Tag Archives: Dan Frazer

Retro Television Review: Law & Order 8.6 and Homicide 6.5 “Baby, It’s You”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC!  It  can be viewed on Peacock.

This week, Homicide crosses over with Law & Order.

Law & Order 8.6 “Baby, It’s You”

(Dir by Edwin Sherin, originally aired on November 12th, 1997)

Homicide 6.5 “Baby, It’s You”

(Dir by Edwin Sherin, originally aired on November 14th, 1997)

In New York City, Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) and Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) find themselves investigating the death of a 14 year-old model named Brittany Janeway.  The daughter of plastic surgeon Steven Janeway (Tom Tammi) and his wife Gayle (Maureen Anderman), Brittany died after complaining to her father about abdominal pain.  The medical examiner determines that, two weeks before her death, Brittany was sexually assaulted with such severity that it resulted in internal injuries that led to toxic shock.

When the detectives learn that Brittany was in Baltimore two weeks earlier, they call Lt. Giardello and ask if he can send two of his detectives to check on the family’s Maryland home.  The job falls to Detective Munch, who is still angry over the fact that Briscoe once slept with his first wife.  Munch asks Falsone (ugh!) to accompany him.  When Munch and Falsone learn that the son of the Janeways’s New York housekeeper was seen in Baltimore on the night that Brittany was raped, they have a suspect.  Danvers sends them to New York with one mission.  Arrest the guy and bring him back to Baltimore to stand trial.  Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) is not happy about that.  Because Brittany died in New York, he feels that it’s his case to prosecute.  Because the rape that led to Brittany’s death happened in Baltimore, Danvers claims that it’s his case.

Of course, once the suspect is arrested, it turns out that he wasn’t the perpetrator.  Instead, he was a witness.  According to him, Brittany had already been raped by the time he arrived at the house.  The suspicion immediately shifts to Dr. Janeway.  When the doctor is arrested in Baltimore, McCoy heads down to Maryland to argue that the case should be tried in New York.  Judge Andahl (Sagan Lewis), who was last seen getting Elijah Wood off of a murder charge, disagrees.  However, she allows McCoy to be co-counsel with Danvers.

In a twist that will not surprise anyone who has ever seen an episode of Law & Order, it turns out that Brittany was not assaulted by her father.  Instead, she was assaulted by her mother.

The last time Law & Order and Homicide did a cross-over, the emphasis was on Pembleton and Bayliss and their unorthodox interrogation technique running up against McCoy’s need for admissible evidence.  This time, when McCoy goes down to Baltimore, he quickly befriends and starts to discuss life with — you guessed it! — Detective Paul Falsone!  In fact, Pembleton and Bayliss are barely present in this cross-over.  While Munch does get to engage in some fun passive-aggressive banter with Lennie Briscoe, this cross-over is ultimately all about Paul Falsone, the super detective who never makes a mistake.

Good Lord, why?  WHY DOES EVERYTHING HAVE TO BE ABOUT FALSONE?  Falsone is a boring character.  We are five episodes into the sixth season and Falsone has been a major part of four of them.  The veteran Homicide actors were pushed to the side so that Jon Seda could wander around and mutter his lines.  I get that show was trying to appeal to fans of more action-orientated cop shows with the character of Falsone but, in what I’ve seen so far, Seda has not shown a hint of charisma in the role. The fact that Homicide keeps insisting that Falsone is the greatest detective in the history of detectives does not make the character any more intriguing.

This crossover was a disappointment,  The story, which was obviously based on the JonBenet Ramsey case, was sordid simply for the sake of being sordid and the big reveal that the murderer was the mother was not quite the shocking moment that it was bult up to be.  Anyone familiar with Law & Order could have guessed who the murderer was going  to be.  And then, on top of everything else — FALSONE!

This was not a good one.

The Super Cops (1974, directed by Gordon Parks)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

David Greenberg (Ron Liebman) and Robert Hantz (David Selby) are two tough and smart New York City cops who become detectives and play by their own rules.  They make arrests off-duty.  They drive their lieutenants crazy.  They bust drug dealers and prostitutes and single-handedly clean up their police precinct.  They’re the Super Cops and they’re even nicknamed Batman and Robin.  When they throw punches, a graphic “POW” appears on screen with a sound effect.

There’s an old saying about how, when the truth is different from the legend, always print the legend.  That’s certainly the case here.  The real-life David Greenberg went into politics and ended up doing time for mail fraud, insurance fraud, and obstruction of justice.  Robert Hantz was busted for possessing marijuana while he was on vacation in the Bahamas.  The arrest led to a demotion and Hantz quit the force as a result.  The film hints at Greenberg and Hantz’s involvement with the Knapp Commission, which investigated police corruption in the 70s.  (Lisa wrote about it when she reviewed Serpico.)  But the film does not mention that the Knapp Commission suspected that Greenberg and Hantz murdered two drug dealers.

You don’t get any of that with The Super Cops, which tries to mix the grittiness of films like The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, and Serpico with moments of cartoonish comedy and it really doesn’t work.  (Years after The Super Cops was released, Hill Street Blues proved that gritty drama and dark comedy could be mixed but it has to be done just right.)  Ron Liebman overacts while David Selby doesn’t seem to be acting at all.  (Liebman and Selby are both good actors but you wouldn’t know that from this movie.  For Liebman, I suggest checking out his performance in Night Falls On Manhattan.  For Selby, I recommend an overlooked dark comedy called Headless Body in Topless Bar.)  It’s hard to believe that Gordon Parks went from doing Shaft to doing this.  Shaft would have tossed the Super Cops through a window.  Popeye Doyle would have given him an assist.

There is one good thing to note about The Super Cops.  Edgar Wright is a fan of this film and it partially inspired the far superior Hot Fuzz.

 

Late Night Retro Television Reviews: Monsters 1.17 “Taps”

Posted on 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 Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire show is streaming on Tubi.

I was pretty hard on Monsters last week.  In retrospect, I think some of that was due to the fact that I was feeling anxious about getting my new laptop.  I stand by what I said about the episode because it wasn’t a good one but I do regret the slight tone of outrage that I took in my review.  Seriously, this is not a show to take seriously.

Take tonight’s episode for example….

Episode 1.17 “Taps”

(Dir by David Misch, originally aired on March 4th, 1989)

Suzy St. Claire (Mary Jo Keenan) is a professional dancer who is appearing, on Broadway, in a show that stars and is directed by an egomaniacal tap dancer, Gary Gregory (Neal Jones).  Suzy wants freedom from both the show and her romantic relationship with Gary so that she can go to Hollywood and try to become a star.  Gary tells her that there’s no way he’ll ever let her go.  So, Suzy contacts a lawyer and he helps her got out of the contract, along with suing Gary for sexual harassment.  Nah, just kidding.  That’s what I would do but Suzy just decides to poison him.  When Gary doesn’t die quickly enough and proves to be too big to fit in a suitcase, Suzy dismembers him.

A few years later, Suzy is in Hollywood with her agent, Sam (Dan Frazer).  She demands to know why Meryl Streep is getting Oscar nominations but she’s not.  Sam points out that starring in Graveyard Slasher III is not the path to getting Academy recognition.  After Sam leaves, Suzy realizes that she’s not alone in her apartment.  She looks over at the window and, behind the curtains, she sees a familiar red shoe.  She opens the curtains and is confronted by….

…. A DISEMBODIED LEG!

Apparently, she forgot to destroy Gary’s leg and now, it has tracked her down.  In a scene that has to be seen to be believed, she is chased around the apartment by the leg.  When she tries to leave the apartment, the leg trips her.  The leg hops up and down until she says, “You want to dance with me?”  It’s a scene that is so ludicrous that it nearly works.  The only problem is that a hopping leg, on its own, doesn’t really have the type of forward momentum necessary to be a real threat.  If you can’t outrun one hopping leg, maybe you deserve whatever you get.

In Suzy’s case, that means using a meat carver to chop off her own leg and then somehow — it’s never shown how — attaching Gary’s leg to the stump.  When we next see Suzy, she is back in New York and Sam is wondering why she’s abandoned her film career to return to dancing.

Good Lord, this was silly.  To its credit, it was meant to be silly.  None of the dialogue was meant to be taken seriously and the actors were all clearly in on the joke.  But, ultimately, that disembodied leg was just too utterly ridiculous for the story to work.  I applaud this episode for laughing at itself but I just wish it had been a little better executed.  Add to that, for an episode about dancers, we didn’t get to see nearly enough dancing.  Sorry, the hopping leg doesn’t count.

Next week …. Tori Spelling guest stars!  We’ll see how that goes.