Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

To hear the review

      It’s cool to see the premiere episodes of TV series, and learn where they began.  Paramount Home Entertainment releases the Action Packed TV Set on May 26th, a single-disc DVD which features the premiere episodes or pilots of NCIS, MacGyver, Mission: Impossible and Walker, Texas Ranger.  Three of these TV shows were good.  And one was Walker, Texas Ranger.  Which, despite being the only truly irritating series represented on this disc, is also the only one that gets a two-hour episode as a premiere.  Three decent hours, and then two hours of Walker.  Ugh.  A brief rundown of each premiere:

     Mission: Impossible (1966): 

     “Your mission, should you choose to accept it…”

     The earliest show on the set, Mission: Impossible opened with an episode that introduced each of the characters and defined their roles.  Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain) is the smoking hot femme fatale who can get men to do anything she likes.  Dan Briggs (Steven Hill) is the leader – although he would prove to be a difficult actor and he did get replaced after the first season.  There is the disguise man, the strong man, and the electronics man.  There is a recording that gives them the mission before self-destructing.  There is the memorable theme music.  All of this is immediately introduced before the team gets down to the business of stealing missiles from a South American general.

     MacGyver (1985): 

     “Don’t tell me you know how to make a bomb out of a stick of chewing gum.”
     “Why, you got some?” 

     The greatest silly, cheesy show in television history, MacGyver kicked off with Richard Dean Anderson rescuing an unidentified man from some unidentified soldiers in an unidentified location.  Then, he rescued some scientists trapped underground by an explosion in a lab.  In the process, he stops an acid leak with chocolate bars, makes wisecracks, does a really cheesy and really long voiceover about a horse he once rode as a child, and builds a bomb using a jar of water and a cold pill.  He also saves the scientists, gets the girl, and escapes from the underground lab one second before the giant missile is to be fired into the location.  And so begain one of the greatest shows in all of television history.  Ahem.

     Walker Texas Ranger (1993): 

     “It is personal.”

     A TWO-hour debuit episode, this one is convenient because once you’ve seen it, you never have to watch Walker again.  This one has everything.  Chuck Norris depositing unconscious bad guys in the bed of his pickup truck.  Twice.  His partner is killed by some cartoon bad guys.  He goes on a mission of revenge.  He is the only one who knows what’s really going to happen, and he ends up alone trying to stop the elite team of former-CIA bank robbers.  The main cartoon bad guy runs out of bullets, so they close things out with a fistfight, where every Norris kick and puch is “for” someone.  “This one’s for my partner…this one’s for…”  You know what I mean.  And the old guy keeps tagging along to help, and the sidekick rubs Walker the wrong way, and the show ends on a freeze frame that is supposed to be funny as they bond.  Well, that’s it.  That’s Walker.  Now you never have to watch any other episode, ever.

     NCIS (2003): 

     “Get out of the president’s chair.”

     The first-ever episode of NCIS is totally silly.  A terrorist attack on Air Force One is foiled only by the cleverness and badassery of Mark Harmon, the only man smart enough to figure out the plot.  At the very last possible second, of course.  This episode features stock footage of George Bush walking around and doing stuff, and a bunch of scenes where the local cops, the FBI, the Secret Service and NCIS fight over jurisdiction at the crime scene.  We are supposed to believe, I think, that the NCIS, (the navy’s forensic team) is somehow a secretive, super-elite agency that is better and smarter and tougher than the FBI and the CIA and the DEA and the…other…organizations that I can’t think of right now.  But they get no respect and remain anonymous, and that’s how they LIKE it.  OK, fine.  But it’s pretty silly.  Thank God this show got better than the pilot episode.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 2:29 am and is filed under 1966, 1985, 1993, 2003, Action, TV series. 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.