Late Night Retro Television Review: Pacific Blue 5.4 “Blue Hawaii: Part Two”

Posted on November 3, 2026 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 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, things wrap up in Hawaii.

Episode 5.4 “Blue Hawaii: Part Two”

(Dir by Michael Levine, originally aired on August 8th, 1999)

In Hawaii, the California bike cops and the Hawaiian anti-drug task force decide to work together to get revenge for the death of Officer Peter Cho. “For Peter,” the bike cops say, obviously moved by the death of someone who they barely knew. They decide that the best way to take down drug dealer Michael Shane (Shawn Michaels) is with an undercover operation. Of course, the last time they tried to take down Shane with an undercover operation, Peter got shot. I swear, these idiots never learn anything. They’re kind of like the people in Michigan who are incapable of understanding that a senatorial candidate who spends the majority of his time voluntarily hanging out with anti-Semites is probably a rabid anti-Semite himself.

Luckily, Shane doesn’t learn anything either. When Cory presents herself as being a former bank employee who can hack into a bank and steal a lot of money, Shane falls for it. Or, at least, he does for a few minutes. Eventually, he figures out what’s going on and, after a tense standoff with the other cops, he makes a run for it. In one of the dumbest scenes I have ever seen, TC borrows a stranger’s bicycle so he can pedal it through the hotel while chasing Shane. I mean, I get that this is a show about bicycle cops but I’m starting to feel that TC uses bicycles the way that some people use a security blanket.

While that’s going on, Bobby considers staying in Hawaii with Claire (Kristanna Loken) but eventually, he decides not to because I imagine the only reason people were watching this show in 1999 was to see Mario Lopez chase after the bad guys. Just as with last week’s episode, this was clearly meant to be a pilot for a series that would have followed the Hawaiian cops. (Baywatch relocated to Hawaii around the same time.) As such, it’s not like Claire could have followed Bobby to California. So, I guess Bobby and Claire are done.

There is one odd moment where Bobby and Claire are talking about the undercover operation that got their colleague Peter killed. Bobby says that all he could think about was that, if anything happened to Claire, he’d never forgive himself. Claire says she was thinking the same thing about Bobby. Umm, hello? Peter’s dead! Remember all of that “For Peter” nonsense? I swear, bicyclists are so self-centered.

There’s another moment where TC gets a call from Monica, who is still in California. She informs him that there’s a guy running for mayor who says he’s going to eliminate the bicycle patrol because it’s a waste of money. I want to vote for him!

Late Night Retro Television Review: Pacific Blue 5.3 “Blue Hawaii: Part One”

Posted on October 27, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, the bike cops go to Hawaii!

Episode 5.3 “Blue Hawaii: Part One”

(Dir by Michael Levine, originally aired on August 1st, 1999)

TC, Cory, Bobby, and Granger are sent to Hawaii so that they can spend five days training other bicycle cops. If there’s anything that this show has shown over the past five seasons, it’s that it takes a lot of training to be a bicycle cop. For instance, you have to know how to look smugly self-satisfied while holding up traffic. That’s not a natural skill. That’s something you have to learn. Whenever Cory responds to a legitimate question by yelling and shoving someone into a wall, you’re seeing years of training. Whenever Chris runs a bystander over with her bicycle and then says, “Just doing my job,” that’s her way of sayin, “Your taxes paid for this!”

Bobby and Granger spend their first Hawaiian night at a strip club. A drug dealer (Dax Griffin) mistakes Bobby for a buyer. This leads to Bobby and Granger getting involved in an undercover operation. We meet the other members of Hawaii’s special undercover task force. There’s Sgt. Aikau (Andy Bumatai), a surfer who puts a curse on TC. There’s Matt Cho (Lorenzo Callender), who acts just like Bobby. There’s an Australian cop (played by Corey Page) who acts just like Granger. And then there’s Officer Claire Keene (Kristanna Loken) who acts just like Cory.

As you probably already guessed, this episode was a backdoor pilot for a series that was didn’t end up happening. (This episode aired the same year that Baywatch became Baywatch Hawaii.) It’s also a two-parter, which means this episode ends with Bobby and Granger still working undercover, the drug dealers still on the loose, and the Hawaiian cops in need of some lessons on how to work undercover. Bobby is also falling for Claire and is thinking about transferring permanently to Hawaii.

Like a lot of backdoor pilots, this episode fails because it asked us to get emotionally invested in a bunch of new, poorly-drawn characters. The fact that all of the Hawaiian cops had the same personality tics as their California counterparts didn’t help matters. That said, I enjoyed this episode just because it was shot in Hawaii and the scenery was lovely.

Next week, we’ll conclude our trip to paradise with Part Two of Blue Hawaii!

Back to School Part II #36: Dead Man On Campus (dir by Alan Cohn)

Posted on September 13, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh my God, it’s Zack Morris smoking pot and getting laid!

That, in a sentence, is the main appeal of the 1998 comedy Dead Man On Campus. This is the film that features Mark-Paul Gosselaar playing a character who does everything that most Saved By The Bell fans have always assumed that Zack Morris was doing whenever he wasn’t on-screen, fooling Belding, tormenting Screech, and gazing at Kelly.

(By the way, if you’re interested in the further college adventures of Zack Morris, check out Primetime Preppie, where Derek Morris and I are reviewing every single episode of Saved By The Bell: The College Years!)

In Dead Man On Campus, Gosselaar plays Cooper Frederickson. Cooper is a college student. He spends most of his time partying and consistently fails his classes but since he’s going to a college that apparently doesn’t believe in academic suspension, it doesn’t matter. Cooper’s father continues to pay for him to go to school. To be honest, Cooper is kind of a jerk but he’s also really hot. He wears glasses and there’s just something about a bad boy with bad eyesight.

(Seriously…)

Anyway, Cooper has two roommates. Kyle (Jason Segel) is … well, he’s Jason Segel, giving another one of the somewhat odd performances that typified his film career before he co-starred with The Muppets and played David Foster Wallace. His other roommate is Josh (Tom Everett Scott). Josh starts out as a responsible and hard-working student but then he falls under Cooper’s bad influence. He also gets a girlfriend (Poppy Montgomery) and ends up having so much fun that he blows off all of his classes.

Suddenly, Josh realizes that he’s about to lose his scholarship. At the same time, Cooper’s father comes to visit and announces that he will no longer be paying for his son’s lifestyle. If Cooper flunks out of school, he’s going to end up cleaning toilets for his father’s janitorial service.

Oh no! Zack Morris cleaning a toilet!? How the mighty have fallen! I guess they’re screwed, right!?

Nope! It turns out that there’s a clause in the university charter. If a student’s roommate commits suicide during the school year, that student gets perfect grades for the semester! (I was told the same thing during my first semester at the University of North Texas.) Unfortunately, Kyle has recently moved out of the dorm and neither Cooper nor Josh are willing to die for the other.

So, they decide to get a new roommate. After breaking into the school’s student files, they identify the three students who are most likely to commit suicide. One is an aspiring singer who Cooper and Josh come to suspect might be faking his depression as a way to hit on girls. (Okay, that’s kind of clever because I know that I’ve gone out with people who I thought were dark and profound, just to discover that they were actually rather boring and bourgeois.) Another is a nerdy computer guy who has paranoid delusions about Bill Gates.

And then there’s Cliff. Cliff is actually the first potential roommate that they investigate but he also makes the biggest impression. In fact, he makes such a big impression that he ends up overshadowing everyone else in the film. Cliff is played by Lochlyn Munro, who has subsequently become one of the patron saints of the Lifetime network. (Seriously, it seems like Munro shows up on Lifetime on a daily basis.) Ripping through the film like a cyclone, Munro is definitely the highlight of Dead Man On Campus. It turns out that Cliff isn’t so much suicidal as he’s just absolutely insane and Munro goes so wonderfully over the top in the film that he briefly brings some much-needed life to this comedy about death.

Anyway, Dead Man On Campus is a pretty forgettable movie and it’s never as clever as it thinks that it is. But it does feature Mark-Paul Gosselaar taking hits off a bong and that’ll definitely make it worth seeing for some viewers.