Banacek (season one, 1972)

Banacek had an interesting history. In the early 70s NBC was experimenting with “wheel series” - the idea being that instead of making a single series for a particular timeslot they’d make three different series which would screen in alternate weeks in the same timeslot. Their first attempt had the umbrella title The NBC Mystery Movie. The three series were Columbo, McCloud and McMillan and Wife. It was hugely successful and inspired the network to do the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie with Banacek, Cool Million and Madigan screening on a three-week rotation. 

Cool Million and Madigan sank without trace after a single season but Banacek did well. It ran for two seasons and was renewed for a third season but that third season did not materialise because star George Peppard quit for reasons that say quite a bit about his idiosyncratic approach to his own career. He was going through an acrimonious divorce and he feared that most of his earnings from a third season would have gone straight to his ex-wife. So he walked away from it. Peppard was a fine actor who had a successful career that should have been even more successful.

The big advantage of the wheel series concept was that it allowed for much longer shooting schedules than were usual in television. That permitted plenty of location shooting and high (by television standards) production values. Each episode was in effect a feature-length made-for-TV movie but with the same recurring characters.

Banacek had one thing in common with Columbo - both series employed a kind of ongoing gimmick that gave thjem a distinctive flavour. Each episode of Columbo was an inverted detective story in which the identity of the murderer is revealed at the beginning rather than the end. Each episode of Banacek is an impossible crime story.

Thomas Banacek is a freelance insurance investigator. When a robbery or suspicious arson or similar crime is committed the insurance companies naturally carry out their own investigation. If after sixty days the crime has not been solved it is thrown open to anyone who cares to try to recover the money or goods. If they succeed they get ten percent of the insured value. A freelance insurance investigator who is good at his job can make a great deal of money. Banacek is very good. He is as a result very wealthy. Which is just as well. After a deprived childhood Banacek has developed a taste for the good things in life. He collects antiques, he lives expensively, he drives a very cool 1942 Packard 180 roadster. And oh yes, he has expensive tastes in women.

The pilot, Detour To Nowhere, aired in March 1972. This is a classic impossible crime story. An armoured car disappears near the border between Texas and Oklahoma. Literally disappears. Without a trace. With $1,600,000 worth of gold on board. That’s a big payout for the National-Meridian Insurance Company. Their chief investigator, McKinney (Charles Robinson), has made no progress at all on the case. The one thing that bothers McKinney more than not solving the case is that after 60 days it can be taken up by anybody. Including Banacek. And McKinney just cannot stand the idea that Banacek might recover the money. McKinney would do anything to prevent this.

Not that this worries Banacek. In fact it amuses him - it adds a bit more zest to the case.

This story establishes the character of Banacek - wealthy, highly cultured, a connoisseur of  beauty, slightly arrogant, devilishly handsome, charming and brilliant. We also find out that beneath the charming and cultivated exterior Banacek is a man who can handle himself in a street brawl, and once he takes up a case he is unlikely to be deflected by any setbacks or any dangers he might encounter.

The casting of George Peppard as the Polish-American Banacek proved to be inspired. Peppard has plenty of boyish charm but he’s also convincing as a guy who is tougher than he seems to be, and he can handle the odd moments of low-key humour with ease. He’s a slightly prickly character but he’s likeable as well. The other two regular cast members are Ralph Manza as Banacek’s wise-cracking driver Jay Drury and Australian-born Murray Matheson as slightly eccentric rare book dealer Felix Mulholland who just happens to be a mine of information on all manner of esoteric subjects.

The first episode of the series proper, Let’s Hear It for a Living Legend, offers us an impressive enough impossible crime. A pro football star vanishes. Not such a big deal, except that at the moment he vanished he was playing in a game in a stadium in front of tends of thousands of people. In spite of the fact that his vanishing act was also caught on camera by a TV network there is still no explanation. One moment he was there - the next he was gone. 

In Project Phoenix Banacek has to find a stolen car. Not just any stolen car, but a super-secret super-high tech experimental car insured for a cool five million dollars. The excellent No Sign of the Cross sees Banacek trying to recover a fabulously valuable medieval cross. This episode is interesting in that we get to see a slightly different side of Banacek. Although he’d be the last one to admit it he does have a softer warmer side. In A Million the Hard Way Banacek investigates the disappearance of a million dollars from a casino in Las Vegas. Casinos tend to be rather obsessive about security. Anyone wanting to steal money from them would have to come up with a pretty clever plan and this one is a peach. This is an impossible crime story that stretches credibility a little but then all impossible crime stories have to be a bit outlandish. This one is very outlandish but it’s certainly fun.

Banacek has the same kind of feel as the other successful NBC Mystery Movie series - the  crimes take place among the rich and famous, or the rich and powerful, there’s an emphasis on the detective’s use of brainpower rather than muscle in solving the cases and there’s a studious avoidance of the sleazy and sordid. This all serves to make Banacek classy, stylish, civilised and very very entertaining. Highly recommended.

I've also reviewed Banacek season two.

Banacek season two (1973-74)

Banacek having been one of the successes of the first year of NBC’s Mystery Movie series it was hardly surprising that a second season of eight episodes followed in late 1973 with George Peppard once again playing the handsome debonair insurance investigator who has a taste for the good things in life, and the money to indulge that taste. It is almost unnecessary to add that Banacek’s idea of the good things of life most certainly includes women.

The format was the same as in the first season with each feature-length episode being an impossible crime story (and usually a pretty good one).

In season two Carlie Kirkland (Christine Belford), who had appeared in the pilot episode, was added to the regular cast, at least for the early part of the season. She’s an insurance investigator as well and it was obviously felt that the sometimes friendly, but mostly antagonistic, rivalry between the two would add some interest. And of course there’s an uneasy romantic tension as well. I’m not sure it was an entirely necessary change but their interplay is quite amusing. She disappears in the later episodes.

Once again Banacek gets invaluable help from his friend Felix Mulholland (Murray Matheson), rare book dealer and expert in all manner of esoteric subjects.

One of the secrets to the success of this series is George Peppard’s ability to make Banacek a character who is both arrogant and genuinely likeable. He’s likeable because the arrogance is done with a twinkle in his eye.

In No Stone Unturned an eleven foot high three ton statue disappears. To get the statue into the museum where it was to go on display required an entire wall to be removed. The wall was then replaced so there was absolutely no way the statue could have been removed from the building. But someone did remove it.

If Max Is So Smart, Why Doesn't He Tell Us Where He Is? concerns the theft of a computer. A brand new high-tech medical computer. And this is 1972, so this computer is the size of a room. A large room. The computer, costing several million dollars, was built with money put up by a wealthy hypochondriac. This is a very good episode.

A three million dollar horse-drawn wedding coach belonging to a Middle Eastern potentate is stolen from a shipping container in The Three Million Dollar Piracy. The coach was being shipped to the Middle East for the ruler’s marriage to movie star Diana Maitland.

In this episode Carlie has become engaged to the very respectable, and very dull, Henry DeWitt and this gives Banacek the opportunity to have a good deal of fun at his expense. This is a particularly pleasing episode that includes everything a Banacek fan could ask for.

The Vanishing Chalice is a valuable ancient Greek artifact that is stolen from a museum. Stolen in public. Stolen right in front of dozens of witnesses. But nobody saw it happen. The solution turns out to be a quite ingenious and satisfactory impossible crime solution.

This episode also sees Carlie manoeuvre herself into the position of being Banacek’s assistant. She claims that she just wants to learn from the master but this being Carlie we’re not surprised that she has another more devious agenda. Carlie is pretty good at manipulating men but she discovers that a girl has to get up pretty early in the morning if she wants to out-manipulate Thomas Banacek. Another fine episode.

Horse of a Slightly Different Color is pretty good as well. This one was written by Jimmy Sangster, better known for writing scripts for Hammer horror movies.

A racehorse is stolen, in full view of numerous witnesses. This is not just any racehorse. This is Oxford Don, the best racehorse in America, and he’s insured for a cool five million dollars. That means half a million dollars if Banacek can find the horse (his terms are always that he gets ten percent of the insured value of any items he recovers). Oxford Don had been owned by Katherine Wells, the most glamorous racehorse owner in the country. Katherine admires horseflesh but there are other things that interest her more. To be more specific there is one thing she likes more than horses, and that is men. She chooses her men the way she chooses her horses. They need to be thoroughbreds, in the peak of condition, and with lots of stamina. She prefers stayers to sprinters. Anne Francis has plenty of fun with this role and is able to make Katherine both slightly horrifying and rather sympathetic.

Oxford Don wasn’t exactly stolen. He was taken out for trackwork and when he came back he wasn’t Oxford Don any more.

Carlie Kirkland doesn’t appear in this story which is just as well. There are two women involved in this case and Banacek needs to give them both his undivided attention.

In Rocket to Oblivion a new highly advanced rocket engine is stolen from a science and technology expo. There is no way something of that size could be stolen within a few seconds and there was in any case no way of removing something that heavy from its display, given that the electricity was off at the time of the theft. Nonetheless the engine was stolen. The insurance company wants it back. The inventor of the engine wants it back. The Pentagon wants it back.

Carlie thinks she can crack this case herself. She was a secret weapon. And anyway Banacek seems to be spending all his time bedding the glamorous organiser of the expo, the deliciously named Cherry Saint-Saëns (Linda Evans).

Fly Me - If You Can Find Me concerns a jet airliner forced to make an emergency landing at a remote airfield in Nevada. The crew spend the night at a motel and when they return to the airfield the next day the aircraft is gone. But there is no way it could have taken off. It was not only in no condition to fly, it would have been impossible to get the plane airborne.

Now You See Me, Now You Don’t involves stage magic, and usually I love movies or TV dealing with this subject. In this case the setup is very good but to me the ending was just a bit too far-fetched.

The second season generally maintains the high standards of season one. Banacek is stylish and witty entertainment with some reasonably clever plots and it has a charismatic star. There’s not much more you can ask for in a television program. Highly recommended.

TV viewing highlights of of 2017

Instead of doing a list of the best television I watched in 2017 I’m going to focus instead on the most exciting discoveries I made and on the series that provided the most pleasant surprises.

First up has to be The Plane Makers. This British ATV series ran for three seasons from 1963 to 1965. It’s concerned with the behind-the-scenes dramas at an aircraft factory about to launch a new small jetliner. It’s tale of boardroom plots, political manoeuvring, industrial tensions and personal dramas. It’s much more entertaining than it sounds, superbly written and with a fine cast.

Somewhat similar in style is Mogul (which was renamed The Troubleshooters after the first season). This long-running adventure/drama series about an oil company began in 1965.

I was definitely pleasantly surprised that the second season of Banacek lives up to the promise of the first season. George Peppard stars as a dashing insurance investigator with a taste for expensive art, and expensive women. Each episode is an impossible crime mystery.

The 1967 French historical action/adventure series The Flashing Blade was also quite good fun and it’s certainly a handsome production.

The A-Team, season 1 (1983)

With its over-the-top but very cartoonish violence and its general air of mayhem and craziness The A-Team became one of the legendary cult TV series of the 80s. It ran on NBC from 1983 to 1987.

Mercenaries had figured in several great cult movies of the late 60s and 70s such as Dark of the Sun and The Wild Geese so it was perhaps only a matter of time before they featured in an action adventure TV series. The A-Team is a US Special Forces unit that had served in Vietnam but one of their more spectacular missions went badly wrong. Actually the mission was a success but the officer who ordered the mission got himself killed so the team had no proof that their mission was authorised, and as a result they found themselves facing a court-martial. They escaped from custody before the court-martial could be convened and now they make their living as commandos-for-hire.

The A-Team comprises Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith (George Peppard), mechanical wizard Sergeant B. A. Baracus (Mr T), smooth-talking con-man Lieutenant Templeton "Face" Peck (played by Tim Dunigan in the pilot and by Dirk Benedict in the series) and insane (literally insane) pilot “Howling Mad" Murdock (Dwight Schultz). 

Their nemesis is military policeman Colonel Lynch (William Lucking) who is obsessed with tracking them down and forcing them to face that court-martial.

The pilot episode, Mexican Slayride, gives us much of the background. Nobody is really sure the A-Team even exists but feisty girl reporter Amy Allen (Melinda Culea) believes that they do. And she just happens to need a team of commandos. Fellow reporter Al Massey (William Windom) has been kidnapped by a gang of Mexican bandits. Amy is determined to free him. Massey had discovered something big, something that was more than just a simple gang of bandits.

The A-Team is willing to help her although they do expect to receive a token payment - of $150,000. Transportation to Mexico won’t be a problem. They will just “borrow” a Gulfstream executive jet. The big problem will be persuading B. A. Baracus to board the jet. He is terrified of flying and their usual method is to forcibly drug him and then strap him down to his seat (he needs to be strapped down so he won’t kill them when he regains consciousness). Getting the other equipment they will need involves conning the Mexican Film Commission into thinking they’re big time Hollywood film-makers and they need a few simple props for their movie - just little things like a crop-dusting aircraft, some armour plate and perhaps an artillery piece or two. 

Mexican Slayride is a non-stop roller coaster ride of craziness and mayhem involving the expenditure of thousands of rounds of ammunition and countless explosions and wrecked vehicles. It establishes one of the this show’s trademarks - despite all the shooting and all the stuff getting blown up nobody ever seems to get seriously hurt. There’s an immense amount of violence but no blood. 

This first season covers many of the favourite obsessions of its time period. In Children of Jamestown it’s a religious cult. In Pros and Cons it’s the ever-popular Evil Redneck Cops in the Deep South and in A Small and Deadly War it’s corrupt cops (although the series goes to extraordinary lengths to assure us over and over again but it’s just a Few Bad Apples). 

Breaking someone out of captivity is a trope that the series did tend to over-use just a little (although having said that I have to admit that The A-Team usually does this with style) so A Small and Deadly War is all the more refreshing for avoiding that particular concept.

Black Day at Bad Rock (a nod to the 1950s Spencer Tracy movie Bad Day at Black Rock) covers another obsession of the day - biker gangs. B. A. has been shot up in an operation and the team stops at a small California town to get medical help for him but the doctor thinks it’s a bit strange that his friends claim it was a hunting accident - what kind of game do you hunt with a .50 cal machine-gun? She calls the cops and Hannibal and Face get themselves arrested just as a biker gang is about to descend upon the town. Much mayhem naturally ensues.

The Rabbit Who Ate Las Vegas sees the A-Team up against gambling racketeers. A brilliant mathematician has invented a fool-proof method for beating the odds at the gambling tables and not surprisingly the gambling bosses take a very dim view of this. The A-Team have to rescue the mathematician.

The Out-of-Towners is basically another retelling of The Seven Samurai with frightened storekeepers in Manhattan employing the A-Team to protect them against the oppression of extortion racketeers. West Coast Turnaround sees the team helping out a farmer who can’t get his produce to market. Not much of a story this time and this is definitely a lesser episode. 

A mission in Guatemala goes badly wrong for the A-Team in Holiday in the Hills. Murdock manages to get them out but their aircraft crashes. Maybe stealing an aircraft that was due for repair was not such a great idea? They crash in South Carolina only to find themselves hunted by hillbillies. Murdock has a plan for getting them out. He’s seen the movie Flight of the Phoenix and he figures that if survivors of a plane crash in a movie can build a new one out of the wreckage then they should be able to do the same thing.

In One More Time we’re back to the breaking out of captivity thing again although this time instead of having to worry about being pursued by the US Government they’re working for the government. Which can be even worse. Till Death Do Us Part looks like being yet another retread of the same basic trope but there’s end up being more to the story. And the helicopter chase is pretty cool. 

The first season of The A-Team works because it starts out being an outlandish cartoonish adventure romp series and that’s what it remains. The temptation to take itself even moderately seriously is valiantly resisted. It’s unashamedly and defiantly silly.

The acting is perfect. OK, maybe Dwight Schultz pushes the crazy thing a bit too hard at times but he manages to be genuinely amusing. Dirk Benedict is delightfully smooth and charming. Mr T is superb. B. A. Baracus is a big scary intimidating guy and he’s plenty tough when he needs to be but underneath he’s a big softie. Mr T gets this across without ever crossing the line into over-sentimentality. George Peppard chews every piece of scenery he can get his hands on. This is very different to his earlier TV hit Banacek although Peppard's trademark self-confidence is equally apparent in both series. All the characters are caricatures but they’re meant to be. They’re cartoon characters and all the cast members understand this and play it accordingly.

The stunts are nothing if not spectacular. They must have wrecked hundreds of cars and other assorted vehicles making this series. No episode is complete without its full complement of explosions and cars flying through the air. The stunts, like everything else, are deliberately exaggerated and cartoonish and that’s why they work.

The A-Team is a roller-coaster ride of non-stop mayhem all done with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Terrific fun and as long as you don’t take it the slightest bit seriously it’s highly recommended.

McMillan and Wife season 2 (1972-73)

McMillan and Wife was one of the big successes among the various mystery series that screened under the umbrella of The NBC Mystery Movie. The second season of seven feature-length episodes went to air in late 1972 and early 1973. The season one cast remained intact, with Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James as the two leads and John Schuck as Detective-Sergeant Enright and Nancy Walker as the McMillans’ maid Mildred.

McMillan and Wife was the television equivalent of the “cozy” detective fiction sub-genre, with no graphic violence or sex and done in a slightly playful manner but with an emphasis on good old-fashioned well-constructed mystery plots.

The season opener, Night of the Wizard, starts in typical McMillan and Wife style with Police Commissioner McMillan (Hudson) pursuing a suspect through the streets of San Francisco. The fact that a Police Commissioner would be incredibly unlikely to be doing such a thing is in fact a sort of running gag. In this instance the chase is rather inspired and quite witty.

Night of the Wizard is by McMillan and Wife standards a semi-serious episode. A woman is terrified when her dead husband appears to her at a séance and accuses her of his murder. The accusation is all the more disturbing since the woman, Evie Kendall, had in fact been charged with the murder but was acquitted.

There are lots of fun Old Dark House elements in this one.

In Blues for Sally M. an attempt is made to murder a composer/pianist. But why does he have a signed photograph of Mrs McMillan in his apartment? Unfortunately this episode suffers from a fatal flaw which makes the solution obvious right from the start. Keir Dullea gives a good performance as the obnoxious self-pitying composer.

Cop of the Year marks two big moments in Sergeant Enright’s life - he gets to collect the Cop of the Year award and he shoots his ex-wife. At least he seems to have shot his ex-wife, it seems like an open-and-shut case, but he denies it. And Commissioner MacMillan believes him. All he has to do now is to prove that Enright didn’t do it despite the overwhelming evidence.

Enright’s ex-wife, Monica, isn’t (or wasn’t) exactly the ideal wife. In fact she was selfish, narcissistic and vicious, so Enright had plenty of motive. This is an episode with a classic film noir setup. It’s based on an Edward D. Hoch short story, Hoch being a noted exponent of the impossible crime story. Robert Michael Lewis emphasis the puzzle aspect by shooting the murder scene from directly overhead.

The mystery here is not whodunit (which is pretty obvious from the beginning), but howdunit. And on the whole it’s a very good locked-room mystery.

Terror Times Two makes use of one of the most hackneyed ideas in television history, the idea of the double. A gangster has found a man who is Commissioner McMillan’s exact double. Rock Hudson does a pretty decent job playing the dual roles but you can’t get away from the fact that it’s an unimaginative idea and the script just doesn’t manage to add any interesting or original twists.

No Hearts, No Flowers is another story which involves one of the hoariest ideas in crime fiction, in which the detective’s wife is the potential victim of a psycho. Sally has her purse snatched. This has unexpected consequences as it becomes apparent that Sally has a stalker. The twist ending might perhaps stretch credibility a bit but this is a detective story, not a documentary. It’s supposed to be entertainment, not reality, and it does entertain. There’s also a car chase. There’s no point in setting a cop show in San Francisco if you don’t have some car chases. It’s a city that seems to have been designed specifically as a venue for car chases.

In The Fine Art of Staying Alive Sally McMillan is once again in danger. Commissioner McMillan has to choose between saving Sally or saving a priceless Rembrandt. This one perhaps doesn’t have quite enough plot to sustain the feature-length running time and the crucial clues are just a bit too convoluted and obscure to be believable. It’s still fairly enjoyable.

Two Dollars on Trouble to Win takes McMillan and Sally to the racetrack. Sally’s Uncle Cyrus (well he’s not really an uncle but rather an old friend) has a horse that’s a sure thing to win a big race. Cyrus is a cantankerous old cheapskate but for some reason Sally thinks he’s wonderful. Cyrus has a bad heart and a series of accidents threatens to make that heart problem critical, or even fatal. Could it be a diabolically clever plot to murder the old boy by indirect means?

McMillan and Wife suffers a little from plots that are, with a few exceptions, rather on the conventional side.

The second season is also pretty uneven. Night of the Wizard and Cop of the Year are the standouts and they're very good indeed. Blues for Sally M. is a fine idea let down by one serious flaw. Terror Times Two is the only episode that could be described as a real dud.

The major strength of McMillan and Wife lies in the two leads. Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James make a convincing married couple. They have the right romantic, and sexual, chemistry. They’re extremely likeable and John Schuck is equally likeable as Enright.

This is definitely crime on the cozy side but it’s thoroughly harmless light entertainment. Not as good as its NBC Mystery Movie stablemates Columbo and Banacek but if you don’t take it too seriously it’s enjoyable. Recommended.

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.