Late Night Retro Television Review: Pacific Blue 4.7 “Damaged Goods”

Posted on June 16, 2026 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 Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Pacific Blue, a cop show that aired from 1996 to 2000 on the USA Network! It’s currently streaming everywhere, though I’m watching it on Tubi.

This week, the bike cops are it again.

Episode 4.7 “Damaged Goods”

(Dir by Michael Levine, originally aired on October 4th, 1998)

Bobby has a new girlfriend named Annie (Tracy Hutson). Bobby says that he’s in love with her. Meanwhile, Granger is in lust with Annie’s best friend, Jo (Shannon Elizabeth, in an early role). After Granger sleeps with Jo, Jo tells him that he owes her $200. It turns out that both Jo and Annie get paid to have sex. Meanwhile, Annie’s roommate is found dead below a 6-story window.

Chris is convinced that Annie’s roommate was murdered. TC and Cory disagree. TC is especially angry because he thinks Chris is spending too much time hanging out with her friends in Homicide. Oddly enough, none of those friends show up in this episode. As well. no one from the Vice Squad shows up to investigate the campus prostitution ring. Instead, this is yet another episode where it somehow all falls to the bicycle cops.

Monica goes undercover and joins Jo and Annie’s therapy group, where Dr. Alicia Alper (Joyce Hyser) teaches that prostitution is empowering. Soon, Jo recruits Monica to work as a an escort. Or, at least, I think it was Jo. This episode is edited in such a haphazard way that it was hard to keep track of what was actually going on.

This episode finds Cory worrying about how she’s going to survive as a single mom. Her ex-boyfriend, Doug (Owen McKibben), returns and says that he wants to be in the baby’s life. Cory says that it’s been over a month since Doug reacted to the news of her pregnancy by walking out on her. Doug threatens to sue for the right to be a part of the baby’s life. Cory has a miscarriage. She says it was due to the stress Doug put her under. Doug says that it was due to Cory still working a very physically demanding and rough job despite being pregnant. I felt so bad for Cory in this episode, especially since the only person (other than Doug) who bothered to visit her in the hospital was Chris, who is pretty much incapable of feeling or showing emotion.

Anyway, it turns out that Annie’s roommate was murdered by a client and then the client was murdered by Dr. Alper. However, when the bike cops arrest her, several other woman all walk up and declares that Dr. Alper is innocent because they killed the client. However, Dr. Alper confesses. Bobby breaks up with his girlfriend. That’s probably for the best. Everyone knows Bobby should be with Monica.

This episode …. oh God. I mean, it tried to liven things up a little. There were a lot of intense interrogation scenes and a lot of jump cuts that were apparently meant to create tension. We would watch Chris ask a question and then jump to someone in a totally different room answering an unrelated question. It was very showy but it wasn’t very effective. These folks aren’t hard-boiled detectives. They’re bicycle cops.

Seriously, where were the real detectives?

Late Night Retro Television Review: Pacific Blue 4.3 “Seduced”

Posted on May 12, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, the bicycle cops clean up Malibu.

Episode 4.3 “Seduced”

(Dir by Terence H. Winkless, originally aired on August 9th, 1998)

Last week, I said that it appeared that the Pacific Blue recruits were no longer living in their funky loft. Well, it turns out I was wrong. This episode opens with Granger at the funky loft, hosting a party. Unfortunately, the party comes to an abrupt end when Granger tries to play an adult movie on his totally hip VCR. Uh-oh — it turns out that the lead actress in Barely Legal is the 16 year-old sister of one of Granger’s (dead) friends!

(She’s also played by Alison Lohman, a reminder that everyone had to start somewhere.)

Granger and Bobby Cruz set out to take down Malibu’s adult movie underground. TC agrees to help by telling Jamie Strickland to go undercover as a film student who needs a job. Strickland says that she’ll do it but she’s not going to have sex on camera. However, once she reaches the set, the sleazy director decides to put her in the film. Strickland calls Cory. Cory says, “We can’t pull you out now.”

Really? You can’t? Why are bicycle cops even going undercover?

Meanwhile, Playpen magazine offers Monica money to pose for them. They offer even more money if Monica can get the other women of Pacific Blue to pose as well. Needless to say, the other women of Pacific Blue are not willing to pose and they talk about how demeaning Playpen is for women. (Cory, who is pregnant but not showing, is at least tempted.) But the show still features a lengthy montage of Monica’s photoshoot. This show always tries to have it both ways.

This episode probably would have worked better if Granger was actually an interesting character but he’s not. It also would have helped if we knew anything about Strickland’s character, beyond the fact that she’s super-competent, but we don’t. Even the veteran characters — TC, Chris, and Cory — don’t really have any personality. Thankfully, this season has got Mario Lopez playing Bobby Cruz like A.C. Slater on a bicycle and Shanna Moakler, playing Monica as a scheming agent of chaos. Only Lopez and Moakler seem to to have really understood what type of show they were on.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Pacific Blue 4.1 “Glass Houses”

Posted on April 28, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, we start season 4!

Episode 4.1 “Glass Houses”

(Dir by Michael Levine, originally aired on July 26th, 1998)

The fourth season of Pacific Blue opens with many changes.

Palermo and Victor have retired. Cory is now dating Doug Fraser (Owen McKibbin). At the start of the episode, Cory and Doug accompany TC and Chris to Vegas, where they are married by — you guessed it! — an Elvis impersonator.

TC is now in charge of Pacific Blue and, while Chris and Cory both make plans to take the sergeant’s exam, TC focuses on bringing in some new blood. At the police academy, he recruits two recent graduates — hyper-competent Jaime Strickland (Amy Hunter) and edgy rebel Russ Granger (Jeff Stearns). He asks and gets undercover cop Monica Harper (Shanna Moakler) transferred to Pacific Blue so that she can go undercover to break up a meth operation at the local college. Everyone is shocked when Monica turns out to be young and blonde. Were they expecting a 40 year-old undercover college student?

Not happy about having to ride a bicycle, Russ decides to insert himself into Monica’s undercover operation. Monica and Russ meet the two main dealers, Quincy (Joe Michael Burke) and Cherry (Michelle Beauchamp). They discover that they’re getting their drugs from a chemistry professor (Robin Thomas). What they don’t do is make an arrest. Quincy and Cherry murder the professor and escape after setting off a bomb in the chemistry lab.

TC is not happy with his new cops. In fact, the episode ends with him telling them that he has doubts about whether or not to keep them at Pacific Blue. Fortunately, we the viewers know that they’ll be okay because they are all now listed in the opening credits.

Also listed in the opening credits is Bobby Cruz (Mario Lopez), the campus cop who drags Monica out of the laboratory right before it explodes. Bobby has a history. He was a member of the LAPD but, disgusted by the anti-Mexican racism that he saw, he became a campus cop instead. (Where I went to college, the campus cops were the biggest joke around.) TC offers Bobby a chance to be a member of Pacific Blue. Bobby says that he’ll think about it. We all know that means yes.

And that’s a good thing because this show could definitely use more Mario Lopez! In fact, the only reason I started reviewing this stupid series was because I knew Mario would be joining the cast eventually. Let’s hope Mario’s magic starts to make things better soon!

As for this episode, it was …. well, it wasn’t good. Other than Lopez, none of the new characters really made much of an impression. But, I am an optimist. I have hope.

Never give up hope.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Pacific Blue 3.22 “Best Laid Plans”

Posted on April 21, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, season 3 comes to an end.

Episode 3.22 “Best Laid Plans”

(Dir by John B. Moranville, originally aired on April 19th, 1998)

Heh heh …. they said laid.

The third season finale of Pacific Blue finds everyone at a crossroads, almost as if the showrunners weren’t sure who would be back for the fourth season so they wanted to make sure that everyone had an excuse to leave. There’s a lot of personal drama in this episode and I guess it would be compelling if any of these people were the least bit likable or sympathetic.

Victor Del Toro is being investigated by Internal Affairs and he spends the majority of the episode telling people that he suspects that he’s going to lose his job.

Cory is dumped by her long-distance boyfriend and leaps into a new relationship with some guy she accidentally punched at a bar. (She was trying to hit his friend, who was being pretty obnoxious at the time.)

Chris takes a pregnancy test and it’s positive. TC asks her to marry him. Despite the fact that Chris was previously hoping TC would ask her to marry him, Chris says no because …. well, because Chris is the worst. No, actually, it’s because Chris doesn’t want TC to marry her just because he feels like he has to. Chris and TC have separate scenes where they imagine how wonderful it would be to have a baby and how annoying it will be once the baby grows up to be a bratty teenager. But then Chris finds out that it was a false positive.

Palermo, meanwhile, is burned out. He’s feeling old. He wants to do more than just look at crime scenes. Plus, he’s having sex with a 22 year-old (played by Saved By The Bell: The Next Class’s Sarah Lancaster) and he’d rather do that then go to work.

Sadly, Palermo does have to go to work. A gang of criminals is breaking into people’s home and carving letters on their foreheads. (The letters correspond to their last name — Edwards gets an E and so on.) It turns out that the leader of the gang blame Palermo for his mother’s death and is spelling out P-A-L-E-R-M-O. The bad guys are always one step ahead because a member of the gang (Ginny Shcrieber) is working as a receptionist at Pacific Blue headquarters. Do they not do background checks before hiring people?

Palermo does catch the guy, though only after several people have been permanently scarred. Once again, you have to wonder why the bike cops are the only people working these cases. Add that the end of the episode, Palermo announces he’s going to Italy.

That’s one down and four more to go! Who will be around for season 4?

We’ll find out next week!