The Stephen J. Cannell Thread

Ever read his books? They're definitely airport reads but some of the Shane Scully books have been pretty good, better than some of the crap James Patterson has been pushing out. Although one involved the LAPD and Sheriff's dept SWAT teams getting into firefights with each other and another involved a white gangsta woman. Crazy shit indeed.

Greatest American Hero

Rockford, Hardcastle, A-Team
One thing's for sure. His shows had all the coolest theme songs ever recorded.

"Rockford" was a little before my time. My pop loves it and I probably should give it a shot. I honestly don't recall much about "Hardcastle" other than the terrific theme.

In no order my top 5 would be "21 Jump Street," "A-Team," "Stingray," "Renegade," and "Hunter."

I need to check out "Profit" one of these days. Only heard good stuff about that one.

Baretta, Rockford, Riptide.

I get that Chiller channel now with my dishnetwork service and that show seems to play everynight. Maybe now is a good time to see what it's about.

ED209, "I love it when a plan comes together" Colonel John "Hannibal" Smith
These are my favorite series of Stephen J Cannel...
1) The A-Team- Aside from Star Trek...My 2nd favorite series all time. I don't know where you start! From the score composed by Mike Post and Pete Carpenter, to George Peppard starring as Colonel John Hannibal Smith, Dirk Benedict as Face, pretty tom boy Melinda Culea as Amy Amanda Allan the reporter that covers the A-Team, The rival Colonel Decker Lance LeGault always outsmarted by CJHS, the terrific action sequences where no one was even harmed or the humor. To me...the best Hannibal escape is the opening ep of season 4 where Hannibal lead Col. Decker and his men up a building while he used a window washers rig and then parachuted off the same rig as Decker replied...I don't believe this.

2) Hunter-2nd best cop series after T.J. Hooker. I liked the interplay between Hunter and McCall, another excellent score from Mike Post and Pete Carpenter, the action, car chases, shoot outs and plenty of trouble with their Captain.

3) Hardcastle and McCormick- Good interplay between the leads, great music and car chases.

4) Wiseguy- Ken Wahl made an interesting criminal and it was one of Kevin Spacey's best early roles.

5) Greatest American Hero- A fun series with Connie Sellica as the girlfriend to the titular hero and great wisecracks by Bill Culp.

Hopefully John Singleton will not mess up...The A-Team film.

Wiseguy. Loved the half-season plot arcs, and the casting was spectacular - Vincent Terranova had a better Rogue's Gallery than Spider-Man. Spacey's first substantial role, Tim Curry, Jerry Lewis, Ray Sharkey, David Straithairn and Stanley Tucci all did great work here.

Shame on Jonathan Banks Is My Hero not naming Wiseguy before Fleed did.

Oh yeah Wiseguy, (Need to add that to the queue) featuring Kevin Spacey as part of an incest couple and Sen. Fred Thompson as a racist hillbilly.

Biggest Cannell disappoitment: "Booker." I was so stoked when I heard Grieco was getting a spinoff. I didn't hate the show, but it never matched the awesome vibe he brought to that one season of "Jump Street."

That's my favorite of all the different versions of that production company logo. The collar up, showing off his guns, getting ready to finish cranking out a "Commish."

Especially love the Simpsons send-off with Itchy & Scratchy.

Little known fact: David Greenwalt (co-creator of "Profit") and Joss Whedon at one time considered bringing the character Jim Profit from "Profit" onto "Angel" to work for Wolfram & Hart. Adrian Pasdar, who played the character, couldn't do it because of obligations to another series.

You left out the mighty William Russ as Roger LoCocco. Shame on you.

Man, I haven't thought about that show in a long time. It's funny, I would not, under duress, characterize Ken Wahl as a great actor, but he had an empathetic quality that couldn't be duplicated when he had to be replaced (even by such an eminence as Steven "Manolo" Bauer).

I loved revisiting these on DVD. They didn't have the home video rights to "Nights in White Satin" for the Steelgrave arc, though, so it's diminished a little.

(And I left out Anthony John Denison and Debbie Harry and a bunch of other interesting characters. Netflix this show!)

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Silk Stalkings. That was one of my favorite series from Cannell. It had the ever hot Mitzi Kapture and a steamy intro. I remember the show changed cast after a few years and I became less and less intersted but I was surprised to find out on IMDB that it lasted until 1999, wierd!

Most everyone aleady covered these but, my favorites are: A-Team, 21 Jump Street, Silk Stalkings, Renegade and The Commish.

I've never seen a single episode of Profit but I heard good things about it, also wasn't a big fan of Hunter or most of the other shows he made (notable exception, Rockford Files but I saw that in reruns so I'm not counting it).

His Shane Scully novels are pretty decent, actually. Pretty over the top - but there's actually some substantive social commentary in there; much more than some of the 'top' crime writers.

That would have been so perfect as to constitute a proof for the existence of God.

Here's the wiki entry for Wiseguy (full of spoilers) - does a better job of explaining the arcs. Swapping out almost an entire supporting cast every few months was invigorating. Really can't recommend this show enough to fans of TV crime drama.

EDIT! The Sleuth Channel is running the 1996 Wiseguy reunion movie all this month and next. The villain is played by Acting Sensation Ted Levine. Tivo'd, baby.

"Cobra" wasn't too hot, maybe I'm biased since I never cared for Dudikoff. It was a really a pale imitation of "Stingray."

I never saw "Street Justice" but I'd like to just because of Weathers. If I ever come across the first season cheap I'd snag it.

I remember a show Cannell produced that got a lot of hype before it aired called "The Hat Squad." It was about 3 adopted brothers who solve crimes while wearing spiffy hats. Didn't last long.

I remember that show, I think it had James Tolken as the patriarch. Wasn't it supposed to be like a fictional update of the actual hat squad, as portrayed by Nick Nolte and company in Mulholland Falls?

Echo the love for Wiseguy, and especially Rockford. Riptide was a childhood favorite as well.

It's clear Cannell outranks Quinn-Martin. You know it to be true.

The reason I remember Street Justice is that the other star besides Carl Weathers was the guy who played Rocco in The Bold and the Beautiful. Yes, back then I was more aware of Bold and the Beautiful than the works of Carl Weathers. If I remember correctly Rocco protected Brooke from some thugs in a back alley by kicking their asses with karate. One moment about Street Justice that I still remember was when Rocco demonstrated his karate skills by kicking bricks off from a brick wall. The other thing I remember about the show is one episode which was about some street gangs and cops facing off and in the end it was revealed that than gang bangers were actually the good guys and the cops were corrupt.

I believe Tolken was on the show, once it was canned he ended up as the boss on "Cobra." I know Nestor Serrano was one of the 3 brothers on the show.

It was inspired by that real-life hat squad which was a mistake in my book because the 3 leads wound up wearing the same hat every week. If they would have had them wear a different hat each week (cowboy hat, top hat, fedora) they probably would have had more viewers because people would want to see which new hat they'd wear.

Could I take a hard-nosed cop seriously if he was wearing a beanie? (And I mean those ones from the 50's that had a propeller on top of it) Not really.

Interesting reading if you're a fan of Wiseguy.

And Amazon has seasons 1-3 available for download, including the weirdo Twin Peaks-esque second half of season 3, which never made it to DVD.

wow, SJC was responsible for Renegade? I did not know that.

Which reminds me, wasn't Lorenzo Lamas awesome in that show?

When the 1996 movie aired I was the happiest motherfucker in the world. I sat down to watch and as the opening credits rolled the Seattle metropolitan area experienced an earthquake of significantly minor preportions. Due to the Seattle news media's inferiority complex making them desperate to prove we are as relevent as San Francisco or Los Angeles we were treated to two hours of coverage showing us where the epicenter was and the same footage of a collapsed shelf and broken bottels in Kent over and over again while simultaneously being updated that no further damage had been reported but they were on top of it. It never aired again and I don't have the Sleuth Channel. I am sad.

Like Al Bundy and Hondo, Mundt and The Wiseguy TV Reunion movie.

C'mon Fazer, SJC even appeared numerous times as Reno Raines' arch-nemesis Dutch Dixon.

Lamas was upstaged every week by you know who (no, not one of his interchangable ex-wives).

PM me yall's address, brotha. Though hang onto your thanks til after. Having just watched it, I can't help but feel like it plays as a watered down version of the Mel Profitt arc, and I gotta wonder if it was originally conceived as a miniseries and hacked down to fit into a TV movie slot. Still, it's Wiseguy.

Just finished the Mel Profitt arc. Some great stuff, lightly seasoned with 80s cheese. William Russ should've had a better career. Shit, everyone here except Spacey should have had a better career. Traci Lords turns up in the last episode!

Spacey's interesting in the interview - he fully acknowledges the debt he owes the show, but he gives a bit of a backhanded compliment to Wahl ("he always knew his lines"?? wtf), and seems sort of smugly bemused by the show's role in his career.

Here's a pretty thorough review of the arc.

Even better news, that same August day sees another Cannell production make its DVD debut.



Oh Billy Idol, please let them keep the theme music intact.

It's such a budget label releasing these. I'm real curious to see if they follow Wiseguy through to the end of season 3, or include season 4 at all. (I've given up hope that the Tim Curry arc will ever be released, due to the music clearances.)

Yow. Season 3 of Wiseguy starts off on shaky ground, in both content and on a technical level. An episode of this arc seems to be encoded with its fields inverted, so that you're seeing the first field of a frame after the second field of a frame, giving the entire image a fluttery effect. A whole episode. I looked up reviews of the set and all make the same complaint.

The storyline is a little contrived compared to what came before, and guest antagonists MIchael Chikilis, Robert Davi and Chazz Palminteri can't wade through all the relationship crap weighing down the first arc. This feels like the season they discovered women liked Wiseguy, so the show is subtly engineered to skew that way - lead character Terranova shows up with a romance novel mullet and a deep tan, has more heart-to-heart conversations with his mom, etc. The lead mobster is granted Sympathetic Status by crying when his reputation gets his pre-teen kid turned down by a private school. Lots of good moments, but the arc doesn't have the epic feel of the Steelgrave or Mel Profitt storylines, and it doesn't feel as "grown-up" as the garment industry storyline that ended season 2.

The two episodes between the first two arcs (inexplicably included on a 4th bonus disc instead of in the order they aired) have a different issue - you can't watch them without commentary. They only contain one audio track, and it's full of Ken Wahl telling you how an extra seemed like a nice girl but was really a wild slut, or how he knew he'd be nominated for an award for playing his own father, or how this was the most important episode in the series. He stops a moment or two to watch his own acting, but the episode's mostly impossible to get through due to the glitch.

Wahl looks a little like an Italian Frankenstein in the black and white flashback scenes of his dad:



Oh, Australia and the UK are getting full 1-3 season box sets (minus the missing season 2 music industry arc) in July. The Twins Peaks-inspired "Lynchboro" arc that finishes season 3 has never been on dvd before. Exciting times.

Based on this and the other thread, I downloaded the first four or five episodes of Wiseguy from iTunes. If I don't like them, Phil, you're the first one I'm coming for.

To be honest, that shit takes off around episode 5 or 6. It's a little clunky through the "Loose Cannon" episode. But I recommend you weather that whole arc (it definitely finds a groove). When you get near the end of the final Steelgrave episode ("No One Gets Out Of Here Alive"), watch this scene on youtube instead of the dvd (they replaced the music on the DVD due to a rights issue), and then you'll be in a prime spot to really enjoy the Kevin Spacey arc that follows. And it's superior to the Steelgrave arc. If I were a betting man, Rath, I'd say you'll like the season 2 "rag trade" arc (with Ron Silver and Stanley Tucci) most out of all of them.

Season one is greatness if only for this Jonathan Banks(tm) moment:



But look into Netflixing - it could get pricey if you try to download them all.

Thanks for the heads up. The only reason I'm using iTunes is because Netflix doesn't have the first 2 arcs, apparently. Lame.

I think that's because the whole first season is getting a dvd rerelease in August, and it looks like Netflix will be carrying those.

Finally! After a decent but dry arc set in Washington DC, where a government conspiracy is engineered to frame Vinnie for involvement in an attempt to destabilize the Japanese economy (told you, dry), and after a handful of standalone episodes that varied from serviceable to terrible (they even let Wahl direct one), Wiseguy finishes up season 3 with a fairly solid return to both the multi-episode arc and the oddball antagonist, this time in the form of Mark Volchek (West Wing's Steve Ryan). Rich, secluded, prone to roller-skating around his dry-ice enshrouded home, and obsessed with the William Castle film Mr. Sardonicus, Volcheck is the de facto boss of the rainy Washington logging town. He's the owner of two legitimate businesses, as well as the gambling halls and brothel that keep the resident workers placated in the off hours, and seems to have the local police force firmly in his pocket.

Ordered to investigate the isolationist nature of the town and its 5,000 residents, Vinnie manages to get hired onto the four-man sherrif's department (headed by David Straithairn, REALLY good here) and is soon up to his eyeballs in Pacific Northwest imagery, amputees, sexual kinks, serial murder - what seems to be one big Twin Peaks in-joke (did I mention the town is called Lynchboro?). Solid stuff so far.

Holy cow. Here's a little flavor from the Twin Peaks-goofing the show is doing in season 3. Strathairn chews it up!

But the real reason for the post is this bit of nonsense. You'll recall from my last post, the villain of this arc is obsessed with the William Castle film Mr. Sardonicus. To explain what this might mean to the investigating team (and the audience at home), the feds bring in the big guns.

More random season 3 goofiness. Click here to see Jonathan Banks get so scared his hair stands up like Harold Lloyd.