Tracy Hutson | 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 Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Pacific Blue, a cop show that aired from 1996 to 2000 on the USA Network! It’s currently streaming everywhere, though I’m watching it on Tubi.

This week, the bike cops are it again.

Episode 4.7 “Damaged Goods”

(Dir by Michael Levine, originally aired on October 4th, 1998)

Bobby has a new girlfriend named Annie (Tracy Hutson). Bobby says that he’s in love with her. Meanwhile, Granger is in lust with Annie’s best friend, Jo (Shannon Elizabeth, in an early role). After Granger sleeps with Jo, Jo tells him that he owes her $200. It turns out that both Jo and Annie get paid to have sex. Meanwhile, Annie’s roommate is found dead below a 6-story window.

Chris is convinced that Annie’s roommate was murdered. TC and Cory disagree. TC is especially angry because he thinks Chris is spending too much time hanging out with her friends in Homicide. Oddly enough, none of those friends show up in this episode. As well. no one from the Vice Squad shows up to investigate the campus prostitution ring. Instead, this is yet another episode where it somehow all falls to the bicycle cops.

Monica goes undercover and joins Jo and Annie’s therapy group, where Dr. Alicia Alper (Joyce Hyser) teaches that prostitution is empowering. Soon, Jo recruits Monica to work as a an escort. Or, at least, I think it was Jo. This episode is edited in such a haphazard way that it was hard to keep track of what was actually going on.

This episode finds Cory worrying about how she’s going to survive as a single mom. Her ex-boyfriend, Doug (Owen McKibben), returns and says that he wants to be in the baby’s life. Cory says that it’s been over a month since Doug reacted to the news of her pregnancy by walking out on her. Doug threatens to sue for the right to be a part of the baby’s life. Cory has a miscarriage. She says it was due to the stress Doug put her under. Doug says that it was due to Cory still working a very physically demanding and rough job despite being pregnant. I felt so bad for Cory in this episode, especially since the only person (other than Doug) who bothered to visit her in the hospital was Chris, who is pretty much incapable of feeling or showing emotion.

Anyway, it turns out that Annie’s roommate was murdered by a client and then the client was murdered by Dr. Alper. However, when the bike cops arrest her, several other woman all walk up and declares that Dr. Alper is innocent because they killed the client. However, Dr. Alper confesses. Bobby breaks up with his girlfriend. That’s probably for the best. Everyone knows Bobby should be with Monica.

This episode …. oh God. I mean, it tried to liven things up a little. There were a lot of intense interrogation scenes and a lot of jump cuts that were apparently meant to create tension. We would watch Chris ask a question and then jump to someone in a totally different room answering an unrelated question. It was very showy but it wasn’t very effective. These folks aren’t hard-boiled detectives. They’re bicycle cops.

Seriously, where were the real detectives?

In Rated X, two real-life brothers play another set of real-life brothers.

Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen play, respectively, brothers Jim and Artie Mitchell. Two pot-smoking entrepreneurs who found fame and fortune during the so-called Golden Age of Pornography (Behind the Green Door was their most famous film), Jim and Artie owned the O’Farrell Theater in San Francisco and became famous for their numerous legal troubles and their advocacy for freedom of speech. While Jim became a semi-respectable figure who hobnobbed with the city’s elite, Artie became known for his consumption of cocaine. In 1991, Jim drove over to Artie’s house and shot him twice. Jim, who claimed Artie had threatened to kill him, was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison. Jim was released after serving three years. (He died in 2007, long after this film aired on Showtime.)

Rated X tells the story of the Mitchell Brothers in a flat and perfunctory manner. Emilio Estevez not only plays Jim but he also directs. He doesn’t bring much visual style or storytelling style to the film, despite a few scenes that appear to have been cribbed from Boogie Nights. Estevez doesn’t seem to be sure what he wants to say about the Mitchell Brothers and they come across as being the most boring pornographers in history. What’s really strange is that Estevez and Sheen are not believable as brothers, despite both wearing matching bald caps. There’s nothing about their performances that would lead you to believe that they grew up with each other. Casting Sheen as an out-of-control drug addict seems like a no-brainer but he’s not even believable when he’s snorting coke and handing out cheerleader uniforms. In fact, the film probably would have worked better if Sheen and Estevez had switched roles. Estevez was always better at showing emotion than Charlie. In Rated X, Jim is always intense while Artie always has the wide-eyed stare that Oliver Stone made such good use of in Platoon.

I can understand the casting, though. Jim and Artie were brothers so it makes sense to cast brothers to play them. Because Charlie has always been best-known for his flamboyant life off-screen, it probably seemed to the obvious decision to cast him as the wild brother while Estevez, who has always come across as being a stable guy offscreen, seemed right for Jim. But onscreen, Estevez is always better as an unpredictable outlaw and Charlie is always better as someone who tries to keep his real emotions bottled up. This film was cast based on Estevez and Sheen’s off-camera personas and they’re both miscast as a result.

There’s an interesting movie to be made about the Mitchells. Their rise and fall mirrored the rise and fall of the 6os counterculture. (A year before he killed his brother, Jim even tried to launch a Ramparts-style magazine for the 90s.) Unfortunately, the Showtime-produced Rated X is not it.