Winrich Kolbe – 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 Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!

This week, a future star makes an appearance and Bruce gets a chance to prove himself.

Episode 6.9 “Return To Death’s Door”

(Dir by Winrich Kolbe, originally aired on December 12th, 1982)

Teenage Chris (Lee Montgomery) is risking his life in dangerous street races! Can Ponch, who knew Chris’s older brother and who was there the day that Chris’s brother was killed in a street race, get through to Chris? Sure, he can. He’s Ponch. He can do anything.

This episode of CHiPs felt very familiar. This is not the first time that the show featured Ponch having flashbacks to his youth as a juvenile delinquent. Of course, Estrada plays himself in the flashbacks and, by the time the sixth season rolled around, he was a little bit old to be convincing as a teenager. But no matter! What’s important is that Ponch took part in one last race to convince Chris to change his life around. That’s the power of Ponch! (And fear not. Ponch appears to have gotten over the death of his fiancée in record time.)

While Ponch was saving lives and changing outlooks, two honeymooners from the South were stealing cars and having a fun time seeing the sights. Honey Jean was played by Kathy Shower while her new husband, Billy Joe, was played by an actor named Bryan Cranston.

That’s right. Bryan Cranston!

This episode proves that everyone had to start somewhere. Today, Bryan Cranston is best-known for playing Walter White on Breaking Bad and the father on Malcolm in the Middle. (To be honest, I think Malcolm in the Middle is one of those shows that people claim to like more than they actually do.) In 1982, he was just a young actor playing a down-home car thief on CHiPs and speaking with a really broad country accent.

Interestingly, it’s Bruce Nelson who arrests Billy Joe and Honey Jean. Between Ponch ending the street races and Bruce making arrests, Bobby Nelson really didn’t get to do much in this episode. Tom Reilly may have been listed second in the credits but this episode treated him like a bystander. From what I’ve read, Reilly and Estrada got along even worse than Estrada and Wilcox. When Reilly got arrested for driving while intoxicated, it led to the real Highway Patrol threatening to pull their sponsorship and, if CHiPs had come back for a seventh season, it’s easy to imagine that Reilly would have been gone and Bruce Penhall would have been Ponch’s new partner. That actually might have worked because Penhall is a far more believable cop than the somewhat spacey Reilly.

In fact, Bruce gets to do a lot of good things in this episode. He also rescues a dog that had gotten loose on the highway and brings it to the station. Harlan adopts it and Getraer spends this episode sneezing. Eventually, the dog’s owner picks up the dog. Don’t worry, though. Bruce shows up with yet another dog and this one is even cuter than the first!

The dogs were cute and I enjoyed saying, “Wait a minute! Is that Bryan Cranston!?” For a sixth-season episode of CHiPs, that counts as success.

This week, CHiPs jumps the proverbial shark.

Episode 6.3 “The Spaceman Made Me Do It”

(Dir by Winrich Kolbe, originally aired on October 24th, 1983)

There’s three storylines in this week’s episode. Let’s start with the two that make sense.

In the episodes comedic storyline, the members of the Highway Patrol all receive a chain letter. Some continue the chain and have good luck. Others — like Ponch — do not continue the chain and wait for their bad luck. Grossie mails his letter and then gets an $800 refund from the IRS. However, at the end of the episode, it’s revealed that the Highway Patrol’s secretary failed to mail the chain letters and the IRS informs Grossie that his refund was a mistake. Everyone laughs at Grossie. Poor guy.

The B-plot features Grossie and new officer Kathy (Tina Gayle) tracking down some thieves who are robbing Japanese tourists. This was a traditional CHiPs story and it was actually kind of nice of the show to acknowledge that Ponch isn’t the only person fighting crime in California.

But then there’s the main plot. Ponch and Bobby have been assigned to night patrol. They catch a preadolescent girl named Jodi (Kyle Richards) breaking into a jewelry store. She says that an E.T. (and yes, she says “E.T.’) ordered her to break into the store because it need the diamonds to fix its spaceship. Ponch and Bobby take Jodi to the station and Ponch volunteers to serve as Jodi’s legal guardian until her parents can be found. Dr. Joyce Brothers appears as herself, talking to Jodi and announcing the Jodi is not crazy.

Having watched five seasons of CHiPs, I found myself waiting for the inevitable moment in which it would be revealed that Jodi was being manipulated by a master criminal. When Jodi ran away to meet up with the UFO, I expected that Ponch and Bobby would track her down and arrest the actual villain.

Instead, when Ponch and Bobby tracked down Jodi, I got a scene of a light shining down from the sky, Jodi being pulled towards the unseen UFO, and Ponch grabbing her and yelling that the aliens can’t have her. Ponch’s words apparently have the right effect because the lights disappear as the never-seen UFO returns to its own planet.

“What was that?” Bobby asks.

“Whatever you want it to be,” Ponch replies.

No, guys. I’m sorry. This is CHiPs. It’s a show about cops on motorcycles. It’s not a show about UFOs. You can’t just introduce an alien on this show and then have everyone shrug it off once they hear that Grossie won’t be getting his tax refund. This just isn’t the show to try that sort of thing. (Yes, Force Seven did get pretty weird but that was a backdoor pilot for a different series and Ponch and Jon didn’t actually get involved in any of the mad scientist/karate action.)

I’m going to guess this episode was an attempt to shake things up. Maybe there was a feeling that, since new star Tom Reilly lacked all credibility as a cop, the show should abandon the straight-forward approach that it used during the Larry Wilcox years. I’m sure the show had its reasons but this episode just doesn’t feel right.

Of course, some thing never change. The aliens may have been a surprise but it’s not a surprise that Ponch was the one who (somehow) made them go away. Aliens or not, this is still….