Reviews

Many of the Wild Wild West episodes are too campy and sacrifice a solid and consistent story line. When the episodes start to resemble Batman I move on to the next episode. Other than some of the early episodes this one was a rare and enjoyable find. Sammy Davis Jr. Works nicely either Jim and Artemus. Maybe a tad goofy when he gets the shakes but other than that good plot that turns out well without all the usual overacting by the cast of villains. I rate this ad one of my top five of the series.

As the Kojak series winds down so obviously does the writing team. This was another episode on this disc and the end of the season where the story and the actors just phoned it in. I strongly disagree with the review that suggests this was a nice change of pace. When you have a great series and great actors, why do you want a change of pace? The backing soundtrack was the perfect cherry on top. No other way to describe it than corny. I understand they're bringing back writers and directors from the early years to handle the upcoming Kojak movies. Thank goodness!

The other reviews I read nailed it. This is not the typical Kojak episode. It's a shame the writers and directors feel like they need to run contrary to a very successful formula and try for humor. They achieve neither a good, professional story or humor. The only other episode that runs a close second to this poor level of story and acting is The Captain's Brother' Wife with Shelly Winters. Other than that, so far all the other episodes and movies are strong.

Silliness and slapstick mostly provided by Shelly Winters makes this the hands down worst Kojak episode. My wife and I are thankful we've gotten this far into the season to find a bad episode. Even the background music signals foolishness is about to be witnessed. The writers and director decided it was time to take a break from the serious themes, tight scripting, and polished acting. We must beapproaching the end of the series.

I was intrigued by the diversity of reviews for this episode. It goes to show that we all lean on different experiences and make judgements based on those. For my wife and my taste this was an outstanding episode. There were enough previous episodes to formulate the character of Paladin and now we get a glimpse of an experience that shaped is present character. This was very well directed as others have noted. It was tough to pack this story into 30 minutes but it was done pretty well, albeit leaving some questions unanswered. There have been several excellent episodes but I would rate this as one of the top 3 in the series. It was sad for me to see some others considered this cringeworthy. There are a few of those in this series but I can't see anything about this episode that would rate that label. But then again I guess it's in the eye of the beholder.

Too much JR not enough Barnaby. JR can't stop believing he's a lover boy macho man and that every girl should fall in love with him. It would be nice if he'd learn how to be a PI from Barnaby as the series unfolds.

Naked City has 7.999 million good stories but this episode was not one of the 8 million. I can't even imagine why the quality cast allowed themselves to be suckered into this episode. I'm guessing they only did it because they were under contract. The sad thing is the story concept could have been used very well to produce the normal high quality we see in almost all the other episodes. Somewhere along the line someone decided to turn this into slapstick and utter foolishness. The final scene where we have everyone sitting in the precinct laughing was very hard to sit through. I couldn't find my remote fast enough to shut it off. My only hope is the next episode which will be the start of the new season will return us to the real Naked City.

This was quite terrible. Low budget cart. Trrrible acting. The girls can't sing or act for that matter. Not up to Barnaby Jones standards.