 |
|
| Home · Reviews · Interviews · Contests · Blog · Forums · Follow Us On Twitter |
|
by Raul Burriel Published: July 11, 2005
 I still remember this show vividly and fondly. I remember several scenes intricately, which is very odd for a child who was barely ten years old when the first episode aired. Even more unusual was the fact that I was permitted to stay up and watch this show which, if I recall correctly, aired at 10pm on NBC. Clearly I had a peculiar childhood.Remington Steele harkens back to the days when an hour long drama was preceeded by a mini-trailer aluding to what was coming up Tonight... on Remington Steele! OK, they didn't actually say "Tonight... on Remington Steele", but they still broke down the entire premise (and spoiled the secret) in the first thirty seconds of the first episode! I therefore do not hestitate to tell you all about it right now. As Laura Holt's (Stephanie Zimbalist) narration over the opening theme explains, "Try this for a deep, dark secret. The great detective Remington Steele? He doesn't exist. I invented him." Laura Holt is a damn good private investigator. But she's also a woman. And in the early 80s, apparently, being "damn good" just wasn't enough to help you get ahead in business if you were a woman. So Holt invents the mythical Remington Steele and launches the Remington Steele Detective Agency. By keeping clients in the dark as to the true nature of Mr. Steele, Holt succeeds in making her new agency a success. But then comes along a sauve, dashing (and nameless) international jewel thief with an old movie fetish played by future James Bond, Pierce Brosnan. Through a series of convoluted events, the thief assumes the identity of Remington Steele and by the end of the first episode, he's decided to stay on and help Laura out with her detective agency. James Read played Murphy, Holt's partner. He was supposed to play a part in a love triangle with Steele and Holt that never really developed and by the next season, Read would be gone (too bad, I liked him). The first season of Remington Steele had all the elements that you would come to expect from the series in later years, as well as from other zany and offbeat detective shows that would come in its wake. Murder, intrigue, espionage, and a hunt for gold through the desert of the Southwest. But the series is dated, particularly when it comes to waredrobe and set design. And some elements are almost comical today (a woman has to invent a male superior in order to be successful in business?) The writing, though, is witty. Remington Steele originated much of the male/female chemistry ("will they or won't they?") that we see on TV today. In fact, one of the show's producers, Glen Gordon Caron, went on to take this chemistry to new heights when he created Moonlighting. Bonus Material What really disappoints me about this collection is that the video transfer doesn't seem to have been cleaned up at all. The picture quality is grainy throughout. It looks like something cobbled together in a back room in Hong Kong off a bunch of VHS tapes. The disc menus also feature grainy images and have no background music whatsoever (very unusual given the show's trademark theme by Henry Mancini - I could have made menus better than these!) The packaging is fairly standard. You get four discs in two slim snap cases and inserted in a slip case. The front of the slip case screams "Pierce Brosnan Before He was Bond He Was... Remington Steele" and images throughout the packaging show Brosnan, Zimbalist, and - oddly enough, being that she didn't join the cast until the second season - Doris Roberts (perhaps trying to capitalize off Roberts's success on Everybody Loves Raymond?) OK, that's the bad stuff. Now for the shocking stuff. These discs feature commentary on selected episodes! No, not by Brosnan or Zimbalist (I wonder how keen they'd be to revisit this series after the rumors that both of them lost movie roles when the show was unexpectedly renewed in 1986-87). Instead, we get the show's creators, which is just fine by me (although Brosnan and Zimbalist would have been nice, too). Robert Butler and Michael Gleason give great commentary on two episodes and Gleason and writer Susan Baskin are featured on a third. It's great stuff listening to a couple of old Hollywood hands discussing how they gave birth to a series. We also find out why everyone's wearing fedoras in the first episode (very jarring - and Gleason and Butler agree.) Side B of disc 1 includes a great featurette (whose superior video quality just makes the episodes look that much worse). Creators, producers, executives, and even Brosnan himself tell us how the show came about. No hard feelings, 'eh, Pierce? You got to be James Bond after all. A second featurette on side B of disc 2 gives us profiles of the characters. Everyone compares Brosnan to Cary Grant and we get a little "where are they now" with actress Janet DeMay who played Bernice Foxe in the first season (and then fell off the face of the earth). Side B of disc 3 includes a third featurette, this one about the slapstick in the show and it's homage to old movies. It's the show's little touches that always made it endearing to me. Every episode had "Steele" in the title, for example ("License to Steele," "Tempered Steele," etc.) and the kitten in the MTM logo at the end wore a Sherlock Holmes hat. There's a catch 22 involved with this series, though. While it originated much of the sexual tension and tongue-in-cheek humor we'd see in numerous later shows, it also suffers from having been first. It's quaint but just doesn't have the edge and humor of today's shows. Contents:
Series Rating: B Bonus Material: B |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © 1997-2009 Burlee LLC. All rights reserved. | Reprints | Privacy Policy | Disclosure | About Us/Contact Us | RSS Feed |