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 1st and Ten, which aired in syndication from 1984 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on Tubi.

This week, Lawrence Taylor shows up!

Episode 4.7 “Saturday, Bloody Saturday”

(Dir by Stan Lathan, originally aired on November 16th, 1988)

Ever since I started reviewing this show, my friend Mark has been telling me to keep an eye out for Lawrence Taylor.  Taylor is an actual football player who has gone on to have a sporadic acting career.  (He also did Dancing With The Stars.)  This week, after months of searching, I finally spotted Lawrence Taylor’s name in the credits.

Taylor plays Tombstone Packer, an opposing player who goes on television and announces that he’s going to destroy the Bulls to get revenge on Dr. Death for crippling one of Tombstone’s teammates.  Usually, I joke about how the worst actors on shows like this are always the professional athletes.  But I have to admit that Lawrence Taylor is not that bad in this episode.  Of course, he spends most of the episode yelling at and threatening people and I imagine that would come naturally to most football players.  Still, that’s more than most of the basketball players who appeared on Hang Time were capable of pulling off.

There’s a lot of drama in this episode, even beyond Tombstone Packer’s search for vengeance.  For instance, Billy Cooper is shocked to discover that his newest girlfriend, Sybil (Samantha Eggar, seriously slumming), is the wife of Dodds Corporation executive Robert Nelson (Derek Patridge).  Making things even worse is that Sybil dies of a drug overdose and Billy is worried that he and the players might be blamed and even criminally charged.  Billy shouldn’t have worried, though.  It turns out that Sybil had a long history of sleeping with athletes and Robert was okay with it.  He’s not even that upset to hear that his wife has died.

Meanwhile, TD Parker (OJ Simpson) meets Gillian (Michael Michele).  The newly-divorced TD flirts with Gillian at a supermarket and learns that she’s a soccer player.  TD decides that it’s time for the Bulls to make history by signing Gillian as their backup field goal kicker!  Over the objections of Coach Denardo, Gillian becomes the first woman to play professional football.  Of course, Tombstone tackles her as soon as she makes her first kick and she’s carted off the field with a bruised leg.  The show ends with TD welcoming Gillian to the team but, according to imdb, this was Gillian’s only appearance on the show.  Hopefully, she didn’t make TD angry.

(I should also say that, on Tubi, this episode’s sound was extremely muddy and the close captioning was running way behind so the show ended before the captions even reached TD’s postgame talk with Gillian.  Their conversation was not always easy to hear.  That said, Gillian looked really happy so I’m assuming that TD welcomed her to the team.)

As I watched this episode, I remembered that, a few years ago, a woman actually did try out to be a kicker in the NFL.  She received a lot of media hype in the days leading up to the try-out.  Everyone was really excited until she actually kicked the football and sent it skidding over to the sidelines.  I also thought about how Degrassi spent an entire season building up Jane as being a totally badass football player, just to abandon the idea after a few episodes.  I guess my point is that I guess it would be great if a woman played in the NFL and totally dominated all of the 300-pound men who play in that league but I just don’t think it’s going to happen in my lifetime.

Oh well!  At least I can now say that I’ve spotted Lawrence Taylor on 1st & Ten.