“I quit!”

To hear the review

      Oh, how silly the supporting characters are in Jake And The Fatman!  The Fatman (William Conrad, as the district attorney) is so abusive to his underlings that they whimper and cry until they finally snap and yell and quit.  The women are all cops, who are implausibly attractive and not very smart but tough, anyway.  And the bad guys are of course cartoons.  Sometimes pretty good cartoons, but cartoons nonetheless.  No one on this show, however, could be more cartoonish than J. L. McCabe (The Fatman), who is so fat that he is virtually unintelligible.  He seems to be forcing the words out of his mouth through jowls so thick that it appears he has ingested the words, chewed them thoroughly, and because there is just no more room in his stomach for them, they come spilling back out of his mouth in a mangled, wheezing sort of way.  When you’re too fat to talk, you are too fat for TV.  It seems to me.

     For some reason, Season One was split into two volumes by Paramount Home Entertainment.  Season Two, which comes out on May 5th, gets its own DVD set.  Maybe because this is a whole new show.  And it’s growing on me.  You see, in Season Two, the show moves to Hawaii!  There is a double-length episode to kick off the season and explain the move.  Jake Stiles (Joe Penny), the Fatman’s investigator, goes on vacation to Hawaii to visit an old friend.  But that friend has of course been murdered.  And before long the rest of the crew (minus that fat bulldog) are joining Jake in Hawaii to help him defend himself against charges of murder.

     We discover (at least, I think we discovered this in Season Two - I don’t remember it ever being brought up in Season One) that J. L. McCabe cut his teeth working in Hawaii, and he still has contacts and informants and community ties on the island.  And, over the course of the first episode of the second season, McCabe gets blackmailed into taking the prosecuting attorney’s job in Hawaii, then he extorts Jake to force him to come work for him there, and the rest of the people are bullied and pressured into coming along…and, we’re in Hawaii!

     There is a blonde woman in this first episode.  We think, for a second, that she is a Bad Guy because not everything adds up!  But, this being a cop show set in Hawaii, I knew exactly what was going to happen.  She was actually going to be an undercover cop, and…gasp!  Likely a recurring character on the show from that point on!  No TV show set in Hawaii or another tropical location can fail to be at least a little silly and ridiculous.  Hawaii Five-O, Magnum P.I., Sweating Bullets…(sidebar - did you know that Sweating Bullets, the dreadful Canadian TV show from the early nineties, is still a gigantic hit in Serbia?  Or that the guy who played Nick Slaughter on that show is in Serbia now filming a documentary about his bizarre popularity over there?  Food for thought…)

     So we get some ridiculous moments, some silly dialogue, a womanizing investigator-cop, tropical locations, hot women, and a really fat guy struggling to breathe.  And somehow, it all works just enough to make this show watchable.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 5:56 am and is filed under 1989, Cop, Crime, Joe Penny, Lawyer, TV series, William Conrad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.