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, Amy’s psycho nephew shows up!
Episode 1.15 “Sophie a La Modem”
(Dir by Stan Olsen, originally aired on April 18th, 1988)
“In this episode,” Mr. T tells us, “Sophie goes AWOL with Amy’s nephew and no one is safe from him …. NO ONE!”
This episode focuses on Sophie (Catherine Disher), who is Amy and T.S.’s administrative assistant. Since my first job out of college was working as an administrative assistant to an attorney, I appreciated that Sophie finally got to be the focus of an episode. Seriously, you can’t have an office without an office manager.
Amy’s nephew (Sunny Besen Thrasher) — who T.S. refers to as being “that little bad kid, Donald!” — is at the courthouse, firing a water gun at the security guard. Amy and T.S. take him to the office, where Sophie is extremely happy because she’s purchased — 80s alert! — a new modem! Donald, who is way too obsessed with guns, fires a rubber dart at Sophie’s computer screen. How big of a brat is Donald? He ever wears a bow-tie, just like the problem child kid. (Remember him?)
T.S. and Amy have to go to court so they’re not at the office when Mrs. Williams (Ruth Springfield) shows up and says that the people to whom she’s rented a house appear to be building something in the basement. Donald tells the woman that Sophie is Amy and somehow, this leads to Sophie and that little bad kid Donald going to investigate on their own.
Back at the office, T.S. and Amy return and discover that Sophie and Donald are gone but they don’t seem to be too worried about it. Instead of wondering where their administrative assistant and the little kid have gone, they talk about the time that Donald put a mouse in T.S.’s cookie jar. “He’s a bad kid,” T.S. growls.
At the house, Amy and Donald meet the two tenants, Gord (Ron Gabriel) and his slow-witted associate, Benny (Richard Donat). They also sneak into the basement and discover, as Sophie puts it, “a computer and a modem!” It turns out that Gord and Benny are using the magic powers of the modem to hack into bank databases. Unfortunately, Gord and Benny catch Sophie and that bad kid in the basement. Uh-oh!
Back at the office, T.S. speculates that Donald probably abandoned Sophie somewhere in Toronto and then stole her car. Instead of heading out to try to find the missing child and the administrative assistant, T.S. heads to the gym. I guess T.S. really does not like Donald!
Gord and Benny attempt to lock Sophie, Donald, and their landlady up in a crude cell they’ve constructed in the basement. Fortunately, Donald still has his toy dart gun and, by attaching a string to the dart, Sophie is able to snag the key to the cell. After unlocking and opening the cell door, Sophie turns on the computer and uses the magic powers of the modem to send a message to Amy, letting her know that they are being held prisoner in the basement.
T.S. shows up at the house and bangs on the door. “LET ME IN!” he shouts. When Gord and Benny fail to do so, T.S. kicks the door open. “I SAID LET ME IN!” While Gord begs T.S. not to kill him, Sophie uses the dart gun to shoot a rubber dart at Benny. Gord passes out and T.S. throws Benny through a wall.
Yay! This was an incredibly silly episode but I enjoyed it because Sophie got to live every administrative assistant’s dream. She did a good job and so did this episode. It was fun.
Episode 1.16 “Black and White”
(Dir by Don McCutcheon, originally aired on April 25th, 1988)
“In this episode,” Mr. T. tells us, “Amy and I are caught in the middle when Detective Jones takes the law into his own hands.”
If the previous episode gave Sophie her chance in the spotlight, this episode spotlights Detective Jones (played by Ken James). Since the second episode, Detective Jones has been the detective with whom Amy and Turner always seem to end up interacting. He’s also the detective who arrested for T.S. for the crime that T.S. didn’t commit. Needless to say, their relationship is occasionally awkward but, all things considered, surprisingly friendly.
This episode opens with Detective Jones’s wife (Meredith McRae) coming across two teenage boys breaking into her house and getting knocked unconscious as result. Jones, who is out for revenge, thinks that one of the boys was Tom (Nicholas Shields), who is later arrested for another burglary and whose attorney is — you guessed it! — Amy Taler. It turns out that Tom was one of the two teens that broke into Jones’s house but he was not the one who hit Mrs. Jones. This is all something that Jones finds out after he follows Tom to the surprisingly large warehouse that is owned by Tom’s accomplice, the psychotic Len. Fortunately, T.S. also follows Jones to the warehouse and helps him to subdue Len. Tom is given a suspended sentence and Jones and his wife leave for a Miami vacation.
This is a good example of an episode that suffered due to T. and T. having to cram an hour’s worth of story into a 30-minute time slot. This episode certainly had the potential to be interesting, with Detective Jones turning into a vigilante and T.S. Turner sympathizing with Tom because of their shared background as foster children but, with the shortened running time, the whole thing was juts a bit too rushed to be effective.
Next week: T.S. Turner faces off against two rich kids who think that ruining someone else’s life is just a game!
Through the Shattered Lens 