Frank Adamson | 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!

There’s nothing scarier than going to the dentist! Especially when he has a cursed electric chair!

(As a sidenote, I was planning on reviewing this last week but I was not feeling well so I held off until this week. I apologize for the delay in the writing and posting this review! These things do happen and I’ve recently been told that I need to start getting more rest and looking after my health so it may happen more than once.)

Episode 1.17 “The Electrocutioner”

(Dir by Rob Hedden, originally aired on April 18th, 1988)

In 1978, Eli Pittman (Angelo Rizacos) was sitting on death row, an innocent man who had been wrongly convicted of murder. Sentenced to die in the electric chair, Eli’s cries of innocence fell on deaf ears. The warden of the prison didn’t care. The judge didn’t care. The prosecuting attorney didn’t care. Miraculously, Eli survived the first attempt to electrocute him. And, fortunately, his death sentence was overturned before he could be shocked a second time.

Ten years later, Eli is working as a dentist at a school for runaways. Though he presents himself as being a charitable doctor who just wants to help the less fortunate, Eli is actually a deeply bitter man. He wants revenge on everyone who sent him to prison. Eli has purchased the electric chair in which he was meant to die. He’s disguised it as a dentist chair. When his teenage patients sit in the chair, they are reduced to ash. Eli is then able to generate electricity through his body. He uses this power to get his revenge.

Can Ryan, Micki, and Jack stop him?

After a really good opening scene (which is filmed in black-and-white and makes use of a handheld camera to generate a genuinely nightmarish atmosphere), this becomes one of the sillier episodes that I’ve watched so far. Angelo Rizacos is good in the flashback scenes and he makes you feel a good deal of sympathy for Eli. But, in the modern day scenes, he overacts to an extent that Eli goes from being a victimized man driven by revenge to a rather broadly-drawn supervillain. He’s like a character from a B-comic book movie, the sort of villain that would expect Venom or Morbius to battle in a pre-credits sequence.

Add to that …. an antique electric chair? This show is at its best when the antiques are stuff that you could imagine actually stumbling across in an antique store. The idea of that big, bulky chair being in the store (and subsequently being disguised as a dentist chair) was just silly.

But you know what? Friday the 13th is a fun show, even when it’s silly. Chris Wiggins, John D. LeMay, and Robey made for a good team of investigators and, if nothing else, it was fun watching them interact in this episode. This was a silly episode but at least it was silly in an entertaining way.

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, T.S. and Amy battle the Canadian Mafia!

Episode 2.8 “Every Picture….”

(Dir by Don McCutcheon, originally aired on November 21st, 1988)

This episode of T and T continues to insist that the show is taking place in a place called Metro County. It even features a newspaper called the Metro County Eagle and suburb of Metro County that is called Ridley. As well, it appears that all of the cars in Metro County have American-style license plates.

Listen, T and T, you’re not fooling anyone.

We can all see the snow on the ground.

We can all see the frozen breath whenever a scene takes place outside.

We have all noticed how polite all the extras are.

We can all see the hockey hair and the denim jackets.

Even more importantly, we can all hear the accent whenever anyone apologizes or asks, “What’s this all aboot?”

Everyone knows that T and T totally takes place in Toronto! Obviously, a lot of a Canadian shows deliberately tried to leave their setting ambiguous so that they could appeal to viewers in the United States. Interestingly enough, the most successful syndicated Canadian show in the United States was Degrassi, which was always proudly and forthrightly Canadian.

As for today’s episode, it opens with a waitress named Kathy (Jacqueline Samuda) fleeing from a diner after she happens to see her picture in the newspaper. It turns out that a lot of people have noticed that picture. One of them is a burly mob hitman (Paul Coeur) who calls the paper and demands to know who took the picture. When the editor refuses to name names, the hitman breaks into the office to search for the name himself.

Because Amy is friendly (and maybe more!) with the editor, she volunteers T.S. to investigate the photograph. T.S. and Amy track down the photographer, a nerdy teenage prodigy named Lenny (Robert Haiat). After talking to Lenny, they track down the diner where Kathy worked and eventually, they break into Kathy’s apartment. Kathy isn’t there.

“She either left in a hurry or she’s a bad housekeeper,” T.S. growls.

Meanwhile, the hitman kidnaps Lenny and demands that he take him to the diner where the picture was taken. When Lenny’s father tells T.S. that the abduction is all his fault, T.S. says, “I’m going to make this right!”

Kathy, it turns out, is actually named Maria. Because she testified against her mob boss brother, she’s in the Canadian witness protection program. Lenny kind of ruined all that by taking her picture. Now, she’s hiding out in a church but, after the hitman catches a priest entering Kathy’s apartment, he’s able to track her down. This hitman is so evil that he’s prepared to shoot Kathy in the head in the middle of a church! Luckily, T.S. shows up just in time.

“HEY, FOOL!” T.S. shouts before beating the crap out of the hitman.

There’s a simplicity to T and T that you really have to admire. For all the talk of T.S. being a detective and an advocate of peace and understanding, he solves most of his problems by either punching someone out or throwing them through a window. This show reminds us that the simple solution is sometimes the best.

Anyway, you know what? This was a really good episode. The mystery was intriguing. The show generated actual suspense over who would find Kathy first. The scene in the church was nicely atmospheric. Even the sentimental ending, with Kathy giving T.S. a crucifix to thank him for saving her life, felt totally earned. Way to go, Toronto!