highlights of my cult TV viewing of 2018

These were the highlights of my cult TV viewing in 2018. Not necessarily the best cult TV I watched, but the most rewarding in terms of exiting new discoveries, and some rediscoveries of forgotten old favourites.

The most exciting new discovery was Airwolf, which I think may well have been the best action adventure series of the 80s. With the 1984 first season being outstanding.

A fun rediscovery was Land of the Giants (1968) which turned out to be quite a bit better than my hazy memories initially suggested. Maybe not great TV science fiction but very enjoyable and with mostly fairly impressive special effects.

The Guardians (1971) is a British dystopian political thriller with some very unexpected subtleties and complexities.

There was also The F.B.I., an uneven, occasionally odd but interesting crime series.

As far as individual episodes are concerned the Danger Man episode Colony Three (1965) was the best of the year. The 1975 The Crazy Kill from Brian Clemens’ Thriller series was also exceptionally good with a great performance from Anthony Valentine.

Adventure and Comic Strip: Exploring Tara King’s The Avengers (book review)

There have been quite a few non-fiction books on The Avengers, but not too many dealing specifically with the Tara King era. So that in itself is a strong recommendation for Rodney Marshall’s 2013 tome Adventure and Comic Strip: Exploring Tara King’s The Avengers. An even better recommendation is that Marshall takes a very favourable view of this period of the show’s history.

Having said all this I’m not entirely sure I can recommend this book. The big problem is that it’s kind of thin. There’s really not much to it. Basically it’s just an episode guide, and not a very detailed one. On the plus side he doesn’t give us just a synopsis of each episode. There is a bit of analysis. It’s not too in-depth but it’s a bit more than just fanboy gushing. On the whole he avoids pretentious academic jargon and he generally doesn’t try to ram his political views down the reader’s throat (which is a very unusual thing for a book published in our modern age).

The episode guides are reasonably stimulating and he shows a real understanding of the appeal of the series.

The biggest plus is that Marshall doesn’t start out with the prejudice that of course the Tara King era was inferior to the Emma Peel era and that of course Linda Thorson was a poor replacement for Diana Rigg. Marshall approaches the series with an open mind and finds a great deal to like about the Tara King episodes. Since I happen to be a very big Tara fan this naturally inclines me to approve of the book.

You just can’t get away from the fact that there’s not a great deal of text here. And there are no illustrations.

Marshall is incidentally the son of Roger Marshall, one of the great British television writers of the 60s and 70s.

Adventure and Comic Strip is a welcome reassessment of a much maligned period of the history of one of the great television series so I’m inclined to recommend it in spite of its thinness.

McCloud season 1 (1970)

The 1970s was a real golden age for American TV mystery/detective series. There were good 70s cop shows and good 70s private eye shows but the most enjoyable and most characteristic American 70s crime shows were the puzzle-plot murder mysteries in which a brilliant detective matches wits with a brilliant criminal. Columbo was the most famous of these series but Ellery Queen and Banacek were every bit as good, and McMillan and Wife had its moments.

And there was also McCloud. It ran for seven years on NBC so it was one of the most successful of the genre.

What all these series had in common, apart from obvious structural similarities, was that they had colourful and charismatic detective heroes. McCloud certainly qualifies on both counts. Sam McCloud is a Deputy Marshal from a one-horse town in New Mexico. An important case takes him to New York City and for reasons which never really make sense he ends up being on more or less permanent loan to the NYPD. The NYPD isn’t quite sure what to do with him, he can be a bit of an embarrassment but on the other hand he does keep on solving major cases for them.

Dennis Weaver had had a long career already by this time but in McCloud he demonstrates considerable and hitherto unsuspected star quality. When you take Weaver’s performance, combine it with the fish-out-of-water country hick teaching the city slickers a thing or two theme and some fairly solid scripts you have the ingredients for a pretty entertaining series.

Portrait of a Dead Girl was the pilot episode. Deputy Marshal Sam McCloud has to track down a witness who has ignored a subpoena. He finds him in the wilds of New Mexico. McCloud is not altogether thrilled at the idea of having to escort the prisoner all the way to New York, but McCloud always does his duty.

The witness, James Waldron (Shelley Novack), may be able to give evidence that would overturn the conviction of Luis Ramos for the murder of a beauty queen. Or his evidence may have an entirely different effect. No-one knows but clearly someone does not want Waldron to testify since he is kidnapped as soon as he arrives in New York. This is pretty embarrassing for McCloud and he intends to find the kidnapped witness and those responsible for snatching him.

McCloud’s presence in New York is unwelcome to chief of detectives Peter Clifford (Peter Mark Richman). Ramos’s defence attorney Del Whitman (Craig Stevens) also seems disturbed by McCloud’s presence. The one person who is delighted by McCloud is journalist Chris Coughlin (Diana Muldaur). She’s written a book on the beauty queen murder but she doesn’t seem to care if McCloud finds evidence to discredit her book. She finds him fascinating and she’s a good enough reporter to know that Sam McCloud is good copy and hanging around with him will undoubtedly be useful to her career-wise.

The plot is pretty far-fetched. It also has some political overtones and that’s something that American television invariably did poorly.

Dennis Weaver was already well known to viewers from his rôle in the long-running Gunsmoke series. McCloud made him a bona fide star. He’s perfect as the Deputy Marshal from New Mexico. He doesn’t overdo the wide-eyed innocence and he doesn’t overdo the dumb hick thing. Sam McCloud finds New York to be a very strange place but he’s a smart cop and he learns quickly and he’s nobody’s fool. To some extent he uses the Columbo technique of persuading suspects to underestimate him.

Diana Muldaur is a semi-regular character in the series and provides a love interest for Sam McCloud as well as managing to get him lots of publicity which gets him into constant trouble. She’s pretty good. Terry Carter as Sergeant Joe Broadhurst plays the sidekick rôle and does it fairly effectively.

Portrait of a Dead Girl doesn’t quite gel for me, partly because I just didn’t but the central plot idea as being plausible. But it does introduce Sam McCloud effectively enough.

The first episode of the first season proper is Who Says You Can't Make Friends in New York City? McCloud has been posted to Peter Clifford’s precinct in New York to learn about big city policing. I have no idea why a Deputy Marshal from New Mexico would need to learn such things but the premise of the whole series is that it’s about a hick cop in the big city so some justification for his continued presence had to be cooked up. McCloud proves to be a bit of an embarrassment to Clifford who is overjoyed when he finds an excuse to ship McCloud back to New Mexico. The only problem is that McCloud refuses to go until he’s cleared up the case he’s stumbled into.

Horse Stealing on Fifth Avenue is about actual horse stealing on Fifth Avenue, and it’s about a gunman who won’t kill. It’s an offbeat tale and it plays to the strengths of McCloud as a character - he gets to crack a few down-home jokes, he gets to demonstrate his gift for understanding and empathising with people and he gets to approach a case in his own inimitable and unconventional way. And he gets to play the climactic action scene on horseback!

The rodeo comes to New York in The Concrete Corral and McCloud is assigned to keep an eye on the cowboys. He’s pretty annoyed by this since he’d rather be chasing actual criminals but he’ll find plenty to keep him occupied with those cowboys, especially when their dramas lead to murder. And McCloud finds that when you have to track down a country boy it’s a definite advantage to be able to think like a country boy yourself. A decent episode.

The Stage Is All the World plunges McCloud into the world of the theatre where a megalomaniac producer is receiving death threats but he has a track record of publicity stunts so the threats may or may not be bogus. The threats still have to be taken seriously, and McCloud is inclined to think there really is a tragedy brewing. A pretty solid episode.

In Walk in the Dark McCloud gets assigned to an all-female squad for training. As you might expect there’s a fair bit of politically incorrect humour (in fact there’s quite a bit of political incorrectness in this episode, this being 1970 when it wasn’t necessary to tread so carefully). McCloud fears he’s going to be stuck investigating shoplifting incidents but in fact he finds himself in the middle of a multiple murder case, with one of the victims being a policewoman. He’s not supposed to be on the murder case but when Sam McCloud is given an instruction he tends to interpret it rather loosely. He also finds time for some romantic dalliance with a pretty young policewoman (played by Susan Saint James). There are some interesting moral subtexts to this story, subtexts you would never get away with today, wth McCloud being less than happy about young women being used as bait for a murderer. It’s a good story with a solution that is a bit far-fetched but still quite clever.

Our Man in Paris is a change of pace. What could possibly be more fun than having a Deputy Marshal from Taos, New Mexico running loose in New York City? That’s easy. Having a Deputy Marshal from Taos, New Mexico running loose in Paris. Chief Clifford is held hostage and McCloud is forced to fly to Paris with a briefcase full of money, very hot money. It’s not all bad though, since McCloud strikes up a friendship with a pretty French stewardess. One thing they do appreciate in Taos, New Mexico is a pretty girl, and McCloud appreciates them more than most (and it has to be said that the ladies seem to find him irresistible). This is a fine thriller episode to close out the first season.

A word of warning in regard to the DVD releases of McCloud. After their original broadcast the six first season episodes were clumsily edited together into three feature-length episodes. The editing was done so badly that some of the original writers and directors subsequently had their names removed from the credits in disgust. The original hour-long episodes were later lost. When McCloud was released on DVD in the U.S. only the butchered movie-length versions were available and and so those were the ones issued on DVD. Then Madman Entertainment in Australia located the original hour-long versions, which fortunately were in excellent condition. Madman’s Australian DVD release of the first season includes both the original hour-long versions and the edited feature-length versions. So if you’re going to buy the first season on DVD the Madman release (which is in print and easily obtainable in the U.S.) is the only one to consider buying. Of course you’ll need to remember that the Madman release is Region 4.

McCloud isn’t quite in the same league as Columbo or Banacek but it’s still very enjoyable viewing and it’s recommended. There you go.

The F.B.I., season one part one (1965)

The F.B.I. was one of the many hit TV series in the action/adventure genre made by Quinn Martin Productions in the 1960s. In fact it was the most successful of all Quinn Martin’s productions, running for nine seasons from 1965 to 1974. The F.B.I. has been released on DVD in half-season sets and it's the first part of season one with which this review is concerned.

In this series we always know the identity of the perpetrator right from the start, so these are inverted crime stories. This is also very much in the police procedural mould, with the interest lying in the methods used by the F.B.I. to hunt down wrongdoers.

The two lead characters are Inspector Lewis Erskine (Efrem Zimbalist Jr) and Special Agent Jim Rhodes (Stephen Brooks). Erskine is the old hand and he’s a complex character with some personal tragedies that he’s still working through. Rhodes is a young hotshot but he’s a decent guy and the two agents have a very amicable relationship.

You have to remember that this series originated in 1965 and in 1965 the idea of a series that painted the F.B.I. in an entirely heroic light seemed pretty reasonable. And this series really does present a very very favourable view of the Bureau. It was made with the blessing of J. Edgar Hoover (who was still F.B.I. Director at the time).

The fact that the series began its run in 1965 really is quite important. The F.B.I. deals with all sorts of crimes and this includes political crimes. In 1965 it could be assumed that any political crime would almost certainly be the work of communist agents working for Moscow. And it could be assumed that these communist agents would be working class. This is 1965, just before the social revolution of the 60s. Within a couple of years the F.B.I. would be looking for subversives at university campuses rather than among dock workers.

Social and sexual mores were also about to change radically. In the first season Erskine’s daughter Barbara and Special Agent Rhodes have fallen in love and want to get married. Erskine wants her to wait until she finishes college. Barbara and Rhodes want to get married straight away. Within a few years a senior F.B.I. officer like Inspector Erskine would be delighted by anything that would get his daughter away from the subversive atmosphere of university.

The Episode Guide
The Monster was a rather bizarre opening episode for any series. A con-man named Francis Jerome (Jeffrey Hunter) has escaped from a federal prison. Jerome preys on women. What the F.B.I. don’t know is that he also kills women. Jerome is a seriously weird guy with a weird history.

Erskine is convinced that Jerome will return to his home town. He also suspects that he will try to make contact with one of his previous victims, Jean Davis. There’s some rather odd flirtatious stuff going on between Jean Davis and Erskine. In fact Jean Davis is pretty seriously weird as well. This is just a weird episode.

Image in a Cracked Mirror is a lot better. Erskine and Rhodes are hunting an embezzler. Charles Gates (Jack Klugman) has covered his tracks well. He has managed to destroy every photograph that has ever been taken of him. No-one really seems to know what he looks like. He’s now on the run with his 13-year-old son and that could be his weakness. It’s a weakness that Erskine is prepared to exploit with a ruthlessness that shocks Rhodes. Erskine has an odd personal stake in this case because Gates reminds him of himself. A very good episode.

A Mouthful of Dust is like a flashback to the Wild West, with Erskine and Rhodes saddling up (with six-guns in their gun belts) to join a posse tracking down an Indian. Joe Cloud (Alejandro Rey) is accused of killing a man who raped his wife. Erskine had been Cloud’s commanding officer in Korea and Cloud turns to Erskine for help. Erskine doesn’t want to let Joe down, but he does. Can he then put things right? Can Cloud be persuaded to save himself? Rey’s performance is OK but the Argentina-born actor’s very strong accent is rather wrong and jarring. Italian-American Robert Blake is no more Native American than Rey but he pulls off the important rôle of Joe’s brother Pete Cloud much more successfully. An offbeat episode that works, up to a point.

Slow March Up a Steep Hill is a case of history repeating itself, or at least it seems like it. A bank in Exeter Maryland is robbed and the same bank is robbed again three days later. Everything about these robberies seems to parallel a similar case in 1938. And the 1938 bank robber has just been released from prison. Erskine trusts his instincts on this one. Everyone thinks he’s on the wrong track but he won’t compromise. An excellent episode.

The Insolents involves a very rich young man accused of murder. Special Agent Rhodes seems to have a personal stake in this case. It’s a mystery that appears to have only one solution but what if that solution is the wrong one? This time around it’s Rhodes who has to trust his instincts. Not a bad episode.

In To Free My Enemy Erskine has been trying to find evidence to convict pornographer Bert Anslem. Now his suspect has been kidnapped by a trio of cheap punks and Erskine has to save him. By saving him he may also be helping him to escape justice. But Erskine has no choice. He has to do his best to save Anslem. A good episode with with some cool police procedural stuff.

Given the priorities of the F.B.I. in the sixties it’s perhaps surprising that it’s not until the seventh episode, The Problem of the Honorable Wife, that the evil commies make their first appearance. They’re planing to sabotage the U.S. war effort in Vietnam by planting bombs on the San Francisco dockside. One of the saboteurs is married to a Japanese woman and she unwittingly puts the Feds on her husband’s trail. This is an episode in which Special Agent Rhodes, who is basically a decent young guy, feels just a little uncomfortable about working for the F.B.I. This is quite an interesting episode.

In Courage of a Conviction Lew Erskine should be a very happy man. He’s just caught up with a master forger who has eluded all law enforcement agencies for years. He’s a forger on the grand scale and it’s quite a feather in Erskine’s cap. But he’s not happy. It’s all because of a girl he saw in Ray Lang’s office. The girl is a junkie and Ray is a lawyer who has been supplying the F.B.I. with quality information for years. Ray and Lew are also old buddies. But what is Ray Lang doing with a junkie? As he connects the dots Lew realises  that the unshakeable case he had against that forgery suspect isn’t so unshakeable after all. This is one of a number of episodes that emphasises two key things about Lew Erskine. Firstly, he trusts his instincts no matter what. And secondly, he will risk his own career rather than see a man convicted if he becomes convinced that the man is innocent. Of course it not emphasises Erskine’s high moral standards but also those of the Bureau (and emphasising the honesty and probity of the F.B.I. was a pretty good idea for a series that relied heavily on the coöperation and goodwill of J. Edgar Hoover).

The Exiles would appear to be inspired by the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Exiles from a certain Latin American nation are planning to launch an invasion to overthrow the ruling dictator. The F.B.I. have to persuade the leader of the exiles, General Rafael Romero, not to go ahead with the invasion. It’s not that the U.S. government doesn’t want the dictator overthrown but the F.B.I. has intelligence that indicates that the invasion is guaranteed to be a messy and expensive failure and therefore very embarrassing to the U.S., especially given that the invasion is planned to be launched from Florida.

This is an intriguing one. General Romero and his private army (and his rich backer Maria Blanca) are not portrayed as being the bad guys, in fact they’re portrayed as heroes,  and yet they have to be stopped at all costs. And Erskine has to infiltrate Romero’s group and betray them. This is a surprisingly ethically complex tale and it’s also surprisingly realistic in depicting international relations as a frustrating quagmire. A very fine episode.

The Giant Killer is a total hoot. A fanatic is trying to sabotage a U.S. ballistic missile being transported by road to an Air Force base. This is not just a regular nuclear missile. This is a brand new design and it’s immensely important. If this missile is sabotaged the whole free world will be endangered and world communism will triumph. The paranoia is approaching Dr Strangelove levels in this episode. On the other hand it’s certainly exciting and the idea that a lone fanatic with a rifle can destroy a ballistic missile is intriguing. Robert Duvall is at his crazed best as the lone fanatic. The epilog to this episode is absolutely beyond belief. Dr Strangelove himself would have been embarrassed. A bizarre but weirdly and morbidly fascinating episode.

In All the Streets Are Silent automatic weapons are stolen from the U.S. Marine Corps. Erskine persuades cab driver Frankie Metro to turn informant but informing on the Murtaugh brothers is dangerous work. This one includes a fairly spectacular shoot-out. A pretty good episode.

An Elephant Is Like a Rope presents Erskine and Rhodes with an odd problem. They have a young man with a bullet wound in the head. He’s going to make a full recovery but is suffering from compete amnesia. So he can’t tell the G-Men where the half million dollars in his possession came from. There’s no actual evidence that he has committed any crime. The half million dollars seems to be clean. A strange little offbeat story but it works.

How to Murder an Iron Horse is somewhat silly but very enjoyable. It taps into 1950s obsessions that bad child-rearing practices were going to turn kids into juvenile delinquents. And this is really a typical 50s B-movie juvenile delinquent story with some bizarre diabolical criminal mastermind flourishes thrown in. A young man whose father was more interested in his model trains than his son now wants to blow up trains. Not model trains, real trains. And he demonstrates that he can indeed blow up a freight train. If he isn’t paid $100,000 he threatens to blow up a passenger train. It’s all quite crazy but if you like trains and explosions you’ll enjoy it.

Pound of Flesh is one of the few episodes in which we’re not sure of the identity of the criminal. The chaplain’s wife at an army base is murdered. Private First Class Byron Landy is the obvious suspect and there really isn’t much doubt of his guilt. In fact Erskine and Rhodes wouldn’t have any doubts about the case themselves if only Landy hadn’t confessed. But the confession really seemed bogus and now the two F.B.I. men are more or less convinced of his innocence. Unfortunately the media, the civilian authorities in the nearby town, the base commander and the top brass in the Pentagon just want a quick arrest and Erskine and Rhodes are put under extreme pressure. Of course if you try to put Lew Erskine under pressure like that he just gets really really stubborn. A very good episode with a good performance by Leslie Nielsen as the chaplain blinded by hatred.

The Hijackers is a rather light-hearted episode involving a truck hijacking which is actually a practical joke gone wrong. This one tries to combine whimsicality with sentimentality. The results are not as bad as you might anticipate.

The Forests of the Night deals with a fundamentalist Christian sect victimised by an extortionist on top of having to deal with less than sympathetic neighbours. When you’re dealing with such subject matter there’s always the risk of becoming preachy and that’s what happens here. This is crude hate-filled propaganda that portrays rural people as knuckle-dragging redneck bigots. A shockingly bad episode.

Final Thoughts
It’s easy to mock this series. There’s plenty of full-on hysteria about evil commies and the whole country seems to be overflowing with fifth columnists and foreign agents. But this is how reality looked to most people in 1965. There’s a sincerity about the series that tends to win you over. Erskine and Rhodes and their colleagues at the Bureau are brave dedicated men and they’re thorough professionals. This is basically a police procedural. We pretty much always know who the bad guys are right from the start so the interest lies in the methods used to track down the criminals. There’s some high-tech stuff but mostly Erskine and Rhodes rely on hard work and patient methodical routine investigative procedures. These guys do not give up. One of the things I really love is seeing the technical side of law enforcement in 1965 - it’s all still delightfully analog! To find a fingerprint match you go through thousands of fingerprints on file, and you go through them with a magnifying glass!

The series is a fascinating time capsule with a slightly melancholy edge - the American  society depicted in the first season in 1965 had to a large extent ceased to exist by the time the series ended its run in 1974.

The F.B.I. is a slightly odd series.  The tone is sometimes very serious, occasionally quite dark, and at other times light-hearted and even whimsical. The scripts are however mostly clever and well-constructed and often quite original and the execution is always top-notch. There are unfortunately occasional signs of the preachiness that was already starting to infect American television (signs that are also all too apparent in another contemporary Quinn Martin production, The Fugitive). Production values are high. Efrem Zimbalist Jr has real star quality. This was, like most Quinn Martin productions, very well-made television.

Recommended.

Naked City, season two (1960-61)

Naked City takes its name from the 1948 film The Naked City. The Naked City was a police procedural with a documentary feel. The TV series does owe something to the movie structurally and thematically. The TV series is also much much better than the movie.

The Naked City was a bad movie but a very influential one. Naked City was a good TV series and a very influential one. Naked City started out in 1958 with the half-hour format that was still more or less standard at that time. It did not do particularly well and was actually cancelled. It was then re-engineered and relaunched in 1960. The change to hour-long episodes was crucial. This is a series that takes a leisurely approach to is subject matter. It’s a world away from the frenetic excitement and urgency of a series like M Squad (made at almost exactly the same time). Naked City is a character-driven police procedural series. It takes the time to let us get to know the characters.

Naked City is also notable for featuring a substantial amount of location shooting. One thing it does share with M Squad is a gritty realistic feel. This is a serious attempt to show us life on the streets of New York - the sleaze as well as the glamour.

There’s also an emphasis on what today we would call adult themes. This is not cops and robbers with the cops being straightforward good guys and the robbers being straightforward bad guys. This is a show that deals with complicated people who are sometimes neither heroes not villains.

It should be emphasised that this was not all that startling in 1950s American television. American cop shows like the aforementioned M Squad and Dragnet (this is the 50s Dragnet I’m talking about, not the woefully inferior revamped 1967 version) could be surprisingly hard-hitting and intelligent. Both cop shows and private eye shows (such as Johnny Staccato and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer) of that vintage were still heavily influenced by the dark-themed crime movies of the 40s and early 50s that we now label as film noir. There was a lot more to 1950s American television than Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It To Beaver. The difference with Naked City was mostly one of degree - it used the hour-long format to delve more deeply into the private lives of not just the cops but also the criminals and the victims and the innocent bystanders.

Madacy  released a 10-DVD boxed set that includes 40 of the 99 hour-long episodes of Naked City (it doesn’t include any of the 39 half-hour episodes from the first season). It’s enough to give a pretty good impression of the excellent series. The boxed set includes nine episodes from the second season which aired from 1960 to 1961 and it’s season two we’re concerned with at the moment. Horace McMahon as Lieutenant Mike Parker and Harry Bellaver as Sergeant Frank Arcaro were joined by Paul Burke as Detective Adam Flint for the revamped hour-long second season that went to air for the first time in October 1960.

A Death of Princes demonstrates the willingness of this series to tackle dark themes of a type that would have been likely to provoke extremely hostile responses from the police at that time. It deals not just with a corrupt cop, but a corrupt out-of-control killer cop.

The hero of the series, Detective Adam Flint (Paul Burke), sees his partner Detective Peter Bane (Eli Wallach) gun down an unarmed suspect. The problem is that while he can bring departmental charges against Bane there’s no way he can make them stick. He knows that, and his boss Lieutenant Mike Parker (Horace McMahon) knows it too. The only thing to do is to keep an eye on Bane. Sooner or later he’ll make a wrong move.

Flint doesn’t have long to wait. Bane is mixed up in an an extraordinarily complex conspiracy. It’s the sort of thing that only an incredibly arrogant man could think he could get away with.

Debt of Honor begins with a very high stakes card game, which is interrupted by three punks with masks and guns. One of the card players gets shot dead. One of the other card players is Nick Mori (Steve Cochran). The punks might have had second thoughts about their plan to rob these high rollers if they had known that Mori was a gangster.

Mori has other things to worry about. His wife has just arrived from Italy. He has never met her. It’s a complicated story. Mori owed a debt of honour to a very important man in the old country. When that man was dying he told Nick that he would have to discharge his debt by looking after the old man’s daughter. The best way to do that would be to marry her and bring her to the United States. Now he was to explain to her that he doesn’t want it to be a real marriage, which is a problem since she is filled with determination to be a wonderful wife.

To make things more interesting Nick isn’t actually a gangster as such. Not quite. He clearly has Mob connections. He movies in those circles. He’s no Boy Scout. But he isn’t an actual gangster and he’s really not a bad guy. He has no idea what to do with this wife he has suddenly acquired but one thing is certain. He doesn’t want to make her unhappy. He doesn’t want to hurt her. She’s an embarrassment to him but she is his wife.

Steve Cochran was a fine actor who never achieved real stardom but appeared in several bona fide film noir classics in the 50s including Private Hell 36 and the superb Highway 301.

The Man Who Bit a Diamond in Half is a heist story and a delightfully complicated one. The police have no idea that the heist is being planned. All they have is some events that don’t make sense. A museum security guard shot but all that is stolen is a replica of a valuable diamond, and it was clearly marked a being a replica and being worthless. And there’s a wealthy Greek who wife’s valuable bracelet appears to have been stolen but it wasn’t stolen. There are other little things but they make even less sense. Detective Adam Flint doesn’t like it. He has this feeling that there is a connection, if only he could see it. Some nice twists in this one. Very entertaining.

Murder Is a Face I Know is about Nick Ross, an immigrant who is the American Dream personified. A hard worker, a loving husband, a devoted father, a solid citizen. The kind of man you’d be proud to know. Except for one minor detail. He’s also a contract killer for the Mob. His son Joey (Keir Dullea) is not surprisingly having trouble accepting all this. The police are having troubles of their own with the case, with Ross refusing to say anything at all. A good episode.

A Hole in the City starts out with a series of spectacular chases and shootouts and then becomes a hostage drama. But mostly it’s a psychological drama about a very strange young man. Lewis Nunda (Robert Duvall) has masterminded an armoured car robbery that has left a trail of corpses. It all started in his childhood.  He has a lot of childhood grudges and he’s never forgotten them and they’re all based on his total inability to understand the world. An episode that is very ambitious and very pretentious but mostly it works. And it ends with another very impressive action set-piece.

Button in the Haystack presents Adam with a real headache. A man was murdered in a service station and thee is very strong, almost overwhelming, evidence against the guy who runs the service station, an ex-con named Brewer. But Adam thinks he’s innocent. To prove it he has to find Brewer’s gun and that turns out to be an almost impossible task. This story is enlivened by a bit of humour and it works very well.

Shoes for Vinnie Winford is the story of a rich little boy who grows up to inherit his father’s vast business empire. Only Vinnie Winford never does grow up. He now has immense wealth and power but he’s still a little boy. A spoilt over-indulged little boy. A little boy with severe mommy issues. A little boy with a violent temper. Although he owns a huge business empire the one business that really matters to him is his dance hall, a sleazy business to be sure but it’s the only thing he has ever actually built up by his own efforts. And it’s the dance hall that will get him into trouble. One of his hostesses has disappeared. Vinnie has taken steps to make it seem like Judy Hill never existed but Adam Flint believes the story that Judy’s friend Ruby tells him. Nailing Vinnie will however be quite a challenge.

The best thing and the worst thing about this episode is Dennis Hopper’s performance as Vinnie. It’s certainly memorable. It may be the hammiest performance in the history of American acting. It’s like Hopper is channeling James Dean in Rebel Without a Clause (which also deals with the 50s fear that bad mothering was the cause of all social ills) but Hopper is even more ludicrously over-the-top than Dean. If you happen to get a kick out of  unbelievably excessive Method acting you’ll find Hopper’s turn in this episode to be bizarrely fascinating.

On the plus side there are some great shots of 1960s New York street scenes and the bridge climax is pretty impressive.

New York to L.A. starts off with lots of frustrating inaction. Detective Flint and Lieutenant Busti are in L.A. to take custody of two punks accused of armed robbery and murder but the extradition hearing looks like it’s going to drag on forever. Then suddenly all hell breaks loose. This is one of those episodes that taps into 1950s obsessions with child-rearing and psychology. The two punks were raised in an orphanage and the script goes perilously close to casting a couple of vicious hoodlums as victims although it’s not clear what they are victims of. This sort of thing can be a bit cringe-inducing. Despite some exciting action scenes this one is a bit of a failure.

Vengeance Is a Wheel deals with a gang that has staged a series of daring waterfront warehouse robberies. A night watchman is killed during one of the robberies. He was an Italian and his family decide that they will not coöperate with the police. They will deal with the matter themselves. It is to be a vendetta. Not just a vendetta as a figure of speech but the genuine article, just like in the old country. This is awkward for Adam as he knows and likes the murdered man’s family. Ethnic violence was a fairly daring theme for television to tackle in 1960. The Untouchables had tried hinting that maybe there were Italians involved in organised crime in the days of Prohibition and that had unleashed a storm of protest. Vengeance Is a Wheel is a fine episode.

But this is fairly typical of Naked City’s willingness to deal with serious subject matter in a grown-up way. Naked City has a good deal of the gritty flavour of the classic American crime B-movies of the 40s and 50s and there’s certainly a film noir tinge to a number of episodes. What makes Naked City so good is that it has that seriousness of intent and that slightly dark and troubled atmosphere but without the nihilism that we see in so many more recent series. This is very much grown-up television that is prepared to face sometimes unpleasant realities but it doesn’t wallow needlessly in misery or sleaze. In fact the tone of this series is close to perfect.

It also has a wonderful style, very much influenced by film noir but with a kind of tough urban visual poetry to it.

This brief sampling of the second season is enough to make it clear that Naked City is one of the great American cop shows. Very highly recommended.

The Time Tunnel (2002 pilot episode)

In 2002 somebody at Fox decided it would be cool to reboot Irwin Allen’s 1966 series The Time Tunnel. A pilot was made but never made it to air and that was the end of that idea. In 2006 this pilot was included as an extra in the DVD release of the 1966 Time Tunnel series.

Quite a few changes were made to the original series concept, some of the changes being positive and some being disastrous. Most of the changes were predictable. In 2002 you could not possibly have two male heroes, so Dr Tony Newman becomes female scientist Dr Toni Newman.

Another predictable change is that the reboot takes itself very very seriously. All races of fun have been banished.

The acting is a major problem. If the series takes itself very seriously these actors take themselves even more seriously. They have that amazing ability that modern actors have to be both intense and dull at the same time. The biggest problem is Andrea Roth as Dr Toni Newman. She’s so irritating that her performance on its own would have been enough to persuade me not to watch any further episodes. And she’s by no means the least obnoxious of the characters. In fact within ten minutes I decided that I hated all these people and wanted them all to die.

The one positive change is that the reboot does have a slightly more serious science fictional concept at its core, which is that an attempt to develop atomic fusion has unleashed a time storm that is changing both the past and the present. Only the personnel at the time tunnel complex know what the world was like before the changes occurred. It’s not an original idea and it’s not all that interesting but it is at least an idea.

In actual fact I preferred the approach of Irwin Allen’s original series, in which no matter how hard you tried you could not change history - somehow any attempt to do so would always end in failure.

Doug Phillips (David Conrad) is an ex-Marine who works for some security outfit. Now he finds himself forcibly recruited by the government for a mysterious mission. For some reason the fact that he’s a bit of an expert of the 1944 Battle of Huertgen Forest is important. He discovers that whether he likes it or not he’s now part of a team that is going to travel back to 1944 through the time tunnel to try to repair the damage done by an interloper from the year 1546.

It’s now that one of the worst features of the reboot becomes apparent. The time travellers are going to disguise themselves as 1944 American soldiers. The problem is that two members of the team are female. It’s been made clear that the number one priority is not to change anything or interact with anyone unnecessarily. It’s vital not to attract attention. Having two women dressed up as  soldiers is obviously going to make it absolutely impossible to blend in. Trying to shoehorn political correctness into the world of 1944 effectively destroys any semblance of believability.

The basic concept is not dissimilar to that of Sapphire and Steel - trying to prevent any tampering with the established timeline. The difference is that Sapphire and Steel dealt with the subject in a much more intelligent and much more interesting manner and with some actual subtlety.

There is one single solitary attempt at humour and it’s feeble and it’s out of place.

Visually it’s very disappointing. It looks like a bad video game. The special effects look more modern than those in the 1966 series but that doesn’t mean they look better. In fact the effects are very unimaginative and uninteresting. The time tunnel complex is boring and looks cheap and shoddy compared to that in the Irwin Allen series. There’s no real sense of style. Whatever else you may say of Irwin Allen his series always had style.

This is a reboot that was doomed from the start. A series needs characters that the audience can care about. Nobody is going to care about these walking clichés. A science fiction series needs to have some kind of visual signature. This pilot looks like a TV car commercial. There is an idea here with some potential but time travel is a concept has been pretty much done to death.

The one good thing about the 2002 version of The Time Tunnel is that it’s included as an extra in the Irwin Allen Time Tunnel DVD boxed set so I didn’t have to pay money for it. And it is an extra that I guess is worthwhile if only because it makes Irwin Allen’s 1966 series look so much better. It’s one of several interesting extras in this DVD set, the other notable one being the 1976 pilot Time Travelers which was an earlier attempt (by Irwin Allen) at a reboot. And a much more successful attempt than the 2002 effort.

McMillan and Wife, season 3 (1973), part one

The third season of McMillan and Wife is basically the formula as before, but with perhaps a slightly more outrageous tinge.

The format is still the same, which each season comprising a handful of feature-length episodes.

It still relies a good deal on the superb chemistry between Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James. Mrs McMillan is still managing to get herself quite innocently mixed up with just about every major crime in San Francisco. And somehow Stewart McMillan, the Police Commissioner, is still managing to find excuses to take personal charge of investigations in a way that no actual police commissioner ever would. The fact that these two elements in the formula stretch credibility to breaking point is no problem at all. McMillan and Wife does not pretend even for a moment to be a realistic cop series. It’s a series that follows the conventions of the puzzle-plot mysteries of the golden age of detective fiction in which the detective hero is always conveniently on the spot whenever a murder occurs, and always seems by an uncanny coincidence to have some link to either the victim or the killer. It was a type of fiction that actively rejected realism, and McMillan and Wife rejects realism in an exceptionally thorough way.

It’s also a series that to some extent traces its ancestry back to the 1934 hit movie The Thin Man, which established the husband-and-wife crime-solving team as guaranteed box-office gold.

The season opener is Death of a Monster... Birth of a Legend and it takes Commissioner McMillan and his wife Sally to Scotland for a vacation. They’ll be staying in the McMillan castle, owned by the laird who happens to be McMillan’s uncle. And while it might seem very strange that Sergeant Enright should suddenly show up at the castle that’s exactly what happens.

The very first thing that happens after the Commissioner and his wife arrive is that the old laird shoots himself. In fact McMilan doesn’t even get to see his uncle alive. It’s obviously suicide.

McMillan however seems rather unconvinced by the suicide explanation. The viewer of course knows it can’t be suicide because then we wouldn’t have a story.

There's a certain “it was a dark and stormy night” ambience to this story. The family solicitor tells ghost stories, in this case about a ghost who would have a very good reason to be ill-disposed to the Laird McMillan.

If you’re going to have dark and stormy nights and ghosts and castles you might as well go for broke and have all the gothic trimmings including secret passageways. Which is exactly  what we get.

Apart from the gothic angle this is also an attempt at a locked-room mystery and while there’s an obvious explanation that explanation is not necessarily the correct one.

Now at this point you might be thinking that this is all a little bit far-fetched if not silly. If you are thinking that you should just stop. This is McMillan and Wife and McMillan and Wife was never intended to be taken very seriously. It’s lightweight and it’s meant to be lightweight. The idea is to have a mystery, a few thrills, a few laughs and some romantic moments. Some episodes do contain fairly decent mystery plots but they’re still essentially supposed to be harmless fun.

I should also point out that there’s still a lot more silliness to come. There’s still the matter of the monster.

There’s an obvious motive in the old laird’s unwillingness to sell the castle (a hotel consortium wants to buy it) but that motive could point to more than one suspect. And there are other plausible motives.

The guest cast is headed up by the always delightful Roddy McDowell. He’s the laird’s grandson Jamie and he’s not exactly the black sheep of the family but he’s also not quite the grandson the old boy would have wished for. Jamie is rather hard-up for money and he also has a very expensive fiancée who is likely to develop into an even more expensive wife.

The solution is far-fetched but it’s clever enough and it is fairly clued and it is just about plausible.

Death of a Monster... Birth of a Legend offers plenty of fun.

The second episode is The Devil You Say and it continues the gothic theme, and also the outrageousness, of the first episode. This time Sally’s life is in danger from devil-worshippers. She gets a call from Dr Comsack at the children’s hospital where she does volunteer work with deaf kids. It’s not quite clear if it’s Sally who’s in danger or Dr Comsack. Mildred might be in danger as well, after witnessing a murder that didn’t happen. There’s also the matter of the film of the Satanic ritual that someone sent Sally. The same person also sent her some other curious items. Those items are obviously significant, but significant of what? If that’s not enough craziness for you there’s Dr Comsack’s totally insane and creepy wife and there’s Professor Zagmeyer who is an expert in hypnotism, reincarnation and Satanism.

So this episode has pretty much the entire quota of the lunacy that was so characteristic of the 70s.

Once again there are some deliriously over-the-top performances from the guest stars, especially Keenan Wynn as Professor Zagmeyer, Werner Klemperer as Dr Bleeker (best-selling author of a diet book but we get the strong impression he’s probably into some seriously weird stuff as well) plus a truly bizarre performance by Barbara Colby as the loopy Mrs Comsack.

And once again it always seems to be a dark and stormy night. The masks are however a very effective sinister touch. This one overall is even nuttier than the previous episode. The plot hangs together well enough. You don’t have to believe all the crazy stuff, as long as you’re willing to believe that the characters themselves do believe every word of it.

Back in the early 1970s Dennis Wheatley’s occult thrillers were immensely popular and I think it’s possible to discern a definite Dennis Wheatley influence in this episode. That’s OK by me since I happen to love Wheatley’s occult thrillers.

The Devil You Say is highly enjoyable nonsense.

These two episodes get season three off to a most entertaining start. I’ll be reviewing the other four episodes in the season in the near future.

You might also be interested in my reviews of McMillan and Wife season one and season two.