Late Night Retro Television Review: 1st & Ten 1.1 “By The Bulls”

Posted on July 16, 2025 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 Wednesdays, I will be reviewing 1st and Ten, which aired in syndication from 1984 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on Tubi.

For a few years now, first Prime and now Tubi have been recommending that I watch a sitcom called 1st & Ten.

My initial reaction, upon looking the show up online and discovering that it was about a football team that was owned by a woman and coached (from the second season on) by OJ Simpson, was to say, “Why would I want to watch this?” And, to be honest, that’s still kind of my reaction. Football is not my thing. The only thing that is less my thing than football is soccer.

(“But in the rest of the world, soccer is called….” Yeah, yeah, I know. I don’t care.)

But then I read on and discovered that this is actually a historically significant show in that it was HBO’s first attempt to produce an original sitcom. It was later sold into syndication, with all of the cursing and nudity edited out. (Apparently, most of the episodes that are currently on Tubi are the edited syndication versions.) That piqued my interest. I may not care about football but I love historical footnotes.

So, without further ado, let’s get things started.

Episode 1.1 “By The Bulls”

(Dir by Rod Daniel, originally aired on December 2nd, 1984)

The show begins as wealthy Diane Barrow (Delta Burke) comes home to her mansion and discovers her husband, naked in their bedroom with another man. “This is Ty Tylor,” her husband says, “he’s a tight end.”

“I bet he is!” Diane replies.

Later, while talking to her divorce lawyer (Earl Boen), Diane announces, “I want his Bulls!”

“You want his….?” the lawyer replies, glancing down at his crotch.

No, Diane doesn’t want his balls She wants the Los Angeles Bulls, the football team that he owns. When the lawyer replies that Diane’s husband loves the Bulls, Diane announces that if she doesn’t get the football team, she’ll let the world know that her husband’s gay.

(It’s the 1980s, folks.)

Diane gets the Bulls and she also gets a lot of attention due to being apparently the only woman to ever own a football team. Everyone doubts her but Diane is determined to prove herself. However, her sniveling general manager (and her husband’s nephew), Roger Barrow (Clayton Landey), tries to end her ownership before the season even begins by planting cocaine in her mansion, His plan is that, during the pre-season party, one of the players will snort the cocaine and …. I don’t know. I guess he’s hoping some will call the police or something. It doesn’t seem like much of a plan, to be honest.

Fortunately, veteran Coach Ernie Denardo (Reid Scott) hears about the plan from a friend of his so he rushes over to the party and gets rid of the cocaine, though not before letting Diane know that she has powerful enemies. That was nice of him since Diane previously fired him for being incompetent. Needless to say, Denardo gets his job back.

And that’s it! We did get to see a few snippets of the players, who all seem to be wild and wacky. Carl Witherspoon (Sam Scarber) shows up at the party with his lawyer and demands a lot of money. Another player, Kyle Brody (Robert Logan), tries to hit on Diane. I checked with the imdb and this is Logan’s only appearance on the show so I’m not really sure what the point of him being at the party was. It’s a pilot so I imagine that a lot of the background people in this episode will never be seen again.

Overall, my feeling about the pilot was that it …. well, it sucked. The humor fell flat. The acting was terrible. Delta Burke showed some potential as Diane but I didn’t like how, after demanding, “I want his Bulls!,” Diane suddenly became this passive character who needed Denardo to tell her about the cocaine in her mansion. But you know what? It’s always unfair to judge a show by it’s pilot. The Office, for instance, had a terrible pilot. In the end, this particular pilot did what it was supposed to do — it introduced us to the main character and it set up the premise of the show.

We’ll see if things get better in the weeks to come.

The Super (1991, directed by Ron Daniel)

Posted on March 8, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

You’ve just won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing a psychotic gangster and you’re worried that it’s going to lead to you getting typecast as a villain. What do you do?

If you’re Joe Pesci, you follow-up playing Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas by agreeing to play Louie Kritski, Jr. in The Super. Louie is the son of a slumlord (Vincent Gardenia) and he’s eager to follow his old man into the family business. But when Louie is arrested for failing to keep his buildings up to code, he’s sentenced to actually live in one of them. Louie has to stay in a rat-infested apartment. He has to repair the rest of the building and will not be allowed to do any work on his apartment until everyone else’s apartment is up to code. Louie thinks that his father will use his influence to get his son out of this mess. It turns out that Big Lou just wants to set the building on fire and be done with it. Louie isn’t down with that. He may be a loud-mouthed slumlord but he has his standards.

Louie becomes a better person as a result of living in a slum. All of the tenants, from Marlon (Ruben Blades) to Tito (Kenny Blank), come to respect him. He even plays basketball with them. Louie finds a new girlfriend (Madolyn Smith) in the court officer who is sent to check on his progress. Louie is still Joe Pesci, though. He’s still a loud mouth who is quick to lose his temper and there’s always a feeling that Louie is about to snap and blow the entire building away. Joe Pesci was always a good actor and skilled at comedy but The Super doesn’t make good use of his talents in the way that My Cousin Vinny did. My Cousin Vinny worked because it put Joe Pesci in a place where you wouldn’t expect to find Joe Pesci, the genteel South. The Super is a New York movie and Pesci’s wiseguy intensity means that his sudden redemption doesn’t feel true.

The Super was a box office flop and briefly derailed Pesci’s attempts to show his range. Luckily, My Cousin Vinny was right around the corner.

Guilty Pleasure No. 59: Teen Wolf (dir by Rod Daniel)

Posted on October 29, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1985, Teen Wolf is a bit of an odd film.

Michael J. Fox is Scott Howard, a 17 year-old high student in Nebraska. There’s nothing special about Scott. He plays on the school’s lousy basketball team. He has a crush on the most popular girl in school, even though she barely seems to know that he’s alive. He’s completely oblivious to the fact that his lifelong best friend, Boof (Susan Ursitti), is totally crushing on him. His parents are clueless to Scott’s angst. Maybe the only thing that Scott has going for him is that he is friends with the coolest kid in school, Stiles (Jerry Levine). How cool is Stiles? He’s so cool that his name is Stiles! Actually, to be hones, Stiles seems just as dorky as Scott but this is an 80s film so who am I to argue with the film’s argument that everyone wants to hang out with Stiles?

Then, one night, Scott discovers that he has inherited the family “curse.” He’s a werewolf! But, on the plus side, he’s a really popular werewolf. Everyone at school loves the werewolf. The popular girls want to date the werewolf. Everyone loves seeing the werewolf van surfing. And, even more importantly, the werewolf is really good at basketball! It’s weird because the Werewolf is just as short as Scott was but apparently, being a wolf makes you good at basketball. You have to wonder why the other teams wouldn’t protest having to play against a werewolf. I would be worried that the werewolf would get mad if it missed a shot and kill everyone on the court.

Anyway, Scott is popular but he soon learns that popularity is empty, regardless of whether you’re a werewolf or not. He also realizes the Boof is the girl that he should be going out with but Boof only wants to date Scott. She doesn’t want to date the werewolf. Will Scott find the courage to go to the school dance as himself?

This is a pretty stupid movie but Michael J. Fox brings a lot of heart to the role of Scott and his romance with Boof (who really needs a better nickname) is actually rather sweet. The highlight of the film are Scott’s interaction with his supportive but nerdy father (played by James Hampton). There are a lot jokes that fall flat and the plot never makes much sense but the film itself so amiably dumb that it’s hard not to kind of like it. That said, don’t ever try to surf on top of the van. Werewolf or not, that looks dangerous!