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, a show which ran in syndication from 1988 to 1990.  The show can be found on YouTube!

Despite the name of the series and the fact that producer Frank Mancuso was responsible for both the films and the show, Friday the 13th: The Series did not involve Camp Crystal Lake or Jason Voorhees.  Instead, it was a supernatural-themed show about two cousins, Micki (Robey, who has red hair like me!) and Ryan (John D. LeMay), who inherited a cursed antique shop from their uncle, Lewis.  When they discovered that Lewis spent the last few years of his mortal life selling cursed antiques, they realized that it was up to them to track down the evil items before they could cause too much harm to the world.  Working with them was Lewis’s former partner, Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins).

Episode 1.1 “The Inheritance”

(Dir by William Fruet, originally aired on October 3rd, 1987)

On a rainy night, antique store owner Lewis Vandredi (R.G. Armstrong) is literally dragged into the depths of Hell, the result of a long-ago deal that he made with the devil.  The store is inherited by Lewis’s niece and nephew, Micki Foster (Robey) and Ryan Dallion (John D. LeMay).

Micki and Ryan, at first, don’t seem to have much in common.  Ryan is a practical joker whose first reaction upon entering the store is to put on a rubber mask and wait for his cousin to show up so that he can startle her.  The much more responsible Micki just wants to sell off whatever is in the store so that she can return home to her fiancé, an attorney who really doesn’t understand why she has to waste her time with any family stuff at all.  The only thing that Micki and Ryan have in common is that neither one of them knows that their uncle made a deal with the devil to sell cursed antiques.  That changes when Lewis’s former business partner, Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins), shows up and not only tells them about Lewis’s supernatural activities but also finds the ledger where Lewis recorded all of his sales.

Uh-oh, it turns out that Micki herself has sold something from the shop.  She sold an extremely ugly doll to Mr. Simms (Michael Fletcher), who in turn gave it to his bratty daughter, Mary (played by a 7 year-old Sarah Polley).  Yes, the doll is cursed and yes, Mary is already using it to get revenge on anyone who annoys her.  First, she uses the doll to kill her stepmother.  Then, she uses the doll to kill the sweet babysitter who asked Mary to be polite about asking for snacks.  When Micki and Ryan show up to retrieve the doll, Micki chases Mary to playground, where Mary uses the doll to make a statue breathe fire and a merry-go-round to spin dangerously fast.  Fortunately, while Mary is tormenting Micki, Ryan walks up and snatches the doll away from her….

…. and that’s it!

Seriously, it’s kind of an anti-climatic ending but I get it.  This was the first episode and, obviously, it was more important to establish why Micki and Ryan were the new owners of an antique store than to really offer up a complicated story of the supernatural.  This was a pilot and it got the important part of the job done, introducing the premise and the characters.  Robey and John D. LeMay were instantly likable as Micki and Ryan and the antique store was an intriguing location.  The story with the doll may not have been anything special but the pilot did leave me looking forward to next week’s episode.  And personally, I kind of liked how simple the solution was this week.  Mary was an awful brat so there was something really satisfying about Ryan just snatching that doll away from her.  Take that!

Next week: Ryan and Micki go to a monastery!