Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing SLEDGE HAMMER!, a cop comedy which ran on ABC from 1986 to 1988. The entire series can be found on Prime!

This week, Sledge meets his hero.

Episode 1.13 “The Old Man and Sledge”

(Dir by Charles Braverman, originally aired on January 3rd, 1987)

Sledge is upset that his hero, former Detective Gilmore Yates (Stephen Elliott), is being evicted from his apartment. Back in the day, Yates shot even more people than Sledge, but now he’s facing a future in a retirement home. Sledge and Doreau arrange for Yates to get a job as a security guard at a jewelry store. When the jewelry store gets robbed, Yates takes a bullet to the arm and ends up in the retirement home anyway. However, Sledge suspects that there was more to the robbery than meets the eye…

By the standards of this show, this was a pretty low-key episode. If not for Sledge saying that his favorite song was “Taps” and that The Deer Hunter was his comfort film, this episode could almost pass for a traditional cop show. Fortunately, David Rasche is just as wonderfully unhinged as always, and he and Stephen Elliott played off each other well. (Just watch the scene where Sledge is disappointed to learn that Yates doesn’t talk to his gun.) This was a minor episode of Sledge Hammer!, though it still had its moments.