After a twelve-year break, the best, award-winning police procedural and crime drama is back. For twenty seasons Law & Orderdelivered the best “ripped from the headlines” twists and turns, featuring the best shifting casts, long-term regulars, and returning characters. Its split episode format with two detectives and assistant district attorneys blended the best of all the cop shows before or since with the #1 series ever created about lawyering (it helped get me through criminal procedure in law school two decades ago, and I’ve seen each of its 456 original episodes at least four times). Well, now the best is back, with a mix of familiar faces and some promising new ones, beginning with this week’s first episode of its 21st season, a twist on the infamous Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein cases. It’s the return of the best two assistant district attorneys in the history of the show. And it hasn’t changed a bit–a good thing–like the series kept going after we last watched it way back in 2010.
The streaming channel Peacock arrived in a free, ad-supported edition this summer, and it’s pretty much like having a full cable TV line-up for only the one-time price of an Amazon Fire Stick. The Fire Stick is typically available here at Amazon for between $30 and $50, depending on the options you want, and it’s a great portal to a variety of streaming platforms, from Netflix to YouTube and Disney Plus to HBO Max, as well as all the series and movies on Amazon Prime and the streaming platforms already available via that service, like BritBox. Named for NBC’s classic trademark logo, the Peacock channel is bigger than it sounds, incorporating the giant NBC network of historic programming, content from channels like Bravo, USA, Syfy, History, Nickelodeon, Fox, The CW, MSNBC, lots of XXXII Olympiad 2020 sports coverage, and more. On Peacock you get a variety of movies and series, much more than is supported on other TV network-based streaming providers. Like 46 seasons of Saturday Night Live, plus great fan-favorites like Psych, Monk, Parks and Recreation, six seasons of Vikings, Heroes, Eureka, Charmed, Sliders, and Battlestar Galactica, several seasons of the different flavors of Law and Order, classics like The Carol Burnett Show and Good Times, Cheers, and Columbo. But what should you watch first?
We suggest bingeing the first season of Stephen J. Cannell’s 1970s detective series, The Rockford Files.
The Crazy Top Shop was my early 1980s experience with heat-press printed T-shirts. At Southridge Mall you could show off your fandom with slogans or images from your favorite shows. Who can forget the smell of the melting glue as the clerk ironed your selection onto your favorite baseball jersey? I remember getting one shirt with the Three Stooges, one with The Fonz, and one with Yoda right after seeing The Empire Strikes Back.
An online shop is now offering shirts for all sorts of fans with some great throwbacks to pop culture’s past. From mash-ups, humor, and obscure references, many we haven’t seen elsewhere, Retropolis has an incredible variety of printed logos. We’re betting everyone can find something on the store’s website, where it currently is offering more than 900 retro-themed shirt styles. What’s it going to take to get you nostalgic, and what kind of nostalgia defines you–enough to display it for everyone to see on your shirt? Do you like classic television shows? How about toys and toy companies from the distant past? What about forgotten advertising campaigns and the earliest pop culture slogans? Retropolis may not have everything, but it has plenty. How about a shirt with a vintage comic book logo, like the old Charlton Comics brand, that crazy Hey Kids! Comics, or the memorable Comics Code Authority stamp?
How about a shirt with an image of that yellow plastic 45 RPM record adapter? How about T-shirts regularly seen worn by characters inside TV and film, like Three’s Company, John Ritter’s Captain Avenger from Hero At Large, the jersey from Teen Wolf, Snoopy’s Joe Cool shirt, Mork and Mindy, or Pigs in Space? And a few hundred of the catalog listings are for shirts sporting famous and not-so famous superhero logos. From Super Grover to the Flash, several 1966 Batman characters, and even Captain Carrot, if you can think of something, it’s probably there.
You can also find several mash-ups, allowing you to show off your own twisted sense of humor, like an unforgettable Marvel Star Wars comics character colliding with a Carl Weathers movie for an Action Jaxxon logo. We also spotted Atomic Blondie, Cap’n Crunch on a Big Wheel, Fonzie’s Jump the Shark episode from Happy Days meets Jaws, and other shirts featuring Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots, Monster Cereals, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Planet of the Apes.
Along with the superhero shirts, we spotted four big categories to choose from. Like fake pop culture. We saw Amalgamated Ice Cream(Batman),ACME(Looney Tunes),Arnold’s(Happy Days),Athlead (The Office),Advanced Idea Mechanics (Marvel),Chop Suey Palace(A Christmas Story),Camp Crystal Lake(Friday the 13th),Child Detection Agency (Monsters, Inc.),Cocktails and Dreams (Cocktail),Frostbite Falls(Rocky & Bullwinkle), Fox Force Five (Pulp Fiction),Hill Valley Police(Back to the Future),Rockford Agency (Rockford Files), and Wimpy Burgers (Popeye).
You still haven’t found something you must have yet?
If you aren’t watching this season of Major Crimes, last night you likely missed the best episode of television this year, which made us do a double take as to whether this was a midseason finale special cliffhanger ratings booster. It wasn’t. Likewise, it was the best TV pilot we’ve seen in ages (more on that later). And add to that one of the most satisfying conclusions that The Closer and Major Crimes writers James Duff and Mike Bercham have concocted yet.
Directed by The Closer, Major Crimes, Dallas, and NYPD Blue director Michael M. Robin, the episode “Two Options” took an almost Dragnet approach to a police procedural and crammed more drama into an hour of TV than we thought possible. And the climax might have caused someone to claim it as the best stand-and-cheer moment since Eowyn killed the Witch-King at the end of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Reviewers write about new seasons and finale episodes all the time, but it takes a great hour of regular programming to cause you to stop in your tracks and tell everyone about it, especially in the week full of press briefings leading up to Comic-Con.
For regulars of the series who haven’t watched the episode yet, we’ll just note that everyone gets his and her moment–Sharon, Louie, Andy, Mike, Julio, Buzz, Amy, Taylor, Rusty, Dr. Joe, Cooper, and even Fritz. Although if we worked in the actual district attorneys’ office in Los Angeles we’d probably not be too happy with the portrayals of last years’ Deputy D.A. Rios or last night’s D.D.A. Gloria Lim.
That brings us to our prediction. Allow us to summon the ghost of Carnac the Magnificent. (Drum roll, please).
This year’s TV series Almost Human had the potential to be a big hit, with movie star Karl Urban as one of the two lead actors, and a classic sci-fi plot that looked like it would mix RoboCop, Alien Nation, Blade Runner, and Total Recall. After a fun but uncertain pilot episode, it has managed to deliver each week the kind of science fiction stories that are stuff of classic TV. Almost Human isn’t just sci-fi, it’s a full-blown police procedural drama, and a good old-fashioned buddy cop show to boot.
The series centers on megastar-film actor Karl Urban’s future cop, Detective John Kennex. Kennex is a grumpy guy with baggage, a past encounter gone bad resulted in the death of his partner and the need for a cybernetic leg. Early detractors of the series likened his Kennex too much to his similarly gruff Doctor McCoy from the new Star Trek movies. It’s a fair comparison. But we don’t care. They are both great characterizations and the miserable, tough guy routine is separable and fun to watch, especially Kennex’s banter with co-star Michael Ealy as almost human robot cop Dorian, an android of a decommissioned type who has become Kennex’s partner. In fact, the buddy cop routine will make you think of your favorite buddy cop shows, in the league of Alien Nation, Adam-12, Life on Mars, Hot Fuzz, Dragnet, Life, White Collar, and Starsky and Hutch.
This week’s episode was emblematic of why the series is destined to continue as long as the network will let it. The writers basically took the plot from a classic episode of Law and Order about pacemakers being refurbished and placed in new people. Here, that concept is blended with a current political item: what happens if there is no Affordable Care Act in the future, and a current element of technology some people use every day: the prepaid cell phone. So how did the writers put it all together?
The first season of Major Crimes was better than the last season of The Closer. It even had individual episodes that out-performed several episodes of the entire run of The Closer. Since the production was working with pretty much the entire cast of The Closer sans the series lead, is that a commentary on Kyra Sedgwick’s Brenda Lee Johnson? Heck no, but the freshman year of Major Crimes convinced me that The Closer picked the right time to end a good thing. Major Crimes is a good series in its own right that should be judged on its own merits. Yes, it has its faults, including some clunky writing in its season finale. Yet considering it was set up for failure from almost the beginning of the last season of The Closer, Major Crimes surpassed the typically lackluster performance of any season one effort.
