Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing 1st and Ten, which aired in syndication from 1984 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on Tubi.

This week, the fourth season comes to a close!

Episode 4.14 “The Irreducible Bottom Line”

(Dir by Stan Lathan, originally aired on January 4th, 1989)

The Bulls are going to the championship game, and Joe Namath is hosting a documentary about them. In mockumentary style, Namath and his cameras follow the players around as they prepare for the big game. Quarterback Doug Clayton is told to say, “I’m going to Play Land!” if he wins. Bubba insists on wearing his lucky shirt, no matter how sweat-stained it gets. A decal for a burger chain is placed on all the footballs. The game is as much about big money as it is about victory. In the end, the Bulls win easily, and Coach Denardo finally gets a post-game call from the President.

This is a weird episode. According to IMDb, it ran 26 minutes when it premiered on HBO — the standard running time for 1st & Ten. The version streaming on Prime and Tubi, however, is only 12 minutes long and is full of abrupt jump cuts. Those streaming copies are the syndication edits. Because the series originated on HBO, most episodes included a little nudity and a lot of profanity, all of which was cut for syndication. In this case, about 14 minutes appear to have been removed. One can only assume the Bulls really partied before and after the big game.

Unfortunately, that makes it pretty much impossible to review the episode properly. A few amusing moments still land, mostly the ones that treat sports as a business. It’s also obvious that large stretches of the story were cut. All I can say is that the Bulls finally won the championship, and the rather uneven fourth season of 1st & Ten is over. We’ll start season five next week.