Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  This Thursday, I will be reviewing Harry’s Battles, which aired its only episode on ABC in 1981.  The show can be found on YouTube!

Episode 1.1 “Pilot”

(Dir by Adam Rafkin, aired on June 8th, 1981)

Harry Fitzsimmons (Dick Van Dyke) is a grocery store manager who doesn’t understand why life has to be so complicated. During the opening credits, we watch as a gas station attendant (Joe Regalbuto) changes the price of unleaded while Harry is filling up his tank. We watch as the car-wash guy (Joe Regalbuto again) changes the radio station in his car. We watch as a postman (played by, you guessed it, Joe Regalbuto) clumsily tosses Harry’s package into the street after Harry tells him that it’s fragile.

Harry is easily frustrated, and anyone who has ever had to deal with any sort of bureaucracy will be able to understand where he’s coming from. In this episode, he and his wife, Mary Carol (Connie Stevens), are planning a night at the theater with their best friends, Herb (Danny Wells) and Diane (Marley Sims). They’re going to see Kate Jackson in Evita. But then Mary Carol gets something in her eye, and Harry decides to run her by the emergency room to get it checked out. It should only take a few minutes….

Two hours later, Harry is demanding to know where his wife is, the nurse on duty (Brooke Alderson) is more interested in talking on the phone than talking to him, and Dr. Harwood (Joe Regalbuto) is making jokes like, “We may lose patients on the operating table but not in the halls.”

It turns out the ER is short-staffed because everyone is at a party for the departing head of psychiatry. Harry talks to the incoming head of psychiatry, Dr. Jorgensen (David Ruprecht), who starts talking about the wrath that he’s going to bring down on the world. Only Harry seems to notice that the incoming head of psychiatry is apparently insane.

When Dr. Harwood announces that he’s found Harry’s wife, he rolls out an elderly woman (Florence Halop) in a wheelchair. When Harry insists that the woman is not his wife, both Dr. Harwood and the nurse reply that the woman is named “Mrs. Fitzsimmons” and therefore she is Harry’s wife. Eventually the woman announces that she’s escaping and rolls out of the hospital. Only then does it occur to the doctor and the nurse that the woman might not be Harry’s wife despite her last name. They have a good laugh over it.

When Mary Carol is finally found, she’s on a gurney and can barely walk or talk because of the painkillers she’s been given for her broken collarbone. “See,” Harwood says, looking at the X-ray, “look at that finger-shaped bone!” “That is my finger!” Mary Carol finally manages to say. Harry loses it and accuses Dr. Harwood of being incompetent. The doctor responds that not everyone can afford to go to the theater and that he is proud to be a doctor for those people. All of the patients in the ER applaud….

I’ve watched a lot of pilots for this feature and most of them are pretty bad. Harry’s Battles is actually really good and still funny and relatable nearly 45 years after it first aired. (It’s amazing to think that Dick Van Dyke, who was in his fifties when he did this pilot, is still with us.) Harry’s anger is the anger that everyone feels while dealing with incompetence. His frustration with paperwork and bureaucratic nonsense remains relatable. If anything, it’s probably even more relatable today than when this pilot first aired. We live in an overly regulated society and, sadly, there are a lot of people currently running for office who want to make things even more regulated. Dick Van Dyke may be a DSA supporter, but Harry Fitzsimmons definitely would have known better. I also really like the idea of Joe Regalbuto playing everyone who annoys Harry. Watching this pilot, it was easy to imagine week after week of various Regalbuto characters making Harry’s life difficult.

Sadly, this pilot was not turned into a television series. If Harry’s Battles had become a series, it probably would have been a classic. As it is, we’ve got this one episode that encourages us to consider what could have been.