Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 4.8 “Wheels of Justice”

Posted on August 11, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!

This week, not Ponch can smile his way out of the darkness.

Episode 4.8 “Wheels of Justice”

(Dir by Gordon Hessler, originally aired on December 21st, 1980)

The streets of Los Angeles are dangerous in this week’s episode.

Stan West (Basil Hoffman) is a reckless driver who is constantly causing accidents by driving too fast and making unsafe lane changes. He gets away with it because he keeps changing his name.

Arthur Holmes (Joshua Bryant) is a drunk who Jon and Ponch have pulled over several times. Arthur gets away with it by claiming, after every accident, that his wife was the one driving, Denise (Christine Belford) goes along with it, even though she hates the fact that she’s enabling her husband.

A group of cheerleaders drive around and do their cheers while driving!

Finally, a gas leak at the hospital leads to all the newborn babies being loaded into an ambulance for transport. When the ambulance is side-swiped by Stan, the babies end up at the station. Getraer gives everyone a lesson on how to properly soothe a crying baby. It’s cute but it’s also so manipulative that it leaves you feeling oddly used. But, hey, at least it’s cute!

This episode of CHiPs took a serious turn towards the end when the drunk driver swerved to avoid the cheerleaders and the end result is that his wife was thrown from the car and killed. When the car was shown crashing in slow motion, the wife’s mannequin actually fell out of the car. While I imagine that was probably not planned, it still created a memorably macabre image. In the end, Arthur ends up sobbing while Denise lies dead just a few feet away from him. That’s a pretty dark ending for an episode of CHiPs. Not even a quick scene of the officers holding the babies could change the fact that this was a really downbeat episode.

And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that. Driving drunk is selfish, stupid, and dangerous and CHiPs deserves some credit for not holding back.

Night Shift (1982, directed by Ron Howard)

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

Chuck Lumley (Henry Winkler) was a Wall Street wizard until the stress of the job started to give him ulcers. He dropped out of the rat race, got a less stressful job as an attendant at a New York City morgue, and eventually met and became engaged to Charlotte (Gina Hecht). When Chuck’s supervisor decides to give Chuck’s day shift to his new guy, Chuck is promoted to the night shift. “He has the same last name as you,” Chuck says when he learns the about the new employee. “Yeah, I think he’s my nephew or something,” his supervisor replies.

Chuck finds himself working nights with “Billy Blaze” Blazejowski (Michael Keaton), a hyperactive “idea man,” who has so many brilliant plans that he has to carry around a tape recorder so he doesn’t forget them. A typical Billy Blaze idea is to battle litter by creating edible paper. Another one is to rent out the hearse as a limo and give rides to teenagers. Chuck may not be happy about his new shift or coworker but he is happy that he shares his new work schedule with his upstairs neighbor, Belinda Keaton (Shelley Long). Belinda is a high-class prostitute who first meets Chuck when she comes by the morgue to identify the body of her pimp. When Chuck discovers that Belinda needs a new pimp, he and Billy take on the job themselves, which brings them into conflict with not only the vice cops but also with Pig (Richard Belzer) and Mustafa (Grand L. Bush).

Raunchy but good-hearted, Night Shift has always been one of my favorite comedies. Along with being Ron Howard’s first movie for grown-ups, it also featured Michael Keaton in his first lead role. Keaton is both funny and surprisingly poignant as Billy. He’s hyperactive and impulsive and doesn’t think things through but his friendship with Chuck is real and later on in the movie, he reveals himself to have more depth than he lets on. Also giving good performances are Henry Winkler and Shelley Long, two performers better-known for their television work than their film roles. With his role here, Winkler proved that he was capable of playing more than just the Fonz. Shelley Long has probably never been better (or sexier) than she was in this film. The scene where she makes breakfast for Chuck is unforgettable. Even though she’s playing a stock character, the prostitute with a heart of gold, Shelley Long brings her own unique charm to the role and makes Belinda seem like a real person.

Night Shift starts out strong but falters slightly during its second hour, when Chuck and Billy seem to magically go from being nerdy morgue attendants to successful pimps overnight. Some of the violence feels out-of-place in what is essentially a buddy comedy with a dash of romance. It’s still a funny movie that is full of memorable one liners and good performances. As you might expect from Ron Howard, Night Shift is a surprisingly good-hearted look at the business of sex. Ron Howard has directed a lot of films since but few of them are as much fun as Night Shift.

Embracing the Melodrama #32: Ordinary People (dir by Robert Redford)

Posted on July 7, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For the past seven days, I’ve been reviewing — in chronological order — fifty of the most memorable melodramas ever filmed. We started with a silent film from 1916 and now, we have reached the 80s. What better way to kick off the decade than by taking a look at the 1980 Best Picture winner, Ordinary People?

Directed by Robert Redford, Ordinary People tells the story of the upper middle class Jarrett family. On the surface, the Jarretts appear to be the perfect family. Calvin Jarrett (Donald Sutherland) has a successful career. Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) keeps a perfect home and appears to be the ideal suburban matriarch. However, one summer, their oldest son drowns in a sailing accident and their youngest son, sensitive Conrad (Timothy Hutton), attempts to commit suicide. After spending four months in a psychiatric hospital, Conrad come back home and the family struggles to put their lives back together. Even though he starts to see a therapist (Judd Hirsch) and starts dating his classmate Jeannine (Elizabeth McGovern), Conrad still struggles with his feelings of guilt over having survived. Beth’s struggle to maintain a facade of normalcy leads to several fights between her and Conrad with Calvin trapped in the middle.

Among my fellow film bloggers, there’s always going to be a very vocal group that is going to hate Ordinary People because it won the Oscar for best picture over challenging black-and-white films directed by Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull) and David Lynch (The Elephant Man). They always tend to complain that Ordinary People is a conventional film that tells a conventional story and that it was directed by a very conventional director. More than once, I’ve seen an online film critic refer to Ordinary People as being a “big budget Lifetime movie.”

Well, you know what?

I love Lifetime. Lifetime is the best network on television and to me, a big budget Lifetime movie would be the best Lifetime movie of all. And, at the risk of alienating all of my film-loving friends, if I had to choose between watching Raging Bull and Ordinary People, I’m going to pick Ordinary People every time. Raging Bull is visually stunning and features great performances but it’s also two hours spent watching an incredibly unlikable human being beating the crap out of anyone who is foolish enough to love him. Ordinary People may essentially look like a TV show but it’s also about characters that you can understand and that, as the film progresses, you grow to truly care about.

Yes, I do wish that the character of Beth had been given more of a chance to talk about her feelings and it’s hard not to feel that Ordinary People places too much blame on the mother. But, even so, the film still ends with vague — if unlikely — hope that Beth will eventually be able to move past her anger and reconnect with her family. The film may be hard on Beth but it never gives up on her. That’s what distinguishes Ordinary People for me. In many ways, it’s a very sad film. It’s a film that was specifically designed to make you cry and I certainly shed a few tears while I watched it. But, even with its somewhat ambiguous ending, Ordinary People is also a very optimistic movie. It’s a movie that says that, as much pain as we may have in our life,we can recover and life can go on and it’s okay to be sad and its also okay to be happy.

And that’s an important lesson to learn.

(That said, if I had been alive and an Academy voter in 1981, I would have voted for The Elephant Man.)