Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Pacific Blue, a cop show that aired from 1996 to 2000 on the USA Network! It’s currently streaming everywhere, though I’m watching it on Tubi.
This week, the cast of Pacific Blue gets outacted.
Episode 2.9 “Genuine Heroes”
(Dir by Terrence O’Hara, originally aired on October 20th, 1996)
Pacific Blue makes an unforgivable mistake in this episode by giving a plum guest-starring role to Charles Napier. When your show is populated by boring regular characters and actors who are distinguished by their almost total lack of screen charisma, the last thing you want to do is bring in a certifiable badass character actor like Charles Napier. If Lt. Palermo and the bicycle crew seem charmless during a normal episode, just imagine how much worse they look when compared to Napier.
Napier plays Tyrone Justice, a Texas bounty hunter who has come to Santa Monica to track down a bank robber and his girlfriend. The members of the bike patrol are like, “We’re not going to let you cause any trouble down here,” and it’s kind of hard not to smirk because Tyrone Justice is Charles Freaking Napier. He wears a leather jacket and carries a shotgun. The bike patrol wears shorts and those stupid plastic helmets and spends all of their time riding their bicycles. Like, seriously, shut up, bike patrol.
Meanwhile, VJTV (which I guess is the show’s version of MTV) is shooting on the beach for spring break. Del Toro has a crush on VJTV personality Ginger Delvecchio (Angelica Bridges). Cory rolls her eyes whenever Del Toro sees Delvecchio, complaining that Delvecchio’s career is due solely to her sex appeal and how she looks in a bikini. (This argument perhaps would have worked better if delivered on a show that didn’t open every episode with stock footage of women in bikinis.) Cory complaining feels out of character. Usually, Kelly is the member of the bike patrol who is written to be an annoying straw feminist. At the end of the episode, Ginger leaves VJTV for a show that is obviously meant to be Baywatch. Seeing as how Pacific Blue itself is an obvious rip-off of Baywatch, all of the smirks and sighs feel a bit hypocritical.
Anyway, this episode was pretty dumb. It’s impossible to take people who ride bicycles seriously. When the bike patrol arrested Charles Napier, I had to laugh. There’s no way Charles Napier would ever surrender to some douchebag on a bicycle.
Through the Shattered Lens 