A Televisual Feast

I don’t know what I was expecting from “The Rockford Files.” I mean, I’ve seen it before: the occasional episode and all of the TV movies. But the pilot, while good, is severely lacking.

The problem is with the pacing. “Rockford” doesn’t need an establishing pilot (the majority of the establishing is done in the first ten minutes), it doesn’t need a setup, it just needs a case. And the pilot movie’s case is interesting and surprising, but it also isn’t worthy of seventy-five minutes. The pilot movie is just a stretched episode… more setpieces, more scenes developing Rockford’s romance with guest star Lindsay Wagner.

The things the episode gets right are the case, the bad guy (utterly deplorable villains work best in forty-five minute encounters, just look, for contrast, at how tedious they got in Cliffhanger), Garner (obviously), and the direction. The credits roll after the episode’s started and Richard T. Heffron starts early, doing some really nice work before I saw his name and recognized it. I’m not a Heffron movie fan (though, actually, it looks like I used to like some of them), but he really knows how to bring texture to a television show.

The other thing about the pilot being so elongated… it has a chance to get better. During the particularly tedious parts (when it’s obvious the only problem is the episode’s length), I had a bad feeling overall… but the last act really brings things together.

Except when Rockford and Lindsay Wagner are in the car chase and Wagner’s not freaking out as the car fights an airplane. It seems like they should have done some retakes.

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