Fran Gebhard | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Late Night 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 Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on YouTube!

This week, Jack is on vacation so Ryan and Micki try to retrieve an antique on their own. Near disaster ensues. I swear, why is Jack always running off? How can you take a vacation when your job is to literally save the world? You know who never got a decent vacation? Atlas.

Anyway, onto the episode….

Episode 2.3 “And Now The News”

(Dir by Bruce Pittman, originally aired October 14th, 1988)

With Jack on vacation, it falls to Micki and Ryan to track down the latest antique, a cursed radio that will reveal information to its owner as long as the owner uses the radio to kill a certain number of people. (The radio brings people’s greatest fears to life. So, if you’ve got a thing about snakes, watch out!) Micki and Ryan discover that the radio is currently in the possession of Dr. Avril Carter (Kate Trotter), who works at the local mental hospital and who is murdering patients so that the radio will help her with her research. Dr. Carter really wants to win that Nobel Prize.

Ryan and Micki really probably should have waited for Jack to come back because their attempts to get the radio back leads to one disaster after another. Ryan even manages to get electrocuted while trying to climb over the hospital’s security fence. Micki, meanwhile, does manage to get into the hospital but she is soon reminded that the majority of the patients are serial killers and perverts.

The best thing about this episode is that radio actually has a voice. Henry Ramer provides the voice of the “radio announcer,” who says stuff like, “And now the news …. after this murder” and such. At the end of the episode, it even taunts Dr. Carter when she fails to kill the required number of people and announces that Carter will never win a Nobel Prize. (The radio then proceeds to electrocute her.) In a nice touch, the announcer continues to talk to Ryan and Micki even when they’re taking it down to the vault. It offer to help them out in their quest, in return for a certain amount of murders. Micki and Ryan end up tossing the radio back and forth between the two of them. The episode even ends with a freeze frame of the radio in the air. Hopefully, they got it into the vault eventually.

This was a fun episode. The mental hospital was a atmospheric location, the radio was an inspired antique, and Kate Trotter gave a good performance as the villainous Dr. Carter. After two less than enthralling episodes, And Now The News was a definite return to everything that worked about the first season.

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!

In this episode, Terri finally get to show what she can do in court.

Episode 3.7 “A Lesson In Values”

(Dir by Clay Borris, originally aired on February 17th, 1990)

While working late at the courthouse, Terri stumbles across a homeless man named Nesmith. Nesmith explains that he’s not a drug addict or a drunk or a criminal or anyone dangerous. He’s just a man who lives on the streets and travels the country, jotting down his thoughts in notebooks. Terri is charmed by Nesmith and offers to find him room at a nearby hostel. Nesmith accepts the offer but then drops dead of a heart attack.

Terri takes it upon herself to serve as executor of his estate. In his will, Nesmith asks that all of his money — several thousand dollars — be left to his friend and traveling companion, Junior Grayson. Turner tracks down Grayson, which is about all T.S. Turner does in this episode. Instead, the entire episode revolves around Terri trying to prove that Nesmith’s will is legitimate. Nesmith’s wife (Fran Gebhard) and her sleazy attorney (John Stocker) want the money for themselves, despite the fact that Nesmith left home 12 years previously and had little contact with her afterwards.

It took seven episodes but Terri finally gets to be at the center of an episode. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty predictable episode and it’s also one that presents the homeless as being not people in need of support but instead as whimsical truth-tellers who enjoy living on the streets. As played by Kristina Nicoll, Terri is not a particularly credible attorney. I mean, Amy was definitely an underused character but you never doubted that she knew what she was doing in court. Terri, on the other hand, seems to think that suggesting that the judge will be a big meany head if she doesn’t find for Grayson is an effective argument.

In the end, Grayson does get the money but, because Nesmith’s owed a bunch of back taxes (Come on, Canada, the mans dead!), Grayson will only be getting a few dollars. That’s okay, though. Grayson knows that there’s more to life than money. Grayson gives Terri all of Nesmith’s notebooks and the episode ends with Terri starting to read them while Turner and Decker box in the background. (Seriously, Turner does next to nothing in this episode and, from what we do see of him, he just seems to be annoyed in general.) Personally, I was hoping that the episode would end with Terri announcing that she was going to get the notebooks published so that everyone could know who Nesmith was.

Another strange thing about this episode is that the actors playing Nesmith and Grayson were not credited. I sat through this show a handful of times, looking for their names but they were never listed. (And they’re not listed at the imdb either.) The actor playing Grayson gave a heartfelt performance and was this episode’s redeeming factor. I wish I could credit him.