Cynical Cinema

I don’t know.  But I think I might be giving Cannon extra credit because I just watched Jake And The Fatman all day yesterday, and William Conrad is so fat in that show that he looks positively svelte in comparison when I watch Cannon.  He’s still pudgy, and he still wheezes when he walks, but he’s probably 100 pounds lighter, and that’s gotta count for something.  But I still can’t quite figure out the appeal of the show.  In the beginning of each episode, you see who the bad guys are, and what their plans are.  And then Cannon shows up and solves the crime and saves the day.  Every episode.  What they should have done is let at least one of the bad guys get away every season.  Then there would be a little drama in each episode.  Like, maybe this is the one where the bad guys get AWAY!

But that never happens.  In fact, nothing really ever happens.  Cannon is a tough guy, he’s relentless and he’s resourceful.  But he isn’t particularly interesting.  His most distinguishing feature is that he’s fat.  And he did THAT even better in Jake and the Fatman.  So I welcome any insight people can shed into this program for me.  From the first episode of Season One Volume Two, Cannon on a train, until the final episode, where a young kid in prison is being used by an evil gang with the help of a hot chick, I could not understand the appeal.  Then again, I did watch the entire season.

Season One, Volume Two of Cannon comes out December 2nd, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

“You made just one mistake.  Murder.  Most foul.” 

The Fatman needs new friends.  It appears that in just about every episode of Jake And The Fatman, Season One Volume Two seems to involve a friend of the Fatman in someway.  Either some old poker-playing buddy who gets mixed up in a murder, or an author friend actually is a murderer.  Every time one of William Conrad’s old friends shows up, it means one of two things.  Either he’s a killer, or he needs help proving that he isn’t one.  Much like Jessica Fletcher in the old Murder She Wrote series, this guy has got to hang out in different circles and spend time in different places.  As a crown attorney, dedicated to putting bad guys behind bars, it seems to me like a clear conflict of interest that he knows so many of them.

And then there’s Jake Styles.  He’s an investigator, working for the DA’s office.  As I mentioned in my review of Volume One, he appears to be a prostitute of some kind.

http://blog.rogersradiointernet.com/cynicalcinema/2008/07/06/jake-and-the-fatman-season-one-volume-one-out-tuesday-410/

But what was bothering me during Volume Two of the first season of Jake and the Fatman was that Jake was constantly doing things that would seem to be outside the boundaries of his job.  Arresting people.  Shooting people.  Interrogating people.  He’s not really a cop, right?  He’s an investigator who carries a cop badge, I think.  But it’s never really clear how the whole system works there.  The point is, every time I see him doing regular cop stuff, like arresting people, I get this CSI flash, where I question the process.  Like in CSI, when the scientists interrogate suspects and I twitch a little.  In the final episode of Season One, he goes to a mob boss to get some help.  Because he knows the mob boss and he can help.  This feels more like something Steven Seagal The Cop would do, rather than something James Bond The Cop would.

Oh, and one more thing - enough with the bulldog already, Fatman!  We get it - he looks like you, and you dote on him…but William Conrad does not need anything extra in this series to accentuate how fat he is.  I get out of breath just watching him waddle around, and impatient waiting for him to get up stairs.  I don’t like to sound shallow, but William Conrad, by the time this series came around, was too fat for television.  He was too fat to act.  He was too fat to get up and move around.  And just watching him makes my arteries harden.

Season One, Volume Two of Jake and the Fatman comes out on DVD December 2nd, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

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.

Season One of Jake and the Fatman comes out on DVD tomorrow, July 8th, from Paramount Home Entertainment. It’s actually, believe it or not, a spin-off of a couple of Matlock episodes, where William Conrad played an aging prosecutor. NBC liked the character so much that they decided to build an entire show around the Fatman in the late 80s and early 90s. They added Joe Penny as Jake, an investigator for the prosecutor’s office. The Fatman was just that - William Conrad being fat. He falls asleep in court, because he’s too fat to stay awake. He flops down into furniture, because he’s too fat to stand. He uses handrails to move about, because he’s too fat to walk, and he wheezes because he’s too fat to breathe. What an interesting character!

Jake, on the other hand, is the James Bond character of the series. He is slick and charming and sexy and sleeps with many, many ladies. He plays poker and drinks fancy drinks and gets into unnecessary car races and chases. There were many characters like Jake in other shows in the 80s - Face in the A-Team, for example. The main thing that made these characters Bond-esque was that they had nice hair and a suit. Apparently, in the 80s, all you needed was nice hair and a suit to get all the ladies you wanted. What a simple time! Penny isn’t exactly Sean Connery here, but he’ll do. The thing is, every character in the show is straight out of the 80s, whether it be TV dramas or sitcoms. Every situation on the program is depressingly familiar as well. Like the premiere episode, where a guy running for state senator gets mixed up in a murder plot. We certainly haven’t seen that one before!

Every episode of Jake and the Fatman seems to begin with a woman taking her clothes off. It was TV, and the 80s, so of course she doesn’t get down to the ol’ birthday suit or nothin’. Just down to the underwear. And whether she ends up being a character in the episode, or just someone whose naked torso will get the ball rolling, she’s always in there. But it’s not the little plot contrivances and generic episodes that bother me about this show. It’s the two main characters. Who wants to see a fat guy wheeze about and flop down on sofas? What does he add to the mix here? Like his character on Cannon, William Conrad doesn’t seem to be unusually smart or anything here. So why that character? And Jake? He’s a half-assed Remington Steele, who is also apparently a prostitute of some kind. Much is constantly being made about the fact that for a cop, he lives above his means. And the insinuation is always that the women he sleeps with buy him expensive things. Does that not make him a prostitute? Should a prostitute really be enforcing the law?

Jake and the Fatman ran for five seasons on NBC, based partly, I suppose, on William Conrad’s success as Cannon. He’s certainly put on weight since then, and he was already pretty darn fat. When the show died, it was actually spun off into another show, Diagnosis Murder, starring Dick Van Dyke. Which means that Diagnosis Murder is actually a spin-off of a spin-off of a Matlock episode. Which does nothing for the show in the middle. Jake and the Fatman (at least Season One) is a show best forgotten in the 80s.