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 show is proving difficult to review.
Episode 1.5 “Out of the Past”
(Dir by Terrence O’Hara, originally aired on March 30th, 1996)
Look, I tried. I really did.
This episode should have fascinated me. It featured three storylines. Palermo was told take a vacation when it became obvious that a serial killer known as The Angel (Tim Thomerson) had returned to the beach and was targeting doctors. Palermo and The Angel had a history, with Palermo failing to capture The Angel during the killer’s previous spree. This time, The Angel tried to force a journalist (played by Barry Miller) to record his crimes for posterity.
Meanwhile, Chris and TC went undercover as guests at a hotel so that they could catch a thief and a peeping tom. Chris and TC pretended to be romantically involved and were so dedicated to maintaining the act that they ended up spending a good deal of the episode hanging out together in their underwear.
Finally, both TC and Del Toro were obsessed with catching a speeding biker who continually managed to outrun and outmaneuver them. Compounding their embarrassment was the revelation that the biker was a woman.
Mystery, empowerment, and lingerie. Those are three of my favorites things but this episode still managed to thoroughly bore me. I had to view it three times because I kept getting distracted whenever I tried to sit down and just watch the show. Admittedly, with my ADHD, my attention span is on the short side but still, this episode of Pacific Blue was remarkable in that, no matter what happened, I just didn’t care.
Why? Why can’t this show even work in a so-bad-its-good kind of way? The characters are just boring and interchangeable. The men are all grim and serious-minded and, physically, they’re all the same type. They’re all tall and lean and blandly handsome and none of them have any quirks or interests to really make them stand-out. The women are also bland and spend most of their time smirking at their male co-workers. Who are these people? Who cares?
Perhaps the biggest flaw with this episode and the show so far is that the members of the bicycle patrol just look dorky and they peddle around the beach. The worse thing is when they have to chase a suspect down a flight of stairs and they literally pick and carry their bicycles as they do so. It’s hard to take bicyclists seriously, even when they’re cops.
Watching the show, I kept thinking about the bicycle cops who used to patrol the campus where I went to college. No one took them seriously and everyone knew the experience of being yanked over by one of them and being asked, “You been drinking tonight?” when you were totally sober. It happened to me, one night, when an old ankle injury was acting up and I was walking with a slight limp. I was already feeling self-conscious about it and getting stopped when all I wanted to do was get home and rest my ankle didn’t help. The insistence that I must have been drunk or otherwise under the influence and also the assumption that I was obligated to stand around while the cops slowly talked to each other left me feeling violated. Whenever I see TC or Palermo sitting on their bikes with their oh-so serious “I am a badass” facial expressions, I remember every bad experience that I’ve ever had or I’ve ever seen someone else have with a cop.
My hope is that Pacific Blue, over the course of its run, eventually found a way to make its characters less annoying and more likable. (For instance, I don’t mind the cops on CHiPs because at least they’re entertaining.) I guess we’ll find out!
Through the Shattered Lens 