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, season one comes to an end!

Episode 1.13 “All Jammed Up”

(Dir by Ronald Victor Garcia, originally aired on May 25th, 1996)

Here we are at the end of the first season of the show and both Pacific Blue and Tim Palmero’s bicycle squad are still struggling to justify their existence.

There’s a couple of thieves robbing people who are stuck in traffic.  The thieves ride bicycles.  You can literally see Palermo light up as he realizes that he’s finally run into a criminal who can reasonably be subdued by his bike patrol.  Of course, it still takes them forever to catch the guy.  Whenever the bike criminal would escape and Palermo or TC would say, “We’ll get him next time,” I was reminded of Mike Brady trying to sell his terrible architectural designs in The Brady Bunch Movie and assuring his desperate boss that the next client would definitely want their gas station or restaurant to look just like the Brady house.

Meanwhile, Chris and and Cory go undercover as escorts in order to catch an arms dealer who is staying at a hotel and who has a thing for sex workers.  Chris is not happy with assignment and complains about it.  Normally, I would agree because it really is a degrading assignment.  (The arms dealers can be identified only by a tattoo on his behind.)  But Chris whines about everything so I have to admit that I didn’t have as much sympathy as I should have had.

Cory, along with her undercover work, is upset because her boyfriend (Ken Olandt) refuses to tell his parents that she’s a bike cop.  Her boyfriend’s father was played by Robert Pine, the sergeant from CHiPs.  That was amusing.

Meanwhile, Elvis wants to ask someone out.  TC gives him advice and, in a nod to Cyrano, tells Elvis what to say.  Hey, TC — there’s a crime wave going on!  Or maybe you didn’t notice….

This was a pretty pointless way to end the season but …. eh, it’s Pacific Blue.  It’s pretty much what I was expecting from this show.  This first season was pretty bad.  I can’t really think of a single episode that didn’t get on my nerves in some way.  Way too much time was spent this season on people saying, “They ride bikes?”  Yes, they ride bikes.  They look stupid and I would be kind of angry if I was the victim of a crime and any of these losers showed up but at some point, both the show and the audience will have to accept that it is what it is.  The show is about cops on bicycles.  Every episode during the first season seemed to be designed to make us go, “Okay, they’re real cops!”  But if you’re still having to convince the audience of that thirteen episodes in, it’s a problem.

Oh well.  Season 2 starts next week!