Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 5.1 “Suicide Stunt”

Posted on November 24, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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, the fifth season begins.

Episode 5.1 “Suicide Stunt”

(Dir by Michael Caffey, originally aired on October 4th, 1981)

The fifth season opens with the Highway Patrol pursuing a gang of thieves and also keeping an eye on Janos Szabo (Les Lannom), a motorcycle daredevil from Hungary who has come to Los Angeles to take part in charity show for “Highway Patrol Widows and Orphans.”

Since Hungary was controlled by the evil communists (hisssss!) when this episode originally aired, I assumed the episode would be about Janos trying to defect so that he could start a new life in the greatest country on Earth, the USA (yay!). Instead, it turned out that Janos was more concerned with spending time with an ex-girlfriend named Maria (Anita Jodelsohn) who had defected (Good for you, Maria!) and was now working for the Highway Patrol. The entire episode was pretty much scene after scene of Janos sneaking away from his handlers, stealing a vehicle, and then trying to kidnap Maria. Maria found it to be amusing. The members of the Highway Patrol were amused. Even Janos’s handlers seemed to be secretly amused. Still, when Janos set a fire outside of the CHP headquarters to distract everyone so that he could steal another car (this one with Maria in it), Ponch had no choice other than to arrest him.

“I am glad it is you who arrest me,” Janos says to Ponch, smiling like an idiot.

With Janos arrested, it falls on Jon Baker to perfect the stunts while riding Janos’s motorcycle. And Baker is able to do it easily, even the one that involves bursting through a ring of fire. So, I guess they didn’t need Janos to begin with. They should have just had Baker do it and they could have saved a lot of money. Way to waste the taxpayer’s cash, Jerry Brown!

(He was governor at the time. Then, like 30 years later, he was governor again.)

Odd episode, this one. Most season premieres try to go big but this was pretty much just another episode of CHiPs. The California scenery was nice. I always appreciate that this show was largely shot on location and, as a result, even the worst episodes have some value as a time capsule. That said, Janos was an incredibly annoying character. The fact that the show meant for us to laugh at his antics made him even more annoying. There’s only so many times you can watch one jackass try to abduct one woman before you say, “Enough already!”

Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 4.20 “Dead Man’s Riddle”

Posted on November 3, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, the CHiPs team investigates an accident and a guest star gives a really terrible performance.

Episode 4.20 “Dead Man’s Riddle”

(Dir by Michael Caffey, originally aired on May 10th, 1981)

An accident in the mountains causes three cars to explode and one driver to die. Since the dead driver was a captain with the Los Angeles fire department, the MAIT Team is sent out to recreate the accident and to try to figure out what happened. They know that at least three cars were involved in the accident. One driver died. One driver is in the hospital. And the other driver appears to be missing. Getraer suspects that the accident could be due to people racing each other in the mountains.

What makes this episode odd is the casting of Joanna Kerns as psychiatrist Colleen Jacobs. She’s assigned to the MAIT Team. She actually drives through the mountains frequently and she even gets involved in racing sometimes. In fact, she saw one of the cars right before the accident! At first, she doesn’t bother to share this with anyone. Instead, she just sits in the background with a guilty look on her face. Finally, Jon Baker — in an unmarked car — tricks her into trying to race him. That’s when she finally confesses….

….and faces absolutely no consequences! Oh sure, Getraer gets a little annoyed and says that it would have been helpful if Dr. Jacobs had been honest from the start. But Dr. Jacobs is allowed to continue to work with the MAIT Team. Even though she intentionally withheld evidence from investigators, she’s not charged with obstruction. Ponch tells her that she’s getting a chance to redeem herself which I don’t think is police policy. No one comments on the fact that, even though she was worried that she may have previously caused a fatal accident, she still tried to race Baker. Does no one care that, at the very least, she appears to have no impulse control?

Making things even stranger is that Joanna Kerns gives one of the worst performances that I have ever seen as Dr. Jacobs, delivering half of her lines as if she’s struggling not to laugh. Even when she’s admitting her fear that she may have been responsible for the accident, she still seems like she’s on the verge of breaking out into laughter. It’s very odd.

Speaking of odd, an eccentric old man named Max (Owen Brooks) claims that he saw a UFO before the crash. (Dr. Jacobs laughs when she repeats this.) It turns out that he just saw a hubcap flying through the air.

In the end, it’s proven that the captain was not at fault in the accident. That’s all that anyone really seems to care about. I assume that Dr. Jacbos and Baker then proceeded to race each back to Los Angeles.

Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 1.22 “Flashback!”

Posted on April 15, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, the first season comes to a close!

Episode 1.22 “Flashback!”

(Dir by Michael Caffey, originally aired on April 1st, 1978)

When a recent graduate from te motor school joins the unit, he immediately rubs everyone the wrong way. Brent Delaney (Joe Penny) may have graduated at the top of his class but, as Baker points out, he flunked public relations and everyone quickly tires of his holier-than-thou approach to policing. Add to that, his father is a bigshot politician and everyone assumes that Delaney is just some rich kid who got the job through his connections. Delaney’s arrogant and cocky attitude doesn’t do much to change that impression.

Fortunately, Baker and Ponch are both willing to look past Delaney’s cockiness. In fact, they spend the majority of the episode remembering how, one day, a CHiP officer named Jon Baker met a cocky dirt bike rider named Ponch (Erik Estrada) and also how Baker talked Ponch into applying for a spot on the force. No one gave Ponch much of a chance, largely because of his background as a juvenile delinquent and his friendship with a gang leader named Henry (Edward James Olmos). But, soon, Ponch and Baker were patrolling the streets and rescuing two women who were trapped in a car that they accidentally drove into a swimming pool. Ponch proved himself. Will Delaney?

Yes, this a flashback episode but, interestingly enough, most of the flashbacks appear to have been shot specifically for this episode. (There were two clips that I recognized as coming from the show’s pilot but the rest of the flashbacks appeared to be original.) The flashbacks don’t play out in a chronological order, either. Instead, they are somewhat randomly triggered by Ponch or Baker hearing an engine backfiring or spotting some person on a bike. This episode comes as close as one can to answering the question of what a cop show directed by Nicolas Roeg would look like.

As for Delaney, he eventually proves his worth when he takes down a group of bikers who were stealing CHP motorcycles. (One of the bikers is played by John Furey, who is best-known for playing Paul in Friday the 13th Part II.) It’s a pretty good thing that Delaney caught those guys, seeing as how his motorcycle was one of those that was stolen. Having proven himself, Delaney is welcomed into the CHP. Even the formerly skeptical Grossman and Bear end up shaking his hand and telling him that he did a good job. Way to go, Delaney! I imagine we’ll never see him again.

And so ends the first season of CHiPs. It was a fun season. There was nothing particularly challenging about any of the first 22 episodes but the scenery was gorgeous and some of the chase scenes were exciting. That’s really all you can ask for with a show like this. Though I understand that Larry Wilcox and Erik Estrada did not particularly like each other, that wasn’t obvious during the first season. In fact, even Estrada’s tendency to overact was nicely paired with Wilcox’s tendency to do the opposite. For the first season at least, they came across like legitimate partners and friends.

Next week, we start season 2!

Late Night Retro Television Reviews: Chips 1.3 “Dog Gone”

Posted on November 27, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, Baker gets a dog and Ponch makes an enemy!

Episode 1.3 “Dog Gone”

(Dir by Michael Caffey, originally aired on September 29th, 1977)

When an adorable sheepdog puppy ends up on the Los Angeles highway, Baker and Ponch manage to rescue it, though not before it causes a minor wreck on an overpass. The official CHiP policy is that all stray animals should immediately be turned over to the shelter but Baker takes one look at the puppy and decides that he can’t just leave it with anyone else. In fact, every member of the highway patrol quickly falls in love with the dog.

Everyone except for Sgt. Getraer, who is allergic to dogs and makes it clear that the puppy is not to be kept around the station.

At first, Baker tries to keep the dog in his apartment but it turns out that the dog likes to bark. So, Baker heads out to the trailer park where Ponch lives in an RV and apparently spends all of his time watching football while only wearing his boxer shorts. (One gets the feeling that Erik Estrada had an “at least one shirtless scene per episode” clause in his contract.) Baker leaves the dog in the RV and then runs off before the half-naked Ponch can protest.

Fortunately, for Baker, Ponch decides that he loves the dog, which he named Fido.

Unfortunately, for Ponch, Fido’s owners eventually show up at the station and ask if anyone has seen their dog. The dog — who even I, while admittedly not being a dog person, has to admit is cute — is reunited with his family and I guess Ponch is alone again.

Meanwhile, three really stupid criminals — Boots (Bill Adler), Zero (Jeffrey Druce), and Little John (James Crittenden) — are really angry with Ponch because, at the scene of the earlier accident, Ponch prevented Boots from threatening another motorist. Boots and his friends hops into their dune buggy and decide to stalk Ponch and Baker. Boots even decides to sabotage Ponch’s motorcycle by loosening the front bolt so that the wheel will eventually come off while Ponch is riding it. However, these three criminals are so stupid that they sabotage the wrong motorcycle. As a result, the entire second half of the episode is full of close-ups of Baker’s front tire wobbling as he speeds down the highway.

The subplot with the criminals is really dumb but the way it plays out shows that Larry Wilcox had a point when he complained about the show’s producers always favoring Erik Estrada. Not only is Ponch the one who faces off against Boots at the scene of the accident but he’s also the one who gets to save Baker’s life at the end of the episode. When a guilt-stricken Zero goes to Getraer and tells him about what Boots did to the motorcycle, it doesn’t take long for Getraer to figure out that they accidentally sabotaged Baker’s motorcycle instead of Ponch’s. With Baker unable to hear his radio due to being involved in a high-speed chase, it falls to Ponch to chase after Baker and warn him. The bike still crashes but Baker is not seriously injured and Ponch …. well, Ponch is just a big damn hero!

(Admittedly, there is a scene earlier in the episode where Baker performs mouth-to-mouth recitation on a motorist who has had a heart attack and saves the man’s life. But even then, Ponch is the one pushing on the man’s chest to try to get his heart going again. Baker’s a good cop, the show tells us, but Ponch is a big damn hero.)

This episode …. well, at least the dog was cute! And the California scenery was lovely to look at. Still, a cop show like this needs to have some smart or at least intimidating criminals for the cops to do battle with and Boots was such an idiot that it was hard to take anything he and his gang did seriously. In the end, this was a typical episode of CHiPs, full of stiff acting but impressive motorcycle stunt work. Probably the most interesting thing about this episode was discovering that Baker was the one with a swinging bachelor pad while Ponch was the one living a solitary life in a trailer park. I’m just happy that the dog was reunited with its family.

Retro Television Reviews: The Master 1.8 “The Good, the Bad, and the Priceless”

Posted on June 30, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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 The Master, which ran on NBC from January to August of 1984. The show can be found on Tubi!

This week, The Master goes to New York City!

Episode 1.8 “The Good, the Bad, and the Priceless”

(Dir by Michael Caffey, originally aired on March 23rd, 1984)

This week’s episode of The Master asks us to consider just how needlessly complicated an hour’s worth of entertainment can be.

John Peter McAllister (Lee Van Cleef) and Max Keller (Timothy Van Patten) are in New York City! Apparently, McAllister was flipping through a magazine when he came across an advertisement featuring a picture of his long-lost daughter, Terri. The agency responsible for the ad is headquartered in New York. McAllister is excited about the prospect of finally tracking down his daughter. Max is a little sad because he knows that McAllister won’t need him after he finds Terri. And Cat Sinclair (Tara Buckman) is just along for the ride….

Who is Cat Sinclair? She was introduced last episode as a love interest for Max. This episode tests Cat as a third member of the regular cast. Unfortunately, since Cat isn’t a ninja, she doesn’t really got to do much in the episode, other than stand in the background and roll her eyes whenever Max makes one of his terrible jokes. At one point, McAllister mentions that Max has a bit of a crush on Cat but we don’t really see much evidence of it. If anything, both McAllister and Max seem to go out of their way to ignore her.

Anyway, it turns out that the modeling agency is surprisingly willing to give out the home phone numbers of its models. They also have no problem telling McAllister, Max, and Cat that Terri has been booked as a model at a private fashion show being put on by Simon Garrett (George Maharis).

However, what neither McAllister nor Simon Garrett realize is that the woman who shows up at the fashion show and introduces herself as Terri McAllister is not Terri at all but is instead an FBI agent named Gina (Janine Turner), who bears a passing resemblance to Terri as long as she’s wearing a brunette wig. Simon Garrett is not only a fashion designer but he’s also an international criminal. Gina shows up (as Terri) at the fashion show and tries to search Garrett’s office. When Garrett’s security goons discover her, her life is saved by McAllister and Max, who both believe her to be Terri.

(How exactly McAllister, Max, and Cat managed to crash Garrett’s exclusive and private fashion show is not discussed.)

Gina continues to pretend to be Terri so that she can convince McAllister to help her figure out what Garrett’s current scheme is. Meanwhile, Garrett recognizes McAllister as an American ninja so he arranges for his men to kidnap Gina (who, again, everyone thinks is Terri). He threatens to kill Gina/Terri unless McAllister uses his ninja powers to break into the Brooklyn Museum of Art and steal the Crown Jewels of England. McAllister agrees to do so, which leads to an extended sequence of Lee Van Cleef’s stunt double avoiding the security lasers by doing elaborate back flips. Timothy Van Patten’s stunt double then does the exact same back flips. Who knew that stealing the Crown Jewels would be so simple?

As you can probably guess, this all leads to all the stunt doubles getting into a fight at Garrett’s office. Garrett is arrested. The crown jewels are recovered. Both McAllister and Max turn out to be surprisingly understanding about Gina having lied to them. One would think that McAllister, who is essentially being hunted a ninja assassins because he came to America to find his daughter, would be a bit more upset over having his emotions so blatantly manipulated but McAllister actually appears to be amused by the whole thing. Again, it’s hard not to suspect that finding Terri is not really as big a thing to McAllister as Max seems to believe it to be.

This is one of those episodes where everything was dependent upon everyone else being an idiot. These are typically my least favorite episodes of any show and that’s the case here. It’s kind of a shame because Lee Van Cleef and Timothy Van Patten both had some good moments in this episode. The scenes where Max talked about how much he’s going to miss McAllister after they find Terri actually did have some emotional heft but it wasn’t enough to make up for the episode’s missteps. I will admit that I smiled a bit at a subplot about an ad guy who wanted McAllister to put on a cowboy outfit and pose for a series of deodorant ads. McAllister took one look at the outfit and said, “I would never wear that.” Oh yes, you would, Van Cleef!

Next week: Okasa returns!

Seven in Darkness (1969, directed by Michael Caffey)

Posted on July 10, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

A group of blind people, led by teacher Alex Swain (Barry Nelson), are flying to a convention for the blind in Seattle. When their flight is knocked off-course by an unexpected storm, the plane crashes into a remote forest. The plane’s crew and the one sighted passenger are all killed in the crash, leaving the eight blind passengers to fend for themselves. The plane is perched on the edge of a mountain, there are wolves all around, and no one can see the surrounding terrain. And one of the passengers is pregnant and could give birth at any minute! To Alex’s resentment, the group turns to Mark (Sean Garrison) to help them survive in the wilderness. Mark was blinded while serving in Viet Nam and he’s still haunted by what happened during the war. At first, he resists being thrust into a leadership role but finally, it becomes clear that he has no choice. Under Mark’s leadership and despite Alex’s protestations, the eight survivors try to find their way back to civilization.

Filmed for television and based on a novel by Leonard Bishop, Seven in Darkness is a tense and well-acted movie. It’s not easy to watch the survivors feeling around in the darkness, trying to find their way to safety. That we can see what they don’t makes things all the more suspenseful. Even more importantly, the film does a good job of presenting the survivors of being individuals. Even though they all share a disability, they still have their own personality quirks, strengths, and flaws. Surprisingly the stand-out amongst the cast is none other than Milton Berle, cast in a dramatic role and giving a nuanced performance as the angriest of the survivors. Watching Seven in Darkness, you come to care about all of the survivors and you get very wrapped up in whether or not they’re going to be able to make it to safety.

Seven in Darkness was the first film to be shown as a part of ABC Movie of the Week. It can be found on YouTube.

The Hanged Man (1974, directed by Michael Caffey)

Posted on August 4, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

In this made-for-TV western, Steve Forrest stars as James Devlin. A hired killer and a notorious outlaw, Devlin has finally been captured and is sent to the gallows. At first, it seems as if the hanging’s been a success and Devlin’s life has been extinguished at the end of the rope. But then, while his body is at the funeral home and is being prepared for burial, Devlin suddenly opens his eyes and reveals that he’s alive.

No one can figure out how Devlin manage to survive being hung, especially not Devlin. However, Devlin is now alive and free to leave town. Has Devlin been sent back to Earth to serve God or did he just get lucky? Devlin may not be sure himself but he is determined to turn around his old ways. That starts with protecting a widow (Sharon Acker) and her son (Bobby Eilbacher) from Lew Halleck (Cameron Mitchell), a greedy businessman who wants their land and is prepared to go to any lengths to get it. Devlin is not only still as good with a gun as he was before his execution but, having survived his hanging, he can now read minds!

The Hanged Man was designed to be a pilot for a weekly TV series and watching it, it’s easy to imagine how the show would have developed. Devlin would have traveled around the old west, helping out a new guest star every episode and presumably trying to discover why he had been returned to life. It’s not a bad idea for a show, though the pilot film doesn’t do enough with it. Despite the fact that Devlin might be undead and that he now has the power to read minds, it really is just a conventional western, featuring the saintly widow and the evil land baron and all of the other familiar tropes of the genre. It may begin with Devlin coming back to life but it ends with a shoot-out that could have been lifted from any number of old TV shows.

Still, as far as made-for-TV westerns are concerned, this one is entertaining enough. Steve Forrest is a good hero and, as always, Cameron Mitchell is a good villain. I wish they had done more with the supernatural aspects of the story but The Hanged Man is good enough for undemanding fans of the genre.

Horror on TV: Kolchak: The Night Stalker 1.11 “Horror In The Heights” (dir by Michael Caffey)

Posted on October 21, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight, on Kolchak, someone or something is eating the elderly and poor residents of Roosevelt Heights! Carl Kolchak investigates!

After battling Native American monsters, Cajun monsters, and European monsters, Kolchak finds himself battling a Hindu demon in this episode. Apparently, Chicago was quite a busy place in the 1970s.

This episode originally aired on December 20th, 1974, just in time for the Christmas season.

Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcmRZuhSLXQ