Chris: So “House of Soul” opens with a flashback to the docks of turn of the century San Francisco and some unsavory characters (white guys with Irish accents) smuggling in some Chinese antiquities. Then it gets real foggy and a Chinese ghost causes the infamous 1906 Earthquake. The show then snaps back to the present and the gang of the House of Soul negotiating with a couple of producers from The Jerry Springer Show who want to shoot an episode at the club because it apparently was built over an old Chinese temple that was destroyed in that same quake. This is the temple where those antiquities were being stored and Jerry wants to uncover it all on television much in the same fashion as Geraldo and Al Capone’s vault. Except, you know, not an embarrassing national fiasco. But when Jessica (remember the club owner who is credited in literally every episode and has spoken probably less than a dozen lines? Her) and Raleigh get wind of the plans they team up with Frank to get to the treasure before Jerry and his people. It’s actually more accurate to say that Frank muscles in on Jessica and Raleigh’s action because business had been slow and he could use the money. Also the descendants of the Irish guy who swiped the treasure back in 06 and some Chinese secret agents are sniffing around too. It’s a lot.

And a lot is usually better for Night Man because the plot bounces around so frequently that the inept stupidity comes off as charming instead of grating. There’s something like a dozen different characters and they all have their own agendas and information and one of them is Jerry Springer and another is a Chinese ghost warrior. Also, and this is crucial for a really successful episode, there’s so much going on that Johnny is barely in it. The spine of the plot is a Treasure of the Sierra Madre riff where all these characters are so desperate to find the loot that they risk losing their humanity. The show literally stops so that Johnny and Raleigh can talk about the movie just to make sure that we know that they know what’s going on. My favorite part is when Frank forces Raleigh and Jessica to cut him into their caper by offering protection from all the people who are bound to be overcome with “Treasure Fever” at the thought of all old timey doubloons and scepters and jewels lying around.  But this is Night Man, so no major character goes crazy or really tries to hurt anyone or anything like that. It’s more just an excuse for the cast to mug and rub their hands together in the ways that greedy people do. I’m surprised they didn’t insert freeze frames where characters have little gold dollar signs over their eyes so we knew they were going crazy thinking about all the money.

This might be cool if the show had a higher budget than high school play in an underfunded school district.

I think “House of Soul” works better than a lot of other more Toontownish Night Mans because it’s focused. There’s a lot of characters but they all want the same thing for different reasons. Some of them want the money, some want revenge, or ratings, some want to restore cultural dignity, etc. Everyone has something to do, and no one has too much, and it’s all over before you know it. Which, again, I can think of no higher compliment to give an episode of Night Man than to say it didn’t feel three hours long. And I gotta say… Jerry Springer was a lot of fun. Like, he’s in the episode a lot, does a lot of things and seems like a good sport. There’s a whole thing in the big climax at the dock where Jerry is hiding behind a bunch of stuff and watching slash narrating all the action unfold that’s pretty entertaining. What did you think, Ronnie? Do you rate this episode as highly as I do? You have to be happy that it ends with Night Man executing a man without any kind of due process, right? Sound off below!

Ronnie: Tubi description of this episode: “The House of Soul is haunted by ghosts. No surprise, given its name.” It’s House of Soul, Tubi, not House of Ghost! Stupid streaming platform. Anyway, in 1906 a shipment of Chinese Nonsense is interrupted by the famous San Francisco/Bay City/whatever earthquake. Christopher Cousins is involved. Remember him? “I fucked Ted” on Breaking Bad? He’s been a television regular for decades. This takes us to present day where Jessica and Raleigh are making a deal for Jerry Springer to do a show about the House of Soul, because it’s built over a 19th century temple. “Place doesn’t look Jewish to me,” Raleigh cracks. No, silly, it’s a CHINESE temple! That’s a whole other barrel of stereotypes that we’ll be dealing with in this episode. Just imagine how anti-Semitic this would get if it were a Jewish temple, though. Night Man lasering golems writes itself. Springer is pretty hyped up in the episode, as though he weren’t just Phil Donahue for idiots. Of Springer, his producer says “he just loves Johnny Domino’s music”. This is followed up with a pretty good punchline where Springer says “who’s Johnny Domino? They couldn’t get Kenny G?”. Points to Night Man.

Night Man doesn’t seem to know what Jerry Springer actually does (profiting off human freakshows), and I’m inclined to think that he’s in the episode because Geraldo Rivera (who is namechecked) said no. Investigating a jazz club built over a Chinese temple seems way more in his wheelhouse than Jerry’s. When it becomes apparent there may be treasure underneath the House of Soul, all sorts of interested parties come out of the woodwork. Our heroes want it, the Springer people want it (there’s a “treasure clause” in the contract), Christopher Cousins’ descendant wants it, the Chinese want it. Unfortunately there’s an armored ghost guarding the treasure that Raleigh mistakes for Night Man initially. Long story short, the villain is some of the Chinese but not all of the Chinese, which is practically progressive for Glen A. Larson.

Being mayor of Cincinnati is still more demeaning than being in Night Man. 

I think Jessica may be starting to develop as a character? We know from “You Are Too Beautiful” that she hops on bandwagons and in this episode she seems intent on monetizing the House of Soul beyond Big Time Operator shows and overpriced drinks. That’s two points of characterization, which is grand considering she didn’t appear in most episodes and did nothing when she did appear. A scheming businesswoman trying to wring profit out of everything wouldn’t solve most or any of the problems with the show, but it would give Felecia M. Bell something to do. You’re paying her, so might as well.

Chris: Here’s my push back vis-a-vis your They Really Wanted Geraldo theory: Jerry Springer is fun, Geraldo is a prick. Like, I understand why it would seem like Geraldo would be a better fit for the episode, he’s the guy who might actually do something like this. But people hated Geraldo. They tuned into his show because a Klansman might bust him across the chops with a chair and break his fucking nose. They want to laugh at him when he excavates an empty room while dressed like Indiana Jones. Jerry was gross, sure, but he had a weird avuncular quality that people dug. The guy was the mayor of a majorish American city for heaven’s sake. He was married to Connie Chung. Remember the Jerry Springer movie Ringleader? It positioned him as a merry prankster who presided over a carnival of fools with a benevolent smile and a twinkle in his eye. If they made a movie about Geraldo it would have been called Shit Monger and he’d have been as a loathsome feces smeared ghoul who slept in his own filth and talked like Gollum.

The Night Man Team are far from the best in the business, but even they could see that Jerry would have been a better fit for their lighthearted treasure hunt. I refuse to believe that the Night Man Gang would have been excited to hang out with Geraldo, and the cast being starstruck and greedy was 80% of the fun of the episode.

More of the show should be disconnected scenes of Johnny blowing that sweet saxomophone.

I don’t actually remember old episodes of Night Man particularly well–it’s a trauma response I think–but I feel like there’s been a promising trend developing where the supporting cast get to be exciting and enthusiastic about whatever bullshit framing device is being used for the particular episode. Like the wrestling one where it turned out Raleigh and Frank were big fans and Jessica gets super into it too. I like that. Night Man is a bad show for idiots but THIS idiot is gonna have a better time watching it if it seems like the people involved in the production appear to be having a good time making it.

Ronnie: This is shockingly progressive for a Night Man episode because it’s of the opinion that the “treasure” belongs with the Chinese and nobody in America bears any claim to it. Repatriation may be accepted now, but maybe not as much in the 1990s. Nighty could’ve let sleeping dogs lie, but he purposefully hauled ass to the ship to tell the Chinese woman (not Donna Chang) that one of her cohort (Chinese people) was going to sell the treasure at a markup in Hong Kong. Again, he didn’t have to do that. This episode is not particularly respectful but I would say it’s not particularly disrespectful either. You know? For a Chinese ghost story you could do a lot worse. Dare I say tying everything in to the 1906 earthquake suggests a level of thoughtfulness I didn’t think possible with Night Man. I’m not saying it’s good; it’s stupid and mostly consists of dipshits scheming about a Macguffin. The final confrontation’s emotional weight is blunted by constant cutbacks to Jerry Springer going “I can’t believe I’m seeing this!” bullshit. But I am surprised “House of Soul” isn’t as bad as it is. I expected egregious Orientalism and didn’t get it.

They have definitely used this ship in a previous episode.

Odds & Ends
-“You survived the death battle with the ghost warrior” this was probably the episode they submitted to Emmys in the writing category.
-”What does a saxophone player have to do with a fortune and buried treasure?” would be the runner up.
-I don’t want nor do I need Jerry Springer audio commentary on a Night Man fight scene, but “House of Soul” provides it anyway.
-Lt. Dann is absent this episode because no one needed to hear the name “Frank” approximately 70 times.

1X16 “NIGHTWOMAN”

Chris: Well folks, Night Man enters monkey’s paw territory with “Nightwoman” as my theory of “the less Johnny/Night Man in a given episode the better” is put to the test when Johnny is zapped into a laser beam induced coma halfway through the first act and center stage is taken by Lorie Swift, aka Night Woman, a former undercover cop turned vigilante super hero after suffering a near fatal accident at the hands of local mobster Johnny Gelato. It seems that at one point Officer Swift and her partner slash kinda-boyfriend Lt Charlie Dann were working together to bring the sinister Gelato down, her on the inside as gangster’s moll and him on the outside as the cop she called on the phone and told things to. But when Gelato got wise he cleverly lured Swift onto the balcony of his high rise apartment by revealing that he knew who she actually was and then pushing her over the edge and sending her plunging however many stories up they were to the ground below. Except instead of hitting asphalt, Swift landed in a swimming pool and was merely paralyzed from the neck down. It was very sad for Lt. Dann because he wanted to marry Lorie and it’s sad for Lorie because her life was ruined. But fortunately, Swift’s father was some kind of government scientist and he whipped her up a magic suit that both unparalyzed her and gave her electricity powers. But you don’t just throw something like that together on the fly so a couple of years and 15 episodes of Night Man pass between the prologue and her first appearance as Nightwoman at a bank in Bay City where Johnny and his dad Frank happen to be taking out a loan to buy a boat.

There’s not a shot in the episode that makes the costume look any less shitty. Believe me, I looked. 

Frank, by the way, is significantly more emotionally invested in the whole boat scheme, Johnny just kind of seems like he’s humoring the old man and is positively giddy when his evil senses pick up on Lori’s plans and he can spring into action. Okay, Lori is robbing the bank, yes, but only kind of because what she’s actually doing is robbing a safe deposit box where Gilardi was storing his bosses’ money. So, while she’s technically committing a crime, it’s in the service of seeing justice done on a larger scale because what she’s really trying to do is to get Gilardi in trouble with the higher ups so they’ll kill him. I don’t know if that really qualifies as evil in the way Night Man defines the word. Here’s my theory: Johnny was so desperate to get away from Frank that his super power kinda cheated in order to give him an excuse to drive away from his dad as fast as he can. Which he does, and when he catches up with Lori, she shoots him in the brain with her electricity powers and puts him in a coma that lasts for most of the rest of the episode.

I don’t know if this was supposed to be a backdoor pilot for a Bionic Woman style spin-off or if Matt McColm was exhausted, injured or holding a sick-out, but “Nightwoman” has less Night Man than any episode up to this point and it suuuuuuucks. I don’t know if Jennifer Campbell (the model Jerry met in the plane who later thought she caught him picking his nose!) is actually worse at acting than Matt McColm but Lori is a worse character than Johnny. Johnny is ridiculous in a fun way, a kickboxer slash white jazz guy slash lighting psychic slash Iron Man style superhero, whereas Lori is an ex-cop turned bitter cripple who’s on a very specific mission of revenge. Her history with Lt Dann is supposed to be tragic or bittersweet I suppose, but he’s a damp sock of an actor and they don’t have an ounce of chemistry. Seriously. It’s even bad for Night Man. Whatever charm Frank has is rooted in him being a perpetual fuck-up and concussion enthusiast, him wide eyed and hysterical with worry over his injured son is fucking intolerable. So yeah, instead of an insane show we mostly just get a boring one. They’re both bad, but I’ll take insane bad over boring bad seven days a week and twice on Sunday.

Ronnie: Is it not a bit early in the show’s run to be introducing spinoff characters? I suppose next will be Nightboy, Nightchild, Nightdog. Nightdog could be pretty good actually. Dogs already bark at people for no apparent reason. What if the reason was they were evil? All they’d need to do is find a dog that wouldn’t outshine Matt McColm, which may prove difficult. “Nightwoman” is indeed a step down because there’s no clear focus. There’s Nightwoman, who’s a fucking terrible actress, and there’s the supporting characters, who are supporting because they’re not interesting enough to be main characters. I’m looking at you, Lt. Dann! I know it’s impossible to “act well” in these circumstances, but Michael Woods is one-note in his performance. I like the performance, but that’s only because it’s novel to have a Dragnet ripoff character in the cast. It’s an ironic “like”, that’s what I’m saying.

Lt. Down To Fuck

So let’s talk about Nightwoman the character, shall we? She’s not very good, as a character and as an actress and as a concept. “The Pick” lady was clearly not cast for her skills on the screen. Maybe she was hired because she’s from Bay City, Michigan. According to IMDB anyway; other sources say Honolulu, Hawaii. As Barack Obama has proven, though, no one is actually born in Hawaii. Nightwoman is a confusing character because it’s well before the point that Night Man could conceivably have a female counterpart. Like, Night Man is not Superman, he’s not some public champion of the city. I don’t think anyone on the show even calls him Night Man, and the characters are only peripherally aware there’s some laser eyed dude occasionally helping them out. Moreover, the events of the episode place Lorrie’s crippling before Johnny gets his powers, so her shit was in the works well before Night Man even existed. It’s like if She-Hulk predated the Hulk. If anything, Johnny should be inspired by her and call himself Nightwoman Man. It’s Bay City San Francisco, they’re all tolerant people.

I don’t think this disguise would fool anyone for any reason ever.

The only way this episode makes sense is if it’s intending to spin off this character to her own series. That doesn’t work because Jennifer Campbell makes Matt McColm look like Matt McConaughey and no one in their right mind would decide a middling syndicated show needs a worse spinoff to it. Then again, no one in their right mind would make Night Man, so here we are. But let’s run with the idea that this was a spinoff in the works. What would Nightwoman look like? You’d have Jennifer Campbell as Lorrie Swift, obviously. Then there’d be her dad. Who else? Would Charlie Dann slot over as her on again off again love interest? Imagine the love scenes. I guess she’d fight some motley crew of mobsters and whatever the hell Night Man fights. You’d just end up with another Night Man. Nobody wants that!

Chris: I think what you’re saying, Ronnie, if I can sum up your last few paragraphs, is that there really isn’t any reason for this character to be called Nightwoman on account of she has absolutely nothing to do with Night Man outside of possessing a truly awful costume: it’s black but it glows blue and sparkles like it was animated by the Tron guys. You know how in the 2011 Green Lantern movie they put Ryan Reynolds into a mocap suit and CGed the actual costume on in post? It’s kind of like that but on a 1997 Z-Grade syndicated TV show budget. There’s no thematic or narrative connection between the two other than the fact that they both appear on the same TV show. It’s not like she came from the same planet or got a dose of his blood, their powers are completely different, she doesn’t sense evil or nothing, she isn’t inspired by him to jump into action because of him like how Kate Bishop Hawkeye is inspired by Clint Barton Hawkeye (in the TV show anyway, I forget why she’s called Hawkeye in the comics). And like you said, her whole accident/motivation is from before Night Man was even a thing! If anything, she should be called Lt. Dann Woman, because that would at least tie her to character that she has a history with.

It’s the Full Moon approximately 207% of the time in San Francisco Bay City. 

Ronnie: Nightwoman actually returns in a Season 2 episode, of course played by a different actress because Season 2 is aggressively Canadian and thus needed to recast or discard most American actors on the show. As a result she escapes punishment for her actions and is a free woman by the end. This is a clunky episode, no doubt, that tries to eat its cake and have it too with its discussion (i.e., a couple lines of dialogue) of the efficacy of vigilantism. Like, also, you’re Night Man so you are going to be pro-vigilante. You can’t criticize Nightwoman for going outside the system when the show’s hero does that every week. I suppose you could carve out a jazzman exclusion, but that seems questionable. The difference between the two characters boils down to active vs. reactive. Nightwoman is actively trying to end organized crime whereas Night Man lets problems fall in his lap, be they extradimensional beast or Chinese ghost. The suggestion is this is just shit he’d experience in his day to day. Eventually Nightwoman realizes she’s over her head (the bad guys kidnapped their dads) and resuscitates Johnny, after having stolen his gravity belt and going on a flying spree. Team-up time! It ends with the implication that the other mobsters are going to kill Joey, with full sanction by our heroes. Sure, why not.

That’s it for this installment of Night Man Nights. Tune in to the next one because both episodes deal with villains from the past. We didn’t anticipate Night Man building a mythos but I’m in favor of it because the more it starts to resemble a superhero TV show the better. The mythos won’t “make sense” but it’ll be there.

Odds & Ends
-“You’re like a bald cold, you just don’t go away, do you?” – Lt. Dann’s cop talk is on point.
-This episode was written by Mark Jones, better known for writing and creating the original Leprechaun. He actually died less than a month ago. None of his obits mentioned he wrote one episode of Night Man, which I think is a shame. You could argue Nightwoman is as enduring a character as Leprechaun. You’d lose that argument, but you could make it.
-Director Rob Spera directed a Leprechaun movie, 5: In Da Hood, which did not involve Mark Jones. He also directed twelve episodes of Criminal Minds and one of the spinoff, Suspect Behavior. Spera is no stranger to junk.
-Dann’s nickname for Nightwoman is “Ace”. Why not “Old Iron Balls”?

Ronnie: This is an important episode, which seems absurd to say when the logline is Night Man impersonates a wrestler to prove another wrestler didn’t commit a murder. But it is, because “You Are Too Beautiful” was written by Steve Englehart, creator of the Night Man comic book. Steve Englehart also has a website at which he writes about his experiences writing comic books and, in this case, a television show. You know what that means: we actually have primary source documentation from someone involved in the making of Night Man. He can’t answer questions related to undergirding aspects of the program (why the jazz hologram? What’s with that dumb whirring noise when he turns on his gravity belt?), but Englehart’s website provides a look into the making of the series. His involvement was not contractually obligated so he essentially cold called Glen A. Larson for a script job and was told to write one script, its acceptance contingent on not having to be rewritten too heavily. In fact, Steve’s script required no rewriting. Keep that in mind: everything in this episode comes from the typewriter of the guy who created Mantis. Mantis the Marvel Comics character, not M.A.N.T.I.S. the handicapable black superhero who eventually got killed by an invisible dinosaur. One gets the sense from the website that Englehart is a little self-aggrandizing and ready to talk himself up, but by comic book creator moral standards he’s John Stamos.

As Englehart explains, this show is less about the main character and more about telling a story that happens to have Night Man in it. Think of that anthology series Spider-Man’s Tangled Web. Johnny Domino’s Spit Valve. Rod Bannerman goes from handsome bank robber to masked superfreak when he robs a jeweler (a stepfather and daughter operation, with the father played by “Jerk Store” Reilly from Seinfeld/Fuchs from The Thing and the daughter played by Meredith Monroe of Dawson’s Creek and Criminal Minds fame) with the wherewithal to place an explosive device into a bag of surrendered jewels. He spends 5 years in prison and upon exiting he’s immediately given a job offer in the lucrative world of pro wrestling. You see, having a hideous face there is not disqualifying. In many cases it’s a perk. Fortunately, Jessica the club owner who’s barely been in this fucking show has free wrestling tickets to offer the boys. That’s how you connect jazz club to wrestling: have the seldom appearing owner come up with tickets out of her ass.

“Hey Golden Boy, the ocean called–“

Meredith Monroe is seated next to Jessica, wondering just who sent her this wrestling ticket in the mail. I like how she has so little going on that she’ll attend whatever is mailed to her. There’s a dispute going between Rod (now the wrestler Golden Boy), his promoter/manager Paddy Ladbroke, a name that hasn’t been used since the days of “Irish Need Not Apply”, and Meredith Monroe, because Monroe causes Rod to lose interest in wrestling, which obviously doesn’t sit well with Paddy O’Potatofamine. A dead body complicates matters. Wrestling groupie Tiffany wanted Golden Boy’s entire body, yet she reacted to him taking off his mask like he’s a Universal monster and not, like, a disfigured guy. Then she’s found strangled to death. She was seen by Golden Boy last, but he claims he didn’t kill her. If you can’t trust a bank robber cum masked wrestler, who can you trust? The characters uncover similar murders of beautiful young women on the circuit and conclude a wrestler must be behind the slayings. Surprised Criminal Minds never did a wrestling episode. That industry is rife with premature death.

Johnny’s evil radio tunes in when in an elevator with some wrestlers, so he needs to narrow down the suspect pool by going up to each wrestler and seeing if their vibe is cool. This seems like a shitty mission in a video game. Meanwhile you’ve got the relationship between Rod and Meredith Monroe, which actually isn’t too bad. He tries to woo her as Golden Boy and she puts 2 and 2 together pretty quickly, revealing she knows he’s the bank robber from 5 years ago. I think a lesser script would keep her in the dark unnecessarily to set up a She’s All That twist later on. It gives her a more active role rather than making her a one dimensional object of affection. Dare I say her character is two dimensional. By the time Reilly Fuchs shows up and it turns out the whole robbery was an inside job to scam the insurance company, I’m like, okay, enough. Steve, you know Night Man isn’t supposed to be this complex, right? It’s just a load of nonsense and bad greenscreen for 43 minutes. Effort goes against the point, man. What say you, Chris? I thought this was actually a good episode when judged against the whole of Night Man so far. Maybe tapping an experienced comics writer instead of your dipshit son for scripts was a good move by Glen Larson.

Chris: You once said to me that the average comic writer couldn’t get a job writing for Guiding Light, and “You Are So Beautiful” neither reinforces nor undermines your assertion because Steve Englehart is an exceptional comic writer and Night Man makes Guiding Light look like Breaking Bad. I assume. I’ve never seen an episode of Guiding Light. I will say that I agree that this is probably the closest NM gets to being good television, and is the best episode of the show so far, and that, to me, is entirely due to the script. Englehart is from that third wave of comic writers who came to comics in the 70s, after guys like Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko introduced continuity, melodrama, and irony to superheroes in the 60s, and before guys like Frank Miller, Neal Gaiman, Grant Morrison and Alan Moore broke through to the mainstream with their post-modern deconstructions. Like his contemporaries, Denny O’Neil, Gerry Conway, and Len Wein, Steve Englehart was responsible for adding modern and/or literary flourishes to the more elemental work of their predecessors. They wanted to add some weight to what had come before but were also all in on the silly, disreputable reputation that comics still had in the art world. This all to say that a superhero getting sidelined in his own story so as to focus on a weirdo Phantom of the Opera/Beauty and the Beast pastiche set in the world of Professional Wrestling seems like exactly the kind of the thing that would have happened to Batman in 1977. Also that’s a compliment. Bruce was wearing a lot of turtlenecks at the time, and lived in a penthouse at the top of a Wayne Foundation skyscraper that also had a revolving restaurant and, no shit, an enormous tree growing inside it.

“I wanna see The Mask” “We have The Mask at home” The Mask At Home:

You can tell almost immediately that a professional had somehow gotten past whatever goons Glen Larson had posted outside the Night Man writers room because “You Are So Beautiful” actually gives the supporting cast something to do. Club owner Jessica gets tickets to a wrestling match from a friend, but she doesn’t know anything about the sport, and it turns out that Raleigh and Frank are wrestling fans, while Lt. Dann gets to be the this is stupid but all my friends are going so I guess I’m going too guy. So, like, the characters get to bounce off one another and react differently to situations and that gives you a sense of who they are and what they’re about. You know, like a writer might have them do. And Johnny gets to sit back and react to what’s happening around him instead of being the engine that everyone else is reacting to. It’s a nice change of pace because, as we’ve said many times, Matt McColm isn’t what you’d call a “great” or even “serviceable” actor. I wouldn’t even go so far as to say he “fits the dictionary definition” of what we would call an actor. His job for the majority of the episode is to look natural in a collared, button up, short sleeve shirt. He is almost up to the task. But he is getting better at certain things. Like, he’s pretty good at being comfortable in groups. When the whole cast is around him doing shit, he actually looks engaged and amused by what’s going on around him. This might seem like a shot but it’s not, you watch actors who are playing main characters in shows and they can look impatient or bored when other actors are on screen with them. McColm sparks (to the degree that he can spark at all) when he’s a part of a group and he gets to watch what everyone else is doing.

What’s more inexplicable and odd (so, more traditionally Night Man) about “You Are So Beautiful” is the C-plot about pretty-girl Meredith Monroe and her asshole step-dad. To say step-dad appears to hate his pretty step-daughter would be a gross understatement. The first time we see him he’s yelling at her for being stupid enough to not intuit that a handsome guy looking at jewels in their jewelry store was about to rob them, and then later, when she gets a bouquet of flowers at the store, he yells at her again, and throws the flowers into the street. Now, with hindsight, I guess we’re supposed to think that the flower incident is a panic-move related to his knowledge that her secret admirer is the guy he conspired to commit fraud with. And maybe if there were scenes of him being kind and loving towards his step-daughter to provide context, that would play. But as it is, the guy just comes off like a hateful belligerent prick, and when the step-daughter says something about how much she loves him you’re just like what, why? It doesn’t help that Monroe comes off as the sweetest woman in the history of the universe. As an actress she’s barely above replacement in the Night Man League (NML) in most respects, but she sells being smitten with Golden Boy, and she has a smile that I have no trouble believing would steer a jaded crook onto the straight and narrow. It is inconceivable to me that anyone could be as thoughtlessly cruel to her as her step-father. I was sitting in my house alone hissing at him like he was a silent film villain.

This is the kind of well choreographed action we’ve come to expect from Night Man.

Ronnie: Well, good news because Reilly the evil stepfather dies in a struggle with Golden Boy and it’s not really addressed the rest of the episode? You’d think Golden Boy being partially responsible for her stepfather’s death would sour the romantic feelings Meredith Monroe feels towards the guy, but not so. I guess that’s why Reilly is a stepdad instead of a biological father. Someone kills your dad and you become Inigo Montoya. I’ve never heard of anyone avenging their stepfather, by contrast. Even Uncle Ben for Peter Parker, that’s a blood relation surrogate father. Before step relations became an easy means for pornography to bypass prohibitions about depicting incest, stepparents were usually of a wicked variety and Reilly is no exception. This is really a Cinderella story where instead of whisking her away because she can fit her foot into a glass slipper the prince fumbles with a gun and in the ensuing scuffle the evil stepparent gets shot. Not sure how the carriage magiced from a simple pumpkin fits in, give me some more time.

She should have those same bandwagon pennants Homer Simpson would have for, like, midseason television and the XFL. 

We’re so in the weeds with this series it’s pretty difficult to tell whether “You Are Too Beautiful” is good or just good by Night Man standards. The relevant aspect is I enjoyed myself way more than other hours. Englehart does a good job at creating multilayered characters over the course of 43 minutes. They’re not too complex, but there’s something there. It’s also certifiably insane like Night Man should be. Right after Rob leaves prison, for example, there’s a guy outside who immediately offers him a job professional wrestling. Now as fantastical as that may be, I don’t think there actually is pro wrestling recruitment outside prisons. That seems like a joke in a heightened reality like in The Simpsons. But hey, even a seasoned writer like Steve Englehart is not immune to Night Man’s, well, Night Man-ness. I do think it’s the best of the series so far, but what does that mean, really? Englehart only writes two more episodes of the series and they’re both in Season 2. I have to imagine next time it’ll be back to same old same old and no lessons will be learned by Glen A. Larson et al.

Chris: Englehart says on his website that he turned in the script and it aired pretty much word for word what he wrote. He said the showrunner told him that otherwise never happened. Here’s my theory: I don’t think Larson read the script at all. Makes sense, right? In fact, it pretty much explains every episode we’ve seen so far. Like, what if the showrunner was being honest but also omitting the detail that every script was done as-is on Night Man. He could very easily have been telling Englehart the truth when he said it almost never happened, he just might have meant it more as an explanation for what the fuck was happening that our man Steve mistook as a superlative about his writing. Or maybe it was both. Maybe the guy was saying “Jesus, your script reads like it was worked on by a group of professionals instead of the transcribed ravings from psychopaths on work release from the local hospital from the criminally insane”. Then he’d take a beat and go on “because that’s who we’ve hired for the writers room. We have no budget and they’re basically slaves”. Another pause. Then “it’s actually grossly inhumane. I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping. I’m snapping at my kids. My wife is talking about a trial separation. I’m afraid all the time. I don’t know who I am anymore. I think this job is killing me.” It makes as much sense as anything!

Odds & Ends
-Englehart’s page on this episode can be found here (https://www.steveenglehart.com/Film/NightMan-Too%20Beautiful.html).
-One of the wrestling matches is between The Hillbilly and Captain Omen, the latter of whom looks like he belongs in a KISS cover band. (Maybe they’re already looking for an Ace Frehley replacement…)
-Tiffany suggests to Johnny they have a private pajama party. He declines. This is a woman who recognized Johnny at a wrestling show; jazz fan and wrestling fan is a rare pairing to say the least.
-Rob Bannerman adopts a pseudonym, “Tom Hammersmith”. I don’t know why. His parole can’t preclude involvement. If we prohibited all ex-cons from wrestling the “sport” would be on life support. Also, isn’t the point of a pseudonym to be less obtrusive than your real handle?

1X14 “DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC?”

Ronnie: I’m so glad that by magic the show means sorcery and not the kind of jackass bullshit that makes up Now You See Me and its sequels. I can’t deal with those guys. Things start off with a bang as a sultry lady walks into the House of Soul and immediately triggers the radio tuned to evil, depicted by a demonic version of the actress saying “come and get me, Night Man”. Said actress, Jacinda Barrett (the ice bath kidney kill in Urban Legends: Final Cut that got added in reshoots because the film needed more death), poses as “Lucy Devlin”, a staff writer for BillBoard Magazine who is interested in interviewing Johnny. Man. Lucy Devlin is on a level of on the nose not seen since “Damien Faustman” in the Ben Stiller Show sketch “Low Budget Tales of Cliched Horror”. When Johnny asks Jessica to meet Lucy, she’s nowhere to be found and her business card is that of a car wash. When she later crops up as a magician, because I guess jazz clubs book magicians now, Jessica won’t believe Johnny when he says he’s seen her before. Next thing you know she’s disappearing people like a magical Pinochet.

The disappeared people actually go to another dimension of sorts. The effects are, as to be expected, awful. Imagine Sliders but somehow worse. Charlie Dann ends up in a prison cell with Bubba Carson, a burly biker type who Dann saw executed five years ago. That doesn’t matter in this realm. Frank follows him and his nightmare vision provides us insight into Johnny’s childhood. See, Frank was always working the beat and that meant he neglected his wife, Johnny’s mother Betsy. This is shown by him being late to his son’s birthday party, a birthday party at which Johnny wears a grim reaper mask because he wants to be creepy for no apparent reason. I appreciate fleshing out the Dominus line, and that Betsy looks straight out of Mad Men makes it funnier. Things take a turn for the baffling when Raleigh is banished to the hell dimension and he’s pulled over by a racist version of Lt. Dann for joyriding in Johnny’s Prowler. Of all the things Night Man is ill-equipped to discuss, race is at the top of the list. I don’t need to see Night Man’s techie buddy Rodney King’d, you know? (There is a funny moment when Lt. Dann meets his superior, who is also Lt. Dann. Perhaps it’s like Pokemon and all police officers look like Michael Woods.) Let’s assess: Dann’s nightmare is being put in a cell with the likes of whom he sent to prison; Frank’s is disappointing his family; Raleigh’s is being subject to police racism. Fortunately, Night Man–the Mightiest of Whities–saves Raleigh from a beatdown by the racist Danns only to start strangling him to death for taking the Prowler without asking. Good thing it’s all an illusion and the show never establishes the parameters of these illusions.

Lt. Dann is Overdrawn At The Memory Bank!

Patrick Macnee, trouper that he is, lends some credibility and exposition to the proceedings. He also provides the key to solving the episode’s problem: Johnny has to use tarot cards to go to the nightmare dimension and retrieve Lt. Dann and Frank from their fears. This consists of beating up a fat man and what would be an emotional reunion between a mother and a son she never got to see grow up that is stymied by Night Man being incompetent and terrible at everything it tries to accomplish. A final battle proceeds, which ends with… Johnny waking up in his chair? And then the events of the episode happen with a different hired magician, and then Johnny sees Lucy Devlin again, only this time he turns down her interview request? Chris, help me out. What the fuck is this ending?

Chris: It’s an ending, Ronnie, and I think we need to be satisfied with that. Did anything in the episode actually happen? Was it all a dream? Was it a kind of supernatural riddle that he solved thereby causing things that actually happened to collapse in on themselves and become dreams retroactively in a kind of Ghost-Of-Christmas-Future Road-Not-Taken morality play? I’m gonna go with sure. To all of it. Narrative is like science, whatever we want it to be (this is a 30 Rock reference, Ronnie). I don’t know if “Do You Believe in Magic” is the worst episode of Night Man we’ve seen so far, but it is the most episode. And that’s kind of like being the worst because Night Man is a really bad show so the episode that’s the most Night Man would be the episode that embodied its properties (in this case badness) to the maximum effect. But there’s a paradoxical quality to the whole production that makes it hard to write off so easily. Because Night Man isn’t bad in any lazy conventional way, it’s hard not to be struck and engaged by just how thoroughly the show’s reach exceeds its grasp, and that means that an episode that mosts its badness is also really striking.

I want to start with Johnny’s first encounter with Ms. Devlin. She gives him her card, right? And then she disappears and the card turns into a card for a car wash. I wish I knew how they ended up with that. Like, why wasn’t the card just blank? Or he put the card down on the counter and then it just disappeared like she did? Why a car wash? It’s not like Johnny goes to the car wash later and gets some clue because it’s an evil and/or haunted car wash. Like maybe it was built on an unmarked graveyard where the prison buried people they executed or something so that’s where she materialized and then transformed into her earthly base of operations. And it’s not like the show runs out the “Everyone Thinks Johnny is Crazy” plot because he keeps insisting something spooky is happening but nothing he’s saying is lining up with what everyone else is seeing. But they don’t bother with that either. Instead the car wash business card is thrown away and never mentioned again. It’s a deliberate detail the show takes the time to include and then does nothing with. And that’s a small, petty detail to focus on, but TV shows are often built out of tiny details the same way letters make up words make up sentences make up paragraphs. Big things are just giant collections of little things.

And we’re supposed to take this seriously, huh?

And when you get a look at the big things that all the little things add up to, it just gets more confusing because in “Do You Believe in Magic” Raleigh gets lost in a racist nightmare where his police officer friend profiles and terrorizes him and Johnny is sexually propositioned by the ghost of his mother. Two difficult subjects that the show has never approached previously and then decided to just dive headfirst into. And the manner the show decides to approach any of it makes the whole thing weirder and worse. The handmade effects and dreamy circular quality of Raleigh’s nightmare combined with the curdled Norman Rockwell psycho-sexual perversion of what goes down with Johnny and his mom suggest someone in the writers room rented Fire Walk With Me at some point and became angry and confused. I don’t understand how we got here and I want to leave. Here’s my point, nothing on this show makes sense. It doesn’t make sense on a plotting level, on a thematic level, or on a prop level. It doesn’t matter how broad or focused you get. It’s fractal. Is it all a dream or what? What’s the deal with the business card? Did Johnny’s mom just try to fuck him? No one question has any more or less weight than any of the others and none of it connects to anything.

I think we’re in hell.

Ronnie: That’d be fitting. You know how in They Live Rowdy Roddy sees the alien on TV and goes “figures it’d be something like this”? It figures our Hell would be a bad syndicated superhero show from the 90s. Whatever we did, we earned this. But let’s not dwell on what we’ve done to deserve this and try to move forward. I like how neither of us have thus far mentioned the baffling decision to have more than one sequence of the Night Man costume coming to life and attacking Johnny. Rare compliment here: the Night Man costume sans an actual occupant is pretty disconcerting. In a better show it might even be disquieting. But the show isn’t better so it’s not. I bring it up because there are multiple components of “Do You Believe In Magic” that do not square with anything else in the episode. One instance is Patrick Macnee is cut off when stating Selene’s real name. You’d think it would be a plot point, like she can be defeated if someone knows her true name, as if she’s a demonic entity. Nope! It’s nothing, another loose thread left hanging.

Tongue designed by Erik Larsen

The end really soured me on this one, I’m sorry. I spent minutes after the thing wrapped up, puzzled. Did any of the episode happen? What parts of it were a dream Johnny had, a dream that emphasized his different need for sleep since the accident occurred? Rather than just ask questions I won’t get answered, I’m going to try to mount an explanation. So Selene’s last line is “be careful, we’ll be watching you” and then Johnny wakes up. I take this to be a premonition, an outgrowth of his power. He meets people and then he can intuit their intentions, either something bad they did or something bad they’re going to do. Sleeping takes it into overdrive, hence the elaborate fantasy. This time he rebuffs Selene and that’s enough to get her to decide “screw this, I’m not interested in fucking with Night Man”. It doesn’t make total sense but it’s enough, I think.

Selene definitely has the makings of a recurring foe, so of course we’re never going to see her again, nor are we ever going to find out who the “we” are that are watching Night Man. Shitty show, terrible job!

Somehow the costume has more charisma when Matt McColm isn’t in it.

Chris: I mean yeah, this is Dumb TV ground zero territory in that it’s clearly going for a Smart TV makes-you-think kind of twist and totally screwing the pooch. Because, like, take Total Recall, okay? The idea behind Total Recall is that the whole Rekall experience is a metaphor for going to the movies. That instead of going and having authentic human experiences as people we instead go and consume these manufactured experiences designed to let us take a break from boring reality and instead live in fantasy wish fulfillment for a second. The joke of Total Recall is that our “fantasy wish” is, when you think about it, appallingly hateful and violent. If the protagonist of Total Recall is dreaming, then his ultimate fantasy is to kill his wife and best friend, go to another planet, kill a bunch of people there, and have sex with a space prostitute. We’re doing what he’s doing means we want what he wants means we’re pretty fucked up, get it? It’s a classic Verhoeven yuck-em-up because it asks us to consider our own violent misogynistic subconscious desires and our complacency towards a culture that celebrates those toxic values. That scamp!

Is “Do You Believe in Magic” attempting a similar kind of psychological character study slash post modern critique of the values of the average Night Man fan? Are we supposed to infer, assuming that it was all just a dream of Johnny’s, that we’re seeing what Johnny believes his friends’ greatest fears are? Like, does he believe that Raleigh is terrified of being profiled and persecuted by the police? Is that supposed to suggest that Johnny is very progressive and woke or does it mean that he can’t see past race and assumes that because Raleigh is black that his deepest fear must be of experiencing violence at the hands of the police? Because, and I can’t stress this enough, the show has never feigned in that direction for a single solitary second before “Do You Believe in Magic” so it was so out of nowhere and was therefore extremely jarring. The answer of course, is almost certainly that they didn’t intend for any of that and were just trying to figure out how to wrap that whole mess up and forget about it so as to move onto whatever bullshit was up next. But I can’t help wonder about it because I don’t have that much going on during the day and I have to think about something. Which is why I think everyone involved with the show should be brought up on charges. I don’t know what exactly they did wrong, but I know it shouldn’t be allowed to happen again.

Odds & Ends
-Selene literally says “do you believe in magic, Johnny?”.
-Racist Lt. Dann calls California the granola state because it’s “nothing but a bunch of fruits and nuts and a whole lotta flakes in between”.
-The Betsy Dominus actress actually did appear on four episodes of Mad Men as Ted Chaough’s wife, Nan.

Chris: Here’s a thing. As we reach the quarter mark of this ill-conceived project I find myself thinking about how much time I’ve spent trying to come up with clever openings for the entries that I lead off. I wouldn’t say it was stressful, but it does take up more of my time than I would like. So I was thinking of maybe adopting a standard intro that I could use at the top of each article that would encapsulate the general tenor of what’s to come. To that end, what do you think about this: “Christ, this again.” Or! Or! What about: “I know why I’m here, but what’s your excuse?” Last one: “… sigh.” No capitalization. Think it over. Meanwhile, let’s dive into the latest entry from Night Man, widely recognized as one of the syndicated superhero shows based on a Steve Engleheart character created for the Malibu Comics imprint Ultraverse that aired between 1997 and 1999. Our first episode “Bad Moon Rising” dispenses with the previous two entries Tragic Romance formula by killing off the girl NIght Man wants to fuck before the first commercial break, which I felt was a nice change of pace. Everyone knows what familiarity breeds. This time, it isn’t a Tragically Compromised KGB Assassin or TIme Displaced Lady Bankrobber who wanders into Sax Pro slash Vigilante Killer John Domino’s jazz club and becomes instantly smitten with him, it’s a recovering junkie and domestic abuse victim who just wants to meet her dirtbag ex in a public place so she can get her house key back without him making a scene. Well the joke’s on her because her ex has a little too much self respect to not attempt to insult, threaten and intimidate her into reconciliaiton.

Unfortunately for the dirtbag ex and lovers of ill-advised second chances everywhere, the recovering junkie has a Samantha Mathis thing going and as such catches John’s eye, causing him to intervene on her behalf. This might seem gallant, but no way he steps in if she’s below an 8, right? Maybe he makes an exception for a 7.5 if it’s been a slow week, but those are probably few and far between for ol’ Night Man, AmIRightOrAMIRightorAmIRight? So John sticks his nose in and the dirtbag ex is like aren’t you the entertainment and John smiles and says that’s right, but I also moonlight as the bouncer. And as God is my witness, it was kind of cool. I know I’ve never said anything even remotely positive about the acting chops of Matt McColm but that’s because he’s been terrible every moment he’s been on screen. Until now. Let it never be said that I’m irrationally unfair to actors just because they stink. Matt McColm pulled off being cool and charming and menacing. Good for him. Anyway, John scares the ex off but not before he slips the girl some heroin accidentally laced with bullshit science goop that makes it instantly fatal. The girl is alone in John’s dressing and decides to take one more hit of sweet sweet H to get herself in the mood for what promises to be a world class make-out session and keels over.

“Bad Moon Rising” is, for me, a welcome course correction after the turgid soap opera of “Lady In Red” and the gonzo incoherence of “That Ol’ Gang of Mine.” I appreciate the Go Big Or Go Home ambition of those two episodes, but they were exhaustingly incompetent. “Bad Moon” is a more straightforward revenge story, and, while it’s far from good, it’s good enough for me to enjoy the rough/amateur elements instead of feeling buried by them. I also felt like the casting worked better here too. Remember how “Ol Gang” wasted John Polito as Al Capone? “Bad Moon”  introduces character actor Ed O’Ross as drug kingpin Anthony Gionello. I refuse to believe that there’s anyone on Earth, including O’ross’s own mother, who would know who I’m talking about just by his name. But we all remember that scene in Lethal Weapon where Gary Busey holds his arm directly over an open flame for an absurdly long time just to demonstrate how tough he is in order to intimidate a low level gangster who we never see again, right? Well, O’Ross played that intimidated gangster. He was also in Red Heat, Dick Tracy and Universal Soldier 1. He’s that kind of actor, and he’s exactly the kind of vaguely memorable no-name that Night Man should be serving up week after week. Someone whose name you don’t recognize and have no expectations for and yet are oddly happy to see.

“Ah, no time like the present to have some nice, relaxing heroin.”

Ronnie: It’s surprising this hasn’t happened before, a woman dying of a drug overdose in Johnny Domino’s apartment. Then again, didn’t the pilot feature a dead body in his apartment? I recall it fucked up his efforts to get laid. In any event, this situation is fleshed out in more depth, whereas the pilot used it more or less as a punchline. “Bad Moon Rising” is broadly about the impact of heroin on our community, be it Bay City or the larger human endeavor, with a science fiction twist. There’s been some contamination of the supply that causes it to kill instantaneously as opposed to taking a bit longer than that. It’s like the fentanyl that zoots cops up on contact. The mob boss suggests sloughing it off on the ghetto communities, because “it’s not like a street junkie is gonna be looking for a good housekeeping seal, right?”. As for the babe who soon pushes up daisies, it’s your typical meet cute wherein Johnny assaults an abusive boyfriend, the girlfriend ends up at Johnny’s place, but she decides to shoot up at the apartment. It’s weird. The onscreen product seems like it’d be cocaine (white powder ingested through the nasal cavity) but they state it’s heroin. Maybe heroin doesn’t look like heroin on television so they have to use cocaine, such as how on The Simpsons horses are used on film instead of cows. In any event, Johnny is arrested and crosses paths with an assistant DA who seeks to use prosecuting a local jazz musician to boost her chances of being elected DA. It’d sure be nice if this ADA (played by the woman who was irked by Jerry throwing away her thank you card in Seinfeld’s “The Pledge Drive”) was a recurring character whose agenda conflicted with Night Man’s, but it’s not that kind of show. “Planning”? “Forethought”? Come on.

“Bad Moon Rising” tries to show us the audience that heroin can and does kill anyone, be it the person who takes it for recreation to the mob boss son who’s addicted to it. Truly the drug epidemic touches all, except for Johnny, who definitely does not partake even though he is a Bay City jazz musician who lives above a nightclub. It’s as conspicuous as nobody smoking cigarettes in Marvel after Joe Quesada’s edict. I’m not saying Johnny has to be shooting up between sets with Big Time Operator and Marc Bonilla’s Dragonchoir, but it wouldn’t hurt. He gets arrested for being an accessory to doing heroin, so that’s close enough. Poor move on Sarah’s part. Johnny saves her from an abusive man, lets her stay in his apartment, and she thanks him by snorting some heroin right there. It’s the lack of consideration that bothers me.

Haworth, the woman running for district attorney, seems to be the show’s effort at political commentary, because she keeps on going on about the liberal judicial system that enshrines crazy wackadoo rights like “not being executed without a trial”. Political commentary might not the right term, because “Bad Moon Rising” doesn’t really have anything to say about the criminal justice system and its lack of ability to combat drug addiction. Johnny contrasts her bloodthirsty attitude with flattery, saying “now why would I wanna flee from an attractive, tough on crime, sexy prosecutor like you?”. She responds by claiming she’ll arraign him for murder. They fit Johnny with an ankle monitor that tracks his location, and wouldn’t you know it the thing even works when he’s Night Man. This is actually kinda clever: the device registers him flying into the air and shit, all of his Night Man activities, so they assume the thing’s busted. The show doesn’t spend a lot of time establishing Johnny juggling a dual identity so I appreciate it when it remembers that.

His agent did that to him after exhausting all possibilities of Murder She Wrote guest appearances.

Ultimately, Night Man must thwart a boy trying to lace a girl’s food with heroin. You know, to get her in the mood, by which I mean date rape her. The superheroin angle in “Bad Moon Rising” is unnecessary and poorly established, especially because it expects us to believe heroin plus some plant matter will equal ricin (as seen on Breaking Bad). The organized crime angle feels superfluous too. So what does work? I liked the interplay with Johnny and the ADA, him hitting on her while she threatens him with Siberian exile. They have chemistry… well, as much chemistry as a hunk of man like Matt McColm can muster with anything living or dead. That’s why I want her to be a recurring character. Imagine the Charles Lederer-like zippy dialogue between a himbo saxophoner and a fascist officer of the court, this tete-a-tete further complicated by the himbo’s nocturnal identity as the Night Man. The show needs a dynamic bad and a will they won’t they between the two would do the trick.

Chris: One of the things that I liked about “Bad Moon” (possibly genuinely? I’m losing the ability to tell the difference) is how lived in it felt. Like, the drug kingpin had this relationship with Night Man Sr and Lt Dann (BTW, how did they get away with naming a character Lt. Dann so close to Forrest Gump? And how did we take this long to bring it up?) that’s outside of and predates the events of the show. They saved his life at some point in the past and that seems to have earned them a measure of respect in the gangster’s eyes. So when they find out the dope is spiked they ask him to get it off the streets, appealing to his humanity as opposed to grimly resolving to arrest or execute him or whatever. You can go ahead and correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like it’s the first time the show has approached anything resembling moral ambiguity. Like, he’s heinous enough to unload super heroin on  San FranCitygo’s most vulnerable citizens but also seems genuinely distraught when he recognizes just how lethal it is. And he resolved to help dispose of it, right? That’s how that resolves? Either way, that was the relationship I would have liked to see continue. A retired cop and grieving mafia don who are on opposite sides of the law but have some kind of low level mutual understanding that borders on affection. But of course we never see him again.

The other, more hilarious, lived in plotline involves the scientist who was importing the ooze that ended up contaminating the heroin. He’s an old coot who runs a lab with his sexy scientist daughter and her horny irresponsible boyfriend who is also a scientist and the old coots assistant/right hand man? I think I have that right? Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that the world is filled with young, white-coated scientists who want nothing more than to play grab ass the minute old-man-project-leader turns his back, but the trademarked Night Man shoddy workmanship gives the whole thing the patina of your cheaper internet pornography. Because the characters serve a purpose. Not only do they import the ooze that fucks everything up, they’re also the lab that the cops bring the dirty H to in order to test and develop an eventual antidote. And there’s a simple logic to that, right? It’s his ooze, who would know more about it than him? But there only appear to be three people working in the lab (is it a mom and pop lab?), one of whom has a constant hard-on that one of the others is constantly pushing away and that the third seems completely unaware of. The whole thing plays out like farmers daughter joke except it ends with the boyfriend trying to spike his girlfriends meal with the tainted heroin, unaware that his harmless plan to drug and rape her would have ended with her death.

“Remember; Night Man says only take what you can handle, and always know your dealer.”

I’m glad you liked the DA plotline, but it was my least favorite of the three. It didn’t have the moral shade of the gangster plot or the cheapo lunacy of the scientist plot. It was mildly amusing insofar as I think this is the third blond ice-queen type the show has introduced to spar and flirt with Johnny, the first two being those reporters that were trying to unmask him or whatever. This time they tried to switch things up by making her an officer of the court, but it’s the same basic routine. The pretty, intellectual blond lady thinks she’s smarter than our Johnny, but Johnny has the last laugh. Been there, done that. And I guess the show felt the same way because she’s another one and done. I do wonder what other sexy blond authority figure type they’ll introduce and throw away over the course of an episode. A sexy lady cop seems too obvious. But maybe there will be an episode where Johnny and the gang have to do a bunch of research at the library and the sexy librarian will keep shushing them. Or, is he too old to have a babysitter? Maybe his dad has a hot date and wants to make sure Johnny doesn’t show up and ruin it so he hires a pretty lady to distract and mind him. There are thirty odd episodes left, would you really be surprised if that happened?

I like how arresting Johnny is the Bay City equivalent of, like, OJ Simpson. 

Ronnie: I like how Frank is forcibly injected with heroin and left for dead and it’s just a plot complication that allows Johnny to revise his bail agreement and get out in the world, so he can visit dad in the hospital. It doesn’t really intensify anything because you don’t get the feeling that Frank’s situation is giving Johnny even MORE of an impetus to solve the drug problem. He already has to clear his name in an overdose death. Frank hospitalized should be a running gag, like how everybody would end up concussed on Smallville. Every episode, Frank tries to resolve the situation on his own and almost dies, thus teaching the audience the lesson that you shouldn’t try to stop crime if you’re an old ex-cop with no official authority anymore. Night Man is irrelevant; jazzmen can do what they want and society has to live with the ramifications of their choices. Frank is just being a vigilante getting up into everyone’s business, so that ought to be discouraged. Night Man needs more life lessons, even if they’re confused, contradictory or downright stupid. Like, the show isn’t good, so why would it be teaching good lessons? You get it.

Odds & Ends
-“You and Bobby almost had the night of your lives. The last night.” Night Man would make a great anti-drug PSA mascot.
-Why would the police lieutenant be allowed to be the primary in an overdose that took place in his best friend’s son’s dressing room? I’m not actually asking, because I know the answer is because everything associated with Night Man is stupid and nonsensical.
-So much of Matt McColm’s acting is shuddering while getting shot at. A good superhero might, you know, try to dodge the bullets instead of just soaking them up. Then again, if he were a good superhero it wouldn’t be Night Man, would it?
-ADA Howarth seems to think breaking house arrest is a violation of Johnny’s “parole”. Look, you can’t expect people on Night Man to know what words mean.

1X12: “CONSTANT CRAVING”

Chris: My friend, it appears that you may have fished your wish because in “Constant Craving” Frank once again sticks his fucking beak where it doesn’t belong and nearly dies. Except this time he isn’t deliberately given a hot shot of bad H for his trouble, this time he’s nearly drained of his precious life’s blood by a dracula. Because Bay City is lousy with draculas (draculi?) all of a sudden, or there are two of them, anyway. And that might not seem like a lot but there are something like eleven people total in the entire metropolitan area so the odds that our hero, or more specifically our hero’s dad, would end up on the business end of a fang are pretty high. Because, see, there’s a new sexy blonde lady in town, and she isn’t a KGB assassin, or an old timey bank robber or a sassy reporter or a slightly different sassy reporter or even a crusading DA. No, this time she’s an Eastern European scientist who’s moving to Bay City and hires Frank’s, um, I think it’s a security company (is this new information?) to protect her shit as it’s shipped in from overseas in big storage containers. Or something.

I mean, my expectations weren’t high but holy shit.

Whatever. The point is, a customs agent disappears along with Johnny’s drummer, which obviously upsets him because good drummers are hard to find, so he goes to the docks where the sexy lady’s containers are being held and sure enough, one of the crates sets off the old evil detector and it’s off to the races. We the audience already know the lady is a dracula because we saw the date with the drummer and we saw her feeding on him, but the twist is that she didn’t actually kill him. She is a dracula, and she did eat the drummer, but she didn’t even eat enough to kill him or even turn him. She’s actually trying to cure her draculism, which is a thing a person can do in the Night Man world, and while she still needed to feed she wanted to be, you know, ethical about it. Kudos to her, I say. Unfortunately, leaving draculaing behind is easier said than done, and her shitty ex/sire Count SomethingIDon’tRemember has followed her to America in an attempt to reclaim her and has no concern about how many bodies he leaves in his wake.

“Constant Craving”, from that perspective, has basically the same plot engine as “Bad Moon Rising.” Both are stories about recovering junkies trying to get away from their dirtbag ex-boyfriends and nearly get Frank killed in doing so. If Night Man were a better show I would suggest it was working on some kind of theme. But I don’t know if I even think enough of it to ascribe the similarities to a lazy formula. We might just be solidly in the land of the Thousand Monkeys Banging Away At a Thousand Typewriters and sometimes shit gets weird. I can’t say that “Constant Craving” made much of an impression on me at all; it wasn’t foundationally berserk like “That Old Gang of Mine” or narratively cracked like “Chrome”. Instead “Craving” is another tired X-Files ripoff in the vein of when he fought the inter dimensional demon dog in “Still of the Night”. That dog monster had werewolf properties, yeah. So has he fought an Invisible Man, Frankenstein, or Creature From the Black Lagoon yet? If not, they’re probably right around the corner.

This is actually what 90s computing looked like, kids.

Ronnie: If they’re going to do a vampire episode and the one right before it is titled “Bad Moon Rising”, how can that not be about werewolves? It’s a slam dunk, so it makes sense Night Man wouldn’t do it. I like how the big moment that Johnny realizes something is amiss occurs when the Countess picks up the drummer and not Johnny himself. “Look, if a woman doesn’t want to fuck me, there’s clearly something wrong with her, be it she’s mentally ill or some sort of boogerman”.”I should point out that the actress, Lysette Anthony, has experience portraying vampires in embarrassing projects, having played Lucy in the (s)hit film Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Man, 90s Mel Brooks vs. Night Man is almost nearly a fair fight. The show having the production values of Cinemax softcore pornography actually aids it for “Costant Craving”, because vampires and softcore pornography mesh well together. They both involve a lot of candles. Johnny’s drummer friend Keith winds up dead after leaving with the Countess and nobody knows the woman’s whereabouts. Johnny protests “parking at a place like that wasn’t Keith’s style” and also claims to have been the best man at the guy’s wedding. He was even there when Keith’s wife died. Holy backstory, Batman! A better show might, like, give members of the band “characterization” before killing one off for emotional resonance. But hey, what do you expect from crappy 90s syndicated television anyway? Compared to the television of today they were bashing stones together in the hope of creating fire.

If you’re wondering how long it takes “Constant Craving” to get to the fireworks factory, and by “fireworks factory” I mean “vampires”, rest assured that we’re only 10 minutes in before Night Man uses his evil FM radio to realize that shipping container his dad helped secure contains a goddamn coffin. Not an ambiguous one either, it’s a full on Dracula coffin. In the coffin they find a missing customs guy, putting Frank in hot water for the second time in as many episodes. It doesn’t really result in anything because in his next scene he’s fielding a security job offer from the Count, aka the true villain of his piece. Behind every woman is a man who wants to ruin her life with his controlling behavior. The Countess doesn’t appreciate Frank hiring himself out to other clients, despite him reminding her “a security company can’t exist on one client”. I don’t think previous episodes have even established Frank has a security company he operates, because most of his entrances into the episode’s plot consist of him interceding in Johnny’s business, like in “Bad Moon Rising”. Again, though, if you’re looking for that kind of shit you’ve got the wrong show.

I get less “vampire” from him and more “ill-advised Deep Space Nine villain”.

You’ve got the right show if you want to see a man lasering a vampire’s coffin, causing said vampire to lose his shit. I was pretty stoned when I watched this, so I may not have all the details right, but the Countess is siphoning blood so she can be cured, and she needs some Keith blood and some Frank blood to do so. All the actual killings are the responsibility of the Count, played by some French guy. Yadda yadda yadda, Night Man defeats the Count and the Countess is cured of her affliction. Since she fed on Night Man and not Frank and got cured anyway she concludes Night Man must be Johnny. I’ll admit, I’ve never seen someone determine a superhero identity based on a blood match. She agrees to keep his secret, and knowing this show it will never, ever come up again. What the fuck does a newly human again vampire do with their life anyway? Guess she better pick up the want ads because being human costs money.

Chris: So I watched this episode with my sister, because she is a good sibling and I am a bad one. And she pointed out what a singularly weird idea that whole holographic jazzman was. Jazz is kinda known for being unstructured and improvisational. Two features that don’t traditionally mesh well with prerecorded material. Because that’s what it would be, right? Johnny records or digitizes a performance whenever he finds a moment, and then plays it back at the appropriate time. Something like that might work if you were first chair in an orchestra with a featured solo or something, or maybe if you were in a quartet? I’m not speaking from any kind of experience, but my understanding was that there are styles of performance that are rooted in precision and timing, and styles that are rooted in adaptation and fun. Isn’t jazz in that second category? And here’s another question, what do the other musicians think about how sometimes Johnny is out there horsing off with everyone on the main stage, and sometimes he stands on the side of the stage and disappears behind a curtain whenever he’s not doing a solo? Do they just chalk that up to Jazzman’s Prerogative (heroin)? Or do they think Johnny is a dick? Because the one drummer seemed to like him okay.

Every time Night Man appears in frame with another actor it really compounds how stupid the costume looks.

It can’t be overstated how clumsy this show is on just about every level. Nothing makes any sense. And when it does something insane (which happens frequently) it barely makes an impression. Like, remember in Lois & Clark when Clark was flying feet first facing upwards with his hands behind his head like he was laying down on a couch and he accidentally ran into a herd of ducks? Part of what made that so memorable was how truly awful the effects were, but it was rooted in a visual concept that was kind of clever (even if it was also deeply stupid). You can tell the writers came up with a weird idea that they knew was weird and went ahead and executed it as best they could. There’s an establishing shot in “Bad Moon” where a bunch of cars are parked at the edge of a bluff and the matting is so terrible (because they couldn’t afford to park a half dozen cars by the side of a road, so they had to fake it) that the either cars are enormous or the cliff is six feet high. It’s funny for a second, but only for a second, because it’s not attached to anything thoughtful or memorable. It’s just a rotten establishing shot. I need some kind of something at the heart of this show to bounce off of or I’m gonna run out of things to say.

Ronnie: It feels like Night Man is still at the stage where it’s figuring out what kind of show it wants to be, so each week you either get a down to earth story about drug addiction or point shaving OR you get invisible monsters, vampires, face changers, that sort of thing. Now I imagine the down to earth stuff is a mechanism of the show needing to stay on a budget; I liked “Constant Craving” more than you, perhaps because it reminds of that X-Files episode where Mulder is missing Scully (who’s been abducted) and fucks his way through the vampire community. You also have to admit the final confrontation between Johnny and the Count is hilarious. I used to have an animated gif of him lasering the coffin and the vampire going apeshit, that’s how much I appreciated the scene. I’m in favor of anything that takes the series in a more supernatural direction, like the second season of Baywatch Nights. Maybe we should’ve devoted our valuable time to assessing that show. Can’t change horses midstream though, so we’re stuck with this. It all depends on how charming you find the incompetence. You seem to be more frustrated than delighted by it whereas I’m the opposite. I can promise you at least that Season 2 has a whole ass overarching plot to it. And a new guy playing Raleigh because black people are interchangeable according to Glen A. Larson. But that’s not for a while. Up next is an episode penned by the creator of the character, Steve Englehart. Perhaps having a scriptwriter of any renown will help the series.

Odds & Ends
-This is the first episode that doesn’t follow up the opening title sequence with the origin recap. The one that goes “Johnny Domino was one of Bay City’s hottest young jazz musicians”? I want to know who thought that episode 12 is when to ditch the expository catchup sandwiched between the opening and the actual episode.
-The Countess sees Johnny’s hologram act and quips “and they give Milli Vanilli a hard time”. Take THAT, Milli Vanilli!
-This is also the second Milli Vanilli joke to appear in an episode of Night Man. Someone behind the scenes took that whole deception hard.
-Johnny tells Raleigh that he saw the Countess steal four pints from the blood bank. “Maybe she’s anemic” Raleigh says in response. When was the last time a blood bank got burgled by someone with anemia?

Ronnie: Welcome again to the pain train that is Night Man. In the 9th episode of 44 episodes–yes, 44 episodes–Night Man…falls in love? Maybe! He’s definitely taken with the mysterious woman he witnesses getting beat on in a parking garage. Petra Medved, no relation to Michael, is a Russian emigre with a mysterious past and more importantly a rockin’ bod. She does a “George Costanza leave behind” of her hotel key so Johnny would come calling because he’s a shallow horn dog and true to form… Meanwhile, Frank continues his flagrant flouting of the law by doing off the books investigations of Petra’s associates, one of whom is named Stepov. You gotta come up with a better name than that, because every right thinking person will immediately think of Elaine’s mimbo boyfriend telling George to “step off”. (I can and will cram in as many Seinfeld references as possible in this article. Who’s gonna stop me, fuckin’ Donald Trump?) This snooping lands Frank a beat down and a trip to the hospital while Johnny and Petra are cavorting on the beach like a couple of Baywatch Nights characters.

“Johnny, before you do anything… Delete my Internet search history.” 

Johnny uses his frequency of evil powers as a party trick and finds out from that that not only is she an ex-KGB assassin, she killed Sean Archer’s kid at the beginning of Face/Off…or something pretty similar to it. This doesn’t dissuade Johnny from wanting to fuck her, you see, because she’s a victim of circumstance: Heywood Jablomeoff threatens her sister whenever she doesn’t agree to take an assignment. So what if she shot a kid? She didn’t mean it, and that’s all that matters. It’s all very stereotypical, with talk of May Day parades and the old country. Look, it was 1997, the Soviet Union had fallen and capitalism was hollowing out Russia, so storytellers felt obliged to tell one of like three stories they had about post-Soviet life. Everyone’s either an assassin or nursing a dangerous alcohol dependency or both.

If this isn’t about Johnny trying to redeem a trained killer with his dick and his superheroics, “Lady in Red” highlights the dangerous dependency that has taken root in Johnny and Frank’s relationship. Johnny misses a baseball game the pair were meant to attend so instead of assuming his son is looking for strange or shooting up like any decent jazz musician would be, Frank tails Stepov and ends up getting the shit kicked out of him for snooping on organized criminals just because his son didn’t catch a mid-August Giants game. This combined with Frank pretending he’s still a cop without the aegis of official employment makes him a dangerous and delusional old man. No wonder Kim Coates would eventually be able to kill him via a phony “sheriff of the Ultraweb” job offer. (Spoilers, I know, but also who cares.) In the hospital, Frank asks Johnny “son, what is it about this girl that has you so fascinated”? Well, it’s like how Batman is attracted to Catwoman and Talia al Ghul: good guys love the bad girl, especially if they think they can “fix” her.

Fix her Johnny does, or tries to do, as he uses his superheroic persona to fight a number of Russian gangsters who exploit “The Ice Lady of Petrovia”. As is typical the fight scenes are really poorly choreographed, though Night Man does say “drinks are on me” and then he smashes a couple of vodka bottles over some goons’ heads. That’s probably his funniest one-liner yet in the series, partially because he also may have killed those men with blunt force trauma to the head. Night Man kills some people in this episode, as he does most episodes. It sure is alarming given most superheroes circa 1997 still adhered to a no killing code. Perhaps disgraced rapist Warren Ellis saw Night Man and that inspired the brutal interventionist ways of The Authority. Prove me wrong, you limey groomer fuck!

Chris: I love how incoherent the opening credits for Night Man are. Every episode begins with a wordless, saxophone-scored sequence that starts closeup of Johnny Domino AKA Night Man’s eyes, followed by a short montage of shots of a city at night intercut with footage of him driving in his car, which ends with him pulling up in front of a jazz club. Then it cuts inside the club where Johnny, who is standing next to an empty stage, pulls a garage door opener looking object out of his pocket, it cuts to a close-up of the doohickey in his hand so we can see him push a button, then cuts wide again to where a copy of Johnny holding a saxophone appears on stage (with the OG Johnny still in shot so we see that it’s a double) who begins to play the sax. They then cut to a reverse of the previous angle so the musician Johnny is in the foreground and original Johnny, now in the background, smiles with satisfaction and walks out of frame. It’s only then that they cut to him suiting up, doing action things, and including footage of other characters. It’s seventeen seconds (the first seventeen seconds) of a minute-long sequence devoted entirely to establishing how Night Man gets out of going to work. And after all that, the show cuts to a different montage, this one narrated, that explains who Night Man is, how his powers work and what the deal with his special equipment is. It’s information that would’ve been super useful in that sequence too, because no one tuning in blind would see that opening and think “oh yeah, okay, he’s one of those jazzman who has his own portable three dimensional hard light hologram of himself in case he needs to establish an alibi while fighting crime”. We spend a lot of time in this column guessing which contemporaneous pop culture nonsense the BTS Night Man crew were familiar with, but I refuse to believe none of them had seen Quantum Leap. We all know they’re perfectly aware of the fact that it was possible to open a TV show with a credits sequence that begins with expository narration explaining the premise and then segues into wordless montage. Everybody knows that.

As for the episode itself, I have to say it feels like a step backwards. I understand the thinking behind trying to do a smaller, more intimate episode of your TV show after a broad mythology episode and then one that takes a stab at social relevance, but the problem with small and intimate is you need actors for that and the producers of Night Man never got around to actually doing that. Say what you will about Lois & Clark (and we’ve said more than anyone ever should), but they had a TV ringer in Teri Hatcher and as for Dean Cain, well, he’s a better actor than Gestapo Storm Trooper. He didn’t have a whole lot of range and had a tendency to look confused and/or constipated when he was supposed to be angry or intense, but he pulled off the affectionate Clark stuff with a fair amount of aplomb (this is the nicest thing I will ever say about anyone who ever got a volunteer job with ICE). Matt McColm is a very handsome man who’s good at kicking and wears the hell out of a white t-shirt, but he is in no way shape or form an actor. At the end of the ep he has to do some narration and he delivers it with the intensity of a belligerent eight grader being forced to read an essay he wrote about his grandmother to the entire class. I swear I could see him glaring at the floor while I listened to it. And as for the actress who played Petra, do you know how bad you have to be for your own accent to sound fake?

I think the trick for the kind of bad that Night Man is that it needs to be going a hundred miles an hour from soup to nuts. And I don’t mean like the hundred miles an hour that a pro like Tony Scott could pull off, I mean it needs to be the manic, panicky, are-we-gonna-cross-the-finish-line-before-this-shakes-apart hundred miles an hour energy of the amateur who is in over their head and is on the verge of tears. Like the previous two eps. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed watching Johnny and his new girlfriend frolicking on the beach like a couple of assholes as much as the next guy, but that should just be the baseline for a show like this. I want to see them playing volleyball and that game where they’re in the water with another couple and the girls are on the boys shoulders trying to shove each other into the surf. They should be eating ice-cream and one of them boops the other on the nose with the ice-cream and then the booper mashes their entire cone into the face of the boopee and then both fall down laughing. There should have been a moment where they got to play frisbee with a dog. And it all needed to be cut to “Something Tells Me I’m into Something Good” like in the original Naked Gun. You know, sick-o shit.

Raleigh, this is a costume party, not a freakin’ Pride float.  

Ronnie: I think “Lady in Red” is interesting in how it depicts post-Soviet collapse Russia, by which I mean Russia is portrayed as being full of thieves and assassins. It’s Orientalism by any other name to be sure. It’s an exotic and mysterious place of intrigue, and that is in keeping with the perception at the time. Something tells me Glen A. Larson and company did not have a firm grasp on 90s Russia and how the influx of Western capitalism created severe income inequality and a precipitous drop in life expectancy among the citizenry. I could go on and quote some issues of The eXile but I don’t think that’s necessary. It’s just funny that Night Man is given an opportunity to maybe say something about anything and that is stymied by the program’s own adherence to its bullshit formula of jazzman nonsense.

I transcribed Johnny’s final spiel about his lost lady love for posterity’s sake. “People have been asked to do things in the name of honor, country, even God, for thousands of years. All too often the deeds demand sacrifices, which in the harsh light of dawn, are meaningless. Such was the life of Petra Medved, who died for her country twenty years after it seized [sic–I know it should be “ceased” but that dummy Matt McColm DEFINITELY says “seized”) to exist. I’ve only known her three days, but my life would be changed forever.” All while this interior monologue is going on the jagoff is playing saxophone on the roof of the House of Soul. When in doubt, sax the shit out of things. I like his sendoff to Petra because it’s like when Ricky from Trailer Park Boys tries to sound intellectual. That’s about the level of intellectual rigor that Johnny espouses. As for Petra changing Johnny’s life forever, I’ll bet my Cabin Boy blu-ray that she’s never brought up again in the series. That’s not hollow either, cause that Cabin Boy disc runs for like $90 on eBay now.

Is that really considered front page news in Bay City? Jesus H.

Chris: One of my very favorite MST3K bits was from the It Conquered the World episode. The (Roger Corman directed) movie closes with this hilariously overwrought Peter Graves speech about Lee Van Cleef’s doomed anti-hero: “He learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature… and because of it, the greatest in the universe. He learned too late for himself that men have to find their own way, to make their own mistakes. There can’t be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. And when men seek such perfection, they find only death… fire… loss… disillusionment… the end of everything that’s gone forward. Men have always sought an end to the toil and misery, but it can’t be given, it has to be achieved! There is hope, but it has to come from inside, from man himself.” They don’t riff the speech or anything, it just plays and that’s the end of the movie (Joel makes some bland wow, makes you think style comment when they’re leaving the theater but that’s about it). Afterward, the post movie segment is Joel and the Bots watching the end of the movie on a little TV while wearing matching after-show-cool-off-style robes and picking at TV dinners. They play the whole speech again except this time you’re not watching the scene you’re hearing it while you watch Joel and the Bots watching. Then, they cut to Mads and they’re watching it and you hear the speech again. All the way through. Then they cut to the credits and instead of the usual theme music you get the entire speech again. They even start it again for the little post-credit button. They play it four times in a row. Four. And there are no jokes. There are no jokes or dialogue of any kind. It’s just the speech over and over and over and over again.

I don’t think they were making fun of the speech exactly? Like, they clearly think it’s goofy and melodramatic, but I never got the sense the show was shitting on or looking down on it. Instead, it’s almost like they’re impressed that a Z grade sci-fi movie about a giant, psychic, space cucumber looking alien that tries to take over Earth would have the audacity to try and close by making its audience think about the fractured nature of man? I don’t think the speech moved them at all, but I do wonder if the people behind the scenes of that weird little, gonzo premised, no-budget, Minneapolis based, puppet sci-fi/comedy show didn’t feel a kind of kinship with the galaxy brained ambition of guys like Corman. And, kind of ironically, I don’t think MST had even the slightest interest in making any kind of comment on the nature of man, fractured or otherwise, but that show is something like thirty five years old and it’s still around and has spawned a whole bunch of spin-offs and became one of the most influential comedy shows of its era and I don’t know if you last that long and make that big an impression on the larger culture without tapping into something about the nature of man (or women, or anyone)?

Imagine if Matt McColm cameoed in Doomsday or Secret Wars. Disney would make 3 billion dollars easy.

I can’t help but think about that when Night Man makes its own little stab at profundity, and how without MST you and I wouldn’t be wasting our time picking on this dumb little show and its outsized ambitions. Night Man’s janky, DIY, best-actors-we-could-find-at-the-bus-depot cast are so in over their heads and it’s a miracle they were able to scrape together anything that even remotely resembles conventional television. The average Night Man production budget was probably less than the catering budget of an episode of Lois & Clark, and I have it on good authority that the catering budget for L&C was a plastic red cup full of quarters on a folding chair in between two vending machines a couple of lots over. Night Man wasn’t working with much is what I’m saying. So should I maybe go easier on them? Try not to be so smug and superior? Should I rein in the cheap shots about the community theater understudy level of acting, stop pointing out how cheap it all looks and narratively incoherent it all is? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. I’m not going to, but, you know, that doesn’t mean that I don’t know that I should. And isn’t that, in its own way, the really important thing?

Odds & Ends
-Tubi should not allow “skip intro” as an option. Not for this show. That’s a load bearing theme song there, guys. Why the fuck would you skip it? It’s like skipping a blow job or ice cream or some sort of horrific amalgamation called an ice cream blowjob.
-IMDB trivia dutifully informs that “Lady in Red” is a song by Chris DeBurgh from 1986. I guess all the episode names are titles of songs? I guess if NewsRadio can name a season after Led Zeppelin albums, so too can Night Man derive titles from popular and not so popular music. Man, I should rewatch NewsRadio…
-Do they come up with the titles beforehand or after the script is completed? Is it Marvel Method where Glen A. Larson says “have it be about a lady in red” and then the scriptwriter makes sure to include a lady wearing red? (Petra wears red in the first, but not any subsequent, scene.) I really want to know how these things get made. Thankfully, we’ll learn some about the creative process once we get to the episodes comics creator Steve Englehart wrote.
-”I have my sources”, Johnny tells Lt. Dann, when asked where he got info about an assassination at the annual costume party. I want to know what sources a freelance jazz musician has.
-When your last name is Domino and you name your kid Johnny, he’s Johnny for life, isn’t he? Like, you’re not calling someone John Domino or Jonathan Domino. The fuck out of here with that nonsense. It’s Johnny from the womb to the tomb.
-He learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature… and because of it, the greatest in the universe. He learned too late for himself that men have to find their own way, to make their own mistakes. There can’t be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. And when men seek such perfection, they find only death… fire… loss… disillusionment… the end of everything that’s gone forward. Men have always sought an end to the toil and misery, but it can’t be given, it has to be achieved! There is hope, but it has to come from inside, from man himself.

1X10 “THAT OL’ GANG OF MINE”

Ronnie: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal” is how the saying goes, I believe. Well, Glen A. Larson might be the greatest artist of all time by that metric, because he has a long and storied history of plagiarism over the course of his 300 television shows. Wikipedia says James Garner punched him through a motor home once after a dispute over Larson cribbing from The Rockford Files. The plagiarism manifests in Larson recycling his old shows in new shows, like an upcoming Night Man that incorporates footage from The Highwayman, as well as ripping off other people’s programs. “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” seems to be taking heavy inspiration from Lois & Clark’s episode “That Ol’ Gang of Mine”, in which a scientist creates clones of Bonnie, Clyde, Capone and Dillinger. In Night Man’s “That Ol’ Gang of Mine”, Capone, Dillinger and Bonnie (but NOT Clyde) are brought back via suspended animation. The Lois & Clark show predates this one by three years, so it’s pretty evident that by episode 10 of Night Man they already had to purloin ideas from better shows. That Lois & Clark is a “better show” is a stunning indictment of Night Man.

Polito is thinking “if only I hadn’t squabbled with Tom Fontana. I could be acting against Andre Braugher right now!”

If you told me that I was going to watch and write about the reanimated Bonnie Parker wanting the Johnny Domino D… well honestly it’s the kind of off the wall stupid shit I ought to expect from Night Man at this point. To be fair, Lois & Clark never thought to have Bonnie joy ride the Prowler, probably because L&C was staffed by normal TV writers and not deranged maniacs. How else do you explain the decision that when Johnny reads her mind, her exploits are in black and white? There’s a more than zero chance the person who wrote this episode thinks the past took place without color. J. Edgar Hoover’s son has revived these gangsters I guess in an effort to get back at his old man’s reputation. Hoover created the fiction that Dillinger, Capone and Parker all died whereas they were just cryogenically frozen like a common Theodore Williams or Walter Disney, and he used said fiction to become a beloved American statesman. Would a loser be portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in a Clint Eastwood joint? Whereas on L&C Rolling Thunder’s William Devane portrayed Capone, Night Man has its own ringer: Jon Polito. The year before he provided a voice in Homeward Bound II: Judgment Day and the year after he was in both The Big Lebowski and Seinfeld. I think if confronted, Polito would’ve quoted Fight Club and said “You met me at a very strange time in my life”. Who cares if Fight Club was 2 years later, we’re talking TV about reanimated Dillinger fighting fucking Night Man. Time, space, none of that shit matters. IT’S ALL BULLSHIT.

I’ll cut this short and leave it to Chris lest I have a mental breakdown trying to tease out anything comprehensible from this shit. Eventually Johnny gets into hot soup when the authorities find his Prowler as a heist getaway ride and he’s abducted by DOJ goons whose job had been to monitor the gangsters in stasis. The show never gives a good answer for why the government bothered keeping notorious criminals on ice for 70 years. The government essentially entrusts a jazz musician to sort this situation out, which sounds about right for the “hey man whatever” malaise of the scandal filled second Clinton administration. Who needs highly skilled government agents doing their jobs when you have a dipshit with a saxophone? You know who else is a dipshit with a saxophone–WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON. So Johnny becomes a triple agent, working with the gangsters by putting his hair into a ponytail and pretending to be their representative while dealing with the Colombians. Lot of ins, lot of outs. “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” seems to want to make Bonnie Parker into a sympathetic character based on her affection for Johnny. Isn’t it a little soon for him to have moved on considering a woman he claimed to have loved died in his arms, uh, LAST EPISODE? I hope this isn’t like Seinfeld and Domino has a new girlfriend every week. I do hope this is like Seinfeld in that everybody winds up in jail. The amount of interference with police business should at least land Johnny, Frank and Raleigh in the hoosegow for a while.

We’re not blessed with that, unfortunately. We are blessed, however, with a pretty spectacular warehouse fight that ends with Bonnie giving Night Man a kiss “for Johnny” after he tells her that Johnny’s secured her a lifetime supply of “Hooverade” so she can start fresh. So Bonnie Parker is just out in the world? It’s fine, though, as the Men in Black still have three corpsicles to watch after: Capone, Dillinger and Hoover. Hoover is in cryogenic stasis after being shot approximately 40 times by Capone and Dillinger. Why? None of this makes any sense. I have a headache.

Chris: So, if I had to describe “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” in one word, it would probably be what the fuck. I honestly don’t know where to start this blisteringly incoherent mess, but I guess maybe the best place is the basic premise. The government has Bonnie Parker, Al Capone, and John Dillinger secretly on ice in the basement of a house somewhere in San Fran- excuse me, Bay City? And they’re being stored in upright, see-through, coffin shaped freezer units like you might have if you were displaying them at Disney World or The Mutter Museum? And they’re under the watch of former head of the FBI but long since dead J Edgar Hoover’s secret illegitimate son? And this secret son (named J Edgar Hoover, not a great first step to burying your association with the boy, J Edgar) was hidden from the public because even though Hoover liked wearing women’s clothes he also enjoyed heterosexual sex so when he had a kid he never acknowledged him so as not to undermine his reputation as a gay cross-dresser?  Yeah, alright. Whatever.

Except, no, not whatever, because let’s think about this for a second. J Edgar Hoover was a real person whose private life was widely speculated about but in actuality very little was known about. That said, it’s probably bullshit that he was a cross-dresser (or at least our good friend the internet seems to doubt it). But was he gay? That seems a little murkier and a lot of people seem to think there was evidence he was. This only matters insofar as why would Night Man go out of its way to confirm that Hoover was a cross-dresser (which he wasn’t) but also insist that he was a committed lady-humper (also probably not true)? Why correct for something that didn’t happen at all? Why not just ignore it or have someone be surprised at the fact that Hoover would have a kid in an understated if-you-know-you-know fashion? Like remember in Seinfeld when Elaine was a beard for the gay guy and his boss and his boss’s wife were like oh, we didn’t expect him to have a girlfriend, and when Elaine asked why they just went no reason? Just do that.

Anyway.

More like John DULLinger 

J Edgar Jr (The kids called him Jedjr!) falls in love with the frozen Bonnie, for reasons. And decides to whip up one of those cure-for-death tonics that would, like in the corresponding Lois & Clark episode, foundationally change the lives of every man, woman and child on Earth, but is instead used as a throwaway to set up a story about a trio of bank robbers running around for a while. There’s a weird little aside where J Edgar Jr suggests that the public explanations for what happened to Parker, Dillinger, and Capone were just cover stories, which I guess is supposed to suggest that Parker wasn’t shot 26 times in what can only be described as a turkey shoot and Capone didn’t die as an enfeebled stroke debilitated syphilitic madman. And that, in turn wouldn’t require the make-up department to affix Bonnie actress (and Saved by the Bell alum) Kiersten Warren with scars from the multiple gunshots wounds her character took to the face and allowed Polito to physically intimidating while also speaking in complete sentences and being aware of what he was and what he was doing at any given moment. And Dillinger’s death was covered up because, I dunno, I guess they didn’t want him to feel left out of the fun or something.

This is one of those episodes that’s hard to parse because no one moment connects to any other in any kind of logical way. We already covered how there’s no explanation for why these three famous gangsters are in deep freeze, and how J Edgar Jr’s motivation for thawing them is also pretty flimsy, but we also can’t dwell on any of it because there’s a lot more nuttiness to come. Bonnie wakes up from her deep freeze and immediately wants to go clubbing, which, yeah, maybe, if I was hibernating for sixty years I might want to take the sights in too. So they head to Ye Old Jazz Clubbe, presumably so she could experience a modern spin on a culture she would have already been familiar with. Also so they could get to the next beat in the story. But Bonnie doesn’t seem particularly dazzled or confused by any of the innovations she missed; the only thing that dazzles her are Johnny’s arms, which, also fair. But if the writers wanted to set up an attraction between the two there were a lot of straightforward ways they could have gone about it. Instead, then have her request a song from Johnny and then dance with Raleigh which, talk about a big matzah ball. You do a TV show where you resurrect a white woman from the early twentieth century who was born in TEXAS and have her go to a jazz club and dance with a black guy? I have questions.

And none of that matters! Bonnie (who talks like she’s from Fargo fucking Minnesota), dances with Raleigh but only has eyes for Johnny (and again, I get it, the man is super hunky). So why insert such an obviously charged sequence into the episode and then just drop it? Do you think the original idea was for her to have the relationship with Raleigh but then it was rewritten at the last minute to make Johnny the focal point so he could go on pretty much exactly the same emotional journey he took in the previous episode? Inquiring minds want to know.

Ronnie: So on the basis of the diverging plotlines I think we can safely say that “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” the Night Man episode is not a word for word recreation of “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” the Lois & Clark episode. What probably happened was someone on staff saw the L&C show and thought it was a rollicking jumping off point for our hero to have a pseudo-romance with famed criminal Bonnie Parker. Is this going to become a recurring thing? Is Johnny Domino going to go through girlfriends like Jerry Seinfeld? I guess we’ll see, but I hope not because Matt McColm isn’t the kind of actor that has chemistry with other actors. He’s best at accomplishing stunts; approximating human emotions such as love, attraction, those sorts of things are not within his skill set. Anyway, I don’t think strictly this episode should be considered plagiarism but it’s a little close for comfort. Like, at least change the title. “Bonnie & Johnny” would be a good one.

The greatest sin the show commits this hour is a waste of Jon Polito. Polito is a wonderful actor as seen in everything from Homicide: Life on the Street to Miller’s Crossing (and a number of other Coen Bros movies) and when I saw he was playing Al Capone I had expectations that of course Night Man could never begin to meet. Polito isn’t terrible but he’s not noteworthy either.  Usually Night Man casts actors that meet the level of quality of the show (Donald Trump, for instance) so when they luck into an actual good one it’s annoying that they’re squandered. Ah well. Forget it, Jake, it’s Glen A. Larson-town.

“You’ll have to speak up, I’m wearing a towel.”

Chris: Yeah, I’m almost more likely to chalk the whole thing up to weird coincidence than lazy plagiarism simply because so many of the details of the story are different between the two episodes. Maybe one of the writers saw the L&C episode and then forgot it but the super broad strokes and title stuck in his mind such that it seemed more like an original idea than rip-off or homage or whatever else you might call it when it sprung to mind again. Because, think about it, why would you change so much about the first version of “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” and then keep such an obvious marker as the title? The whole thing makes more sense if you think of it more as being like when Elaine inadvertently ripped Ziggy off due to a toxic combination of deadline panic and subconscious, bedsheet related inspiration than any kind willful Nina-Copies-The-Letter-From-Chapter-Two style deception.

And while we’re on the subject of plagiarism vs homage vs shit-the-writer-forgot-he-saw, let’s all welcome, I guess, the Men in Black to the Night Man Television Universe? I’ve spoken at length in previous L&C&C&R entries of my deep and abiding affection for plotlines where you can tell what movie or TV show the writer was watching in an effort to avoid work right before their deadline. The Tempus L&C episodes were usually fertile ground for that kind of bullshit. And the in “That Ol’ Gang” we’re introduced to two, nameless, suited and sunglassed government agents who are responsible for guarding and then recapturing the frozen gangsters who are clearly intended to parody Agents J and K from what was at the time, the highest grossing film of that year (Titanic wouldn’t drop for another month). But the thing about the Men in Black is, they’re already parodies? Like, that’s the whole idea? They’re a comedic riff on the idea of the anonymous, super competent, all knowing government agent/bureaucrat that was so big at the time? The 90s were rife with weirdo conspiracies involving government agencies covering up presidential assassinations and coups in faroff lands and either fighting off or aiding and abetting alien invasions. Men In Black was an ultra dry comedic riff on that trope, and in “That Ol’ Gang”, Night Man is trying to riff on the riff. Do you know how good you have to be to successfully parody a parody?

The bridge is a place for couples to make out, not for people to commit suicide as you assumed. 

No really, I’m asking, because however good that is, Night Man not only doesn’t hurtle the bar, it trips over its own shoelaces in the run up, falls on its face and farts in front of God, the viewing audience and everyone.

I will say that I did genuinely smile at Bonnie using the phrase “High Hat” in conversation with Capone. A nice, subtle, reference in a sea of loud, blunt ones.

Odds & Ends
-The credited writer, Doug Heyes Jr., is a real piece of work, by which I mean he’s a lunatic. The “about the author” section of a book he wrote describes his life as such: “Following a life-changing personal healing,Doug Heyes discovered “The Touch” – the gift for healing he describes as “the natural birthright of all human beings. ” He left a successful career in show business to plunge headlong into the waters of holistic health and healing“. The question of whether ten Silk Stalkings scripts makes for a “successful career in show business” aside, building an entire framework from that song from Transformers: The Movie is no way to go through life.
-“Alcohol neutralizes the effect of the serum” – Hoover Jr. to Bonnie. I want to see an alternate version where Night Man wins the day by getting the gangsters hammered.
-Not a Bonnie Parker aficionado but I’m reasonably certain she’d never call anyone a “big palooka”. Yet again Night Man is confusing people with Fantastic Four’s The Thing.
-Dillinger calls Night Man “a flying flashlight”, which is great.

Chris: Greetings programs and welcome to another edition of Whatever We’re Calling This Now That We’re Not Watching Lois & Clark Anymore With Chris and Ronnie. As you no doubt remember, we’ve moved on from covering the just mentioned middling-to-bad mid 90’s Superman network romcom to Nightman, the only one hour superhero drama conceived, produced, and financed entirely by the runners up in a 1997 Marin County middle school AV Club talent contest. Our first episode of the day is called “Chrome” and hold onto your hats folks, because we’ve got a mythology episode. Turns out that karate loving, sleeves hating, jazz guy Johnny Domino wasn’t the only person to be struck by that magic bolt of lightning back whenever it was that he was struck by that magic bolt of lighting. Turns out that a whole bunch of folks all over the world were also struck by that very same bolt of lightning at that very same time and imbued with super powers all their own. Turns out that’s a thing that can happen. I was surprised too. But that one scientist guy from the first episode (played by Patrtick Macnee? How did I miss that?) pops back up to inform Nightman that not only are there an unknown number of superdudes running around, one of them is evil and has dedicated himself to hunting and killing all of his supersiblings.

His name is Joran (oof), and he’s discovered (somehow) that when one member of the Lightning League (what I’ve decided to call the people given powers by the lightning) kills the other, they gain the dead Leaguers powers. You know, like in Highlander. Joran (that’s really the best name they could come up with?) is played by an Irish actor named Shane Brolly and he’s like the homo erectus version of Daniel Bruhl’s Baron Zemo. He’s supposed to be one of those menacing villains who defeats the hero without breaking a sweat in their first encounter, triggering a crisis in confidence in the previously unflappable hero. You know, like in Rocky III. But unlike in Rocky III, Nightman has a plucky black sidekick to help him regain his mojo and strategize a dynamic new strategy to defeat his opponent. Oh wait, that’s also Rocky III, isn’t it? Okay, how about this? Instead of facing off against an astonishingly racist caricature of a Scary Black Man (remember how in 30 seconds of screen time Clubber Lang questions Rocky’s sexual potency, low-key threatens to rape Adrian, and kinda-sorta kills Mickey? Jesus), Nightman instead does battle with a smug, sexually ambiguous, eurotrash fancy boy? That’s different, right?

Better costume, honestly.

Joran (Repetition isn’t making it better) is one of those villains who’s presented as a terrifying new, brain meltingly difficult opponent that puts everyone on edge in the same manner as Venom did in his first appearances in Spider-Man. But instead he comes off like The Vanisher (first appearance, X-Men 02, November 1963), an “unstoppable” villain who’s dispatched with comical ease (The Vanisher is a teleporter whose lethal danger is demonstrated when he steals top secret military plans from the Pentagon despite the fact that said plans are safely stowed in a briefcase kept on a small table surrounded by army men with guns. Just one of the countless near nuclear catastrophes that could have been avoided by a locked file cabinet.). It would be insane to expect any kind of epic “dramatic showdown” from the seventh episode of a 90’s superhero show, but “Chrome” still manages to clothesline itself on the low-ass bar of cheapo syndicated TV. Juran (still a no from me) telekinetically hucks a bell at Nightman, who steps out of its way, and that’s about it. And he wasn’t there anyway because it was just the Nightman hologram, so who gives a fuck? Also am I crazy or does Nightman’s hologram accidentally trip a landmine? What do the makers of Nightman think a hologram actually is? Anyway, it’s all wrapped up in a classic TV “To Be Continued” when the villain escapes by forcing the hero to choose between killing the bad guy or saving an innocent life. So the villain is foiled, but the hero’s noble bloodlust goes unsated, and we the audience are forced to contemplate the inevitable rematch. I guess sometimes nobody gets what they want.

Ronnie: “Chrome” is a real humdinger of an episode for multiple reasons. For one, it broaches the larger Night Man mythos in a way we’ve not seen before. Previously our assumption was that Johnny was the sole beneficiary of the lightning strike to the cable car, perhaps because of his unique jazzman DNA structure. No, others received powers as well. I’m not well versed in the Malibu Comics Ultraverse yet but from the Ultraforce cartoon that I binged with a friend the other streetcar lightning recipients became a superteam called The Strangers. They included black speedster Zip Zap, Genis-Vell (and others) ripoff Atom Bob, Grenade (who despite his design is not the gay member of the team) and sex toy gone sentient Electrocute. What does this have to do with Night Man? Nothing, because I’m almost certain the license for the TV show was for the title character alone and every other Malibu character was tied up in other licensing deals. I bring all this up to mount an explanation for why Joran/Chrome exists. I imagine if they had access to the whole Malibu roster the show would pick a character from the comics. Instead they were faced with the worst situation possible: having to use their imagination.

I suppose I should talk about the actual episode instead of flaunting my knowledge of flamed out 90s comic book companies that were later subsumed and squandered by one of the Big Two. We open on a scientific demonstration of a woman being able to astral project. It’s described as “the ability to virtually be in two places at the same time” which to me is just describing Night Man’s garage opener jazz hologram, but that’s me. Things go awry when Joran kills her using his ability of glowing eyes. “How many more will he kill before we can stop him?” intones Patrick Macnee. How much time you got to fill? Don’t worry, there’s also a subplot about a reporter twigging to there being a crimefighter in town. She even puts a bounty on information about Night Man. This reporter is played by Alexandra Hedison, aka Mrs. Jodie Foster, so that’s neat. Didn’t we already have a reporter character? Whatever happened to her? Oh well, it’s Mrs. Jodie Foster’s time to shine.

This is not the most compromising position Raleigh’s found Johnny in, let me tell you that much.

Joran meets up with her and finds out the common denominator for all Bay City strange goings on is Johnny Domino, so he requests a meeting with him via the reporter, which is how you press the flesh with a jazz musician in this town. You need an intermediary. Joran thinks killing other people with abilities allows him to absorb their powers, which I will note is the premise of Sylar from Heroes. Do I believe Tim Kring, the creator of Crossing Jordan, stole from syndicated TV for his show Heroes? Oh, 100%. Joran is a trial run for Sylar. Instead of Quinto’s mesmerizing eyebrows imagine a dodgy Eurotrash accent and rape eyes. Frank, ever the proud father, dishes to this strange man about his son. “Johnny loves his music. But I tell you, had he become a cop, that kid would’ve gone all the way.” All the way to what? Police chief? RoboCop?

To be fair, Joran almost immediately figures out Domino = Night Man, although Mrs. Foster isn’t convinced. I like how in their first confrontation Chrome ties Johnny up with a fire hose and then telepathically controls the Prowler. This is really the point at which Night Man comes into itself. Imagine sitting on your couch or in your chair and you’re watching a man trapped by a fire hose with a car bearing down on him. And that’s a commercial break. Raleigh fumes: “what kind of monster makes a guy’s own car turn against him?”. Johnny’s advantage over Joran is that since everything the latter does is evil, Johnny can predict his every move. I’m not sure that’s how it works, but okay. Meanwhile, Chrome tries to engineer a camera crew filmed lampooning as well as frames the Night Man for a robbery. Fortunately, our himbo hero knows his foe’s weakness, which leads to a conclusion so insane I hardly believe it happened. And I’ve seen this episode multiple times, over multiple decades.

Chris: Remember when Elaine threw Joe Mayo’s fur coat out the window because she thought it was Puddy’s and then Joe wanted to Elaine to replace the coat, not because she was the one who threw it out the window, but because the person in charge keeping track of the coats should therefore be on the hook for any that went missing on said persons watch? And remember how Elaine thought that Joe was way out of pocket for insisting that she replace the missing coat because it was ridiculous to think that her agreeing to gather and throw all the coats onto a bed in another room somehow made her liable for what happened to them afterwards? You know how Elaine insisted to Jerry and George that whoever it was that threw the coat out the window was the party at fault and should be made to replace the coat? And that when Jerry pointed out that she was the person who threw the coat out the window Elaine pointed out that Joe Mayo didn’t know that and had no way of proving it so she didn’t think she should be held responsible even though she was? That she was being scapegoated for a crime that she was in fact guilty of? Remember how baffled Jerry looked by Elaine’s insane tortured logic? That’s how I felt when Nightman finally cracked the manner in which he would defeat his nemesis.

Nightman’s whole deal is that he can sense evil thoughts and intentions or whatever. And it’s an unconscious, reflexive thing more in line with Spidey’s spider-sense than, say, Superman’s x-ray vision. It’s not something he turns on and off, is what I’m saying, so much as it’s something that’s always active, but not always engaged. So, when Nightman realizes that he can use his ability to sense evil or whatever to sense what Chrome is going to do next, he’s basically discovering that the power he’s had since the beginning of the show can be used to do exactly what it’s been doing the whole time. It’s like if Spider-Man spent an entire issue fretting over how he was gonna stop some bad guy and then MJ was like “yeah, but this is just a guy with a pistol. Don’t you dodge gunfire from automatic weapons every day?” And then Spidey went “oh yeah! Right!” And proceeded to punch the guy out. That’s not really a satisfying conclusion to a story. And to make matters worse, the big climactic fight turns out to be between Chrome’s astral projection and Nightman’s scam-to-get-out-of-work hologram. So what actually happens is a hologram manages to outsmart a ghost? Is that right? But then, and I know I brought this up earlier but I think it bears repeating, the hologram also trips a landmine? Am I remembering this correctly? A weightless massless light construct accidentally depresses the trigger of a mine and detonates it? So a problem is solved due to the discovery of facts that the protagonist was already aware of, leading to a physical confrontation between two non-corporial projections that incurs significant property damage due to explosions triggered by one of the phantoms. That can’t possibly be right.

I’m glad you brought up the Heroes connection, because I noticed it too but kind of thought it would be gouache to mention both how Night Man ripped off Highlander and was then in turn ripped off by Heroes. That’s an embarrassment of trash right there, and I would have been remiss to take more than my share. Unrelated, but you just know that there are gonna be people that complain that this Highlander reboot somehow tarnishes the legacy of the original, and that’s just gonna be fucking nuts. Because all those movies suck. I’m not saying the first one isn’t fun to watch, or that there isn’t something compelling about the core concept, but come on. We’re talking about a film where a large portion of the story takes place in Scotland and whose main character is himself Scottish and is played by  Christopher Lambert, a Frenchman raised in Switzerland with an impenetrable accent and a voice that sounds like he gargles shards of glass before every take. Then they have the audacity to cast Sean Connery and make him play a Spaniard who lived most of his life in Egypt and Japan. But you know what he sounds like? He sounds like Sean fucking Connery. Because Sean Connery doesn’t fuck around with accents. His Irish-American Chicago street cop sounds like his suave British secret agent sounds like his Russian submarine commander sounds like his Baltimore Industrial Magnate sounds like his Robin Hood. What the fuck, movie?

Just had to get that off my chest.

They call this photograph editing “Lenoing”.

Anyway, this is probably my favorite Night Man episode to date. After a half a dozen episodes it’s settling into its identity as a terrible superhero show instead of the previous half hearted feints in the direction of being a terrible science fiction show, a terrible horror show, or a terrible noir/crime show. It’s blindingly obvious that no one behind the scenes had any idea what they were doing or where they were going and the show’s panicky attempts to impose some kind of coherent mythology onto this madness were delightful. We covered the return of Macnee, introduction of a super genius nemesis and the suggestion that somehow the same bolt of lightning managed to simultaneously strike numerous people all over the world. As well as the half assed crisis and climax. You also mentioned the delightful decision to introduce a plucky blond reporter lady in one episode, only to replace her with a new, different plucky blond reporter lady to serve the exact same function a couple episodes later. The only other thing I wanted to draw attention to was Nightman’s team’s attempt to draw Chrome out by appealing to his vanity via a clearly doctored image of what is supposed to be Chrome but looks more like mid-80s McDonald’s celebrity spokesmonter Mac Tonight. I honestly don’t remember what this was supposed to do or why it was supposed to do it, but I liked the phrase “celebrity spokesmonter” and wanted to wedge it in. Can you remind me what that was all about?

Ronnie: This is also my favorite so far for many of the reasons you elucidated. As for why the Night Man team effects such a vicious lampooning on Chrome, it’s simple: Chrome is vain. “Joran’s fatal weakness, his Achilles’ heel, is his vanity.” The object is to get the television network to run the picture and bait Chrome into a duel “at the old world’s fairground at midnight”. Then it’s trickery via hologrammatic Night Man. So all that is to say that the vandalized photo is completely irrelevant to the plot at hand and you could easily cut it out without losing anything. Except for the hilarity of Joran looking like Flabber from Big Bad Beetleborgs, that is. Chrome lives to bedevil Night Man another day when Johnny has to choose between saving Patrick Macnee or apprehending the villain. He chooses the boring choice. Patrick Macnee is an old man; why NOT gamble with his life?

He’s got Bette Davis eyes…provided Bette Davis’ eyes were all shiny and shit.

Jennifer Parks reminds me of Rene Russo in Nightcrawler: she’ll do anything for a story and her ethical scruples are a moving target at best. Lou Bloom vs. The Night Man, who you got? I feel like Bloom is hungrier even if Night Man’s got the physical advantage. Parks would actually do for a solid supporting character but she only appears in one other episode of the series, spoiler alert. Giving Night Man a varied cast of supporting roles, like on Lois & Clark, would both make too much sense and also the finger thing means the money. Nonetheless, she has a good send-off in this episode when she and Johnny are dining and she muses “either you can’t keep a promise or you can’t be two places at the same time”. Night Man promised he’d do a fly by for her camera crew, and it’s about time that happens. Just as Johnny is about to leave, oh, look, it’s Night Man from a distance. This actually isn’t a use of the hologram, which is weird because this is the exact scenario the hologram was created for, but instead Raleigh wearing the suit. Very Silver Age Superman this storyline, from concept to resolution. I liked it.

Look, Night Man is never going to be The Shield in terms of entertainment I enjoy without reservation and without irony. So this C+ episode of Night Man might be the highest we get, and that’s fine because it’s not about being good, it’s about being insane. “Chrome” introduces plenty of absurd elements that hopefully are revisited in future episodes. I can at least spoil that later on in Season 1 Chrome/Joran returns in the creatively titled episode “Chrome II”. Something to look forward to amidst the gaffes and bad puns.

Odds & Ends

-According to IMDB, Chrome is also the name of a San Francisco rock group that formed in 1976. Good looking out, IMDB. To be fair, it keeps with the title naming conventions’ relationship to music.
-The incidental jazz music sounds like Hell’s soundtrack if I’m being honest. That means what you think it means: BIG TIME OPERATOR RETURNS!
-The cable car accident happened on October 22nd.
-Frank and Charlie discuss the rise of swing in the 90s. If nothing else (lol) dates this show it’s that.
-”He’s got all the moves of a jungle predator” is an exceedingly weird way to speak of anyone, least of all your son.
-“If you’re not with me, you’re against me” – Jennifer Parks created the Cheney Doctrine!
-Joran calls himself “Mr. Chrome”, which is a mistake.

1X08 “TAKIN’ IT TO THE STREETS”

Chris: So the first, and most sensible in my opinion, impulse one has after watching “Takin’ It to the Streets” is to remove the DVD from the player, break it into a half dozen pieces, mail each piece to a different continent, then burn your house down with everything you ever loved inside, change your name, start life all over again and never speak of what you saw to anyone for the rest of your life.  If that’s not a viable option for some reason, your second best option is almost certainly suicide. Honorable or otherwise. If you’re one of those miserable bastards that can’t even get killing yourself right, then your only remaining option is to slink into the always open arms of the home away from home for bitter babbling cranks everywhere, the internet. And holy shit, internet, do I have a yarn for you. Because in “Takin’ it to the Streets” Night Man takes on inner city violence. Before we jump into the episode proper, let’s take a quick  look at that episode title. You know what’s never a good sign? A title using street style abbreviation and/or punctuation to denote some kind of authenticity. Oh sure, occasionally things work out like in 1984’s Breakin’ and it’s better known sequel Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, released later that same year (Little known fact, the success of the Breakin’ cycle was what gave French filmmaker Claude Berri the inspiration and confidence to film his now classic diptych, 1986’s Jean de Florette and Mannon of the Spring, or as it was titled in America: Jean de Florette 2: Electric Boogaloo). But mostly it’s an embarrassing disaster like Mo’ Money from 1992, or 2003’s Biker Boyz. Is it any surprise that “Takin’ it to the Streets” falls squarely into the latter category?

That’s a rhetorical question. The answer is no.

So, Night Man has decided to tackle the problems of gangs, black on black crime and its inexorable pull on young black athletes. Oh, and point shaving. In forty-four minutes. Yeah. So Night Man has that one black buddy/accomplice Raleigh who’s the brains behind Night Man’s whole supersuit. At the top of “Takin it to the Streets” we learn that Raleigh has a bea-u-tee-full new girlfriend who is also one of those tough as nails inner city high school teachers who all the kids dig because she’s a sexy lady who isn’t afraid to get down on their level and have a real bull session when the situation calls for it. When she brings Raleigh in to talk to her class about whatever AV gobbledygook he does and one of her students, without raising his hand mind you, “so you’re the guy who gave us Milli Vanilli” (let it never be said that the writing staff of Night Man didn’t have their fingers on the pulse of young black in culture in 1997) she fires right back that they all better sit back and shut up because since all the budget cuts this is their only chance to learn about faking earthquakes through the use of sonics and manufacturing hard light holograms of white Jazz Guys.

Blew Chips

Later that day, or maybe it was before, honestly who cares, Raleigh and his girlfriend are on a date along with Night Man and Night Man’s dad (“Wanna go on a date with me, a buddy of mine, and my buddy’s elderly father?” “Do I?”) when some of the girlfriends students roll up. They’re about to really get into some good natured jive slinging when Night Man’s evil-sense draws his attention to a town car over-flowing with armed men speeding right towards them and is barely able to raise an alarm before the bullets start flying. There’s a promising moment in the immediate aftermath of the attack when the girlfriend asks Night Man how he knew the car was gonna start shooting and Night Man goes “Well..” and trails off before something else pops up to derail the conversation and I was screaming “FINISH THE THOUGHT, NIGHT MAN!” But they never get back to that and instead the plot follows one of her students, basketball-prodigy-and-otherwise-slow-on-the-uptake all-star K-Train and his dalliance with a local crime lord who runs book and a protection racket out of what appears to be an exercise gymnasium/whore house. What follows is a plot that’s incomprehensible even by Night Man standards that involves murder, rigging high school basketball games, the use of the phrase capping on several occasions, a plan to unite the Bay City underworld under one banner at a meet-and-greet held in his gym’s cafeteria and one scene where the crime lord yells “Whitey made a fool out of you” at K-Train.

Ronnie: I think Night Man deserves credit for exiting its comfort zone and broaching sensitive topics. It botches the broach but isn’t the effort worth anything? Well, not really. “Takin’ It To The Streets” is about a guy named Artemis pressuring star athlete Kelvin “K-Train” Barnett into performing poorly in a game to benefit his gambling outfit. This is done in the most erotic “take a dive” scene I’ve ever seen; to wit, it takes place in a hot tub with babes. Is this Night Man or Red Shoe Diaries and is there really a difference? Cut to a depressing high school gymnasium and K-Train is throwing the game. Johnny gives him a pep talk, jazzman to black man, to dissuade him from his illegal activity.

I don’t think Night Man can’t address real issues that affect real people because any art can try to do anything. Go big! Swing for the fences. I don’t think Night Man succeeds at having anything of merit to say about the epidemic of teen sports phenoms being seduced into the luxurious world of point shaving. I doubt anyone on the writing staff has spoken to a black youth, much less had enough insight into the crushing poverty that motivates such mercenary moves. Percentage of writers who call them “the blacks”? Over 50%, definitely. Whoever had the temerity to write the line of dialogue “whitey made a fool out of you”, that’s who uses “the blacks”. While not as offensive as it could be, “Takin’ it to the Streets” is nonetheless pretty paternalistic in its portrayal of Kelvin needing the moral guidance of the resident jazz musician.

See, according to the comics Night Man should look like this all the time. He doesn’t have to sleep ever and he’s hypersensitive to light, hence always wearing sunglasses. Maybe they were going to go that route until they realized Matt McColm looks like an even bigger douchebag with sunglasses than without.

What really sinks it is the sinister and/or homoerotic villain, Artemis Burton. I don’t know actor Evan Lionel from Adam but he fucking stinks. He delivers a performance so campy it’s impossible to take anything seriously. Well, why take Night Man seriously? That’s a good and fair point. All I know is that a high school basketball rigging operation eventually segues into Artemis sitting on a throne, saying “to the dawn of a new era” and initiating a cage fight between Raleigh, Frank, Levin and some guy with dreadlocks among other hoodlums. Shit looks like a Street Fighter level. Actually, those look better than this green screened mess. Raleigh holds his own but Night Man is there with the assist. Johnny also kills the bad guy, quipping “now it’s your turn in the pit” after lasering him into falling a great height. We should’ve kept a tally of the character’s kill count. By now I think it’s already in the double digits if you count henchmen, and you know that we do.

You know, we fought a war so there’d be no thrones in this country.

Chris: So here’s what I’m wondering, it’s obvious that no one who worked behind the scenes on Night Man in any capacity was black or had ever interacted with a black person in their life. We know this because a quick scan of our friend mr internet reveals no reports of any kind from when the episode would have been being filmed of a desperate, sweaty, freaked out individual running out into traffic and banging on windshields while screaming incoherently ala Kevin McCarthy at the end of the 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Martin Lawrence in the spring of 1996 at the end of post production of A Thin Line Between Love and Hate. But what we don’t know, is if anyone was familiar with another old friend, 1988’s syndicated Superboy and its eighth episode of the first season “The Fixer”. Loyal reader will remember that we covered that episode back in the Bad Old Lois & Clark days and it too covered the scourge of gambling’s involvement with amateur basketball. I think it may also have involved a homoerotic hot-tub seduction scene as well, come to think of it! If I was Superboy writer Alden Schwimmer the only thing keeping me from suing the producers of Night Man for plagiarism is the fact that I would then have to stand up in a court of law in front of God and everyone and acknowledge under oath that I wrote for Superboy. I’m not sure there’s enough money in the world, I’m being honest. But that’s the only reason. Well, that and I’m dead.

It would be extremely difficult to say that Night Man is getting better in any conventional sense; it’s still laughably incompetent, but it does seem like it’s hitting some kind of bizarre, atonal stride. The last two episodes have been just as terrible as the first half dozen, but they’re making more of an impression, too. It doesn’t take as much work to remember what happened. Maybe the plots are settling down a little, becoming more conventional. Other episodes ripped off movies and aped the styles of other shows, but the actual ways they unfolded were incoherent. If you mix terrible plotting with wretched acting, tin-eared dialogue and amateur special effects the result is a formless mess that’s almost impossible to retain because it’s really hard to get a grip on something so profoundly chaotic. It becomes too much work for your mind because it can’t rely on any of the foundational elements of storytelling to ground anything. It’s like, imagine you had to walk somewhere you’d never been, but the ground is like that part of Last Crusade where Indy has to leap from letter to letter to spell out Jehovah because all the other letters would collapse underneath him and he’d fall to his death. It’s hard to take in the sites and enjoy the atmosphere if you’re spending all your time focusing on the elements of walking you usually take for granted, is what I’m saying. It feels like the Night Man ground has stabilized a little, and that makes it easier to take in the sights.

Who designed this gym, Joel Schumacher?

Ronnie: You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, yeah? Night Man took the shot that it had something to say about the travails of urban youth and it turned out it didn’t have anything to say. Look, you know, at least they’re trying. What show in the superhero genre other than Superboy dared to broach the subject of point shaving in school sports? I thought so. So yeah, this isn’t very good and is very potentially offensive. At least it makes you feel something, and that’s what I believe separates Night Man from its fellow travelers. Another show would do an unmemorable episode with this, whereas Night Man conjured up a memorably bad one. Again, it’s a something and not nothing situation. This kind of reminds me of the well-intentioned liberalism of Marvel Comics where they’d try to increase diversity but do so only with stereotypes and caricatures. You know, like how the next X-Men team came from all sorts of different countries and backgrounds and mostly that resulted in characters peppering their dialogue with the couple foreign words or phrases Chris Claremont remembered. That’s why I think I reacted to this with amusement rather than Chris’ belief that one can only be pure if they burn down their house after watching this. because it reminded me of heart-in-right-place, head-in-bucket storytelling you’d see from nominally liberal people who’d never, you know, met a black person before. At the very least I can say there’s nothing malicious behind “Takin’ It To The Streets”.

Odds & Ends:
-IMDB pops up again, this time to tell us that “Takin it to the Streets” is also the name of a Doobie Brothers song from 1976, proving once again that IMDB is bottomless well of useful context and that the writers of Night Man really had a firm grip on the music that was speaking the urban black youth of 1997.
-Bay City’s gangs seem to have taken a page from Walter Hill’s 1979 classic The Warriors and adopted festive, eye-catching theme costumes so as to help each crew stand out. My favorites were the proto-Matrix styled cyber punks and KISS-esque Kitty Cat Men.
-”You’re tuned to the frequency of evil” goes hard and should’ve been sampled in industrial songs and I will die on that hill.
-I love how Night Man’s power use is denoted by a closeup of his forehead. Matt McColm is not an actor who can pull off “thoughtful” so that makes it even funnier.

NEXT TIME: Johnny befriends a KGB assassin because she’s a pretty girl; the son of J. Edgar Hoover brings back famous criminals from the dead. Yes, really.

Ronnie: “Still of the Night”, yet another episode named after a song, is instructive for what Night Man is to be. So far the level of preposterousness in the series reached to earthquake machines and a jazz musician being the most compatible and healthy heart donor; with this episode the possibilities become endless as Nighty must fight an extradimensional being, or someone in a bad ape costume, depending on how you perceive things. The bad ape costume stops an attempted rape in a park and Night Man stops that costume from hurting the would-be victim. I like how Johnny’s just bopping out to tunes while driving his Prowler until Raleigh calls him up. Raleigh, by the way, I think invented the whole “man in the chair” shit and Batman Beyond, Arrow et al owe Night Man a debt of gratitude. The being’s blood is poisonous so both the girl and Johnny are infected, but because the latter is a hunk built like a brick shithouse he’s barely affected. The script periodically forgets he’s affected I think.

This whole escaped lab animal cockamamie cover story the authorities are fed reminds Frank (FRANK!) of a case from 8 years ago, when several people died of infections related to a beast. Night Man is prescient in predicting that the police would contract out to private companies because that’s what happens in this episode and causes Frank’s unemployed cop sense to tingle. It’s kind of amusing to see the show go through this little detective story, pretending it’s a real TV show. Eventually they track down the original scientist, a physicist of indeterminate accent who reveals 8 years ago they brought a female beast to our world, and this time the beast is male. I’d like to see an Extradimensional Beast POV episode where he plots his revenge for 8 long years.

“Jazzman dipshit, reporting for duty!”

Cut to the chase: they get to the Fargate that conjured up the creature and the evil guy (there’s always an evil guy who wants to weaponize something for someone) gets thrown through. Night Man knows the only way to develop a vaccine (ew) against the blood disease killing him and that girl is to draw blood from the creature, so there’s a particularly insane scene where Nighty tries to reason with a bad ape costume, explaining they need a syringe of blood from him. The thing is, it WORKS. The fucking monster draws some of his own blood and hands it off to Night Man! Look, if you can’t appreciate plot points like that I don’t know what you’re doing here.

Chris: I’ve been reliably informed by Ronnie that “Still of the Night” AKA “Night Man Goes X-Files” is significant not just because the show stretches its wings in terms of what other, better, 90s pop culture it can rip off, but because it’s our introduction to investigative-reporter-and-girl-in-wig Elaine Barnes (played by Robin Bliley who probably isn’t actually wearing a wig but man does it look like she is sometimes). Because what a show whose primary cast appears to be learning their lines phonetically really needs is a fast talking Howard Hawks style dizzy dame to spit out dialogue like slugs from a tommy gun. Unfortunately, they apparently couldn’t find an actress capable of delivering that kind of focused, rat-a-tat performance at their price range (which I’m assuming was “lift back and forth from the studio and two popsicles a day from the catered mini freezer”) and defaulted to plan B, find someone who made the principles look competent by comparison.

This would be scintillating if the actors had chemistry with each other or, well, anyone.

Look, I’m sure that Ms. Bliley is a delightful person who, under the right circumstances, could deliver a perfectly respectable performance on a television show. Hell, she was one of the leads on 1993’s Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero, and that’s not nothing. But I doubt Lauren Bacall would have been able to pull off what Night Man asks of her because, A. you need actual dialogue to make that shit work, and B. you need competent scene partners to bounce off of. Screwball antics without those two elements is like playing tennis against a guy in a wheelchair using a dry sponge for a ball. You can see her trying to inject some energy into her scenes with Man, but the highest volume of acting he’s capable of is “smug complacency”, so she comes off as a wild eyed maniac who may or may not be wearing a wig, raving and gesturing wildly at a guy who’s thinking about what he’s going to have for dinner or something.

And again, it’s easy to make fun of these actors because they’re terrible at their jobs and should have gone into a career in hydroponics or gotten involved in some kind of pyramid scheme instead. But it’s also important to remember that this show is insane, and no one could look good in it. Take the opening scene with the couple.  It goes on for a while. I get it, it’s Halloween time (“Still of the Night” aired in mid-October) and they’re going for that classic scary story opening of the boy and the girl in the car at night. But they really get into it. Like he tries something and she’s like no, gentle but firm; and he tries again, and she’s like c’mon, I said no, a little stronger but still willing to give him some kind of benefit of the doubt; and he tries again and she says something like you’re ruining this, which, Jesus, buddy, this girl is cutting you a lot of slack and you seem determined to blow it, and he tries again at which point she’s finally had enough and leaves. Why did that have to go on for so long? Were the creatives at Night Man trying to make some kind of statement? Because maybe some dude somewhere was watching that and getting a message about the importance of boundaries, but any tension or seriousness the show created dissipates the moment the handsy boy gets bodied by the guy in the ape costume.

It was a great day for the production when someone nabbed a costume out of the dumpster behind the Power Rangers set.

Ronnie: I think the creatives (lol) at Night Man just wanted to do the classic “bigger situation interceding on a situation”, as an extradimensional being interrupting a guy trying very hard to rape a woman. It is funny to think Glen Larson’s son, being given the ability to write a script, wanted to include a brief message on consent. It’d be forward thinking for sure; the 90s were still pretty retrograde in a lot of ways. Yet any attempt is muddled by the fact that it’s a stupid moment and a bad script written by morons.

More evidence the show is written by morons is that Night Man is a poor excuse for a superhero. By superhero standards, even live action television superhero standards, he does not pass muster. Instead of patrolling the streets in search of danger like a regular hero, Night Man tools around in his Prowler until his black heterosexual lifemate calls him up and tells him of a disturbance. I think this episode features the first time Night Man’s actually saved someone; other times he’s just beaten up bad guys, not proactively removed someone from danger. He doesn’t fare well in fights, getting his ass kicked by the extradimensional entity to the point that the laser eye is hanging out of his mask. The dad does the majority of the investigative work. Like it or not, though, this is our superhero, and Bay City is at his whims. If he doesn’t decide to take action, they’ll be besieged by earthquake criminals, heart thieves or bad ape costumes.

Chris: Hey, what happened to the one guy who spends most of the episode sitting in a chair and gleefully waving an air-baton around while listening to classical music like he was conducting the Policemen’s Benevolent Association Orchestra or something? Did the monster thing eat him or what? I’m not going to go to the trouble of looking at the episode to check, because fuck Night Man, but we spent an awful lot of time with that jerk and if he doesn’t show up again I think I might feel ripped-off. Or maybe I won’t. Honestly, who cares? This isn’t a show designed to be concentrated on or remembered. It’s a money laundering scheme that was made to be sold directly to hospitals so they’d have something to broadcast with the sound off in the Emergency Room at 3 AM. Hey did you notice that the girl who got attacked in the cold open was Chuck’s older sister Ellie from the NBC Show Chuck? That’s gotta mean something to someone, right?

Battle Damaged Night Man toy: coming to shelves never.

Look, the thing about Lois & Clark is it had the benefit of being based on characters with over fifty years of stories and continuity to dip into and reform as it saw fit. They didn’t have to invent Clark Kent or Lois Lane or Lex Luthor, they just had to interpret them. The vast majority of people tuning in to that show have a strong working knowledge of who the main characters are and what their deals are, and that makes it incomparably easier than making shit up out of whole cloth because that means the writers, directors, actors and viewers are all meeting these people at the same time. And if you’re trying to get viewers invested in a world with science fiction or supernatural elements it’s even harder because you keep slowing shit down and reminding everyone how shit works. So there’s a part of me that wants to cut Night Man a little slack, because what they’re trying to pull off is really hard. But then I remember that no one forced anyone to make this shit, and no one forced the producers to cast “talent” that Corky St. Clair wouldn’t have put in Red White and Blaine. So fuck this show. And fuck me for watching it. Thanks for reading, though.

Odds & Ends

-Armadrillion: what Night Man’s costume is made of, apparently
-The episode is written by D.G. Larson. I’m surprised it took us 5 episodes for nepotism to rear its entitled head.
-Cutting from the villain air conducting a classical music piece that was clearly created by one man with a synthesizer to Johnny driving around and rocking out to generic electric guitar rock n roll is the most succinct encapsulation of this show so far.
-Frank needs a hobby.

1X06 “FACE TO FACE”

Ronnie: Let’s get it out of the way instead of dancing around it: yes, Donald Trump is in this episode. American President Donald Trump. The president you elected. When The Donald fascination was at an all time high I had the hope/fear that the Night Man guest appearance would be dredged up like his efforts in Ghosts Can’t Do It or, more famously, in Home Alone 2: Secret of the Ooze. Alas, people ignored it like they have the series as a whole. I suppose I’m happy about that; we don’t need fucking tourists ruining the Night Man scene. Anyway, “Face to Face” is about a guy who gains shapeshifting powers and one of his initial actions is to impersonate Donald Trump and withdraw money from his account. I imagine Trump agreed to this because it establishes he has a lot of cash in his checking account and isn’t horribly in debt to everyone everywhere all the time. The cameo itself is baffling: it’s difficult to tell if Trump knew what was going on and the bank is pretty obviously a greenscreen. It becomes noticeable that Trump never appears in the same shot as anybody else, and that the actorly task of standing, walking, sitting down and spouting maybe 3 lines of dialogue is beyond his means. Trump’s appearance reminds me of video game NPC, which fits because I don’t think the guy has an inner life in real life either. It’s just blank tape. As a guest shot, it’s confusing and also disappointing, because I wanted to see Night Man use his evil sense to see all the rapes and financial crimes Trump is responsible for and decide to laser his weiner off. We can’t always get what we want, however, and Night Man remains a bizarre footnote in the career of our dumbest president (so far).

“Desperado” plays

“Face to Face” is notable within the show because it’s the first time Night Man has been up against an actual supervillain. Last episode introduced aliens and this one introduces a supervillain. Cyril O’Reilly–the actor, not the Oz inmate–plays E. Haskell Bridges, who gains chameleon abilities after facial reconstructive surgery. One of the first things he does is frame Johnny’s piano playing buddy and city councilman Lee Prescott for the attempted murder of the mayor. (The same mayor from “Whole Lotta Shakin’…”, which is a nice touch of continuity.) He then tries to burn down the House of Soul, which I don’t think would require face changing powers but whatever. Johnny stops the fire and saves Jessica. (Remember her? Owner of the club? In the main credits?) This is all part of his revenge scheme against Johnny’s dad and Lt. Dann, the men responsible for sending him up. He committed financial crimes so shouldn’t he be hassling the SEC? For Dann, Bridges impersonates him at a fancy party and asks a Scotland Yard guest of honor “When are you limeys going to get out of Northern Ireland?”, throws a drink in the guy’s face and punches the police chief in the face. Spectacular performance by Michael Woods, and you should know we don’t throw the words “spectacular performance” around willy nilly with this show.

I gotta say, this gets more and more surreal every time I see it.

Facey (that’s my nickname for E. Haskell Bridges)’s plan, outlined:

1. Withdraw $10,000 as Donald Trump.
2. Send Lee Prescott to prison for attempted murder of the mayor.
3. Ruin Lt. Dann’s career by pretending to be him drunk at a party.
4. As Dann, shoot Frank on the Golden Gate Bridge.

He didn’t account for Night Man headbutting him and throwing him into the water. Another adversary killed by OUR HERO, folks! …Or was he?

Chris: Hey, what exactly is “the frequency of evil”? Because to me it implies malicious intent and deliberate amorality. Like, say I have a really bad day at work and decide (for a moment) to break the windows of my boss’ car or take a shit on her desk (you thought the hypothetical boss was a man, didn’t you? Well wake up! Women can be abusive bosses too! Like Jen Aniston in that one movie and maybe the sequel that I never watched!). That, to me, would qualify as an evil thought, because my desire would be to derive satisfaction from causing another person pain or distress. Even if I never actually went through with it, I could never honestly deny that the potential didn’t exist within me. But say I’m a little old lady(or your typical 2nd Amendment White Guy) and when the doorbell chimes I look through the peephole and see a face that I can’t be sure is 100% white, so I grab the Sig Sauer P320 9mm handgun that I keep locked and loaded on a little table against the wall right where I’m standing for the inevitable moment trouble came a knockin, and empty the clip into the door. And imagine when, after I shakily reload and fire off a few more shots, just to be sure, I open what’s left of the door to check for any more gang members that might be skulking about, and see that the person who’d rang my bell hadn’t been a tatted out, seven foot tall, three hundred pound, muscle bound thug in a doo-rag toting an Uzi, but had instead been a young woman, somewhere around five foot two and probably weighed something like a hundred, hundred and ten pounds (she does appear to be Latina, or possibly Italian, so, you know, could have been worse).

This is the House of Soul’s equivalent of Riker growing a beard. 

The point is, while I may have done something technically bad, my intentions were entirely pure. I was in fear for my life from an imminent threat on my own property and I exercised my second amendment right to stand my ground and defend my home. Sure, the suspect on my porch hadn’t been a gang banger looking to terrorize honest, upstanding citizens such as myself and in fact had been a young mother from a few blocks over who it turns out I’d actually met at church on more than one occasion and who’s three year old just needed to use the bathroom, but things happen in the fog of war and next time it really could be a pimped out Blood or Shark with gold teeth and shiny rims looking for houses to rob or kids to traffic, and if (let’s be real, when) that does happen you can’t hesitate for even a second, or you and your loved ones would end up dead, face down in puddles of their own blood. And wouldn’t that be the real tragedy? Hypothetically? It would have been the desire to ward off that horrific slaughter that would have led to my accidentally (but legally) shooting an innocent girl 35 times and inadvertently killing her. Sure, that would be regrettable, but my intentions were far from what you’d call evil. If anything, they were honorable and even heroic.

So I think we can agree that the idea of “evil” in terms of intent is vague at best, but if you were to try to define it in terms of cause and effect it’s actually even harder to pin down because the entire idea of effect presumes a definitive conclusion from which moral value can be determined. Like, say I rob a bank. Say I do it like Clooney in Out of Sight (except for the getting caught part). I walk into a bank, say to a teller that a random dude with an open briefcase is my partner and he has a gun that he’ll start using if she doesn’t give me all the money in her till, which she does, handing over a couple thousand dollars. Nobody gets hurt, there was never any actual chance anyone could be hurt, and the bank is out a pittance that is covered by insurance. But that poor teller is pretty shook up. She has nightmares for months that lead her to seek counseling and she ends up quitting her job. That all sounds bad, right? But what if she never really liked that job and was staying more for security than anything; what if the jarring experience of the robbery inspires her to finally pursue her dream because life is short and nowhere is really that secure and if not now, when? And what if she regularly stopped at one of those funky little coffee places for hipster trash on her way to therapy and struck up a friendship with a cute barista with anxiety issues and they bonded over their shared trauma and the friendship deepened into love and they got married? That only happens if I rob the bank. And, fuck it, let’s take it one step further, what if I hadn’t robbed the bank and the teller had never started therapy and didn’t meet the barista and he (yeah, baristas can be men, it’s 2025 getcherheadouttayerass!) has a series of escalating anxiety attacks that end with him taking his own life? Does that make robbing a bank somehow morally virtuous? Not really, but it’s also inarguable that the teller spending the rest of her (single) life at a mediocre job and the barista committing suicide is a much sadder outcome than a bank temporarily having less cash on hand.

These are the kind of weighty moral and philosophical issues that Night Man asks us to wrestle with.

Ronnie: I think this marks a turning point of sorts with the show because it’s really the first episode you can classify as a superhero adventure. Sure, he’d thwarted bad guys before, Night Man had, but he hadn’t fought with a supervillain, i.e., a criminal with some sort of special ability. This could be a Spider-Man comic with the Chameleon in the place of E. Haskell Bridges is what I’m saying. Now, does Night Man do a good job of putting forth a superhero story? Not really. The end “fight” is shitty even by this show’s standards and E. Haskell Bridges is more smarmy than scary. The result is a confusing hour of television mired in preposterous production decisions. AKA an episode of Night Man. But I do hope to see more supervillains in the show s we continue. Of course, the biggest supervillain in “Face to Face” happens to be a fucking guy with TINY HANDS, am I right?

That famous San Francisco fog

Chris: I basically agree that this is the first episode to feel like a terrible superhero show instead of some other kind of terrible show. There’s a guy with a specific grudge who gains a special ability through quack science that he uses to try and ruin the people he had a grudge against. In that sense, it resembles a professional hour-long television drama. But my god, the lack of basic filmmaking skills is breathtaking. It’s not just that there were shots out of focus, there was a two shot (you can tell I’m a savvy cinephile by the way I casually use industry slang like “two shot”) where Night Man is talking to someone and he’s out of focus and the person he’s talking to is in focus, and then that other person starts talking and the fucking camera focuses on Night Man. Do you understand what I’m saying? The shot started out of focus and then, as the scene progressed and the action moved to the area of the shot that was in focus, the dp changed the focus. Who does that? That was the best take they had? This wasn’t some fancy mobile True Detective oner (man, I’m throwing all sorts of jargon around!) that follows Night Man as he navigates some complicated geography, and it’s not some lengthy static shot where the actors are moving all around in the frame. It’s a ten second or whatever medium, two. One of the easiest shots in the world. And they fucked it up twice in that ten or whatever seconds! It’s madness!

Odds & Ends

-I strongly believe if Bill Clinton never played saxophone on Arsenio this show would’ve never existed.
-”In the future, someone might be able to alter his features enough to look like a totally different person” – the doctor’s entire explanation for why Haskell can change his face, hair and height
-the House of Soul becomes the House of SWING with the first appearance of Big Time Operator, a band you’ll learn to know and love
-Haskell practices his Charlie Dann impression by saying “hey Frank, you’re under arrest”, putting the episode’s Frank count into the stratosphere
-The funniest thing about the Trump cameo is that it’s completely disjointed from the rest of the episode. The characters never refer to Trump by name, for instance, and the actual cameo footage is even more awkwardly staged and shot than usual. He’s clearly never on “set” with another person.
-“Ironically, the guest of honor became the victim of a crime.” Is that actually ironic? Is it?

Chris: Oh boy, so, we’re actually doing this? It’s not like when we watched an episode of Krypton or Superboy or one of those other Super shows as a comparison/measuring stick for Lois and Clark? We’re actually going to watch all of Night Man, the 1997 syndicated superhero show staring Professional Stunt-Man turned Actor and People Magazine’s “Least Charismatic Man Alive” of 1998 Matt McColm as a hunky saxiphoner and kicker-of-men who gets struck by lightning and develops the ability to read people’s evil thoughts (presumably in a later episode someone checks his back for the switch that allows him to only hear their good thoughts) while simultaneously coming upon a kind of 33¢ Store Iron Man suit that gives him the power of flight maybe some other stuff that I can’t remember? That Night Man? The show so cheap that they reuse stock suiting up footage multiple times in the same episode and green screen matting so egregious that it seems like post-modern commentary on cheap green screen matting in grade Z syndicated UHF Saturday afternoon burn-off schlock? The show based on the hero from Malibu Comics, a publisher whose name sounds like what a lazy, burned-out writer would call a comics publisher in a show like Night Man?

All right then. Fine. Let’s go ahead and get it over with. Night Man episode 02 (or 03, depending on how pedantic you want to get about production schedules) “Whole Lotta Shakin…” opens with Night Man’s crusty dad the ex-cop hanging out with a pretty young Scientist Lady whose recently deceased husband was a police officer that Night Man’s dad trained. We learn this through dialogue that is in no way awkward or obviously expository, and it has no bearing on the plot save to explain why these two have any kind of relationship and attempt to allay any fears viewers may have that the old man is going to assault the Scientist Lady sexually. Night Man’s dad is about to leave when a bunch of ninja looking dudes with confusing accents bust in and fuck shit up real good. If you’re anything like me (and I am), you flashback to the vile Die Hard parody from the late in the first season of Lois & Clark and a chill runs down (or up, YMMV) your spine. But those fears are almost immediately put to rest when the Scientist Lady punches one of the ninjas square in the face, Night Man’s dad gets shot and the remaining ninjas hightail it outta there having successfully stolen some of her work. So the good news is, “Whole Lotta Shakin…” isn’t a Die Hard after all. The bad news it’s a Die Hard With a Vengeance, which has the virtue of being far less of a cliche, but still stinks.

Anywho, Night Man and his male companion Raleigh show up at the crime scene on account of Night Man’s dad getting plugged and are just in time to see a press conference wherein a reporter from a European network with a confusing accent asks some stupid question that allows us to recognize that he’s one of the ninja dudes and also hips him to Night Man who is immediately suspicious, not because he picks up any stray nasty thoughts or anything, he just doesn’t like the cut of ol boy’s jib. This, to me, does not seem like an adequate reason to start a vigilante surveillance operation. But it’s good enough for Night Man, which also apparently makes it good enough for Raleigh, who makes a smug comment about how the Eurotrash reporter with the queer accent is in for a world of hurt. I’m not a mathematician, but by my count this is only Night Man’s second adventure and as such maybe that kind of shitty, snarky attitude is a bit premature. Don’t get me wrong, his assumption that Night Man would save the day is right on the money, but the two of them only just met a week or so earlier and that kind of early, unearned confidence is frankly unbecoming. I’m glad you made a friend, Raleigh, and it’s great that you guys can do your crime-fighting together, but there’s no reason to be a dick.

You’ve gotta be a really old school homophobe if you find the sight of Little Richard on TV scary or threatening.

Ronnie: Yep, we’re doing this, and it’s going to get worse before we get Kim Coates hamming it up as Night Man’s archnemesis. (That’s in Season 2.) “Whole Lotta Shakin’” is in many ways a typical episode of Night Man, by which I mean it’s insane nonsense that bridges the gap between stupid 80s television and the superhero shows in days of yore. There’s just as much Fall Guy DNA in this as there is any superhero adventure program.

I would be remiss not to mention the opening narration that follows the opening title sequence. I don’t know why it’s added because I think the credits are pretty self-explanatory. The narrator intones “Johnny Domino was one of San Francisco’s hottest young jazz musicians. But fate, and a cosmic event, were about to change his life forever. What the doctors told him seemed impossible.”

“John, your brain has managed to acquire the capacity to pick up certain frequencies, like a radio.”
“But doc, I’m only hearing bad stuff.”
“Yes, exactly. You’re tuned to the frequency of evil.”

Raleigh then explains what the Night Man suit can accomplish: “A belt which allows him to overcome gravity. Fabrics which are virtually bulletproof. A stealth mode which makes him seem to disappear, a holographic display which makes him appear to be where he ain’t.” Viewers of the show will be inundated with this introduction so I thought I’d offer an encapsulation for the readers.

Night Man, he flies like a moron

Onto the episode itself, which is a good encapsulation of the dumbshit adventure story the series is going to feed us for the next 21 weeks. 21? Jesus. “Whole Lotta Shakin’…”, the first but not last episode to be named after a song or song lyric, is broadly about goons using earthquakes to hold Bay City hostage. Wait, didn’t the intro call Johnny one of San Francisco’s hottest young jazz musicians? Well, yes. The thing about the show is it’s not good, and once you get on that page with the show a lot of it makes more sense. Their herald, their Surfer Silver if you will, is Little Richard portraying “Jubilee Jones”, which sounds like a racist character Will Eisner drew in the 50s. He goes on the television and tells the residents of Bay City when earthquakes are going to happen. The lead goon, some combination of South African, German and Die Hardese, at one point says to Johnny “I have a strong impression another earthquake is going to happen. That’s why I drink my martinis shaken, not stirred.” I share this because I thought you’d like to have a better grasp on what we’re dealing with. Alongside all this nonsense, a little girl needs a new kidney, and you bet your bottom dollar she’s gonna get it.

Chris: I’m glad you mentioned Little Richard’s involvement in this episode because I think it’s a great example of the kind of foundational incoherence Night Man and other syndicated straight-to-landfill filler like it rested on. This is, as we said, the second episode, which is to say it’s probably the first real episode they made of the show after the pilot was picked up. It’s their you had my curiosity, now you have my attention opportunity to demonstrate why Night Man would be a show worth returning to week after week. It’s almost as big a pitch as a pilot in that respect, and you want to put your best foot forward. The good people behind the scenes of Night Man decided that their “best foot” involved naming the episode after the beloved hit song “Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On” and stunt casting beloved rock and roll pioneer Little Richard in a supporting role.

Here’s what I mean when I say things like “foundationally incoherent.” Night Man is a television show that debuted in the fall of 1997, “Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On” is a rock and roll standard written in 1955, best known from its 1957 recording by incestuous pedophile Jerry Lee Lewis (or so wikipedia says). If you’re trying to entice viewers to embrace your hip, sexy, 90’s karate action comic book superhero show, what are you doing making the name a reference to a 40 year old song and making your big cameo a guy who A. was also a big deal 40 years ago and B. doesn’t really have anything to do with that song? It’s not that Little Richard never recorded “Whole Lotta Shakin”, but the internet informs me that it had been recorded by well over a hundred different artists by 1997, including (allegedly) Gary Busey. Look, obviously Little Richard is an historical figure of incalculable significance, and he did record “Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On” (though it doesn’t merit a reference on the song’s wiki page), but what the fuck does any of that have anything to do with Night Man?

Like all good crossovers, what starts as a clash based on a misunderstanding ends on a team-up.

Who is this supposed to be appealing to? What does the venn diagram of people excited by a Little Richard cameo and people interested in a syndicated superhero show based on a character nobody knows from a publisher so obscure that its fans regularly got their asses kicked by the editorial staff of Wizard Magazine (IYKYK) with acting best described as community theater understudy level? And how does the fact that the A plot turns out to be an elaborate Die Hard With a Vengeance riff where the villains are causing earthquakes as a way to drive people out of the city and divert law enforcement so they can loot unmanned banks fit into that equation? And none of this even touches the B plot around the little girl who needs a new kidney. Who do the makers of Night Man imagine are tuning in and what do they think those viewers want to see? Because this just feels like someone wrote a bunch of words on a bunch of ping-pong balls that were dumped into a rotating crate and then someone else picked a half dozen balls out at random and tried to fit them all into the same script.

Ronnie: I’d like to discuss the kidney transplant subplot because that’s something that’s in the episode. Not only is it disjointed from the rest of the show, the connective tissue being the seismologist whom the criminals rob has a daughter who needs a new kidney, it’s hilarious. Night Man figures out the head of the organ board is selling organs to the highest bidder, gaming the system, as evidenced by the fact that he’s got enough money to afford a fancy car. Before Night Man intervenes, it’s Frank who uses his lack of authority to pressure the guy into confessing. He bitches to Johnny and Raleigh and the latter hacks into DA COMPUTER and finds out Dr. Boone has been selling this shit. Rather than let Frank shake the guy down, Night Man laser visions up Booth’s car and also threatens to throw him down from up in the sky. It’s hilarious to see the shoddy explosion effects–think the stock fire in Aqua Teen Hunger Force–but also it made me think of an alternate better premise for the series. Think about it: a bitter ex-cop still wants the action of being on the force. His doofus jazz musician son lucks into a supersuit. Johnny becomes Frank’s instrument of revenge. Revenge against the criminal community, revenge against the cops who put him out to pasture, revenge against widespread anti-Greek attitudes. Johnny’s too zoned out from smack to quarrel with his father’s agenda. Then yada yada yada, son realizes dad is out of control, father fights son, it’s all very dramatic. Oh yeah, and that’s the end of the subplot which doesn’t connect to anything else. Dr. Boone is threatened with murder so he rescinds his rescinding of the little girl’s kidney. She gets the kidney, all is well. What the hell does this have to do with earthquakes? Beats me.

The dazzling special effects of 1997

Odds & Ends

-Also playing at the House of Soul: Marc Bonilla and the Dragonchoir
-Monday: “Great news little girl, turns out we can get you that new kidney you need tomorrow!” Tuesday: “Ah, shit. Never mind. Sorry about that, turns out that kidney is going to someone else.” Night Man walked so One Tree Hill could fly.
-”Hey, aren’t you…” Night Man to Jubilee Jones, suggesting that there are a surplus of 60+ year old black men with pencil mustaches, gigantic bouffant wigs and bright spangly dress shirts out walking around Bay City at any given moment.
-The seismologist pins down the criminals’ accents to either Scottish or Irish, or maybe also South African. And they only spoke German. Tower of Babel filmmaking strikes again!
-”I heard them downloading something from my computer” – you can HEAR a download? I guess…
-Bay City has a female mayor. Good for them!

1X04 “I LEFT MY HEART”

Chris: Remember the time they did that Night Man that looked like it was gonna be a Die Hard riff but then it turned out to be a Die Hard With A Vengeance riff? Well I guess they’ve run out of ideas since then because it’s back to that well with “I Left My Heart”, but this time, instead of defaulting to the cliched Die Hard With a Vengeance riff, the makers of Night Man decided instead to pattern the episode after the earlier, less financially successful film in the series, Die Hard (released in 1988, Die Hard grossed an estimated 140 million dollars, as opposed to 95’s Die Hard With A Vengeance which grossed 366 million. It’s interesting to note that Die Hard was actually the lowest grossing and therefore worst entry into the entire series). This time, instead of playing a citywide game of cat-and-mouse with the villains, our hero is trapped with them inside a skyscraper during a fancy party.

We open with a little girl gazing lovely at Johnny (Night Man’s civilian alter ego) as he plays a sexy sax solo I think maybe just for her. Her chaperone appears to take her away but before she can the little girl says something about how when she’s old enough she’s gonna go to his club and see him again, when he asks her how old she is she says she’s thirteen (I would have guessed eleven but whatever) and both of the adults laugh because there’s an obvious sexual connotation to what she’s saying that’s extremely inappropriate and making them uncomfortable. Well, it made me uncomfortable. It’s worth mentioning that this episode aired in September of 1997, three months after the beloved sequel-that-no-one-involved-regretted-making-and-movie-I-saw-opening-night Speed 2: Cruise Control which also had a subplot about a little blonde girl developing an unhealthy sexual fixation on a boring block of wood. Though in that case, the block was played by Jason Patric, an actual actor who is given nothing to work with yet still managed to convey a mixture of wary caution and parental concern whenever she’s around (I’d describe the tenor of his performance as “Let’s get you to safety, don’t touch me“.

The bowtie makes Raleigh look like a member of Nation of Islam. That’d be a good twist: Night Man has to work with a follower of Farrakhan. Very hip, very 90s.

Now, does this plot similarity combined with the fact that Speed 2 is itself a Die Hard riff that’s the sequel to another Die Hard riff mean that this episode is actually more of an homage to that critical and commercial smash slash movie where Willem Dafoe uses leeches to fight his cancer? Yes, it probably does. But that only matters to losers, academics and quizzo enthusiasts (redundant?). It’s also important to know that, as clever and influential as Speed 2 was, there was never a scene where Jason Patric or Sandy Bullock used a hologram of themselves playing saxophone to lure a thug into leaping over the side of a building in the same fashion as Wile E Coyote might run full speed into a wall that he himself just painted the image of a tunnel onto moments earlier. Advantage Night Man.

Ronnie: The episode begins, as it usually does, with aerial shots of the city set to the smoothest of jazz. That’s because Johnny provides saxomophone for a fancy party. Said party is to inaugurate a fancy plastic surgeon office recently infused with cash. Mr. Cruz, in the employ of a dying drug lord, suggests to the doctor that they “inaugurate this facility in a truly meaningful way” by operating on someone. Tonight. While the doctor is in fancy clothes. The doctor blows him off but takes the proposal more seriously once Cruz threatens his wife and daughter and shows off a pallet of explosives. Cue Die Hard ripoff in which a jazz musician is all that stands in the way of terrorists’ macabre plan.

It’s always a full moon on Night Man… for some reason.

“This OR isn’t equipped for transplant surgery.” “We’ll see.” I love that response; it reminds me of Frank on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia saying “he’ll adapt” when it’s pointed out Charlie doesn’t know how to read. “I Left My Heart” adds a personal wrinkle to the Die Hard ripoff setup, replacing the Bonnie Bedelia aspect (because jazz musicians can’t be tied down, man), by which I mean the terrorists want to transplant Johnny’s heart into Jose Escobar’s body. What does it say that the jazz musician’s heart is the healthiest at the entire party? Dude has a hologram he employs when he’s nodded off from heroin usage and can’t perform at the House of Soul. Henry Darrow plays Escobar and it’s a sweet gig because he’s in bed nearly the entire time.

Most preposterously, when the narco terrorists can’t find Johnny, they pick up the second best heart match: Frank Dominus, Johnny’s dad. Look, no offense, but if Earl Hollimon is the second most compatible heart then you’ve got a party full of people with congenital heart defects or something. He’s a 60 year old man! I like when Night Man is sweating a guy for information (holding up in the air and threatening to drop him, a classic Night Man technique), the guy mentions Johnny’s dad and Night Man goes “they got Frank?”, as though he is on first name terms with the guy. In fact, everyone in this show’s calling him Frank, never “Mr. Dominus” or “Dominus” or “hey, old man”. It’s almost as if Night Man anticipated my college drinking game and introduced as many uses of the name “Frank” as possible. Fortunately before my liver fails due to phantom pains, Night Man dispatches the suitcase bomb with some of the worst CGI the late 90s has to offer and saves his father–er, Frank, from danger. He also scares Escobar so bad he has a heart attack and dies (“El Diablo!” sez Escobar when he looks at Night Man’s visage, which, fair). All in a day’s work.

Do you see? Do you see the shit we have to deal with?

Chris: It would not be an understatement to say that I am astonished at the ineptness of the effects work on this show. And not just the effects work, the entire production feels sub-community theater. Am I crazy or are a bunch of closeups on Night Man out of focus? It’s the craziest thing. There would be these super tight, dutch angled closeups right on Night Man’s puss, chin to forehead, and as God is my witness, his face is out of focus. There isn’t even any kind of background either! It’s just black back there! Like someone hung a big sheet of construction paper right behind his head! How do you shoot literally the only object in front of the camera out of focus? Who does that? I’m honestly a little concerned here because the thing about Lois & Clark was it was professionaly bad. It had shaky acting, the writing was (at best) uneven, and the effects were eighth assed, but by God it was on a network. Shitting on Lois & Clark was (as the kids say) punching up. Taking shots at Night Man feels like ripping apart the drawings my 8 year old cousin did in sharpie of aliens attacking a city on the Amazon box the birthday gift his mom gave me came in. And, to be clear, those drawings were much more convincing than any of the effects in “I Left My Heart.” If you ever read this Henry, don’t ever think I’d disparage your work.

He sued the Night Man production for bedsores incurred while filming “I Left My Heart”; the production settled out of court.

Ronnie: It reminds me of a workprint. These special effects belong in a workprint, not a finished product. Remember when someone leaked X-Men Origins: Wolverine‘s workprint and it was a lot of unfinished effects and Hugh Jackman falling onto gym mats? It’s like that. I wonder if you also notice the amount of slow motion around when Night Man does anything; boy, that’s an obnoxious choice that never gets better with time. We’re watching these from DVDs (I gave Chris the set as a gift one year) and I think it’d be hilarious to see Night Man upscaled to 4K, or even regular blu-ray. You could see everything and it’s hideous!

Odds & Ends

-On Tubi this episode is rated TV-14. I cannot fathom why.
-”This is a dangerous city, doctor. Rape, torture, murder. Those are just the socially acceptable deviations.” Since when are rape, torture and murder “socially acceptable”? What’s worse than those? Cutting off the mattress tag?
-Johnny ducks out of the party briefly to provide sax at his dad’s birthday party at The Blarney Stone. I guess there are no Greek pubs in Bay City.
-Johnny keeps his suit in his spare saxophone case.
-Night Man causes an elevator to fall 40 floors, proving once again that Night Man Loves Killing People.
-Another Night Man kill: a guy falls off a roof trying to tackle the Johnny Domino jazz hologram. What an ignominious end, right folks?
-”You missed your calling as a Marx Brother.” “I like the Marx Brothers.” “My point is they’re all dead.” – Amazing dialogue from a time before ChatGPT

First things first: the opening credit sequence is awesome. Watch it for yourself here. You’ll notice the amazing choices they make with this, such as a superhero show first showing the hero in his civilian guise driving around in his car and then using a device to create a saxophone playing hologram of himself. Only after those things do we see him as an actual superhero. The opening titles make you realize you’re not only watching prime 90s cheese, you’re watching something special, as the pilot bears out. The dramatic pilot can be an excellent thesis statement for a drama or it can be a mixed bag that has to serve too many masters (setting up characters, a plot and a formula for the show to use, including something exciting enough to get people to tune in in the first place). Night Man circumvents the established options and goes instead for insane nonsense.

Before Hologram 2Pac was even a twinkle in someone’s eye…

Nominally, “World Premiere” does succeed at introducing Night Man, who he is, what his powers consist of, and who his supporting cast is. It does so in such a weird way, such that you would not be wrong to think professional writers were not involved. But they were, is the thing. The series was created and the pilot written by Glen A. Larson, prolific 80s TV creator. He created Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider, The Fall Guy and most importantly Manimal. We have plenty of time to dissect his role in these proceedings so let’s get down to it. Johnny Domino (Matt McColm) is a jazz saxophonist in Bay City/San Francisco (they’re inconsistent on the name, but you better believe the Golden Gate Bridge is a frequent sight) who is bestowed superpowers when he’s hit by lightning while in a cable car. Those powers? He doesn’t have to sleep anymore and he can hear evil thoughts. That’s it. His other abilities come from a military supersuit designed in part by Raleigh (Derek Webster), his African-American heterosexual lifemate with whom he becomes entangled over the course of this pilot.

I’m going to turn this over to Chris now because while I’ve seen the pilot multiple times, he’s only seen it the once so I’m interested in his gut reaction to the myriad happenings. Take it away, buddy.

Chris: So you know how if you go to school for long enough you end up with a copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? Maybe you were assigned it for an intro lit class at college, or it could have been for a high school AP English class. If you’re really unlucky you get your copy from one of your uncles on your fourteenth birthday even though you made it abundantly clear that what you really wanted was a VHS copy of Batman Returns or R.E.M.’s Automatic For the People. In my dad’s case it was the summer between high school and college when someone threw a package with his name on it through a window in the living room of his parents’ house. When he opened it he found a copy of Portrait, along with Mrs. Dalloway, Heart of Darkness and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Also a half dozen tootsie rolls that he ended up sharing with his family.

You also know how if you actually end up having to read the thing (my apologies) someone inevitably pops up to inform you, unprompted, that if you really want to get your head spun around by Joyce you should give Ulysses a try, but then a second person appears to remind the first person that Finnegan’s Wake makes Ulysses look like Green Eggs and Ham which I guess makes Portrait like one of those heavy cardboard books that  only have captionless pictures of bunnies and were designed more to be gummed then actually looked at? You know how that happens? I’m bringing all this up to say that Night Man is to Lois & Clark as Finnegan’s Wake is to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It’s a mind-bending, sanity testing, extended freak out presumingly intended only for people who are tripping or criminally insane. I don’t know if it’s actually possible to critique or summarize it in any conventional way; I tried a couple of times and kept getting nose bleeds and passing out. So what I’ve done is to lock myself in a dark room with the windows blacked out and dictated my thoughts into my phone for as long as I can before the darkness seeps into my brain through my eyes, ears and mouth and I tumble into the abyss once more.

Street car jazz is the best kind of jazz.

Anyway. Like Ronnie said, Night Man is about how professional white guy saxophoner and unwilling performer of cunnilingus John Germaine gets struck by lightning and supercharges his brain Lucy style so that he can hear the bad things other people are thinking. He then hooks up with a nerd on the run from the government because they want to use the Iron Man style suit of armor he designed as a weapon and the nerd can’t have that on his conscience. They meet when John (or Johnny) karate kicks a fed through the passenger side window of a car and incapacitates him thus gaining the nerd’s undying loyalty. Or maybe it was a mob guy he kicked, or a triad member, or Yakuza or Murder Inc or Hezbollah. There are a lot of folks after the suit is what I’m saying. There’s the C.I.A. because The X-Files, and then all the ethnically diverse non-American bad guys who spend most of their time in their mountain lair sitting around a table not unlike the one at the beginning of Naked Gun,squabbling with one another and sending goons on errands.

Also, Johnny is able to kick that window because he’s a world class karate person and his dad wishes he would go back to teaching that instead of following his life-long dream of being a white guy saxaphoner in an all-white jazz band that plays at jazz clubs catering to exclusively white audiences. But a black woman runs the club behind the scenes people, thus giving the black nerd someone to flirt with in the time honored “hey look, we’re the only two sexually compatible non-white people on this show so we may as well do this” plot that’s been enriching African-American culture on television and in movies for decades.Look, I just, it’s all too much, you know? Too much! this could be a book.

Ronnie:  Night Man and the pilot especially are difficult to write about for the simple reason that there’s so much to discuss. Like, I had legitimate anxiety during the creation of this article because I feared we weren’t going to be comprehensive enough in documenting the insanity that occurs over the course of these 90 minutes. I still have it a bit. That said, I’ll try my best. The pilot tries to accomplish two goals: provide an origin story for Night Man and tell a story about arms dealing. It does do both but the quality is questionable.

First things first: Johnny Domino, whose real last name is “Dominus” (he changed it because of pervasive anti-Greek sentiment), is the house saxophone man at the House of Soul. Jessica owns the place, and you might recognize the actress Felecia Bell as Sisko’s wife on Deep Space 9. She rarely is given much to do in the plots of these things and her character was eliminated entirely come Season 2. (More on that another time.) Frank Dominus, Johnny’s father, is a busybody ex-cop who always manages to find his way into crime scenes, often helping Lt. Charlie Dann (Michael Woods, Private Eye) out. Dann’s main characterization beyond some surface level cop gruffness is the frequency with which he says the name “Frank”. It’s to the point that it became a drinking game amongst my ne’er do well friends and I. You’ll get shitfaced; over 90 minutes I counted at least 13 “Frank”s.

“Look, just be happy we didn’t mold nipples onto this thing. We’re well into the Schumacher Batman era of things, after all.”

The scene where lightning bestows Johnny with his powers is pretty great. He sort of does a full body dry heave while purple lighting shoots through him and he immediately demonstrates his gift. At first he uses “deductive reasoning” to determine a bag left unattended on the cable car is suspicious. Once lightning’d, however, he’s able to see an incriminating flashback confirming that the bag is indeed a bomb. That these two events–the lightning and the bomb–are unrelated but happen to happen within minutes of each other is why Glen A. Larson made the big bucks. It’s like if Peter Parker was bitten by the spider while failing to stop the burglar. Patrick Macnee of Avengers fame lends some credibility to the production as Johnny’s psychiatrist, who thusly explains: “your brain has developed the capacity to perceive and process thought patterns, much as a radio receives frequencies of sounds.” “Uh huh, except what I’m hearing is all bad.” “Yes, Johnny, exactly. You’re in-tuned to the frequency of evil.” If you don’t catch it the first time, don’t worry: it’s in about half of the first season’s opening title sequence. Stunningly stupid explanation that requires use of the 10% of the brain canard that has been discredited since forever but is common in fiction (see Deathstroke or Lucy from Lucy). If you’re wondering how a cable car lightning storm bequeaths this ability to an ordinary jazz musician, know that there are indeed “lore” episodes of this show.

Glen A. Larson considered piping in audience applause just for Hasselhoff’s reveal but then decided it’d be “confusing” and “disorienting”.

As for the defense contractor shit, well, the Night Man costume is some nerds coming up with military applications for their research. Chris’ Naked Gun comparison is pretty apt; the most striking buyer besides Babu Bhatt from Seinfeld is Ric Young as “Chang”, a Chinese man with some sort of diplomatic immunity. Young plays Chang like a Republic serial villain; all he’s missing is a Fu Manchu or actually being Fu Manchu. The one weapon for sale that Night Man does not add to his repertoire is the neutron gun, which upon zapping people Raptures them, leaving only their clothing. Note that Night Man has no moral objection to it, because he does use the gun on two of Chang’s goons. This superhero killed people before it was in vogue to do so. Raleigh seemingly gets a mixing job at the House of Soul–he has a line about working at the college radio station?–and that’s how he joins the supporting cast. Presumably subsequent episodes will have Johnny alternate between jazz musicianing and fighting crime with Raleigh as his Lucius Fox. I initially said Alfred but I don’t think he’s doing Johnny’s laundry or anything. Even in the late 90s that’d be a bad look.

Our hero, ladies and gentlemen!

Now that we’ve recapped the plot more or less, what do you think of the show’s level of craft, Chris? Feel free to compare it to Lois & Clark, which ended right when Night Man was starting up.

Chris: So there was this tiny little pocket of time in the mid 90’s that stretched into the very early 00’s where video game companies would put out these CD Rom computer games that incorporated an extensive amount of live action footage into the game play. So like, you could play a Wing Commander game where you were Mark Hammill and your best buddy was Biff from Back to the Future and your nemesis was Malcolm McDowell and you’re in a love triangle between adult film legend Ginger Lynn Allen and Jennifer MacDonald, a woman who doesn’t have a wikipedia entry but who IMDB informs me was on an episode of The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. where she played a woman named Tina. So she’s got that going for her. These games were called “Interactive Movies” and were a lot of fun. There’d be little dialogue scenes where someone would say something and you’d pick how Hammill would respond which would lead to different reactions and different outcomes and then you’d fly around having space-ship fights and at the end you get to do a genocide on an entire race of cat-man aliens, one of whom was your best friend.

The bad guys reside in a castle because why not.

I bring this up, Ronald, because you asked me about Night Man’s level of craft and I’d have to put it just below “Interactive CD-Rom Sci-Fi Movie Video Game”. Now, this isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, Wing Commander III cost somewhere between three and four million dollars to produce, which is probably more than was spent on the Night Man pilot (eyeballing it I’d guess Village Road Show sank upwards of eight or even nine hundred dollars into this bad boy), and I personally have a nostalgic fondness for that era of cheap-o syndicated television. But man, this show, uh, it makes some choices. There was almost an abstract Brechtian quality to some of the scenes, or something you’d see in black box theater. Like, Night Man would be standing on a bridge talking to some guy, but with nothing behind them but a pitch back curtain and the “bridge” would consist of a red railing that ran parallel across the screen about where a guardrail might be. And in other scenes, they’d be on the bridge, and it was the phoniest baloniest CG green screen bridge you ever did see. I don’t even understand why most of those scenes were on bridges, if I’m being honest. If they needed somewhere high-up they could have gone to some building on a back lot somewhere. If they needed water go to a beach or river, there must be some of those nearby, and if you absolutely have to do your scene on a bridge, just make it a smaller bridge that you can actually afford to close down and shoot for an afternoon. It makes no sense.

And as for the acting. Look. Maybe I was a little hard on Dean Cain.

Ronnie: It should be said Matt McColm (Johnny Domino) is an accomplished stuntman, working on John Wick, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Problem Child, but actor he is not. Every time he’s in a scene that doesn’t end in him roundhouse kicking something he struggles. Given I’ve seen most of the series before, if not all of it, I can say with some certainty this isn’t a learning curve situation where he comes out competent the other end. Clearly Glen A. Larson prioritized somebody who could fill out the suit and manage the stunt load, with acting a distant second or third consideration. The other actors aren’t much better. Derek Webster’s Raleigh is probably the best of them, but he’s still pretty green, this being pretty early on in his career. (One of his prior roles? A guest spot on, you guessed it, M.A.N.T.I.S.) The rest of the supporting cast, whatever. We’ll have more time to talk about them as this column goes on. I just wanna say that the guy who plays Lt. Charlie Dann, Michael Woods, has two modes: gruff and gruffer. Makes sense his last gig before this one was as a period piece private investigator; that series also starred Josh Brolin. But look, this isn’t about acting. This show is about ideas, like how it’d be a fun idea for Johnny to fail to get laid because his love interest finds a woman’s dead body in his loft. I’m serious, that’s how the pilot ends. Johnny and love interest go to his place for a nightcap, only to find the evil VP of EvilTech or whatever sprawled on his furniture, having been killed by the venomous robot spider displayed earlier in the hour. I like to think the cops are used to jazz musicians winding up with women who pass under mysterious circumstances. “Yeah, we got another 342–D.B. in jazz musician’s home…”

I’d like to say the flying gets less stupid looking, but that’d be a lie.

We hope you enjoyed our first crack at Night Man. We’ve got, uh, 42 more episodes and 21 more of these columns to go, so expect by the end of it for us to have expended more digital ink on this series than anyone else in human history. That’s exciting, isn’t it, Chris, going where no man has gone before. Who gives a shit about being another William Shakespeare expert when you could be the foremost/only Night Man scholar?

Odds & Ends

-There’s quite a bit of interesting casting here. Originally I said stunt casting but that’s not quite right. David Hasselhoff, of Knight Rider fame, is clearly Glen A. Larson cashing in a favor. (Night Man says “life’s a hassle, isn’t it?” after throwing him out a window, a quip even McBain would reject for being too on the nose.) Daniel Dae Kim plays one of Raleigh’s collaborators on the supersuit. You’ve got the aforementioned Brian George (Babu Bhatt) as an arms buyer and singer Taylor Dayne as Johnny’s love interest sing Carla Day. She really stretched her acting muscles with this one, eh?
-Night Man fighting and killing David Hasselhoff has a subtext to it: Knight Rider is over, now it’s time for a Night MAN. That is, if you believe Glen A. Larson knows what subtext is…
-I didn’t keep count of this but the amount of times Johnny is referred to as a “musician” in a derogatory fashion is staggering. Further episodes may bear this out that this version of America is a caste society in which musicians are akin to the untouchables. In any event  it leads to funny lines like “I cannot place my life in the hands of a… saxophone player!”
-“Raleigh, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship” says Frank to Raleigh. Fuck you, you’re not allowed to do Casablanca. Especially not as the line of dialogue that precedes an act break.
-It should be noted Night Man does not actually choose his superhero name; the VP of the evil weapons company suggests it to him.
-The anti-gravity belt is said to “unshackle man from the laws of gravity”, but it makes them fly. The show doesn’t seem to know the difference or care about it if they do know.

NEXT: Little Richard guest stars in “Whole Lotta Shakin’…” and Johnny is at risk of having his heart stolen–literally–by an aging gangster in “I Left My Heart”.

Starring Debra Messing (Will & Grace), Prey’s logline is basically “what if serial killers were a different species?”. It’s a little more complicated than that but no less stupid. For one thing, it misinterprets “survival of the fittest” as “survival of the strongest”, as opposed to what Darwin really meant, which was that the species that adapts the best to its surroundings and circumstances flourishes. The pilot begins with the apprehension of a serial killer/rapist named Randall Lynch. Debra Messing plays Sloan Parker, an anthropologist who works under Dr. Ann Coulter. Yes, you read that correctly, and it’s not some gag on my part. Her boss is named Ann Coulter and it’s distracting and bizarre. Ann Coulter was a known quantity by 1998; High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, her first book, came out then. This leads to two possibilities: someone knew or knew of her and wanted to give her a shout out or someone knew/knew of her and wanted to depict her brutally slain by a serial killer. Spoilers.

Even if it’s the latter, that’s still odd because…why? It’s jarring. She’s portrayed as Messing’s mentor, so if it’s a Michael Critchton-esque dig that doesn’t scan. In any event it took me out of this stupid, stupid program. After Randall Lynch inevitably escapes custody and kills Ann Coulter, Debra Messing discovers that something’s off about this serial killer/rapist: he’s not human. Literally. You know how chimps are 1.1% different from humans? Well, Randall Lynch is 1.6%. Messing and her colleague, some white guy, theorize that Lynch is part of a species that is to humans what humans were to neanderthals, and that global warming triggered their arrival. Thanks a lot, global warming!

She doesn’t even resemble the Creepshow skeleton so she can’t be Ann Coulter.

It’s all pretty silly and po faced, reminiscent of The X-Files but not nearly as good. That definitely seems to be what Prey is trying to evoke. There’s even a shady informant character posing as an FBI agent who turns out to be a 1.6%er as well. But unlike Randall Lynch, “Tom Daniels” doesn’t murder and rape people. He’s trying to prevent his cohort from doing that, establishing him as One Of The Good Ones. I haven’t watched any of the other 12 episodes of this misbegotten mess but I assume there’ll be some sexual tension will they won’t they between the two. It’s got a better chance of happening than Messing shacking up with Larry Drake or Frankie Faison, both series regulars given little to nothing to do in this pilot. Before you ask, no, Larry Drake’s character is neither r-worded nor is he a Dr. Giggles. He’s not even a Durant.

I’ve blathered on long enough for now, Chris. What are your impressions of this show that treated Lois & Clark like we treated the Neanderthals? Were you intrigued or irritated?

Chris: Here’s a thing I only recently (last ten years) learned: Area 51 was an actual factual secret base until the late 1980s. Like, no one knew it even existed until a guy who worked there went public saying there were aliens and whatnot and the government had to be all “okay, yes, yes, there’s been a secret military base in Nevada for the last forty odd years, but there’s no aliens there! C’mon guys! We wouldn’t lie about something like that! Also we can’t tell you what we are doing and no you can’t look for yourself.” while nervously tugging its shirt collar. That sort of sweaty denial is pretty much guaranteed to make things worse, which is exactly what happened, and it became Patient Zero for the Weirdo Conspiracy Boom that swept the nation like a fatter, grosser, B.O. saturated Beatlemania in the 90’s. There was certain logic to the whole movement in that America and had been nursing a survivalist, wild-eyed, anti-government paranoia that started with Watergate and ran straight through the Reagan 80s. The thing was that irrational fear was supposed to be directed at the Soviet Union and their godless communist regime, or at the very least Demicrats but when the Soviet Union dissolved and Clinton rebranded the Democratic party as Diet Republican that hate and fear went schizo and focused on America’s intelligence apparatus, military industrial complex and their unexplored corridors of power. That’s why shit like JFK and the X-Files hit so hard back then, the idea that an era had ended and all the secrets and crimes covered up by Cold War national security would finally see the light of day.

“People take TOO MANY showers, Ricky.”

Which of course didn’t really happen, in part because the whole point of a conspiracy theory is you can’t really kill it as long as someone can believe that there’s something else being hidden even further down the line. So as much evidence as there was that Oswald really probably did act alone and that Area 51 was really just a regular air-force base used to detonate nuclear bombs harmlessly underground and for building and testing super secret, off the books spy planes and bombers capable of delivering extinction level payloads anywhere in the world virtually undetected in less time than it took to consider the ramifications of such an act, or that blurry bigfoot footage was just a guy in a suit, some people couldn’t let go. Like the show said, we wanted to believe. Because conspiracies are fun. They make you feel like the world is filled with codes and secrets that are all hiding in plain sight if you just learn how to spot and decode them. Which is what The X-Files was really good at there for a nice long while. It made life in the dank, grungy mid-90s seem like an adventure, dark and gloomy and a little scary sometimes, but super cool and a lot of fun.

The thing about shows like Prey is that they completely ditch the fun part of paranoia and focused more on the dark and smelly aspects and ended up with a dud that completely missed what made the thing it was aping so special. It was kind of like the TV equivalent of Bush. Remember Bush? They put out an album called Razorblade Suitcase and sang heavy, sludgy songs that sounded like Nirvana if Nirvana were comprised of guys who wrote jingles for commercials that were directed to “write something like the unintelligible depressing shit my grandkids listen to” and then given to a band comprised of graduates of the Handsome Boy Modeling School. The worst part was everyone you knew would ask you, unprompted, if you’d heard Bush yet and did you know they were actually British? That shit went on for months. Anyway, the point is, Prey has that same nonsense poseur vibe that Bush had. They’re a bunch of committee approved photogenic hacks trying to pass themselves off as genuine weirdos. Or that’s what the first episode is, maybe it gets better as shows often do, but judging by the fact that it got the hook almost immediately, that seems unlikely.

Oh, and it really wants to be Se7en, too.

Ronnie: Okay, first of all, Oswald did not act alone, you naive fool, but that’s for another time. I do think you get to the appeal behind the conspiracy genre, that it’s exciting and mysterious and rife with import, and how Prey has precisely none of that. Or at least it doesn’t yet. It’s at this juncture I disappoint the precious readers with the announcement that we’re only ever doing this one episode of Prey and any information from subsequent episodes will have been gleaned from Wikipedia, which I assume is a reliable source because what kind of sick fuck knowingly plants false information about an ABC show from 1998 nobody watched. Now that’d be a conspiracy worth unraveling…

So I guess I should talk about some background information on the series. Debra Messing was not the original Dr. Sloan Parker, for instance; they shot a whole pilot with Sherilyn Fenn in the role. When I say “they” I mean The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s and Poltergeist’s Tobe Hooper. Now by 1998 you could definitely “get” him, but it’s still a more impressive pedigree than the man who directed this pilot, Peter O’Fallon. He’s best known for a lot of forgettable TV (including that show about Vice President Sharon Stone having an on call secret assassin because of a hidden paragraph in the Constitution; stay fucking tuned for an article on that) and Suicide Kings, which may not be the worst Quentin Tarantino ripoff but still belongs in the conversation. If I had to hazard a guess I’d say the original pilot is probably a little better, if only because Tobe Hooper knows how to manage palpable dread, which I think Prey was aiming at on occasion. Zionist nut Debra Messing isn’t the problem with the show. Rather, the crucial flaw is the inherent stupidity in the premise.

Hehe, “homo”

Now, humanity being replaced either from beyond or from within is a premise ripe with possibility. V, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Grant Morrison’s New X-Men all manage to create compelling material out of that. Prey less so. See, it’s positing that the next stage of evolution is basically a race of serial killers. Serial killers are predominantly known for being selfish loners. No matter what a dipshit MAGA person will tell you, humanity’s strength does not lie in individuality but rather our capacity for cooperation. We form communities and those communities thrive and that’s how humanity went from just another terran species to the wonderful blight on the planet that we are today. Whatever social commentary Prey buries amidst the cheap thrills and bad lighting–they treat us like we treat wildlife, man!!!–doesn’t connect, at least in this pilot. It reminds me of The Predator, the Shane Black film that suggests the Yautja consider autism to be a trait worth integrating into their constantly modified DNA. What possible benefit could being a rapist that decapitates his victims have from an evolutionary standpoint?

I’m trying to say I don’t think the science checks out here, Chris. Creator/writer William Schmidt failed to carry all the 1s and “maybe global warming created a race of mass murderers” didn’t reach peer review.

Chris: While I agree that The Predator’s Super-Autism powered kid didn’t work, I appreciated it attempt to redefine what we think of as strength, away from tree-trunk hauling bodybuilders with a surprising facility for puns and towards people who can think in novel, unpredictable ways. If they’re gonna keep making Predator movies, they may as well expand their roster of worthy human appointments beyond no-nonsense tough guys and Adrien Brody after he smoked a case of Marlboros. But I digress.

A big part of my problem with the show is that I in no way shape or form buy that Debra Messing is a grubby lab scientist. Pretty much everyone who gets a lead on a network TV show is attractive, but there are certain types of attractive that make it very hard to believe that the person they’re playing isn’t somehow also attractive for a living. That doesn’t mean they can’t play a wide range of smart, interesting characters, it only means they can’t play dorks or wallflowers. Like, did you know that Robert Redford wanted to be Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate? (imagine please, the little red haired “It’s a fact” girl from Kids in the Hall running up here.) Mike Nichols said he wouldn’t be believable as a loser. Redford said he was an actor and he could play anything. So Nichols asks Redford if he’d ever struck out with a girl, and Redford had no idea what he was talking about. Pretty much speaks for itself, right?

A lot of it has to do with hair, I think. Messing has great hair (Redford too): thick, wavy, and lustrous. I have no idea how long it takes her to get her hair like that every day, but it looks like it would be a while. There’s just no world where I believe that anyone wakes up, puts that much work into their hair and goes to a job where they’re in a fucking lab coat and safety goggles. I could see her as a drug rep, or a lawyer or CEO of a hospital or lab or what have you, but she’s in a profession where it’s important that she look fancy. Now look at Gillian Anderson (easy there, pervert); her hair might take just as long as Messing’s to get ready, but it doesn’t look that way. She probably doesn’t go anywhere with Mulder without a bottle of extra-body shampoo and a sturdy hair-dryer, but that’s about it. I feel the same way about The Rachel. Aniston was, of course, an extremely attractive woman with her own stylists and make-up artists and whatever, but that hair looked just manageable enough that I believed a waitress could and would pull it off.

At least give her glasses. Jesus.

And that’s really the show in this case. There’s a boy too, who maybe is supposed to be a love interest down the line? But he’s completely forgettable. He’s played by one of those guys that I know I’ve seen on other things, but don’t even take the time to look up on my phone while the show is on in the background because honestly who cares. So many TV shows are, at their core, hangout shows. They’re about sitting with the same group of people for thirty or sixty minutes a week and watching them sitting around with each other. Or going into haunted basements without flashlights or whatever. The point is, you watch the show to see the people, and man, this show does not have interesting people.

Ronnie: I have a little bit outside information about the rest of Prey so I thought I’d share. Of the 13 episodes, only 8 aired in what’s considered the traditional television season. The rest were shunted into the summer; never a good sign. Subsequent hours of the show went all in on the world building of the new species, aka Homo Dominant. These details range from amusing to “what the fuck?”; I’ll let you the reader differentiate. Their brains are smaller but denser, making them more intelligent to the point that they manifest psychic abilities, such as Jedi Mind trick bullshit, seeing 10 seconds in the future, and radical empathy. They collect trophies like serial killers. Female HDs have four uteri (thus giving birth to quadruplets… you couldn’t give birth to more than one child with only one uterus, it’s impossible) and can give birth without complication from as early as nine years old. Whereas humans hail from Africa, Dominants trace their origin to a village in Mexico. These details, while fleshing out the antagonists into more than they are in the pilot, still do nothing to diminish the fact that the elevator pitch for the supplanting species is “what if there was a race of serial killers”, a notion so dumb Kevin Williamson would run with it in The Following.

Don’t hire the guy from Mystic Pizza to be your brooding antihero.

Lest you accuse this column of not doing due diligence, and I know you fucks are champing at the bit to do that, I went against my prior proclamation and actually checked out episode 2 in order to see how the show runs once the premise has been established. One thing I immediately noticed is the inclusion of a crawl explaining the concept, always a boon for these types of shows. The plot is fairly anodyne: the serial killer from episode 1 escapes prison whilst Debra Messing continues to investigate the new species. Larry Drake, who looks like Sam Losco from Trailer Park Boys, is shown to be ethically shady given he knocks out Lynch the serial killer to run tests on him. The tests reveal his brain is almost “pure energy”; “his brain makes a Pentium 233 look like an abacus”. Daniels shows up a couple of times to be cryptic to Messing. It’s basically The X-Files if Steven Williams and David Duchovny kinda wanted to have sex. I know I’m making Prey sound more appealing than it actually is. The episode ends with Daniels taking Debra to a cave in which there are piles of eyeglasses, shoes and purses. That’s right, the Homo Dominants are hoarders.

Here’s the $64,000 question (adjusted for inflation: $753,416.12): Is Prey better than the hypothetical fifth season of Lois & Clark? A refresher for you and the reader, Chris: the baby left on the couple’s doorstep would be a rapidly aging member of Kryptonian royalty, so we’d be staring down the barrel of Lois and Clark having to raise a surly royal teen. The plan was he’d leave at some undetermined point; I don’t know if that story arc would last the season or five episodes. All that in mind, do you think ABC made the right choice in axing that in favor of this?

Chris: So, the short answer is no, I don’t think they did. And the longer answer is noooo, I don’t think they did. For one thing, the fact that Prey was a failure pretty much from jump whereas the four seasons of L&C really are pretty respectable in longevity terms. It was never a monster but it did its job for a long while. Put in sports terms, it’s like if an NFL team ditches its mediocre but competent quarterback in favor of finding a better one in the draft, only to end up signing a guy who gets benched for the back-ups before the season is half over. I have very little understanding of the economics of television, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the fifth season of L&C would have been significantly more expensive than the first season of Prey for no other reason than I’m pretty sure you have to give everyone who works on a show a raise each season, but it’s also worth mentioning that Lois & Clark is available streaming and on DVD and shows up on cable from time to time which means it’s still making someone money, whereas the only way you can find Prey is buying VHS bootlegs from when it aired on a Bulgarian cable access channel. Or something. [Editor’s Note: Sci-Fi Channel, but close enough.]

I mean, look, there are plenty of good-to-great shows that only lasted a season for whatever reason. Sometimes they’re before their time or just too expensive to keep producing or Claire Danes wants to be in mediocre 90s dysfunctional family movies. But Prey didn’t last because it stunk. It had no identity or purpose behind it other than “uh-oh, I think there’s a programming hole in the schedule, who’s still available to throw something together”. And even that would have been okay if the shit they threw together had a little style. You can be derivative and imaginative if you’re still lively and fun. This is switching formats I know but Pitch Black didn’t have an original bone in its body and they’re putting the third sequel out later this year. Because Vin Diesel may be a megalomaniacle alleged sex creep, but he really cares about those silly ass movies. I only watched the one episode of Prey but I didn’t get any sense that anyone fit together or belonged on the kind of show they were trying to make. I have no interest in any of those CBS procedurals (well, that Matlock remake looks promising, I mean, come on, Kathy Bates?) but you can tell just by catching a random minute of an episode of any of those shows when they’re playing on one of those big TVs behind the bar at whatever restaurant you’ve ducked into to pick up your take out, that those shows are made by competent professionals. They may all be cookie cutter assembly line widgets disguised as episodic television, but by God, the machines that put them together on that assembly line were clean and properly programmed.

At the end of the day, Lois & Clark was a bad TV show, but it had a personality (even if the personality was sometimes pretty unctuous) and it usually felt like everyone in the cast and crew was on the same page. That ensemble worked. And they rarely looked detached or bored. And, I mean, come on, it’s Superman. L&C did a respectable job updating the character archetypes, but they also started with characters solid enough to have thrived for more than fifty years before the show premiered and are still going strong almost thirty years after it ended. His costume is baggier in the new movie! I think the idea is to make him look a little more human and vulnerable. It took a second for me to adjust to it, but when I saw the trailer opening with him crumpled up in the snow and whistling for Krypto to come find him it clicked for me. I don’t think they’re going for a Man-of-Steel-With-Feet-of-Clay vibe, the trailer is too bright and colorful for that. But at the same time, it seems pretty clear that this Superman is supposed to be a little more clunky and handmade than the last few iterations. I dunno if it will work, but I will certainly check it out. Because it’s Superman, and Superman is Superman, and a Superman story is, at the end of the day, infinitely more interesting than most of the shit they put on TV, and certainly more interesting than Prey. Even when it’s bad Superman. Which Lois & Clark was. The end.

Oh, see, the Homo Dominant just wanted to create their own Holocaust Museum.

Ronnie: I largely agree with you, although I have been sucked into watching the rest of Prey because I have free time and it scratches the itch of cheesy X-Files ripoff. But no, ABC definitely made a mistake cancelling a proven entity in favor of an unknown piece of shit. IMDB trivia claims NBC deliberately counter-programmed Friends against Prey so that it’d get cancelled and Debra Messing could be free to star in Will & Grace. That sounds ahistorical, because why would fucking Friends be used as a cudgel against this shit, but I want to believe, to quote Fox Mulder’s poster. It compels me to wonder “what if?”. If Debra Messing didn’t star in Will & Grace because she had to stay on with Prey, maybe Will & Grace doesn’t succeed and because of that gay acceptance in American culture doesn’t progress as quickly as it did. Folks, I’m saying that Prey getting cancelled is why we (for the moment) have marriage equality. For that I salute the ineptitude of the program, but otherwise I cannot sanction its buffoonery.

Tune in next week or so when this column has changed names to be about the wonderful syndicated television program Night Man. Our goal with the second iteration of the column is to reclaim the character such that the cultural footprint for the character is no longer solely that of being Day Man’s opponent on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

But then things changed. Superhero comics moved from a genre that was comfortably on the edge of the mainstream (“Hey, a new Batman movie? Cool! Some superhero that isn’t Batman? Fuck that and fuck you.”) to the undisputed center of the pop culture universe. People know who Ant-Man is. Nobody should have to know who Ant-Man is. Superhero shit was everywhere, and a numbing sameness had settled over much of it. The formula for how to make these things was obvious and grating, particularly on the CW where their Arrowverse churned out cookie cutter show after cookie cutter show that had a relatively small but super loyal fanbase. I don’t like any of those shows. I tried a couple and outside of the superlative second season of Arrow and Calista Flockhart on Supergirl, it all seemed uninspired and, frankly, community theaterish. But then that fucking pandemic hit and those of us lucky enough to be able to stay inside isolate from the rest of the world had all this time to fill. And none of us wanted to think about the world because it was basically on fire (thank god that’s over, right everybody?) and we all had streaming services and we all basically spent a year watching old TV. Again, those of us lucky enough to be able to stay inside and isolate.

So yeah, I had this idea. Superhero media had become so dull and routine that I wondered if the very elements that made L&C so mediocre back in the 90s would make it entertaining today. Would the stutterings and failures of this early genre exercise that were eliminated on the way to essentially perfecting and mass producing it give the show a depth and quality that the impersonal, assembly line IP content lacked? Basically, would what made it bad in the 90’s make it good in the 2020’s? This is the type of shit that occupies my mind in place of whatever skills are required to accomplish any kind of household chore more challenging than changing a light bulb, finding a good job, or showing up anywhere on time. But that’s what we did. We watched it all, and we wrote about it all. It took three years. We wrote thousands and thousands of words. And now we’re here and we can finally answer the question. Do the failures of Lois & Clark add a layer of charm and warmth to the show make it a better watch now then it was then? Is it good show? The answer, is no. No, it doesn’t, and no it isn’t. Lesson learned.

Ronnie: I don’t want to say that we wasted literal years of our lives watching and writing about this show, but we kind of did? I’m being hyperbolic of course, yet it’s difficult to discern what we learned from the endeavor, other than the Burn After Reading “not to do it again” sort of thing. I suppose the tack I’ll start out with is trying to place Lois & Clark in the overall Superman franchise trajectory. Lois & Clark is about as close a John Byrne Superman adaptation we’re going to get; Smallville, Superman & Lois, even Man of Steel to a degree have taken from his revamp but to lesser degrees. Lois & Clark has Clark as the “real” identity and Superman a persona he adopts. Lex Luthor is a corrupt businessman posing as a philanthropist. Ma and Pa Kent are very much alive and part of the supporting cast. In short, the show reflects the comics that came out concurrently, culminating in the comics and the show both marrying off the couple around the same time. That said, I think Lois & Clark has had a marginal at best influence on the character/franchise. It was a reflection of the times, and those times emphasized Superman as a man, not a Kryptonian trying to blend in as a man. Basically the opposite of what Bill says in Kill Bill Vol. 2.

The most noteworthy attribute to the series is its focus on romance. It should go without saying that most comic book writers abhor romance because they have no experience to draw from. Celebrated writer Jonathan Hickman, for example, has never even seen a woman before, much less kissed one. Comics also have an unlimited budget whereas Lois & Clark makes you think about the budget every time Dean Cain suits up. While the television writers did better at conveying a love story than the average comic book writer (remember Joe Quesada broke up Spider-Man and his wife because of a mid-life crisis), a lot of it coasts on Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher having decent chemistry. Their relationship over the course of the program is prone to fits and starts. The first three seasons are as sexy as the stock footage of the fat guy getting hit by the cannonball whereas the last season overcompensates by making the couple’s collective libido positively Duchovnyian. It’s especially weird looking back, that the show went from seemingly having no conception of sex to devoting screentime to a subplot about Lois’ sexual frustration at Clark’s Superman responsibilities preventing her from getting off.

As a corollary to the romance focus, Lois is a co-lead as opposed to a supporting character. Her name’s in the title, after all. That was a good choice and not only because Teri Hatcher is a better and more versatile performer than Dean “Bigfoot Skeptic” Cain. Lois is a fully fleshed out character with her own hopes and dreams and while she is regularly kidnapped and put in harm’s way, it’s almost always of her own volition and not just because she’s connected to Superman or Clark Kent. I think if this show has any lasting legacy it’s making Lois Lane more of a multi-dimensional character as opposed to a psychotic hellbent on marrying Superman, which is the enduring image of Lois Lane for several decades preceding Lois & Clark’s airing.

If pressed to ask what the show did well, I suppose I’d go with the character of Lois Lane. She would hold her own against Margot Kidder for sure. What about you, Chris?

Chris: Oh man, what does the show do well. What does the show do well? I guess I think the first season does a halfway decent job making Metropolis seem like a bustling place. There’s, what, two extra main characters in Lex and Cat and another two or three recurring with Lex’s various henchmen and that one contact of Lois’s who’s always eating? That’s something I think. And it managed to sustain over season two despite losing Lex and Cat by having more recurring characters like Tasha Yar, the Trent Reznor Cosplayer/Mad scientist trying to revive Lex from the dead, and Tony Baloney and Underused Woman From Wings as potential rivals for L&C’s affections. And while Intergang was never able to quite replace Lex as the primary villain, its tumultuous leadership and constant turn-over of leaders that were fun and played by fun performers kept the show feeling lively. And even the, oh let’s say racially questionable episode set in Chinatown offered variety and scope to the city.

I also think the show did a pretty good job keeping Lois and Clark’s relationship flowing in a (reasonably) consistent way. Like, their relationship at the beginning of season one is different from the end of season one, and there even seems like there’s growth between the end of season one and the beginning of two. Then the end of season two is different from the beginning and on and on. Like, if someone were to watch a random episode of the show with nothing but a vague understanding of the relationship arc they’d probably be able to figure out what season it was from pretty quickly. Which isn’t something every show like this can do. There are, of course, some all time bad stalls and obstacles thrown in their way, but you never get the feeling the show is doubling back on itself; once Lois and Clark are together, they’re together. No make up break up shit is thrown in to distract the writers that they have no idea what to do with the characters beyond high school level emotional drama. Each season has its own character and feel. And let me throw it back to you and ask what you think the best and worst seasons were, and why? Similarly, looking away from the two main characters for a second, and taking Lex and Cat off the board, what did you think of the way the show used the supporting cast?

Ronnie: Season 1 is the best season for me, because the show had more promise back then. We didn’t know it was going to be what it ended up being. John Shea as Lex, while he didn’t necessarily have a reason to be in a lot of episodes, was always entertaining. I’d give worst to 3, just because of the faux wedding cul-de-sac. The individual episodes may not have been the worst, but it killed the momentum of the series and it took a while into Season 4 for that momentum to be regained. But really, I think you could make convincing arguments for any season being the best or worst because of the consistent mediocrity of Lois & Clark. The best season has crap and the worst season has inspired jaunts, you know?

As for the use of the supporting cast, I think one word describes it: poor. Like, I think a lot of my affection for the supporting cast stems from the actors and not necessarily the material they were given. The Kents are great, but their plot utility consisted of showing up whenever Clark and maybe Lois needed advice. Their inner lives faded pretty quickly from the show–remember when Jonathan was jealous of Martha taking a painting class or whatever? Not the most scintillating plotline ever written, but it was something. Likewise, Lane Smith imbues a lot of Perry White that simply isn’t on the page. As for Jimmy, he’s the obvious weak link in the cast, because it’s evident the show never really knew what to do with him. In Season 1 the Michael Landes iteration was a little too cool for school and thus the program course corrected by casting the pervert kid from Serial Mom and Jimmy became, well, simple. We’ve had discussions offline about whether or not Justin Whalin’s Jimmy was “touched by the face of God”, so to speak.

But really the issue is there’s not enough of a supporting cast. Even if you’re doing a two-hander show as Lois & Clark is meant to be, you ought to populate their world. Who is Lois’ best friend? Her sister vanished after two or so appearances and they never hint at her having girlfriends. I guess Clark’s best bud is Jimmy, but there’s a real power and intelligence imbalance there–it’s like if your best friend was an organ grinder’s monkey. It’s for this reason that Season 1 is probably Lois & Clark at its best. Cat Grant may’ve been a crude and sexist caricature of a sexually liberated woman, but she was a straw that stirred the drink. Without her, without Lex, everything becomes a lot emptier. Subsequent seasons try out recurring characters, usually as romantic alternatives, but none of them stick. Dr. Klein is probably the most developed character not in the opening title sequence and we found out about his motorcycle gang and his perhaps inappropriate sexual liaison about three or four episodes before cancellation. You said earlier Metropolis felt bustling early on; by the end it felt like a ghost town.

I don’t know the culprit, either a cheapness inhibiting the ability to continue developing recurring characters or an outright disinterest in expanding the world much further than the people whose names are in the title. More characters means more potential character dynamics means more storytelling possibilities. The same applies to Superman’s rogues gallery or lack thereof. Most of his iconic villains are one-offs, leaving the likes of Tempus his most persistent foe outside of Lex. Which, fine, Lane Davies always brought his A-game to his performances, but it’s weird, right? Every time Lois & Clark feinted at worldbuilding, such as Intergang and the power shakeups within the organization, it pulled back.

Chris: Yeah, I’m with you for sure on that last part. I can understand why L&C didn’t have Peter Boyle money, they aren’t James Cameron. Also, Jesus, Titanic came out almost exactly six months after the last L&C aired. I know it’s unfair to compare an episode of television to what was, at the time, the most expensive most visually cutting edge film ever made, but imagine working for whatever rinky-dink, fifth rate, non-union Mexican equivalent of a Z grade FX house that did the L&C effects and going to see Titanic one day after work. I think I’d go home and slash my wrists. Working on L&C must be the FX equivalent of going out to Hollywood expecting to do a Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare adaptation and ending up being the guy who kills the women in snuff films.

But I digress.

I can understand why they couldn’t turn Peter Boyle into a recurring character, but they couldn’t pony up the dough for ten appearances by Bruce Campbell over a couple of years? They couldn’t have let the Hot Blond Who Acted Stupid But was Actually the Smartest Character in the Room just be a behind the scenes force who gets referenced a bunch and shows up sporadically? I’m not a guy who produced TV in the 90s so take everything I say with a grain of salt, but it seems to me that you could get a mileage out of taking a half dozen characters and slotting them into episodes every now and then to create the illusion of a rich supporting cast. Like your idea of Lois’s best friend, or a low level hood that’s comic relief and an informant like Turk in Daredevil, Pete Ross back in Smallville maybe. If everywhere they go there’s one character who pops up from time to time that the audience recognizes, and suddenly Metropolis seems much denser than it actually is.

But I actually think I might disagree with you about the first season being the best of the show, I think for me it might actually be the second. I pretty much agree with all your points about the expanded cast of season one, and that losing Lex and dumbing Jimmy down at least three shades were crippling blows that the show never quite recovered from, but I also think that there were some basic storytelling mistakes coupled with an almost schizophrenic inconsistency in that first season that caused it to veer widely in quality from episode to episode. Luthor was obviously the best villain the show had, and John Shea was one of the three best actors on the show, but making him the villain behind the scenes of so many episodes diminished him as a threat simply because he was always losing. The show itself seemed to be figuring that out as the season progressed, and Lex was used in more diverse ways. And if I were to think of my least favorite episodes I think a lot of them would come from that first season.

The thing about season two is it retained a lot of the zip of the first season while also being more consistent. That was the season that came closest to what we were talking about in terms of Metropolis having a thriving population. Tasha Yar showed up a handful of times, as did the above mentioned Peter Boyle, Bruce Campbell and Mindy the Smart Hot Blond. The Intergang formula also allowed for a reasonably healthy rotation of celebrity guest villains. They might only be in one episode a piece, but the idea that they were all working for the same mob roped them all together. Didn’t Robert Culp show up in a season two episode? And Raquel Welch (those aren’t buoys!)? And who could forget Robert Carradine as the Intergang tech dork who was immune to Mindy’s charms? And the romantic rivals were pretty lame, or Tony Baloney was anyway, but just the fact that they were both recurring for a while made things feel little more connected.

Ronnie: I’ll go to the mat for Mayson Drake, at least in theory. The idea of a character who liked Clark but disliked Superman is keeping in the classic superhero secret identity dilemma–see Gwen Stacy hating Spider-Man who is, unbeknownst to her, her boyfriend Peter Parker–and her job as district attorney gave her fairly organic reasons for being in an episode’s plot. I won’t argue the plot was well done or that the character had dimensions to her, but it was a nice idea. Lois’ potential beau I don’t even remember his name and I refuse to look it up. I think they could’ve done better in the romantic rivals department if their intention was for them to enter a serious relationship by the start of Season 3.

You may be right about Season 2 being a better refinement of the ostensible platonic ideal of the show. Part of my hedging comes from me not seeing those seasons in a long time and having no interest in revisiting them to confirm or fail to confirm my priors. Really, the difference between the two comes down to Lex Luthor and how much you value him. If you think the show lost a pivotal element once John Shea exited, you’re apt to go to bat for Season 1. That’s me. You seem to be of the opinion that while John Shea and Lex were great, the show mishandled the role by having him continually foiled in his plans. The powers that be agreed with you on that last point, albeit that Lex being a regular cast member diminished Superman because he wasn’t able to lock Lex up within 45 minutes. A good writing team could have found a way for Lex to be in all or most episodes without making him a repetitive presence or a diminished one. Smallville may have its problems, such as it “not being good”, but the Luthor plotlines are among the strongest of that series. Perhaps one approach would slow rolling his evil reveal or gradually depict his fall from grace like in the aforementioned Smallville. His departure left a hole the show never could bother to fill. In his stead were a cavalcade of mostly forgettable foes, some of whom were comic book characters as interpreted by people with as cursory knowledge of comic books as Ben Shapiro has of the vagina.

I suppose we could get into how the Superman aspect of the show ranges from “crappy” to “embarrassing”. Yet there’s a reason it’s titled Lois & Clark; the focus is on Clark Kent, not Superman. Clark Kent is the real identity; any time the show delved into his Kryptonian side it was usually pretty lousy. So how about this as a closer: best episode of the series and worst episode of the series? I think both will be difficult to pin down and for differing reasons.

Chris: So one of the few unambiguously good things you can say about L&C is that each season has its own distinct theme as it regards the relationship at the heart of the show. Season One was about L&C getting to know one another, figuring out their dynamics as coworkers then friends then as potential lovers. Season two is about the leap from friendship to romance and the difference in intimacy the two states require. Three is about a committed relationship and the ups and downs of being a part of a duo and four is about settling into a lifetime commitment. With that in mind, I want to look at the best and worst episodes of each season and then declare a winner from each of the top fours.

Season one is, I think, the easiest to parse on that level because it was the most creative and wildly uneven, which is pretty common with first seasons insofar as they’re the rubber meets the road moment when you get something up on its feet and see what you’ve got as opposed to what you think you had. L&C had a famously turbulent development and first season in that respect, so much so that much talent (behind and in front of the camera) left the show after it wrapped, and everything was retooled from then on.

My choice for best episode is a bit of a cheat because it’s a two parter, but this is all silly arbitrary shit that we make up on the fly so honestly who cares, and it’s the last two episodes of the season, “Barbarians at the Planet” and “House of Luthor”. That little arc is the closest we ever came to the peak of what Lois & Clark could have been and the only other time besides the pilot where the show managed to convey epic scope. They used so many characters! Oh sure, Cat had already been shit-canned, but we get Lex and his henchman, Jonathan and Martha, Richard Belzer’s recurring character shows up. I think that one snitch who ate a lot made an appearance! Remember Jack? The scrappy Dickensian rag-a-muffin crossed with a sassy 90s kid they brought in to out Jimmy Jimmy? Remember how trash he was from jump? They actually managed to find something useful for him to do. I think there’s another Earth out there in the multiverse somewhere where series creator Debra Joy Levine maintains control of L&C past that first season and the show manages to find its footing without losing it’s larger cast of characters and slightly more adult edge.

On the other hand, my least favorite episode from season one is “Pheromone My Lovely”, which wrestles with that adult edge and is the closest I think I’ve ever seen to seeing a show suffer an existential breakdown. Lois & Clark, as we’ve said many times, was a show that was conceived as a sexy night time dramedy about love in the big city that was retooled at the last minute as a G rated r-word fest for families who thought Ned Flanders was a mite too edgy. “Pheromone” manages to deconstruct that tension by introducing Morgan Fairchild as a scientist and ex-lover of Lex’s who sprays the Planet staff with a love potion that doesn’t make people horny so much as, like, I dunno, stupid and handsy? Like Perry falls in love with the Mexican cleaning lady and so he dresses up like Elvis, pinches her butt a few times and tries to serenade her. Lois decides to try and seduce Clark by putting on the least sexy belly dancer outfit that you or I or anyone else has ever seen and attempting to do the dance of the seven veils. It’s loathsome, but also a perfect encapsulation of what happens when you want to make a show about sex that can’t ever talk about sex. Also, Cat Grant spends the entire episode fucking a copy machine repairman in a supply closet and at the end of the episode is like “who got sprayed with a whatnow?” Because Lois & Clark tried to be a show where the female lead put on an ankle length dress and a fucking face covering to seduce the male lead, and the slutty coworker rawdogs a stranger in a closet at work for several consecutive days and everyone just rolls their eyes and goes “That’s our Cat!”.

Season two’s highpoint is clearly Lex’s only appearance “The Phoenix”, which both brings him back to life and closes the door on his status as a businessman and love interest for Lois. It’s one of the few episodes of L&C that manages to pull off any sense of cinematic atmosphere, it actually looks good and has a breakneck pace that, coupled with the alarm the cast gets to show at the knowledge of his return, gives the show an urgent menace that it was never able to recapture. It also has a genuinely touching conclusion where Lex realizes that Lois never loved him and never would, and gives himself up as a result. Most of Lois & Clark exists somewhere between a B- and a C, with occasional bumps to B or B+ and occasional dips to C- and even D (I don’t know if anything they did would warrant an F for no other reason that something has to be, like, morally offensive to warrant an F. It has to be committed. And nothing on L&C is committed enough to get that kind of reaction), “The Phoenix” is the only episode that would crack the A barrier for me.

And the worst? I dunno, like I said above, season two is too professional to really make any terrible episodes the way the other seasons do, but there were plenty of irritating missteps. “Chi of Steel” for instance, isn’t afraid to deploy racial stereotypes in ways that, uh, suck. But I think the episode I liked the least was probably “Bolt From the Blue” wherein Superman’s powers are transferred to loser nobody William Wallace Webster Walldecker, played by Leslie Jordan who had already played a completely different loser nobody in an episode in season one, who immediately turns prick that starts charging people for his services and tries to rape Lois. It’s not a terrible episode of television so much as a confusingly inept one that can be summed up by its decision to use the same actor twice to play two different characters and make one of his key characteristics his attraction to Lois Lane despite the fact that the actor’s whole persona was rooted in his being a small, effete, southern homosexual. The world is filled with gay actors who can play straight ladykillers; Mathew Bomer, I’m looking in your direction. Leslie Jordan just isn’t that guy. It would be weird enough for that to have been his only appearance on the show, but him having already appeared as a different character the season before makes his casting positively Lynchian (side note, I’m extremely proud of how many David Lynch references I was able to fit into articles about a Superman TV show.)

The best of season three is another multiparter, and it’s I think widely loathed by a lot of people, but those people are wrong. I’m speaking of course of Lois and Clark’s first attempt to get married which is thwarted by Lex Luthor kidnapping Lois and replacing her with a clone eating frog who’s a piece of shit but then grows a soul and dies helping Superman while the real Lois gets conked on the head and wakes up thinking she’s Wanda Detroit, the protagonist of a novel that she’d been working on for the last year or so, which is news to the characters in the show as well as the viewing audience in general. It’s a five episode arc that’s fucking berserk, careening from plot twist to plot twist with maniacal abandon. I understand why it wouldn’t be to everybody’s taste, but I was mesmerized not just by how much happened but how good Teri Hatcher and John Shea were in the midst of narrative anarchy. Hatcher plays four distinct versions of Lois over the course of the arc. She’s herself, her clone, Wanda Detroit, and finally a tabula rasa kind of amnesiac who doesn’t seem to know anything about anything. And she does a really good job with all of them, the clone especially, who goes from being a selfish, petulant woman-child to an honest to god tragic figure who is desperate to stay alive. It’s kind of astonishing. Shea doesn’t get quite as much to play, but he manages to pull just a little bit of humanity out of Luthor right before he dies. It’s genuinely good stuff.

The worst of season three is unquestionably “Home Is Where the Hurt Is” aka the one where Sam Lane comes to Metropolis to reconnect with his daughter and ex-wife and also to introduce everyone to his new wife, a robot woman named Baby Gunderson he specifically built to have sex with. If I start to parse how confusing and upsetting the entire concept of a robot built for sex named Baby is, this article will never end, to say nothing of how she’s used in the plot. So I’ll just say Jesus one more time and move along.

Season four’s high point is probably the two-parter “Meet John Doe” and “Lois and Clarks”. It’s not a coincidence that their best work tends to involve multi-episode arcs, or that superhero TV ended up focusing on those kinds of long stories almost exclusively in the 21st Century. It just gives the plots and characters more time to breathe. “MJD” and “LaC” combine for a brisk, ridiculous story that features returning characters President-Fred-Willard-No-I-Won’t-Look-Up-the-Characters-Name, an alternate “weiner” version of Clark that we met in a two parter from season two or three (not looking that one up either) and Tempus, the time traveling ham who somehow became Superman’s primary antagonist after Lex left the show. L&C worked best in the end as a hang out show, and the “MJD” “LaC” one-two punch is one of the last times we get to just kill time with all these clowns. I had a similarly good time with the three part Luthors-Other-Secret-Kid-Because-There-Were-Two arc, but those didn’t have President Willard drinking alone in a bar on the night he lost his re-election bid.

And the worst of season four is also my choice for worst of the whole series, episodes 03 & 04 “Swear to God, This Time We’re Not Kidding” and “Soul Mates”. I don’t want to relitigate these two pieces of shit or even think about them more than I absolutely have to, and we have a two hundred thousand word article that covers both these monstrosities if you want a deep dive so I’ll just say that I’m reasonably certain that there’s a character in “StG” that’s supposed to be Superman editor Mike Carlin and SM is about how L&C have an insane curse on their souls that says their having sex will immediately trigger the extinction of all life on Earth.

That’s it, Ronnie. I’m done. I’m satisfied that Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman was indeed a bad show and I regret all the time I spent watching, thinking and writing about it. That said, the end product is a series that I’ve enjoyed going back to and rereading over the years and will no doubt continue to revisit in the future. With that in mind, I guess it’s time for me to move on to our next  extended waste of time and energy, the beloved ABC smash Prey, starring TV’s Debra Messing as a doctor lady with fabulous hair who hunts down super apes. Or something. See you there.

Ronnie: It took me quite a bit of time to come up with my lists because it required remembering episodes of Lois & Clark; suffice it to say my brain is mostly Shield quotes and cartoon theme songs, so you can imagine the difficulty involved. For Season 1 I’m going to say the best episode, though this may be a cheat, is the pilot. It sets everything up competently and you could argue it suggests a better show than what we ultimately received. What we ultimately received was the likes of “Fly Hard”, my choice for worst episode of Season 1. It’s the one where they do Die Hard but with Jimmy Olsen, hence the name.

The problem with doing these, centrally, is that Lois & Clark is consistently underwhelming. The variance is, like, from B- to C-, so it’s rare there’s an outright disaster but similarly unlikely is an episode you’d recommend without a number of caveats. An episode has to be particularly good or particularly bad, right? In this vein I choose “Tempus Fugitive” for Season 2 on account of it introducing H.G. Wells and Tempus, two of the no doubt most perplexing members of Lois & Clark’s recurring cast. “Chi of Steel” is my choice for worst, Chris, because the racism overwhelms everything else to the point that it’s memorable. Memorable Lois & Clarks merit being called out.

“Memorable” aptly describes the Irish Dr. Doom conceived of in “When Irish Eyes Are Killing”, my worst of Season 3. I took some time deliberating on which Season 3 to choose for my best and wound up on “Super Mann”. You know, the one about Nazi supersoldiers waking up and trying to turn Metropolis into the Fourth Reich. I chalk up this decision to current events bringing our descent into fascism into sharp focus and Lois & Clark’s full throated defense of liberal democracy looks pretty good to me nowadays in an environment where companies are falling over themselves to pledge fealty to the president-elect.

Onto Season 4. “Twas the Night Before Mxymas” is absurd and adheres to the spirit of the holidays, and might actually be a show I’d recommend without burying it in qualifiers. I’m gonna give the ‘worst of’ to “Battleground Earth”; it might not strictly be the worst of that year, but it represents the New Krypton arc that is absolute death.

I think that pretty well covers it, Chris. Any final thoughts?

Chris: I actually don’t really think so? I’m going to go to my grave believing that we spent more time thinking and writing about Lois & Clark than anyone else on Earth. Oh I know that the show itself was in production for four years and working on it was a “Full Time Job” for the vast majority of the cast and crew, but I’m sticking to my guns. For one thing, you can’t tell me that the vast majority of those scripts weren’t written in a blind panic the morning of the day they were due. If each episode of Lois & Clark clocks in at around forty two minutes, then I’d put money down that the average script was written in around thirty eight. Try reading a script sometime, then try reading it out loud. Takes longer, right? And it can be even faster to type than it can to read. A really outstanding typist can type up to a hundred and twenty words a minute, and sure, those people are usually transcribing what other people have said or written, but that can’t too different from chopping up and sniffing up a bunch of caffeine pills cut with Pixie Sticks and spewing out whatever nonsense pops into your head. That’s a kind of transcription too, when you think about it.

Ronnie: I think that’s a good place to leave things. Fret not, readers, because this is not the end of Chris and my collaboration. Let’s just say it involves a man of the night who can hear the frequency of evil.