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!

Are you ready to get back into T and T?

Yeah, me neither.

But I made a commitment to review the show so here we go!

Episode 3.11 “A Place In History”

(Dir by Alan Simmonds, originally aired on March 17th, 1990)

Phil (Sean McCann), the new cut man at Decker’s gym, impresses everyone when he throws one solid punch that breaks the nose of a cocky boxer.  Phil tells them that he learned how to take care of himself back when he was better known as Lucky O’Mara.

OH MY GOD, everyone says, LUCKY O’MARA!

Apparently, in the 50s, Lucky O’Mara was a gangster who was famous for stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.  His picture was never taken and his mysterious disappearance led to a legend growing all over Canada about what happened to Lucky O’Mara.  (He was the Toronto version of D.B. Cooper, I suppose.)  After the local media gets wind of Phil’s story, he becomes a celebrity.  Everyone wants to interview Lucky O’Mara.  And at least one person — a veteran mafia hitman — wants to kill Lucky O’Mara.

Only Turner, Terri, and Detective Hargrove are skeptical of Phil’s story.  When Hargrove summons Phil to the police station and announces that he’s going to be arrested for a murder that Hargrove says Lucky committed, Phil comes clean and admits that he’s not Lucky.  And it all turns out that Phil wasn’t going to be arrested anyway.  It was just a clever ruse on the part of Hargrove and Terri.

At the end of the episode, Phil is back to working as a cut man and no one at the gym seems to be all that upset about him lying to them.  Phil tells Turner that he actually is Lucky O’Mara.  Turner shrugs.

Wow, what a nothing episode.  The idea was intriguing but the episode did little with it.  You kind of have to wonder how it is that a busy policeman like Hargrove and a busy attorney like Terri have time to fake arrest someone.  I mean, aren’t there real arrests that need to be made?  Worst of all, T.S. Turner spent most of this episode sitting in his office.  He didn’t growl at anyone.  He didn’t threaten anyone.  He didn’t get mad at anyone.  What’s the point of T and T if you’re not going to use the T that most people are probably watching for?

This episode was typical of the third season of T and T.  It didn’t add up too much and Mr. T really didn’t seem like he wanted to be there anymore.  I know how he feels but there’s only a few more episodes to go and I’m going to review everyone of them.