Cannon - Season One, Volume One. Tuesday is William Conrad day! (*****5/10)
I have been trying my best to figure out the popularity of Cannon. Season One, Volume One, gets released tomorrow by Paramount Home Entertainment, along with William Conrad’s other big series, Jake and the Fatman. Another one I don’t understand. Cannon was certainly better than Jake and the Fatman, but really all it could manage was being…decent. At best! Conrad plays Frank Cannon, a private detective who has apparently been fired from the police force for being too fat. At the beginning of each episode, he takes a case - charging lots of money to rich clients and very little to poor ones - and then follows the clues, talks to some people, and gets it solved within an hour. Which is fine, but where’s the interesting part? The part that makes it different from other private eye TV shows?
Maybe it’s the fact that he’s fat. Not many of the TV private eyes were fat. But, like I said in a review a few months ago about Mannix, Conrad’s Cannon suffers from the same lack of discernible talents. He isn’t especially smart - he always meets someone who tells him what he needs to know - he isn’t tougher than everyone else, or faster, or more deadly. So…he’s fatter? Is that really it? This series was a Quinn Martin production, and he did many that were better. Like last week’s release, Streets of San Francisco. I said that Cannon is better than Jake and the Fatman, and it is. Mostly because it’s not specifically irritating. But watching Season One, Volume One, really did make me question the reasons for it’s existence.