Michael Lange | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Hunter, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1991. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!

This week, Hunter and a biker compete to see who has the fastest draw.

Episode 1.10 “The Shooter”

(Dir by Michael Lange, originally aired on January 4th, 1985)

Someone is gunning down motorcycle cops. It’s a crime that both Hunter and McCall take personally. Unfortunately, Bernie Terwiliger is in charge of the investigation and he insists that he doesn’t need any help from Hunter or “the brass cupcake.” Considering that McCall’s husband was a police officer who was killed while doing a routine traffic stop, you would think Terwiliger would be a little bit more sensitive but nope. That’s not the way things are done on Hunter.

Hunter and McCall conduct their own investigation, which leads them a country-western bar and a quick-draw video game. Deke Broder (Robert Dryer) is a redneck who is very proud of having the fastest draw on the game. The only problem is that cops keep coming in the bar and beating his time. So, Deke stalks and kills them.

Deke — it’s just a game!

Soon, Hunter is playing the video game and Deke has a new target.

Now, this is a good episode! It’s everything that you could want from an episode of Hunter. It’s violent. It’s fast-paced. It’s got enough atmosphere to hold the viewer’s interest and it features a bad guy who is more interesting than the run-of-the-mill cop show villain. Deke and Hunter have a lot in common. They’re both cocky. They’re both convinced their the best. And they both really like to shoot their guns. Between the motorcycles and Deke’s leather kill suit, this episode was pure style.

This is exactly what an episode of Hunter should be like.

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Freddy’s Nightmares, a horror anthology show which ran in syndication from 1988 to 1990. The entire series can be found on Tubi!

This week …. oh, who knows?

Episode 1.12 “Deadline”

(Dir by Michael Lange, originally aired on January 29th, 1989)

This week’s first story is about Peter (Aaron Harnick), whose father owns the local Springwood paper and who is given a job for the summer. He’s assigned to write the obits so that he can hang out around the newspaper office and learn from the veteran writers. Peter would rather be in Europe. That’s especially true when he starts to visualize the obits that he’s writing and somehow comes to realize that he’ll die unless he meets his deadline.

This story was the epitome of a good premise that was sloppily executed. Peter hates writing obits but if he doesn’t write the obits, he’ll die in the same way as the person that he’s writing about. He has visions. He has dreams. Unfortunately, both his boss and his girlfriend tell him to stop working on his current obit and to get some rest. But if Peter stop writing, he’ll die! Uhmm …. how long does it take to type up an obituary? I mean, doesn’t he just have to type up whatever dead person’s loved ones sent to the paper?

There’s a clever moment where Peter deletes an old article about Freddy Krueger from the newspaper’s computer system. The episode implies that maybe Peter’s visions are in some way Freddy’s revenge but, as was so often the case with this show, it doesn’t really do much to explore the idea.

The first story ends with Peter dead. The episode’s second story deals with Emily (Page Hannah), a friend of Peter’s girlfriend. Emily has been dating an older college student (Timothy Brantley) and she continually has dreams where her friends — including Peter’s girlfriend — get mad at her for not spending more time with her. In her dreams, her friends all die in a car accident. At the end of the story, it turns out that Emily was just daydreaming. Seriously, that’s the entire story.

What a terrible episode. I usually try to be positive about even the lesser episodes but I have to admit that I’m kind of ticked off that I wasted 50 minutes watching this week’s episode of Freddy’s Nightmares. It felt as the show’s writers didn’t even try this week. Instead, they just came up with some weird scenes and then dismissed them by shrugging and saying, “Hey, it was all a dream. Nothing means anything!”

This episode was just lazy.