Years:  1966, 1967
Genre:  TV series, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Lucille Ball
Directors:  Maury Thompson, Jack Donohue
Run time:  11 hours, 59 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The official fifth season of The Lucy Show comes to DVD December 6th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  This is, for those of you born after 1970, or those who haven’t heard or read my reviews of the first four seasons, that show Lucille Ball did after I Love Lucy, the one that wasn’t quite as funny or as classic or as well received as her first sitcom.

     In the fifth season, there are some really great moments.  Most of them involving other actors.  In the first episode, George Burns shows up and asks Lucy to be his partner for his new routine.  For some reason she turns him down and decides to stay where she is, for the sake of her boss at the bank Mr. Mooney.  I guess because the whole show was predicated on Lucy annoying Mr. Mooney.  At the bank, on a submarine for some reason, at the zoo, at a golf tournament, everywhere he goes. 

     If only there were some episodes that DIDN’T involve that same exact premise, that would be super!  Well, there are a couple.  Like one with ventriloquist Paul Winchell.  And a couple with Carol Burnett and Vivian Vance.  There’s even an amazing episode featuring John Wayne, the Duke himself, which for me almost makes the entire DVD set worthwhile.  But the episodes with the guest stars are too few and far between, and I got tired of Lucy and Mr. Mooney long before I got to John Wayne.

Year:  1967
Genre:  TV series, Drama
Country:  United States
Languages:  English
Starring:  David Janssen, Barry Morse
Guest star of note:  Jacqueline Scott, Beau Bridges, Charles Bronson, Bill Raisch, Jack Lord, Joseph Campanella, Celeste Holm, Jack Warden, Bill Erwin, Susan Seaforth Hayes, Martin Balsam, William Windom, James Farentino, Arthur Hill, Diana Sands, Diana Hyland, Ivan Dixon, Laurence Naismith, Diane Baker, JD Cannon, Diane Brewster, Richard Anderson
Narrator:  William Conrad
Creator:  Roy Huggins
Run time:  12 hours 51 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     I hate to call Season Four Volume Two of The Fugitive “much anticipated”.  I mean, it HAS been 44 years since the series finale, and I don’t imagine anyone has been holding their breath that long to see it come to DVD.  But I will say that I have been anticipating the end of this series, having watched every episode from the beginning until now.  It has been frustrating, waiting for the next volume of the next season, but the end is finally here!

     As it turns out, aside from one early episode starring one of my favourite actors (Charles Bronson), there is little that is interesting until the final two shows.  It’s still good stuff, and I still like The Fugitive, but I was kind of hoping that the Big Conclusion would have been something that built throughout the final season.  This just isn’t the case.  There are still a few episodes that star David Morse as Philip Gerard, the police officer obsessed with the capture of Richard Kimble (David Janssen).  But he’s getting no closer to Kimble, and Kimble is no closer to the one-armed man who actually killed his wife (Bill Raisch).

     That is, until the final two episodes, where everything comes together and witnesses come forward and things are resolved and Gerard lets Kimble fight to prove his innocence.  There isn’t much drama left, because we all know the thing has to wrap up in two episodes, no one important is going to die, and the good guy will be vindicated and the bad guy will lose and all will be revealed.

     And so it goes – and it’s  kind of a letdown.  The witness who comes forward to explain that he was there, and that he saw everything, has a piss-poor excuse for NOT having come forward before.  He’s let poor Dr. Kimble run and hide and hang on for 100 plus episodes now, and is still willing to pay a ton of money to cover up his involvement, when in reality he was barely involved at all.  And so with a tiny bit of side drama involving this local man who has little to do with anything, it’s straightforward – bad guy is caught.  Good guy shows up to expose bad guy.  Everybody wins.

     So now I have the entire Fugitive TV series adorning my DVD shelf – eight DVD sets that encompass four seasons.  It looks great, and it will likely sit there for a good, long time without being watched again.  I think I will occasionally pop in a disc and watch one episode at a time, because it’s still good watching, but I’ll never sit down and spend a weekend watching the whole thing.  I’m far more likely to go back and watch the movie for a fifteenth time.

Year:  1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1986
Genre:  TV series, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Andy Griffith, Don Knotts, Ron Howard, Frances Bavier, Jim Nabors, Danny Thomas
Creator:  Sheldon Leonard
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     I have never before seen the Andy Griffith Show.  Of course, it’s one of those iconic shows that is so famous that I knew all about it.  I know that classic whistling theme music.  I know Andy and Opie and Barney Fife and Gomer Pyle and Aunt Bee.  (To be fair, I know Aunt Bee only because of her appearance on Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C.  Yes, I saw Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C. before I saw The Andy Griffith Show.)  At any rate, with the release of the 50th Anniversary collection Best of Mayberry, on DVD December 21st from Paramount Home Entertainment, I was excited to finally sit down and see what this show was all about.

     The Andy Griffith Show was off the air ten years before I was born.  It depicts a community, an ethos and warm-apple-pie values that I am not convinced ever actually existed.  That being said, this is one of those shows that makes me feel nostalgic for something that may never have actually taken place, for a place that was never on any map, for a lazy friendly community that was probably impossible no matter what era.  There’s something terrifically familiar about The Andy Griffith Show, even for someone like me who has never seen it before, and who has never experienced this idyllic portrayal of life in the 60s.

     I assume it’s shows like this one that create that sense among older people today that things were just better back in the 50s and 60s.  Remember how back then, women always made apple pie and cooled it on the window sill, boys would be boys, girls would wear pretty dresses and play with dolls, and every father in America would come home after a hard day’s work, kiss his wife, eat his dinner, and dish out wise advice to his children with appropriate gravitas.  I keep hearing people saying that “family values” were better in this era, that people worked harder and were happier and loved their spouse more and blah blah blah.  Watch Andy Griffith for ten minutes, and I can see that people might think that.

     Then again, watch Andy Griffith for thirty minutes, and you might remember that things really were not as idyllic and lovely as they seem through the revisionist lens of a television camera that shows a non-existent world.  At the end of every episode on this DVD, the characters in the show do a quick endorsement for a product of some kind.  Often it’s coffee and breakfast cereal, sometimes other food.  I love seeing this stuff – I think the scripted endorsements actually make me feel more nostalgic for this time than the show itself. 

     And they are more telling than is the show – especially the one for Jell-O cake mixes, which tells me that the little woman is working herself to distraction in the house, what with the laundry and the cleaning and having to cook dinner – how can we make dessert easier on her?  Well, with the easy-bake Jell-O cake mix, of course!  She will be so much happier if we take nine minutes off her prep time for cakes – and then imagine how the counters will sparkle!  She’ll have nine more minutes to clean!

     So these are my first impressions of The Andy Griffith Show.  My second impression is one of Andy Griffith himself.  I’m very familiar with Griffith from Matlock, because I’ve watched that show for year.  I love me my Matlock.  Now, I’ve never seen Andy Griffith interviewed.  But I suspect that maybe, more than any other actor in the world, he is just like the characters he plays.  I really get the sense that if I were to run into this man today, he would invite me into his house just because, and he would stop by a hot dog cart on the way, and he would have a rocking chair and slippers and extra guitars so he can jam with random guests who stop by.  This is what I picture.

     At any rate, this is a DVD set that I just love.  I think this show was one of the best ever, and it still makes me laugh today.  When Don Knotts gets all smarmy and pompous, I giggle.  He wants to be in the town choir even though his singing makes everyone cringe.  Maybe my favourite episode is the one where he gets into a war with Gomer Pyle over traffic tickets and arrests himself.  And the one with his motorcycle and sidecar is hilarious.

     There isn’t a ton of Gomer Pyle on this DVD set, I guess because he didn’t show up until later.  There’s a lot of Opie and a couple of episodes with the Darlings, a backwoods bunch of Bluegrass-playing hicks with a slutty daughter.  The special features are great too – the first episode on the first disc is the episode of the Danny Thomas Show which introduced sheriff Andy Taylor and his family to the world, and the final disc has the TV movie Return To Mayberry, where Andy Griffith, Ron Howard, Don Knotts, Jim Nabors and twelve other cast members reunited to drum up some nostalgia.  And there’s a monster in a lake, a plot straight out of Scooby-Doo.  Well…not everything in the Andy Griffith Show can be a winner, I guess.

Years:  1966, 1967
Genre:  TV series, Drama
Country:  United States
Languages:  English
Starring:  David Janssen, Barry Morse
Guest star of note:  Hope Lange, Ossie Davis, Tom Skerritt, Ted Knight, Dabney Coleman, Bill Raisch, Bruce Dern, Ed Asner
Narrator:  William Conrad
Creator:  Roy Huggins
Run time:  12 hours 51 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The Fugitive, an excellent series from the 60s, is coming to an end.  Well, the DVD releases are.  Season Four, Volume One is out November 2nd from Paramount Home Entertainment, and it will presumably be followed by the actual final volume in the series in six months or a year from now.  Because putting the whole fourth season on one DVD set would be…too concise?

     At any rate, they have now been able to stretch the four seasons of this series into eight DVDs.  Well, seven.  With the eighth (and only important one, really) still to come.  I still like the show, and I love David Janssen.  Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble appears to be older now than when the show started, which stands to reason.  But I mean a lot older.  And a little chubbier too.  I suspect that’s because the series is now in colour.

     So although I like Janssen and the show, I found it hard to care about Volume One of the final season, aside from the “oh – huh” factor of seeing a few stars like Ossie Davis and Bruce Dern when they were younger.  Really, this is just more of the same from the show, and it’s leading up to a conclusion I really want to see.  But I’m going to have to wait a year to see it.

“Tribbles.”

Years:  1967, 1968
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, Walter Koenig
Creator:  Gene Roddenberry
Run time:  21 hours, 50 minutes
Blu-Ray distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     For a review of the actual Season Two of Star Trek, click here.  This is a review of the Blu-Ray, which should appeal to all the techno-geeks out there.  And the techno-geeks love their Star Trek.  So it works great.  There really is a higher standard that must be applied to Blu-Ray editions of Star Trek seasons, because the nerds hold the show to that much higher a standard than do fans of other series.  And thankfully, the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Original Series on Blu-Ray have delivered.  The Blu-Ray transfer is impeccable, the added detail and enhanced content is terrific, and the show really does look a lot better in both Season Two and Season One. 

     It’s the special features that matter, however, and those are hit-and-miss.  I still have no idea how that Tribbles episode managed to become the most famous of the Star Trek canon.  I am so sick of the Tribbles episode.  I thought it was cute once, but cute doesn’t hold up over time, unless it’s E.T. cute.  And the tribbles are not E.T. cute.  Yet, the Season Two Blu-Ray of Star Trek comes with an entire bonus disc devoted entirely to tribbles.  Including cartoons and commentary and so forth.  Seriously, Star Trek.  Enough with the tribbles.  The Starfleet Access Mode remains pretty cool, though, and should delight the geek world who revel in their Star Trek.

     OK, I have now run out of links to place with the words “Star Trek” in this review.  So that’s over.  And so’s the review.  This is a wicked Blu-Ray, but enough with the tribbles.  It was forty years ago.  Let it go.

“I’m paid to risk my neck.  I’ll decide where and when I’ll do it.  This isn’t it.”

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

      If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?  Howard Hawks had teamed up with John Wayne to make Rio Bravo in 1959.  At the time, it was a way for Wayne and Hawks to respond to High Noon, a movie where Gary Cooper plays a sherrif who asks the town for help when a crew of gunmen show up to kill him.  This went against the view many people wanted to have of the old west, and of Real American Manly Values and so forth.  John Wayne maintained that no tough guy character, ever, should ask for help.  Deal with your own problems and such.  So they made Rio Bravo, where Wayne’s sherrif did not ask for help.  But he certainly accepted it when it was offered.

     The movie was a huge success, and spawned two movies that were, for all intents and purposes, remakes.  The first remake (also directed by Hawks, also starring Wayne) was El Dorado, which comes out on a terrific two-disc Centennial Collection edition May 19th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  (The third version was Rio Lobo in 1969 – each successive instalment of this same story by the same people was a little weaker than the last.)  Now, there are a few differences.  In this movie, the sherrif himself is the drunk, and not his deputy.  And the drunk is played by Robert Mitchum instead of Dean Martin.  And the young gunslinger is James Caan, not Ricky Nelson.  And there is no singing.  Well, very little singing.

     Aside from that, this is basically Rio Bravo II.  And it’s nearly as good, thanks to some great performances by Mitchum and Caan (that one offensive Chinese imitation scene notwithstanding).  At times, John Wayne seems to be phoning it in a little – after all, not only is this the same role he has played his entire career, it’s basically the same one he played for the same director eight years earlier.  But he is reliably badass and tough, and John Wayne phoning it in was still better than anyone else this side of Eastwood.  His main function is to talk tough (tough enough that he rarely has to use a gun at all) and help Mitchum snap out of his alcoholic haze. 

     It takes Mitchum (as it did Martin in Bravo) a long time to snap out of it.  A little too long, as El Dorado relies a little too heavily on his shambling lameness for a long time.  When, finally, some gunslingers and hired assassins come to town and start causing trouble, Wayne comes to the sherrif’s assistance and finally he realizes that maybe drinking himself to death is not the best way to forget a troublesome woman.  From then on, El Dorado crackles and swaggers to the badass conclusion – oh, and the thing Wayne has where his hand sometimes goes numb because he has a bullet from the gun of a hot young woman lodged near his spine comes up at the end too.  It just takes too long to get there – especially since I’ve already seen this movie once.

     The Centennial Collection edition comes with a second disc jammed with special features from Paramount.  Maybe the best is A.C. Lyles Remembers John Wayne, where Lyles talks about this larger-than-life figure and his philosophy on acting and life.  Wayne always said “I’m not an actor, I’m a RE-actor”, and watching his movies you can see that he is half right.  Look at The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Searchers, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon or Red River, and you can see that Wayne was much more than a re-actor.  He was truly a remarkable thespian.  Seriously.  However, in movies like El Dorado, he really was a re-actor only.  But for John Wayne, that’s enough.

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

      Here is a DVD I do not understand.  First of all, the idea of a “greatest hits” album for a band has always struck me as something that must be reserved for bands that have made at least four albums.  Except for Jimi Hendrix, because he was just that damn good.  And Star Trek, The Original Series is no Jimi Hendrix.  It’s pretty good, but it’s no Hendrix.  The second thing that strikes me as odd is – to whom is this Best Of DVD directed?  People are, as I understand, either INTO Star Trek in a hardcore way, or they don’t care a whit when it comes to the Shatner years.  And thirdly, when it comes to the Shatner-level Star Trek freaks, how can you possibly choose four episodes as “the best” without pissing off every single one of them?

     Well, I think I can answer at least one of those questions.  Paramount is hoping that the people who went out this weekend and saw the brand new Star Trek prequel will be newly-minted Trekkies on Tuesday, May 12th.  And they will want to run back to the classics and learn everything there is to know about the history of this fine program.  And they will want to check out something smaller and cheaper than a full First Season DVD set.  So this, and the Best Of The Next Generation DVD also being put out on Tuesday by Paramount Home Entertainment are for those people who want to dabble after seeing the big-screen story of the young Captain Kirk.

     So, on that level, I get it.  No idea how successful that will be, I suppose it depends on the success of the movie.  But as for picking the four Best Episodes, I don’t know how the Trekkies will react.  Then again, I suppose it doesn’t matter, because those Trekkies will already have picked up the superior First Season Blu-Ray set from Paramount last week, right?  Not being a Trekkie myself, I probably have a different opinion of the four Best Episodes than others.  But these are some fine ones, and I get why they were chosen. 

     The first, The City On The Edge Of Forever, sees Kirk and Spock and Dr. McCoy (it’s always those three) transported back into the 1930s, where Shatner falls in love with Joan Collins.  I get it.  I could fall in love with Joan Collins.  Well, in the late sixties, I could have.  The western clothes and scenes make this one memorable, if not a great episode.  The second one, The Trouble With Tribbles, is probably the most-talked-about, best-known episode of the Original Series, where the little furballs called Tribbles take over the Enterprise and make cute little noises and act all cute.  Trekkies still talk about Tribbles as though they were an important part of the series.  Like the Borg, or Klingons, or Federation meetings at big long tables.

     The last two episodes chosen as the Best Of are Balance of Terror and Amok Time.  Balance Of Terror sees the Romulans enter the Star Trek universe for the first time.  It’s a very good episode, where Kirk and the Enterprise do battle and play a cat-and-mouse game with a Romulan ship and captain which both closely resemble their own.  This all stems from some historic animosity between human beings and Romulans, which is never really explained at all.  But it involves a no-fly zone in some way.  I expect that the introduction of Romulans to the Star Trek universe is a pretty big deal.  Then there’s Amok Time, which involves the famous scene of Kirk and Spock fighting each other among giant styrofoam rocks.  Not as fun as the episode where Shatner fights that big green lizard, or the movie where he fights himself, but I understand this to be a Big Moment in Star Trek history.

     I will let the Trekkies comment on this post to quibble over which of these episodes deserves to be among the Best Ever.  But then, they likely won’t read this, because they will likely already own the first three seasons on DVD, and it will be a moot point.  They are ALL The Best Ever!  But for those of you who don’t know Tribbles from Troglodytes, and who have a limited vocabulary in Klingon, you might want to check out this set.  It comes out May 12th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Boldly going where no man has gone before…

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

   Just making this Blu-Ray set is not exactly a bold move, but it may well be a Blu-Ray set that no man has made before.  OK.  That was a pretty nerdy way to start off this review.  I feel a little like wedgying myself.  But really, let’s not kid ourselves.  Star Trek was for space-nerds, and Blu-Ray is a format for techno-nerds, and very often the two are one and the same.  So the best thing Paramount Home Entertainment could do with the first season of Star Trek, for this Blu-Ray release, is come up with some really cool but really nerdy special features and unique Blu-Ray stuff.

   And boy, did they ever.  The Original Series First Season hits Blu-Ray April 28th, and it’s darn cool.  You know, if you’re a nerd.  Of course, there are seven discs, and each one has extensive bonus features.  There are a few features that exist throughout – one the Starfleet Command special feature – acts like a sort of pop-up video feature.  Little information boxes pop up on the screen to give us the history of the Galactic Barrier, or the character bio of Gary Mitchell, or just to define ESP (in the Star Trek context, of course).  This is a pretty neat feature, for those who are interested in geeking it up over the series, but very often the explanation we get to read is virtually word-for-word the explanation being simultaneously given by the characters on the screen.

   Perhaps the coolest special feature is the “Enhanced visual effects”.  With the ANGLE button on your Blu-Ray remote, you can switch back and forth between the original effects and these new ones right in the middle of an episode when it’s available.  Basically, those old-school scenes of ships passing by planets have been totally redone to look amazing.  Where the planets used to look like blurry giant marbles, now we can see topography, mountain ranges, oceans, and so forth.  In short – they look like a real planet.  So, if you’re a die-hard old-school fan who wants to see only the original series as was originally intended, you can do that.  And if you’re willing to flip over to the enhanced visual features, you can actually see the show look really good.

   Of course, this Blu-Ray release, and the upcoming Star Trek movie releases (keep checking, they are coming out just about every week for the next month) are timed to coincide with the theatrical release of the Star Trek prequel.  And, of course, there is a trailer for that prequel on this set.  I can’t remember ever commenting on a trailer as a DVD special feature before, but this one bears mentioning.  Watching the trailer, and then the original series, the connection between the two is tenuous at best, it seems.  Even with the enhanced visual effects, the production values on the original series are less than spectacular.  They look great in Blu-Ray, but the sets still look cheap and cheesy.

   That being said, this upcoming Star Trek movie looks like it’s going to be pretty awesome.  And watching the Original Series in High-Def is pretty awesome.  From the first episode on, (“The Man Trap”, where they started killing off nameless ensigns awfully quickly), the series is solid but it’s the Blu-Ray disc and the features that are the real story here.  It’s a set only for people with Blu-Ray and people who are massive Star Trek geeks.  But what massive Star Trek geek doesn’t yet have a Blu-Ray player?

Years:  1967
Genre:  TV series, Drama
Country:  United States
Languages:  English
Starring:  Mike Connors, Gail Fisher, Joseph Campanella, Ward Wood, Robert Reed
Creator:  Lalo Schifrin
Run time:  21 hours 18 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
DVD extras:  Not much of anything
Related reviews:  Mannix Season Two, Mannix Season Three

          “Mannix” was a TV show from the 60s and 70s.  It seems to be one of those shows that was a success in its time, but it really doesn’t hold up today.  You see, it’s a detective show.  And there have been so many detective movies over the years, and detective TV shows, that for a film or show to cut through and maintain any kind of relevance in today’s world, it has to be something really special.  Think of Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, or Eastwood as Dirty Harry, or yes, even Peter Falk as Columbo.  Each of those characters was so unique and so interesting that people will watch Columbo, Sam Spade, and Harry Callaghan for years to come.  Season One of Mannix comes out today, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment.  But I would recommend picking up the Dirty Harry Ultimate Collection instead, it also comes out today.  And comes with a free police badge! 

          Detective Joe Mannix is played by Mike Connors, who does a good job.  He has a Johnny Cash late-60s haircut, and looks and talks a lot like the Man In Black.  He is tough and implacable, and direct, and determined and smart.  And he always gets his man.  But then, haven’t we seen that a thousand times before?  He’s not as implacable as Sam Spade, not as tough as Harry Callaghan, less determined than Philip Marlowe, and not as smart as Columbo.  So he exists on this second-tier, forgotten rung of the Private Eye ladder from that era, who just doesn’t measure up to Mike Hammer, let alone the truly classic detective characters on TV and in film.  No knock against Connors here, he was just written that way. 

          And it’s the writing that makes this show seem terribly dated when you watch it now.  Mannix works for a company called “Intertect”, a massive private-detective company.  Which was something that apparently existed in the sixties.  There are virtually no cops in the shows, and although there are very often some heinous crimes, like murder, Mannix doesn’t call the cops for backup, he calls his boss.  And regardless of how many bad guys there are, his boss showing up with a gun forces them all to drop their guns.  Which means that Mannix and the boss, played by Joseph Campanella, are so bad-ass that the two of them are able to surround and outnumber ten bad guys at a time.  And “Intertect”?  Sounds a lot like a company name that is created for a punchline in a modern comedy.  Like “Initech” in Office Space.  And the bad guys always come from something that is cryptically called “the syndicate”.  It is never explained what this “syndicate” actually is, we just take for granted it is a large and powerful evil criminal enterprise.  But then, Joe Mannix is not James Bond. 

          In every episode there is a hot babe.  Almost always a blonde.  And in every episode, there is a femme fatale character.  Usually the blonde.  But Mannix is usually too smart and perceptive to fall for their traps and charms – I guess because he saw the exact same woman every week for seven years.  Your radar would be up after that.  The opening and closing credits are irritating, with this mosaic-style fade-cut where a bunch of squares appear on the screen to make a big picture.  Which would be fine if they didn’t do it every single commercial break as well.  And the theme music is sparse, and really short, which would also be fine if it was just for the opening and closing credits.  But they use it as a sting, as a car-chase theme, as dramatic pause music – always the exact same tune!  Through the whole show!  It’s annoying!   

          The episodes have titles that are hit-and-miss, some of them hilarious.  Skid Marks on A Dry Run.  Warning: Live Blueberries.  Coffin For A Clown.  Funny stuff.  There is always a bevy of hot women walking around Intertect, showing up as secretaries and office runners and so forth.  Which makes me think the casting agent for this show was getting laid a lot on the side by promising walk-on roles to every hot woman who crossed his path.  And even if the bad guys are NOT from “the syndicate”, they still seem to have hired thugs for some reason.  All this means that every single episode of Mannix is exactly the same as every other episode of Mannix.  And that makes the first season tough to watch all the way through – 24 one-hour episodes, the main difference in each being that the hot blonde is played by a different actress. 

          Now, there is one awfully cool special feature on the DVD worth mentioning.  Clips from the “Hard-Boiled Murder” episode of the TV show Diagnosis Murder, where the entire cast of Mannix was reunited for the show.  And by that I mean Connors, Campanella and Peggy Fair, who played Mannix’s secretary.  One of the first African-American women to have a regular role on a major TV series, Fair was very good, but she didn’t appear until Season Two.  So really, there is almost no reason to pick up Mannix Season One.