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 …. oh my God, it’s a surprisingly good episode of T and T!
Episode 3.15 “The Butler Duet”
(Dir by Don McCutcheon, originally aired on April 14th, 1990)
Sometimes, one screenshot tells you everything that you need to know about an episode.
In this episode, T.S. is indeed hired to bodyguard a parrot. The parrot, named Higgins, has been named the sole beneficiary of Mrs. Wells’s will. Mrs. Wells’s children (one of whom is played by comedian Colin Mochrie) want to declare their mother incompetent. While Terri does her best to defend Mrs. Wells in court, T.S. works with Mrs. Wells’s butler (Ian White) to protect the parrot.
How does T.S. protect the parrot? By putting on a tuxedo and working as the Butler’s assistant. “Dinner is served,” T.S. Turner growls at one point. Of course, to the surprise of no one, it turns out that the Butler is really the one whom is behind the effort to make Mrs. Wells look mentally incompetent. “It’s always the butler,” Turner growls after grabbing the Butler in the courtroom. Turner, it should be noted, does a lot of growling in this episode and I was happy about that. What’s the point of casting Mr. T if he’s not going to growl at anyone?
With the Butler exposed, Mrs. Wells is ruled to be mentally competent and I guess that means that Higgins is going to be one rich bird. Good for Higgins. I like parrots. I could never own one, of course, not with my love cats and my dislike of hearing my own words repeated back at me. But still, they’re good for television shows and movies. I think it’s a shame that Higgins didn’t have more of a Canadian accent but whatever. You can’t have everything, I guess.
(How do parrots learn to talk? And how difficult would it be for me to teach a parrot to like give an hour long speech or something? I think next year’s state of the union address should be delivered by a parrot. I mean, if a parrot were president, there would be no war. There would be no government and things could go bad really quickly. It would probably work better as a TV show than a real-life thing.)
This was an incredibly silly episode but it was also oddly likable. For one thing, the judge in the courtroom was fascinated by the parrot and it was hard not to smile at him trying to get the parrot to talk while the witnesses testified. As well, the episode was smart enough to realize that there’s no way that Mr. T cannot be amusing while wearing a tuxedo.
By T and T season 3 standards, this was a surprisingly good episode.
Through the Shattered Lens 