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.