Tag Archives: review

Retro Television Review: Homicide: Life On The Street 3.6 “A Model Citizen”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC!  It  can be viewed on Peacock.

No one’s happy this week.

Episode 3.6 “A Model Citizen”

(Dir by John McNaughton, originally aired on November 11th, 1994)

Welcome to Baltimore, where everyone is depressed.  Consider this week’s episode of Homicide: Life On The Street.

  1. The episode opens with Munch, Bolander, Howard, and Felton in a morgue, waiting for the results of an autopsy.  They start talking about the shows that they watched as children and how many of them had their origins right in Baltimore.  Of course, none of those shows are on the air anymore.  Munch mentions his favorite childhood shows and is ridiculed for liking things when he was a kid.
  2. Emma Zoole (Lauren Tom), an artist who makes models of crime scenes for use in criminal court, stops by the department.  She’s looking for Steve Crosetti, to get his input on a recreation.  Meldrick Lewis tells her that Crosetti’s dead but he offers to help.  Lewis has a crush.  However, Emma likes Bayliss and Bayliss likes Emma.  Bayliss is even turned on by the fact that Emma sleeps in a coffin.  However, when Bayliss sees how upset Lewis is over his relationship with Emma, Bayliss tries to break up with her.  They end up having sex in the coffin instead.
  3. That’s it!, Lewis declares.  He cannot go into the bar business with Tim Bayliss.  Then again, there might not be a bar business anyway because Munch got kicked out of the state-required alcohol awareness class.  Munch, for whatever reason, decided to argue about whether or not a bartender could really be held responsible for getting someone drunk.
  4. Pembleton, Russert, and the city of Baltimore are all being sued by serial killer Pamela Wilgis.  Wilgis claims that Pembleton violated her civil rights when he interrogated her.  Pembleton’s entire interrogation style is put on trial.  He feels like he’s being attacked on all sides.  Finally, Pembleton gets depressed enough to reenter a church, even though he earlier claimed to no longer have any use for religion.
  5. Munch and Howard investigate the accidental shooting of a child by his older brother.  Much gets extremely upset while searching for the gun, taking Howard totally be surprise.  Howard comes to realize that Much actually cares about protecting children from violence and Munch realizes that the world is a terrible place.
  6. Beau Felton returns to his house and discovers that both his wife and his son have left and they’ve taken all the furniture with them.  Goodbye is scrawled, in lipstick, on the bathroom mirror.
  7. Much ends up sitting outside, staring at the ground while Lewis and then Howard both talk to him about how much life sucks.
  8. No one wants to end up like Steve Crosetti, Howard says at one point.  Good luck!  This job is depressing!

This was a good episode, one that really captured the emotional turmoil of seeing the worse that humanity has to offer while, at the same time, acknowledging that depressed people often use humor to deal with their feelings.  A few of Munch’s and Lewis’s line made me laugh out loud but seriously, I felt so bad for both of them!

Hopefully, everyone will have cheered up by next week.

Song of the Day: Theme From CHiPs by John Parker and Alan Silvestri

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

As today is Erik Estrada’s birthday, it’s obvious what today’s song of the day has to be.

No matter what you may think of the show, this theme has one of the greatest bass lines of all time.  If you’re not dancing, you might want to call 911.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Check It Out! 3.10 “Shrink from Sendrax”

Posted on 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 Saturdays, I will be reviewing the Canadian sitcom, Check it Out, which ran in syndication from 1985 to 1988.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and Peacock!

This week, corporate sends a visitor to Cobb’s for reasons that are never exactly clear.

Episode 3.10 “Shrink From Sendrax”

(Dir by Jayne Schipper, originally aired on November 15th, 1987)

I’m just going to do a mini-review of this episode because I’m busy working on our big St. Patrick’s Day extravaganza here at the Shattered Lens!

  1. Remember that new company that bought out Cobb’s?  It can be easy to forget about them.  Well, in this episode, they send a psychiatrist named Dr. Matthews (Graham Harley) to check on everyone’s mental health.  Why would they do that?  I mean, is Cobb’s grocery store really that important to them?  It seems like a lot of money to spend on checking whether or not the cashiers are feeling good about themselves.
  2. Admittedly, I haven’t had that many jobs and I’ve never worked in a grocery store.  If you told me that I had no choice but to sit down and talk about my life with a psychiatrist as a condition of my employment, I would probably quit.  It’s not that I have anything against psychiatrists.  It’s just that I believe therapy should always be voluntary.
  3. The episode’s highlight was Leslie wanting to spend hours talking to the psychiatrist about the party that was thrown when he turned two years old.  Aaron Schwartz, who is often underused on this show, really got a chance to show off his comedic skills in this episode.
  4. Gordon Clapp’s Viker also got a few good scenes.  In general, any episode that features Clapp is, at the very least, going to make me smile.
  5. Howard freaks out over the psychiatrist and the questionnaire that he’s forced to fill out.  He gets some advice from 14 year-old stockboy Brad, played by T and T‘s Sean Roberge.  This is Brad’s third appearance on the show and I get the feeling that he was originally meant to be a major character but the show’s writers couldn’t figure out what to do with the character.
  6. This third season has had a lot of weird detours and characters.  We haven’t heard anything else about Howard’s brother.  The corporate liaison, TC Collingwood (Elizabeth Hanna), is occasionally pictured in the opening credits and occasionally not.  What happened to the stockboy who had a crush on Marlene?
  7. Anyway, to prove that he’s not crazy, Howard dresses up like a clown because he knows that only way to prove he’s not crazy is to act crazy while realizing that he’s acting crazy or something.
  8. Marlene and Christian, the two most consistently interesting characters on the show, were not in this episode and that kind of made the whole psychiatry angle feel useless.  The idea of Marlene and Christian reacting to ink blots is such a good one that I personally would have delayed production on this episode until Kathleen Laskey and Jeff Pustil were available to appear in it.

Gordon Clapp and Aaron Schwartz were great but, overall, this was pretty dumb episode.

Lisa Marie’s Week In Television: 3/9/25 — 3/15/25

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

This what yet another week where I didn’t really watch any television, beyond the shows that I review for this site and also the weekly episode of Dark that I watch with Case Writes.  I’ve been busy getting ready for Monday, which is both St. Patrick’s Day and Kurt Russell’s birthday.  But I have to admit that, even since my Dad passed away last year, watching silly reality shows hasn’t really appealed to me the way that it used to.  I don’t how to explain it.  I guess tastes change!

Anyway, maybe I’ll get caught up on Abbott Elementary, Survivor, and all the rest next week!  I guess I’ll have to or else this weekly post is going to start to feel a bit superfluous!

Retro Television Review: Welcome Back Kotter 4.20 “Oo-Oo I Do! Part One”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Saturdays, I will be reviewing Welcome Back Kotter, which ran on ABC  from 1975 to 1979.  The entire show can be purchased on Prime.

Horshack makes a decision about his future.

Episode 4.20 “Oo-Oo I Do! Part One”

(Dir by Norman Abbott, originally aired on May 25th, 1979)

Horshack is shocked to suddenly realize that he has a girlfriend.  To be honest, I think everyone’s a little shocked.  Horshack doesn’t exactly come across like someone that anyone would want to have a romantic relationship with.  He’s not particularly handsome, he’s got that terrible voice, he’s got those weird personal habits, and he’s like 50 years old and still in high school.

Still, when Horshack learns that he’s going to be transferred to another school because his mother married a blackjack dealer in Atlantic City, Horshack asks Mary Johnson to marry him.  And Mary says yes.

NO, MARY!  RUN, MARY, RUN!

So, let’s just consider this.  One reason why Gabe Kaplan refused to appear in much of season four is because the show’s producers refused to consider his suggestions that the Sweathogs should graduate high school and move on to City College.  But the producers were totally willing to have Horshack get married while in high school.  Sure, that makes sense.  Admittedly, people do get married in high school but few of them would marry Arnold Horshack.  Plus, most high school marriages — at least in my experience — involve an unexpected pregnancy and it’s hard to view Horshack as being anything other than asexual.  He’s just too weird a character for a episode dealing with real things, like love and marriage.  I could buy Epstein getting married.  I could buy Washington getting married.  Beau …. sure, I could buy that.  What would have been really cool would have been if one of Travolta’s episodes had featured him getting married.  Even better would have been an episode where Gabe and Julie got divorced.  Seriously, it would have made more sense than someone voluntarily saying, “I want to spend the rest of my life with the school weirdo.”

This is the first part of a two-part episode.  If I’m not saying much about this episode it’s because this episode was 75% Horshack and Horshack annoys the heck out of me.  When the show began, he was weird but he wasn’t quite as cartoonish as he became in the third and fourth seasons.  This whole marriage two-parter was apparently a backdoor pilot for a show about Horshack adjusting to married life.  Seriously, out of all the Sweathog, that’s the one they wanted to spin-off?

(What’s annoying is that occasionally –– like in this episode where Horshack was drinking — Ron Palillo would get a chance to show that he actually wasn’t a terrible actor but the show’s writers usually did him absolutely no favors.)

This episode really showed how far the show had fallen.  Horshack is getting transferred to a new school and Gabe is nowhere to be seen.  Horshack is getting married and again, Gabe is nowhere to be seen.  It’s Welcome Back, Horshack now and the Sweathogs are truly doomed.

Song of the Day: Cleopatra Enters Rome by Alex North

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Since today is the Ides of March, it only makes sense that today’s song of the day should have the feel of the ancient Roman world.  From the soundtrack of 1963’s Cleopatra (stop it, it’s a fun movie!), here is Cleopatra Enters Rome, composed by Alex North!

Scenes that I Love: Marlon Brando as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Beware the Ides of March!

The scene below is from the 1953 film, Julius Caesar.  This Oscar-nominated Shakespearean adaptation had a cast that was full of distinguished actors.  James Mason played Brutus.  The great John Gielgud played Cassius.  Louis Calhern was Caesar while other roles were filled by Deborah Kerr, Greer Garson, Edmond O’Brien, George Macready, John Hoyt, Edmund Purdom. and a host of other distinguished thespians.  And yet, the best performance in the film came from an actor who, at the time, no one considered to be a Shakespearean.  Marlon Brando brought his method intensity to the role of Mark Antony and the result was a performance that is still electrifying today.

On YouTube, someone referred to this as being “the world’s greatest speech delivered by the world’s greatest actor.”  Sounds good to me!

Here is Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar:

Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th: The Series 3.6 “Bad Penny”

Posted on 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 Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The entire series can be found on YouTube!

This week …. hey, it’s a good episode!

Episode 3.6 “Bad Penny”

(Dir by William Fruet, originally aired October 30th, 1989)

The Coin of Ziocles returns!  Last seen being used by a cult to raise the dead, the Coin is recovered from a construction site at the start of this episode.  This turned out to be the best episode of the third season so far.  Here’s a few reasons why:

  1. First off, with this episode, Friday the 13th finally showed that it still remembered its own history.  The last time Jack, Micki, and Ryan sought the coin, Micki was actually killed and remained dead until Ryan and Jack figured out how to use the coin to bring her back to life.  With this episode, we discover that Micki has some serious PTSD as a result of the experience which actually makes a lot of sense.  In the past, I’ve always felt this show tended to gloss over just how traumatizing it would be to deal with cursed antiques on a daily basis.  With this episode, we see that Micki can’t even look at the site where she was killed without starting to shake.  It was realistic and Robey did a great job portraying Micki’s emotions.
  2. In yet another nod to continuity, Johnny stole the coin and used it to bring back his dead father.  In the past, I’ve felt like Johnny was a bit too quick to accept the idea of the antiques being cursed.  With this episode, we saw that the inexperienced Johnny doesn’t quite understand that danger of the cured antiques.  Ryan, Micki, and Jack would never have made the mistake of using the antique or trusting anything that had once been owned by Uncle Lewis but Johnny is still learning.
  3. Steve Monarque and Sean McCann both did excellent work as Johnny and his father.  Needless to say, Johnny’s father is confused when he’s brought back from the dead.  His struggle to understand what was happening brought tears to my eyes.  It’s been less than a year since I lost my Dad.  I’d probably do the same thing Johnny did.  In the end, Johnny sent his father back into the afterlife.  It was so sad!
  4. Micki writes a letter to Ryan.  It’s probably one that she won’t ever send but it’s good to see that the show at least acknowledged how difficult it would have been for her to say goodbye to Ryan.
  5. By mentioning Ryan so much, this show actually made it easier for me to accept Johnny as his replacement.  Over the past few episodes, I kind of resented how quickly Johnny seemed to be stepping into replace him.  This episode showed me that Ryan is still loved.
  6. The villains — a corrupt cop and his zombified partner — were a bit over-the-top  but still entertaining.  For once, this episode focused on our heroes and I was glad it did.

This was an excellent episode of Friday the 13th!  I hope it’s a sign of things to come for the rest of the third season.