Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing T. and T., a Canadian show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990.  The show can be found on Tubi!

This week, the Canadian Mafia (*snicker*) is making trouble.

Episode 3.6 “Take My Life Please”

(Dir by Alan Simmonds, originally aired on February 10th, 1990)

Phillip Phillips (played by Robert Cait) is a stand-up comedian who makes jokes about the mob.  His mafia-themed humor has made him the hottest comic in Canada but it’s also led to him having a run-in with two men who say that they work for the mob.  After they beat him up, Phillip goes to Terri and T.S Turner for help.  Terri totally wants to help out Phillip, especially after he explains that he can’t just change his act because “I do mob jokes!”  Turner, oddly enough, seems rather indifferent to the whole thing.  Maybe he misses Amy.

After being absent for the past two episodes, Terri does return in this episode and she actually gets to do quite a bit.  In fact, since T.S. doesn’t really seem to care that much about Philip and his attempts at comedy, Terri actually ends up doing most of the investigating.  What Terri does not do is mention where Amy has gone or why everyone is acting as if Terri has always been around.  We are six episodes into the third season and the show still hasn’t bothered to explain why a major character has just vanished.  It’s disconcerting.  I mean, did something bad happen to Amy?  Is that why they’re pretending like she never existed?  Could Turner’s indifferent attitude actually be the result of the depression that he feels over losing the person who launched the appeal that put him back on the streets?  Poor T.S.!

As for this episode, I have to admit that I’m a bit skeptical that Phillip, or any comedian working the Toronto comedy circuit, could become a superstar by exclusively making jokes about the Mafia.  I mean, Phillips isn’t Jerry Lewis playing Las Vegas in the 50s and he’s not Don Rickles joking with Joey Gallo in New York in the 70s.  This certainly isn’t Sicily, where it requires a lot of courage to run the risk of upsetting the Mafia.  This is Canada.  And while Canada certainly does have a Mafia that played an important role in smuggling liquor into the United States during prohibition, it’s still hard to believe that Canada is so mob-infested that a hacky comedian like Phillip could become a star with jokes like, “Remember the mob spelled backwards is bom.”

Of course, in fairness to the episode, it does eventually turn out that the two men who are threatening to Phillip are not actually affiliated with the Mafia.  Instead, they’ve been hired by a comedy club owner who wants to scare Phillip into hiring him as his agent.  That’s actually a fairly clever twist on the episode’s part but it still requires us to believe that the painfully unfunny Phillip is on the verge of superstardom.  It just doesn’t work.

Personally, I think this episode should have been about T.S. Turner launching a career as a stand-up comedian.  Seriously, talk about a missed opportunity.