Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Decoy, which aired in Syndication in 1957 and 1958.  The show can be viewed on Tubi!

This week, Casey gets involved in dark and dirty world of professional boxing!

Episode 1.19 “The Challenger”

(Dir by Stuart Rosenberg, originally aired on February 17th, 1958)

Up-and-c0ming boxer Lenny Capper (Bob Carraway) has a chance to become the middle weight champion of the world but a local mobster known as The Bull (Vincent Gardenia) wants Lenny to throw the fight.  First, the Bull has his goons beat up Lenny’s manager, Hecky (Frank Sutton).  Then the Bull attempts to spike Lenny’s orange juice.  Luckily, Casey is there to switch out the spiked orange juice with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.  With the power of citrus goodness backing him up, Lenny is able to win the fight and the Bull and his goons are arrested.

This episode was kind of boring.  Until it was time for her to switch out the orange juice, Casey spent most of this episode as an observer.  The majority of the episode was taken up with scenes of Carraway, Sutton, and Gardenia playing out the very familiar story of the honest lunk-headed boxer with a streetwise manager and a gangster demanding that he throw the big fight.  The only thing that was messing was someone to say, “I coulda been somebody, Charlie!  I coulda been a contender!”

Casey didn’t even really get to go undercover in this episode.  She attended a boxing match and then she just kind of hung around in the locker room.  If I was working a case that involved the world of boxing, I would at least want to get dressed up for one of the matches.  I would demand to wear the dress that Amy Adams wore whenever she went to Mark Wahlberg’s fights in The Fighter.  I would also insist that How You Like Me Now be played while The Bull and his men were being marched out to the paddy wagon.

In the end, the main problem with this episode is that it wasn’t really a Casey Jones story.  Instead, it was just a standard boxing tale with Casey rather awkwardly inserted into the action.  That said, as the episode ends, Casey looks at the camera and tells us that it takes a lot of work to be the middleweight champion of the world.  And then she smokes a cigarette because, even in an episode like this one, Casey was the coolest person in New York.