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 Prime!

Tonight’s episode is weird.

Episode 3.6 “Counterfeit”

(Dir by John Florea, originally aired on October 20th, 1979)

Ponch is shocked to discover that he’s carrying several counterfeit twenties.  He turns the money into the Treasure Department, hoping that it will mean receiving an monetary award.  Instead, he’s told that his reward is helping the government crack down  on the bad guys.  Ha!  Take that, Ponch!

That said, you better believe that Ponch is there to help arrest the counterfeiters, who turn out to be a bunch of phony preachers working out of a church.  I know that sounds like the sort of thing that could be interesting.  But, for the most part, these guys are still just generic CHiPs bad guys, even if one of them is played by veteran screen tough guy Ralph Meeker.

Meanwhile, Ponch goes on a date with a woman and is upset when it appears that she’s shallow and doesn’t want to talk about anything that is the least bit intellectual.  That’s our, Ponch!  He’s never shallow!  Fortunately, it turns out that his date isn’t shallow either.  She was just pretending to be shallow to test whether or not Ponch was shallow.  And now, it’s time to dance!  Wait, what?  That doesn’t make any sense.  Ponch — when are you going to settle down?  Disco isn’t going to last forever.

While that’s going on, architect James O’Hara (played by veteran dwarf actor Billy Barty) becomes frustrated with people assuming that he can’t drive because of his size.  He gets tired of all the dumb jokes and the condescending remarks.  As a result, he keeps getting into minor accident whenever he drives on the highway.  This was a strange storyline, largely because O’Hara’s scenes made up over half the episode despite the fact that he had never appeared on the show before and he barely interacted with the members of the Highway Patrol.  A part of me wonders if maybe this episode was meant to be a backdoor pilot for a series about James O’Hara.  The other weird thing about this episode is that O’Hara’s frustration over people making fun of his height was often played for laughs.  The whole thing just felt well-intentioned but oddly tone deaf.

If you’re keeping track, this episode had two Ponch storylines and a storyline about a guy we had never seen before.  Sorry, Baker!  If we had any doubts about who was the favored partner as far as this show goes, this episode erased them.

This whole episode just felt weird.  On the plus side, there was a lot of nice California scenery and there were quite a few accidents, which is the main reason why most people would have been watching the show in the first place.  But this episode really is an example of how a show can get bogged down with a character that we’ve never seen before and that we’ll probably never see again.  The episode just never comes together.