Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee!
This week, Ponch takes a deep breath and he gets real high.
Episode 1.2 “Undertow”
(Dir by Christian I. Nyby II, originally aired on September 22nd, 1977)
On tonight’s episode of CHiPs, a true crisis breaks out.
The California Highway Patrol’s basketball team loses a game!
Now, they would have won the game if Ponch had been playing. I’m only two episodes into this series and it’s already pretty obvious that there’s apparently nothing that Ponch can’t do. However, while at the scene of an accident on the highway, Ponch stood right in front of a leaky cannister of nitrous oxide! He ended up getting so high that he started seeing double, dancing in the halls of the station, and basically just acting like a total jackass. Of course, he smiled the whole time. Baker was less amused.
Because of his temporary high, Ponch was sent home and ordered to stay in bed for a day. He missed the game and the CHiPs lost to some other off-duty branch of California law enforcement. Fortunately, Sgt. Getraer is able to set up a rematch and, with Ponch now able to play, the CHiPs win by two points! And, of course, the winning shot is taken by Ponch because there’s nothing that Ponch can’t do. This episode ends with a series of freeze frames of Ponch winning the game and proving that California has the best highway patrol in the country.
Of course, the basketball game is only the B-plot of this episode of CHiPs. The main storyline deals with fake tow truck driver (Angelo de Meo) who is listening to the police radio for calls from women who have broken down on the highway. The driver goes to wherever the women are calling from but, instead of towing their car, he instead steals their money! The first time that Ponch and Baker chase him, the crooked tow truck driver gets away. The second time, they catch him. Of course, both of the chases lead to multi-car wrecks on the highway. This episode features the first instance of a car flipping over in slow motion on this show. Apparently, that would go on to become a CHiPs trademark.
Of course, there are other little things that Ponch and Baker have to deal with. They pull over a drunk driver (Jim Backus) and Ponch, who is high from the nitrous oxide, struggles to give him a sobriety test. They also pull over an old surfer (Paul Brinegar), who has a talking myna bird in his truck. The bird was cute. These scenes did not add up too much but I imagine they were included to drive home the idea that Ponch and Baker are professionals, even if they do spend a lot of time talking about basketball.
This episode was actually kind of fun. Erik Estrada is not a particularly subtle actor to begin with and this episode actually gives him an excuse to overact even more than usual. As much fun as it is to watch Estrada bounce off the walls, it’s even more interesting to glance over at Larry Wilcox and see just how much he appears to resent having to work with someone who always has to be the center of every scene. Neither Wilcox nor Baker seem particularly unhappy about Ponch being sidelined for a good deal of the episode. Just as in the pilot, the chase scenes were genuinely well-filmed and it was impossible not to enjoy the shots of the motorcycles weaving in and out of traffic.
Next week, Ponch will probably save someone’s life while Baker seethes in the background. We’ll see!
Through the Shattered Lens 