Rick Goldman | 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 Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!

This week’s episode features a future Oscar nominee!

Episode 5.2 “Vagabonds”

(Dir by Bruce Kessler, originally aired on October 11th, 1981)

The saying goes that “everyone had to start somewhere,” and, for actor Ed Harris, somewhere included guest-starring on an episode of CHiPs.

The future Oscar nominee appears as Lonny Wilson, the scion of a family of a hillbilly con artists. He and his brother, Daws (Jesse Vint), purposefully cause auto accidents and con their victims out of their money in return for not calling the police or the insurance company. Lonny’s young son, Jamie (James Calvert), is looking forward to joining the family business until he actually is injured while taking part in one of the family’s cons. Lonny reconsiders his way of life and, by the end of the episode, he’s cooperating with the highway patrol.

Does Ed Harris come across as being a future star in this episode? Well, he definitely has charisma. He has screen presence. That said, this is also CHiPs, a show that was mostly about capturing potentially serious auto accidents in slow motion. No one came across as being a future star on ChiPs and that was actually a part of the show’s appeal. The stars on CHiPs were always the motorcycles, the cars flipping over on the freeway, and Ponch’s blinding smile. That said, Ed Harris gives a good performance. For that matter, so does Jesse Vint as his brother. This is a well-acted episode of CHiPs. Such things do exist.

In all fairness, I should also note that, when this episode aired, Harris had already starred in George Romero’s Knightriders so, while Harris may not have been a household name, it’s probably still debatable whether or not this was really at the start of his career. Ultimately, the important thing is that, two years after appearing this episode, Ed Harris would play John Glenn in 1983’s The Right Stuff and firmly established himself as one of our best character actors.

As for this episode, it also features the Highway Patrol taking part in a “supercycle” race, which is a race featuring bicycles that you lie down on as you peddle. I don’t know why anyone would want to do that but whatever. Jon Baker wins. Yay, Highway Patrol!

On that note of victory, Retro Television Reviews is going on a holiday break so that I can focus on the Oscar precursor awards and reviewing Christmas movies so this will be last CHiPs review of 2025! CHiPs will return on January 5th, 2026!

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on YouTube.

This week, there’s something in subways!

Episode 2.19 “Far Below”

(Dir by Debra Hill, originally aired on February 25th, 1990)

Alex Kritz (John Scott Clough) is a city bureaucrat who has been sent to do an audit and discover why one subway maintenance crew is getting paid so much despite the high rate of turnover on the crew. The head of the crew, Dr. Vernon Rathmore (Barry Nelson), not only overpays his workers but he also offers them full insurance and a pension. Kritz not only wants to understand why Dr. Rathmore is spending so much money but also how he has been able to get away with it for so long.

Dr. Rathmore invites Kritz to watch a monitor so he can observe two of his workers gunning down what appears to be a Yeti with glowing white fur. Kritz is outraged, accusing Rathmore of killing a homeless man. Rathmore explains that his section of the subway is full of prehistoric, ape-liked monsters who feast on human flesh. Rathmore has taken it upon himself to keep the population under control.

When Kritz again accuses Rathmore of genocide, Rathmore reveals that he actually has two of the monsters locked away in the office. And one of them is his wife! It turns out that she has quite the appetite for nosey bureaucrats….

This was a simple but entertaining episode of Monsters, one that was well-acted by Nelson and Clough and which made great use of two sets, Rathmore’s office and the atmospheric and dark subway tunnels where Rathmore’s men work. The escalating tension between Rathmore and Kritz was well-handled, with Rathmore growing more and more annoyed with Kritz’s questions. Based on all of the urban legends that have sprung up over the years about monsters living in the subways and the sewers (check out Raw Meat for another example), this was an effective episode that managed to tell a complete and interesting story in only 20 minutes. Monsters was a frequently uneven show, as is true of most anthology series. Fortunately, for every couple of bad episodes that the viewer got, the viewer would also occasionally get a masterpiece like Far Below.

Far Below was directed by Debra Hill, who is probably best-known for co-producing several of John Carpenter’s early films, including the original Halloween. This episode was Hill’s directorial debut and it was one of only two things she directed. (The other was an episode of a 90s sitcom called Dream On.) She did an excellent job with this episode and it’s a shame that she didn’t direct more.

Finally, this was the final performance of actor Barry Nelson. Nelson was the first actor to ever play James Bond, playing an Americanized version of the character in a 1950s television adaptation of Casino Royale. (Nelson technically played “Jimmy Bond.”) Modern horror fans know Nelson best for his wonderful performance as the blandly professional Mr. Ullman in The Shining. The scene where Nelson (as Ullman) cheerfully talks about what happened to the last caretaker and his family is one of my favorite bits of acting of all time. Nelson retired after this episode of Monsters and it’s nice to able to say that he went out on a high note.