something you can get very tired of.

You can also get very tired of television shows that are dark and edgy. The A-Team is not the least bit dark and edgy.

Of course technically the A-Team are criminals, but they’re criminals in the way that Zorro or the Green Hornet or the Saint are criminals. We know they aren’t criminals at all.

It’s also nice not to have to worry too much about plausibility. The A-Team doesn’t worry about plausibility one little bit.

Amy Allen (Melinda Culea) quietly disappears from the show’s lineup during this season. Whether a female team member was really necessary is perhaps debatable but she was likeable enough. Obviously the producers did think a female regular cast member was necessary as Tawnia Baker (Maria Heasley) is later introduced a a kind of replacement for Amy.

The Military Police, in the person of the indefatigable Colonel Decker (Lance LeGault), continue to grimly pursue the A-Team without any notable success. While he’s a humourless martinet he’s not really a villain. He is just doing his job, even if if he’s doing it with excessive zeal. And Lance LeGault was always a superb heavy.

OK, maybe Dwight Schultz goes a little too far over the top at times as Howling Mad Murdock but this is after all a series that is aimed to a large extent at kids and if you’re twelve years old then he’s hysterically funny. And if you’ve totally lost touch with your twelve-year-old self then you're probably not going to enjoy The A-Team anyway.

The Episode Guide

Diamonds 'n Dust opens the season in fine style. A pretty blonde Australian girl needs help to get her African diamond mine running in the face of opposition by a very crooked operator. Naturally there’s lots of mayhem including one of the improvised weapon systems that are always a fun feature of this series. One thing I liked about this episode is that the A Team is definitely doing this job for the money. Sure they like the idea of helping out a pretty girl but they also like the idea of the very big pay cheque involved.

Recipe for Heavy Bread has the A-Team helping out an old army buddy from their Vietnam days. Except that Lin Duk Coo was actually A North Vietnamese guard at a POW camp in which the A-Team guys spent some time. But Lin was a real nice guy and they really liked him and if he’s in trouble they’re going to help him. Lin is not the only Vietnam War connection in this episode. There’s also a North Vietnamese general and he wasn’t a nice guy and now he’s mixed up in something pretty sinister. A good episode.

In The Only Church in Town Face wants to help out an old friend but finds he’ll have to hire the A-Team himself if he wants the other guys to help him. The old friend is the only woman he’s ever loved but she dumped him fifteen years ago and he hasn’t seen her since. The A-Team is off to Ecuador and they’re going to be mixed up with nuns, orphans  and bandits. Another good episode.

Bad Time on the Border has the A-Team battling a gang that is smuggling Mexicans across the border, into virtual slavery. There’s nothing startlingly original here but it has all the classic A-Team ingredients (including an improvised armoured vehicle and hubcap bombs) and they’re all combined perfectly and it all works. And it has lots of nice little one-liners.

When You Comin' Back, Range Rider? is a wonderful western romp with the A-Team going after rustlers. Not cattle rustlers, but horse rustlers. The bad guy is an evil cattle rancher. It has all the classic western ingredients with particular highlights being the train holdups (there’s even a vintage steam locomotive to pull the train). And then there’s B.A.’s improvised armoured train. Murdock convinces himself he’s the TV western hero the Range Rider. It’s a two-part episode and it also introduces a new would-be nemesis for the A-Team - Colonel Decker is a hard-nosed gung ho military police officer and he intends to succeed where Colonel Lynch failed and bring the A-Team to justice.

The Taxicab Wars is one of the best season two episodes. It’s a nice idea. There’s a bit of a war going on between two rival taxicab companies. Things are getting a bit nasty, with cabs being sabotaged and drivers being beaten up. Finally, facing financial ruin, the Lone Star Taxi Company calls in the A-Team. And the A-Team turns a commercial rivalry into full-scale urban warfare. Hannibal Smith and his pals don’t believe in half measures. If you’re going to get rough, go the whole hog, with massive destruction. It’s an outrageous over-reaction but it’s a lot of fun - everyone at some point in his life has wanted to respond to injustice with massive deadly force and this episode lets you live out those fantasies. Plus it’s fun seeing the horrified reactions of passengers to the mayhem and craziness unleashed by the A-Team.

Labor Pains is like The A-Team meets Norma Rae. In this story they help oppressed farm workers set up a union. This is a lesser episode, not so much because it’s so overtly political but mostly because it just doesn’t have the necessary imaginative action sequences. It’s all a bit too routine although the van through the 55 m.p.h. sign sequence is fun.

There's Always a Catch takes the A-Team to the seaside, to the cut-throat world of lobster fishing. There’s an evil mobster guy terrorising the decent fisher folk. The problem for the A-Team is that Colonel Decker is hot on their trail and the sensible thing would be for them to get out of town as fast as they can. But there’s no way they’re going to do that when there are people they’ve promised to help. This time Decker really thinks he’s going to nail the A-Team. It’s the usual mix of action and fun and it’s thoroughly enjoyable.

Water, Water Everywhere has a basic plot that has been used countless times. Big rancher Frank Gaines is trying to squeeze out three disabled Vietnam vets in a dispute over water rights. It’s the little guy getting shafted and the A-Team don’t like seeing that happen to the little guy. There’s the usual action and there’s the usual improvised weaponry cooked up by B.A. and it’s all very much according to the A-Team formula and it works. And who doesn’t like to see the little guy come out on top?

Steel is all about demolishing buildings, and about a company that discovers that some very powerful very nasty people are determined to stop them from going about their lawful business of tearing down buildings. The A-Team seems to be their only hope but even Hannibal Smith is worried when he realises the people he’s up against this time. Typical A-Team stuff and lots of fun.

The White Ballot deals with a subject that American television never ever tires of, the corrupt small town sheriff. The hackneyed subject matter doesn’t matter since The A-Team is a style over substance affair and this episode has the essential A-Team style in spades.

The Maltese Cow is a very strong episode. The A-Team goes up against a Tong that is trying to force their old buddy Sam Yeng to pay protection money. Taking on a Tong is like trying to fight a small army but the A-Team are not daunted.

Chinatown is a fine setting for an A-team adventure. There are some witty fight sequences and there’s some lovely hardboiled dialogue. Murdock is in fine form, channeling Humphrey Bogart except that he thinks he’s on the trail of the Maltese Cow. Cult movie fans will be pleased to see veteran actor Keye Luke (number one son in the early Charlie Chan movies and later a regular on Kung Fu) playing Sam Yeng.

In Plane Sight takes the A-Team to Venezuela where they have to clear an American pilot of drug-smuggling charges. It’s a three-cornered contest with the A-Team, the drug smugglers and the Venezuelan Federales all hunting each other through the jungle. Murdock is being particularly disturbing in this story. He’s not doing anything crazy. That’s what’s disturbing. The team finds a new way to persuade B.A. to submit to flying. And there’s a plane chase through the jungle with the plane never leaving the ground. It’s mostly the familiar and very successful A-Team formula but with a few little twists and it’s a lot of fun.

The Battle of Bel Air introduces Tawnia Baker. She’s a reporter and she’s been working undercover at a very high-end security firm and she’s discovered some disturbing facts about the company. She’s also discovered some facts about the A-Team, facts which interest her a great deal. She doesn’t just want to hire the A-Team. She wants to join them. She wants to take Amy’s place. The A-Team do not want another member and they’re not sure they trust her at all but she’s landed herself in great danger and they pretty much have to help her out. They also have to foil a sinister assassination plot.

Improvised armoured vehicles are a fairly standard feature of A-Team episodes but this time around they improvise a helicopter gunship which leads to a rather cool aerial battle. It’s another episode that more or less follows the standard formula for the series but with enough variations to make it very entertaining.

Someone within the U.S.Army is selling Army weapons on the black market, someone else has discovered what is going on and that second someone has been murdered. It’s a case for the A-Team and Say It with Bullets is obviously likely to provide plenty of trademark A-Team mayhem.

Pure-Dee Poison pits the A-Team against moonshiners. Only these aren’t romantic rebel moonshiners, they’re selling stuff that is basically poison and quite a few people have already died as a result. A clergyman who’s an ex-paratrooper asks the A-Team for help. Tawnia plays a reasonably active rôle in this tale. There’s some classic A-Team mayhem. It’s good fun.

It's a Desert Out There pits the A-Team against the Scorpions, a gang that robs tourists who’ve won big at a local gambling joint. The Scorpions seem to be planning some other kind of operation, something big. They ride around in armoured dune buggies. There’s plenty of action as usual, with the A-Team in an armoured bus battling the Scorpions in their armed dune buggies which gives the episode an interesting slight post-apocalyptic Mad Max 2 kind of feel. A good episode.

Chopping Spree is a fun story about car thieves.

Harder Than It Looks is a slight departure from the usual formula - B.A. doesn’t get to construct any improvised armoured cars or similar gadgets. There are some nice twists though, and plenty of action. And B.A. encounters a guy who is almost as tough as he is. And he keeps on encountering him. It becomes the episode’s running gag. Lots of fun in this outing.

Deadly Maneuvers is another departure from the standard formula. This time instead of helping other people in trouble it’s the A-Team that needs help. A criminal syndicate that has suffered at their hands has employed a crack squad of four very mean mercenaries to exterminate Hannibal Smith and his men. But the A-Team isn’t that easy to exterminate. A very good episode with plenty of action.

In Semi-Friendly Persuasion a Christian sect that is being driven out of a town asks the A-Team for help. The only problem is that the help has to be non-violent and the A-Team is not exactly famous for its non-violent methods. How long are non-violent methods going to work against very violent people, and how long will the A-Team persevere with such methods? An interesting story about very uncompromising people.

Curtain Call is a bit of a filler episode, being padded out with flashbacks to earlier episodes. Murdock is badly hurt and everyone thinks he’s going to die so they’re remembering all his madcap adventures. Meanwhile Colonel Decker is closing on on them. A bit of a disappointing end to the season but the escape sequence is clever.

Final Thoughts

There are a few attempts in the latter part of season two to vary the formula just a little, and they manage to work without departing from the show’s essential spirit.

If you liked the first season you’ll like this one. Highly recommended.