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 Freevee!

This week, Ponch and Baker hit the beach!

Episode 1.15 “Surf’s Up”

(Dir by Georg Fenady, originally aired on January 19th, 1978)

At the beginning of this week’s episode, Ponch and Baker are miserable.

Los Angeles, the city that they’ve taken an oath to protect, is no longer as friendly as it once was.  The highways are congested.  The chases are long and tedious.  The citizens don’t seem to appreciate the highway patrol’s hard work.  When Baker is forced to throw a reckless driver on someone else’s hood in order to arrest him, the owner of the car (Fran Ryan) yells at him for scratching her car and threatens to sue the department.

Ponch and Baker need a break!

At first, Getraer is dismissive of their concerns.  He points out, quite sensibly, that he can’t approve their request for a temporary transfer just because they’re having a bad day.  They work in Los Angeles and not every day is going to be a perfect day.

“Thanks a lot, pal,” Ponch snaps.

“I’m your sergeant,” Getraer starts, “if you want a pal….”

“Join the Police Athletic League, we know,” Baker says.

Fortunately, for Ponch and John, the Malibu division has a few men who have gotten the flu so Getraer, realizing that he doesn’t want to have to listen to Ponch and Jon whine for a whole week, finally agrees to giving them a temporary transfer.

The rest of the episode follows Ponch and John as they patrol Malibu.  It turns out that Malibu has the same problems as Los Angeles but it’s also closer to the beach.  (“You can hear the ocean from headquarters!” an excited Ponch says.)  Not only do Ponch and Baker stop a car theft (and save the baby who was trapped in the back seat) but they also catch a gang of van thieves.  Ponch also takes a few kids from the neighborhood to Disneyland, in order to make up for having incorrectly accused one of them of having stolen a radio and bunch of sunflowers.

Of course, we don’t actually see Ponch at Disneyland.  We just hear about afterwards.  What we do see is Ponch and Baker hanging out on the beach and trying out a jet ski.  As I watched this episode, it occurred to me that CHiPs really wasn’t a police show as much as it was an hour long commercial for California.  The theme of this episode appeared to be, “Even if Los Angeles is too crowded and smoggy for you, you can still go to Malibu, meet and date two flight attendants, and conquer the ocean on a jet ski!”  And really, this show is at its most effective when it focuses on being a travelogue.  I imagine quite a few people watched this episode in 1978 and thought to themselves, “I have to get to Malibu!”

Scenery aside, this is a bit of a dull episode.  The van thieves were not particularly impressive villains and even the show’s famous chase scenes felt a bit perfunctory.  As a drama, this episode fell flat but it worked wonderfully as a commercial.