Ted Gehrig | 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 Wednesdays, I will be reviewing 1st and Ten, which aired in syndication from 1984 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on Tubi.

The center cannot hold.

Episode 5.2 “The Inmates Buy The Asylum”

(Dir by Stan Lathan, originally aired on October 12th, 1988)

If there’s one thing that you can depend on when it comes to this show, it’s inconsistency.

Last week, the players decided to buy the team. This was portrayed as being a genius move on their part. Dr. Death dressed up in a suit and said that he was ready to be a businessman as well as a player. TD Parker (OJ Simpson) told the players that it would be a good idea to take a blade to the typical player/owner relationship.

This week, the players buy the team and everything starts to fall apart. Suddenly, the players are all too concerned with their own petty issues to be smart businessmen. Dr. Death is no longer wearing a suit and shows up for a meeting of all the team owners in a denim jacket. (All of the owners except for one walk out on him.) The team decides to fire Coach Grier. Why? They just don’t like him. T.D. delivers the news to an embittered Grier and admits that the players are not good owners. Gee, TD, maybe you shouldn’t have told them to buy the team!

In other words, the players have seized the means of production and screwed everything up. If nothing else, this episode was a good example of why communism will never work.

Meanwhile, agent Max Green was still in Louisiana, trying to sign college linebacker Sonny Clowers (Gary Kasper). Fortunately, a chance meeting with the preacher of Sonny’s church gave Max an inside track. But with the Bulls be able to get it together in time to draft him?

I guess we will find out next week. As for this episode, it felt as if the writers suddenly realized that it was a mistake to have the players buy the team so they set out to course correct at the last minute. Myself, I’m wondering how being both a player and an owner would work. Who sets the salaries? If a player is traded, is he still an owner?

Seriously, this all seems like a bad idea.

This week, OJ’s in trouble!

Episode 3.12 “Of Scalpers and Superstars”

(Dir by Bruce Seth Green, originally aired on December 9th, 1987)

O.J. Simpson gets arrested!

Okay, technically, OJ Simpson is not the one being arrested. He’s just playing TD Parker, the Bulls’s general manager. TD is the one who is arrested at the end of this episode after being framed for stealing 5,000 ticket to the Championship Game and selling to a ticket scalper. Still, as is so often the case with this show, the casting of OJ Simpson does bring a while new layer to the action of meaning to the action onscreen.

Who framed TD? The answer is Dolph Crane (Forry Smith), a former player who was cut from the team. Dolph has never appeared on the show before but, judging from what TD says when he sees Dolph hanging around the stadium, it seems that Dolph was cut last season. One of the things that I’ve noticed about 1st & Ten is that new characters will often pop up out of nowhere and people will act as if they’ve been there the whole time. Dolph appears to be one of those pop-up character. Dolph mentions that he’s now dating TD’s former mistress. Dolph and the owner of Arizona’s team are the ones who conspire to take out TD. Hopefully, they didn’t plant a bloody glove anywhere in the office.

The Bulls are going to the Championship Game …. again! Maybe they’ll actually win this time. This is their third trip to the game, after all. It’ll be kind of sad if they win without Coach Denardo, though. Coach Grier just isn’t as much fun as foul-mouthed Ernie Denardo.

The entire team gets mad at Yinessa. After getting injured during a game, he decides that he needs to make as much money as possible so he allows his agent (Bobby Hosea) to promote him as being the “star” of the team. The rest of the team feels that isn’t fair. The thing is, though …. Yinessa is kind of the star. He’s the quarterback. If he has a bad day, the team doesn’t win. The Bulls are a bunch of crybabies. When they find out that a team music video is being reimagined as a Yinessa music video, they literally look like they’re about to break down in tears. No wonder they always lose the Championship Game.

This episode ended wth the Bulls heads to the Championship and OJ heading to jail. That seems about right. Good luck to the team!