Terry Wills – Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Police Squad!, which aired on ABC in 1982. The show can be found on Netflix!

Today, we start a new show! Produced, written, and directed by the comedy team of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, Police Squad! was the group’s follow-up to Airplane! It only aired for six episodes but it went on to inspire The Naked Gun films. Netflix just added the show so I figured why not? We could all use a few laughs on Thursday.

Episode 1.1 “A Substantial Gift (The Broken Promise)”

(Dir by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, originally aired on March 4, 1982)

In debt to her orthodontist, credit union teller Sally Decker (Kathryn Leigh Scott) stages a robbery by shooting her boss, Mr. Johnson (Terry Wills), and customer Ralph Twice (Russell Shannon). She claims that Twice robbed the place and shot Johnson, and then she shot Twice. Sally probably would have gotten away with her scheme if not for the hard work of Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen).

Drebin, who also narrates in Nielsen’s trademark deadpan style, would rather be working the case of the naked models that someone in the city is dumping at local laundromats, but instead Drebin has been assigned to work the credit union robbery. (Drebin does still find time to pick up his laundry.) Drebin’s investigation takes him to the neighborhood “known as Little Italy,” and as Drebin and his boss, Ed Hocken (Alan North), drive to Mrs. Twice’s apartment, we spy the Colosseum in the background. (The apartment itself has a nice view of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.) After lab technician Ted Olson (Ed Williams) demonstrates the distance a bullet would travel by firing two through a stack of tapes of Barbara Walters interviews, Drebin realizes that Sally’s story doesn’t make sense. To be certain, Drebin recreates the crime from several different angles and ends up with a room full of dead bodies. Drebin also visits shoeshine boy/snitch Johnny (William Duell) and learns that Sally has a long criminal history. (After Drebin leaves, a member of the Episcopal clergy pays Johnny to explain life after death. Good luck, Anglican.)

Drebin confronts Sally and it leads to a shootout. Drebin ducks behind a bench. Two feet away, Sally ducks behind a trashcan. Sally fires her gun until she runs out of bullets. She throws the gun at Drebin. Drebin also runs out of bullets and throws his gun at Sally. Eventually, Ed Hocken arrives and arrests Sally.

Later, at the station, Drebin and Ed share a laugh over Sally’s fate and the episode ends with freeze frame! Or it would, except Ed and Drebin both struggle to hold their expressions through the end credits….

And so went the first episode of Police Squad! It’s a funny episode, one that works because of both the absurd humor (there’s an extended elevator gag in which Drebin and Ed have a deadpan conversation while the police station’s elevator door opens to reveal a ballroom and then a pool) and the way it perfectly captures the feel of the old cop shows. A few years ago, I watched every episode of the second Dragnet series on MeTV and I immediately recognized what Police Squad was satirizing with its narration and its rather simple murder case. As with most of the work of Jim Abrahams and the Zucker Brothers, it works because no one acknowledges the jokes. I should also note that there’s probably nothing more boring than trying to explain why a joke works or why it doesn’t.

Police Squad only ran for six episodes and was canceled because network executives felt that audiences were confused by the show’s style of humor. (The Naked Gun films were spun off from Police Squad and recycled many of the show’s same jokes. They were hits.) I read about the show while reading Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! When I saw that all six episodes had been added to Netflix, I decided to make it our latest Retro Television Review.

For the next few weeks, join us every Thursday for Police Squad!

Not My Kid, a made-for-television from 1985, opens with 15 year-old Susan Bower (Viveka Davis) in a car with her friends. They’re drunk. They’re stoned. They’re laughing. And soon, they’re screaming as the driver loses control and the car ends up getting overturned! (I’ve had that happen before. It wasn’t fun but I survived with only a few cuts and bruises.) Susan isn’t seriously hurt but, at the hospital, it’s discovered that she has alcohol and drugs in her bloodstream.

“NOT MY KID!” her father, surgeon Frank Bower (George Segal), declares.

“NOT MY KID!” her mother, Helen Bower (Stockard Channing, totally wasted in a thinly written role), agrees.

“Totally your kid!” her younger sister, Kelly (Christa Denton), says before then revealing where Susan hides her drugs. This leads to Kelly getting beaten up by Susan and her drug addict boyfriend, Ricky (Tate Fuckin’ Donavon, decades before playing a hostage in Argo.).

Anyway, neither Frank nor Helen want to admit that Susan has a drug problem so instead, they go to see a smug family counselor who tells them that they are both being too hard on their daughter and that they need to just let Susan be Susan. That sounds like a good (and easy) plan but then Susan runs away and disappears for two days. After she’s finally found, stoned and hiding out in the family’s boat, her parents finally decide to send her to rehab.

The rehab is run by Dr. Royce. Dr. Royce is played by Andrew Robinson and it took me a while to recognize him as being the same actor who played the Scorpio Killer in Dirty Harry. Perhaps that explains why Dr. Royce came across as being such a creepy character. As I watched this movie, I kept waiting for the big reveal where Dr. Royce would turn out to be a murderer or something. That never happened, of course. In the world of Not My Kid, the harsh and confrontational Dr. Royce is the only thing keeping the entire teenage population for shooting up heroin.

The majority of the film takes place at the rehab and it gets annoying pretty quickly. This is one of those places where everything is done as a group activity. Whenever someone says something, everyone in the group replies with, “We love you, so-and-so.” When Susan doesn’t act properly ashamed of herself, the group gangs up on her. “You’re a phony!” someone says. “You’re full of crap!” another person adds. “We love you, Susan,” the group chants.

AGCK! Seriously, the rehab scenes totally freaked me out because it came across less like therapy and more like brainwashing. I spent the entire movie waiting for Susan to escape and when she did, I was happy for her. She may have been a self-destructive drug addict but at least wasn’t a mindless zombie like everyone else in the movie! But then she ended up getting caught by her father and taken back to the rehab.

Meanwhile, her parents are going through therapy as well. Again, it’s all group therapy. When Frank tries to talk about how Susan’s behavior makes him feel, someone says, “You’re a phony!’ Another person adds, “You’re full of crap!” And the group chants, “We love you, Frank.” Okay, to be honest, I’m taking some dramatic license with the dialogue here but hopefully, you get the general idea.

I mean, seriously — I understand that I was supposed to be like, “Yay rehab!” while watching the movie but the rehab came across more like some sort of creepy cult. It reminded me of both a Canadian film called, Ticket To Heaven and a Texas film called Split Image. As I watched Not My Kid, I kept waiting for James Woods to show up as a cult deprogrammer.

Anyway, don’t worry. Everything turns out well in the end. This was a made-for-TV movie, after all. Not My Kid is way too heavy-handed for its own good and it lacks a certain self-awareness. On a more positive note, George Segal does a good job in the role of Frank.

You can watch Not My Kid below!