Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!
This week, Ponch fixes everything.
Episode 4.11 “11-99: Officer Need Help”
(Dir by Phil Bondelli, originally aired on January 18th, 1981)
Three criminals are stealing trucks from a trucking company. One of the criminals works for the company but he gets fired, not for his thievery but because he accidentally put a cate of corrosive chemicals on the wrong truck. Now, the highway patrol has to track down the chemicals and also stop the criminals.
It’s a typical episode of CHiPs. A man loses his job after he’s wrongly accused of being the thief. The man’s son (Greg Bradford) helps Jon and Ponch catch the real criminals. There’s a subplot about all of the members of the high patrol carrying a new device that sends out of a signal whenever an officer’s down. Grossman accidentally pushes the button while chasing a lost dog. The emphasis here is on everyone working together and the Highway Patrol going out of their way to always have the best equipment to do their job. In the end, this is such a typical episode that the whole thing is kind of boring.
Really, for me, the only interesting thing about this episode is that it featured a subplot about a new police dispatcher who spoke with a stammer and who had trouble sending out instructions over the radio. I had a lot of sympathy for Kathie Lark (Katherine Moffat) because I had a pretty pronounced stammer up until I was about twelve years old. (It now only comes out if I’m extremely tired or stressed.) That said, considering just how important the dispatchers are when it comes to the Highway Patrol, I was a bit surprised that Kathie got the job in the first place. Kathie mentioned that she had previously been a dispatcher in a small town and again, I wondered how she got that job. To me, it seemed like the Highway Patrol was basically setting Kathie up for failure.
The good thing is that eventually someone gives Kathie some advice that helps her to overcome her nervousness and become an excellent dispatcher. Do you want to guess who gave her the advice? Seriously, I dare you to guess who, out of the show’s cast of characters, magically knew exactly the right thing to say to help Kathie out. If you’re thinking that Ponch was responsible for Kathie becoming a badass on the airwaves, you are exactly right! Is there no problem that Ponch can’t solve? Ponch’s advice, by the way, was that Kathie should always imagine that she was speaking directly to him. The next time that I find myself tripping over a word that starts with B, I’ll try the same thing.
It’s the Ponch Show! Seriously, there’s nothing that Ponch can’t do! Beyond that, this was a boring episode. The California scenery was nice to look at but otherwise, this episode felt like CHiPs on autopilot.
Through the Shattered Lens 