Chester Grimes | Through the Shattered Lens

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 Freevee!

This week, Baker takes charge!

Episode 2.22 “Ride The Whirlwind”

(Dir by Larry Wilcox, originally aired on March 10th, 1979)

Just as with the week’s episode of Miami Vice, I am going to do a bullet-point review of this week’s episode of CHiPs because, quite frankly, it’s the holidays and I’m pressed for time.

In order to combat a crime wave that has apparently broken out in the nearby California hills, Baker has suggested creating a three-person dirt-bike team. His hope is that the team will be made up of him, Ponch, and Sindy. However, when Sindy gets delayed while helping a stranding motorist and ends up missing the morning briefing, Baker is forced to pick Grossman (Paul Linke) instead.
“Yay!” you might be saying. Seriously, Grossman is a far more entertaining character than Sindy. However, Ponch, Baker, and Sindy are not happy about it. My personal feeling is that if riding a dirt bike was that damn important to Sindy, she should have arrived on time.
Ponch pays Grossman forty dollars to fake an injury so Sindy can take his place. Grossman takes the money and then explains that he would have done it for free, just because he can tell who much riding a dirt bike means to Sindy. If it meant so much to her, she could have showed up on time!
The dirt bike patrol is a huge success. One guy rides through an old woman’s lettuce patch on his bike. Baker tracks down the miscreant and not only gives him a ticket but also gets a date with the guy’s girlfriend.
Larry Wilcox also directed this episode, which perhaps explains why, for once, Baker’s the one who gets a date as opposed to Ponch.
Ponch busts a city councilman who later explains that he was just riding his bike recklessly because he was having a midlife crisis.
Sindy busts a punch of PCP dealers. It takes her two tries, however. The first time she chases them, she falls off her bike and sprains her ankle. The second time, she proves that she belongs on a bike.
That’s good because Getraer is in a total panic about putting a woman on any sort of motorcycle, even just a dirt bike. “If she gets injured,” Getraer warns Baker, it’ll be bad news for the entire department. Getraer, I guess, hasn’t noticed that the entire second season had pretty much centered on just how hyper-competent Sindy is.
The stars of this episode were the California scenery and the stunt people. The members of the dirt bike patrol all wear bulky uniforms and face-obscuring helmets, in order to disguise the fact that Larry Wilcox, Erik Estrada, and Brianne Leary are clearly not the ones who are actually riding the bikes.
Noted character actor Paul Koslo appears as one of the PCP dealers. He’s believably redneck-y.
This episode featured some impressive stunts, which is really the main thing that most people ask for when it comes to a show like this. That said, I do think the episode would have been more with Grossman as a member of the team.

Next week: Season two ends!

This week, the first season comes to a close!

Episode 1.22 “Flashback!”

(Dir by Michael Caffey, originally aired on April 1st, 1978)

When a recent graduate from te motor school joins the unit, he immediately rubs everyone the wrong way. Brent Delaney (Joe Penny) may have graduated at the top of his class but, as Baker points out, he flunked public relations and everyone quickly tires of his holier-than-thou approach to policing. Add to that, his father is a bigshot politician and everyone assumes that Delaney is just some rich kid who got the job through his connections. Delaney’s arrogant and cocky attitude doesn’t do much to change that impression.

Fortunately, Baker and Ponch are both willing to look past Delaney’s cockiness. In fact, they spend the majority of the episode remembering how, one day, a CHiP officer named Jon Baker met a cocky dirt bike rider named Ponch (Erik Estrada) and also how Baker talked Ponch into applying for a spot on the force. No one gave Ponch much of a chance, largely because of his background as a juvenile delinquent and his friendship with a gang leader named Henry (Edward James Olmos). But, soon, Ponch and Baker were patrolling the streets and rescuing two women who were trapped in a car that they accidentally drove into a swimming pool. Ponch proved himself. Will Delaney?

Yes, this a flashback episode but, interestingly enough, most of the flashbacks appear to have been shot specifically for this episode. (There were two clips that I recognized as coming from the show’s pilot but the rest of the flashbacks appeared to be original.) The flashbacks don’t play out in a chronological order, either. Instead, they are somewhat randomly triggered by Ponch or Baker hearing an engine backfiring or spotting some person on a bike. This episode comes as close as one can to answering the question of what a cop show directed by Nicolas Roeg would look like.

As for Delaney, he eventually proves his worth when he takes down a group of bikers who were stealing CHP motorcycles. (One of the bikers is played by John Furey, who is best-known for playing Paul in Friday the 13th Part II.) It’s a pretty good thing that Delaney caught those guys, seeing as how his motorcycle was one of those that was stolen. Having proven himself, Delaney is welcomed into the CHP. Even the formerly skeptical Grossman and Bear end up shaking his hand and telling him that he did a good job. Way to go, Delaney! I imagine we’ll never see him again.

And so ends the first season of CHiPs. It was a fun season. There was nothing particularly challenging about any of the first 22 episodes but the scenery was gorgeous and some of the chase scenes were exciting. That’s really all you can ask for with a show like this. Though I understand that Larry Wilcox and Erik Estrada did not particularly like each other, that wasn’t obvious during the first season. In fact, even Estrada’s tendency to overact was nicely paired with Wilcox’s tendency to do the opposite. For the first season at least, they came across like legitimate partners and friends.

Next week, we start season 2!