User Reviews

A Jewish dad befriends Buzz and Tod on the job, and so the guys get to know his family. But then Dad is murdered by muggers, leaving his son emotionally destitute and ready to reject his religious heritage. The guys want to help out but disagree on the best method, causing a rift between them.

As a drama, the entry is average, concentrating mostly on David, the son. McGreevey is fine as the bereaved boy—if he smiles at all, I didn't catch it. There's a religious subtext concerning both Judaism and Christianity that's handled fairly well, without too much sanctimony. I particularly like Ed Asner's affable dad. He makes us feel his loss almost as much as David does, and is certainly a long way from the gruff Lou Grant. I'm not sure what pretty Nancy's (Hush) purpose is, except to furnish us guys with some needed eye candy.

And, oh yes, mustn't overlook a big series strength. Namely, the good look at seedy surroundings, this time of Scottsdale AZ's industrial area. Having the guys bounce from one blue-collar locale to another in their travels furnishes glimpses of an America rarely acknowledged by glamor-bound Hollywood. Thanks so much Executive Producer Herbert B. Leonard for doing something radically different for the time.

Another episode you'd be unlikely to see on another show, at least not from this perspective. The boys are in Phoenix, Arizona, although the locale for once is pretty irrelevant to the story. Ed Asner makes his fourth appearance on the show as a foreman at a manufacturing plant where the boys are working who befriends them and invites them to his house where they meet his mother and son, (his wife is deceased). The family is Jewish and the son is about to have his bar mitzvah. Everyone is very happy until Ed goes out to get his newspaper and is mugged and stabbed by a couple of drug addicts. He crawls to the door of his house yelling for help and dies in his son's arms.

In a cop show, (like this show's sister show, Naked City), the story would be about the search for the criminals but here we never see them again: they are just the delivery boys from random fate. The story then becomes a search for meaning. The boy rejects his faith because it and the Rabbi they send to counsel him have no explanation for how this can happen. He can't evens and to look at the place where they live and vows to hop a freight train to San Francisco and become a sailor, (he's 13). The boys go looking for him, but with different attitudes. Todd, typically trying to be helpful, wants to become a surrogate father and spend time doing some of the things the kid's father would have done. Buz typically, (see "Birdcage on My Foot" and "City on Wheels"), senses that they will be in over their heads and wants to back away. But he's the one who finally finds the kid and sets him straight, (in a rather pat, oversimplified scene).

This one is directed by David Lowell Rich, who had previously done "the Thin White Line". That one had a scene of a drugged Todd looking into a store window and seeing multiple reflections of himself laughing at him. In this one the boy, (MIchael McGreevey, in a good performance), looks into a store window and sees an image of his father. He turns around and it's a different man, (also bald, with glasses). I like a director who knows how to use little touches like that.