Ah, gentle reader. It took me a while to finish this series; I started watching it with my children in 2019, but we wandered away from it (as we did so many things, and still are). This year (or maybe last–it’s been a while) I started over with it, and this time I made it through. It’s 27 episodes, more than a full season, and as I mentioned when I watched part of Season 1 of The Streets of San Francisco, I’m daunted by watching complete seasons or complete series because of how long in calendar time they take–even things which are but a single season, such as this one was.
So: This program aired on the fledgling Fox network in 1993 and 1994 when it didn’t have programming five nights a week. Bruce Campbell plays the title character, a Harvard-trained attorney turned bounty hunter who is hired by San Francisco business interests to find the man who killed his father who was escorting a criminal gang run by John Bly to trial/prison/whatever. A mysterious object, The Orb, is discovered in a mine nearby, and it’s the McGuffin that will drive many of the connected stories, although not all of episodes further the story arc–the early 1990s were just about where things turned that corner from episodic to serial, and it blends them both (as did The X-Files which also debuted that year).
So each week, Brisco hunts a villain of the week or such. Early on, he competes with a black bounty hunter who styles himself Lord Bowler to capture Bly, but eventually they become friends and partners. It has a cast of recurring characters, including John Astin: as a wacky inventor; Kelly Rutherford as a show girl who was John Bly’s girl but comes to appreciate Brisco more; a renegade who works for Bly and serves as a comic foil as he constantly goes into digressions about art, literature, and philosophy; a proto-Elvis Presley who becomes a sheriff in one of the towns Brisco visits; and later a pretty boy card player. It’s more steampunk than straight-ahead Western (and it has its tongue planted in its cheek the whole time) as it has anachronistic things like rockets, tanks, motorcycles, and other call-aheads to things or people not invented yet. It also has a set of that guy as guest stars starting with M.C. Gainey (whose name I will again forget once I post this) capping with Terry Bradshaw in the two-part season finale (Terry Bradshaw, it seems, has not aged much in 30 years since this was on television).
It’s a bit hit-or-miss, and I put it aside for a couple of weeks before ploughing through the last eight episodes (I thought I had another four to go, but the last disc is special features which I skipped). All right, but it might not be something I watch again.
Although if I were, it would be for Kelly Rutherford.
She only appeared in seven episodes total, so IMDB tells me, but she was mentioned in others. She played, as a I mentioned, a show girl, so she got to channel her inner Mae West and vamp around in show girl outfits, although she did get some depth of character at times.
But…. Lord have mercy.
She has had a fairly successful career in other television series, including Gossip Girl, Melrose Place, Quantico, and others and is still lovely today. But, boy Howdy, in 1993 she was all that and a family sized bag of chips. Maybe a variety pack with lots of bags of chips.
