DoctorMeticulous

This show from 1989 was ahead of its time. It follows the investigations of the Behavioral Crimes Unit of the Justice Department and their encounters with disturbed criminals. It is the forerunner to programs like Criminal Minds (especially), Millennium, Profiler, etc.

The show is notable for its cast, featuring TV stalwarts David Soul, Kent McCord, and Richard Kind; character actor M. Emmett Walsh, and Jennifer Hetrick (who played a popular recurring character on Star Trek: The Next Generation a few years later). The stories are a little uneven. The cast is capable in those cases where they are given something interesting to play.

The general vibe is very much in key with Michael Mann's crime film "Manhunter," and the show's least successful character is a poor imitation of that film's protagonist. The show's cancellation after only eight episodes seems like a sad event in retrospect, considering the number of forensic procedurals that have crowded the airwaves in the last twenty years. Sometimes success is all about the timing. Unsub might have developed into something really good if it had been given some support from its network.

"Wild in the Sky" (a.k.a. "Black Jack") is a film that really, really wants to be "Dr. Strangelove" or "Catch-22," but doesn't quite get there. The plot: Three anti-war activists escape police custody, only to find themselves stowaways on a B52 bomber with a nuclear device, which they proceed to hijack. The plot is almost beside the point, except as a vehicle for a series of character-driven comic moments that are diverting enough, but never add up to much.

The film is most noteworthy for comic performances from a slew of faces familiar from 1970s television: Georg Stanford Brown (The Rookies), Larry Hovis ("Hogan's Heroes"), Tim O'Connor ("Buck Rogers"), Bernie Kopell ("Love Boat"), Dick Gautier ("When Things Were Rotten") and Jack Riley ("The Bob Newhart Show"). Barbara Bosson ("Hill Street Blues") is credited, but I didn't spot her. Keenan Wynn is on hand for his usual fuss and bluster. Robert Lansing gives the film's best performance as the spit-and-polish bomber pilot; it is a better than average Charlton Heston impersonation.

Perhaps the film was funnier in its original cultural context, with its send-up of corrupt, perverted, uptight, fundamentally dishonest politicians and military personnel, and its implicit anti-war message. But it offers more silliness than satire, so its bark is without any bite--which is what keeps it from being truly memorable.

I didn't see this at all when it first aired, as I live in the USA. For my countrymen, the obvious comparison is to The X-Files, as a believer and a skeptic (at first, anyway) investigate supernatural mysteries. Instead of UFOs, though, the central bugaboo in this series is demons.

Some of the story elements are familiar to longtime genre viewers. The title character, John Strange (as far as we know, no relation to Adam Strange of The Strange Report) is a defrocked priest, which brings to mind the unsold TV pilot "The Possessed" from Jerry Thorpe (producer of Kung Fu) with James Farentino. The frequent setting of the hospital is reminiscent of the contemporaneous American series The Others, about a group of spiritualists and psychic investigators.

But this series, Strange, is better-written than the first season of the X-Files was. The mysteries are more complex, the scares a little chillier, the backstory exposition revealed at a more leisurely pace. Strange's distaff partner, Jude Atkins, is a nurse and a single mom, and there is a refreshingly honest feminist & working class subtext often absent from American television. Ian Richardson is a delicious treat in his role as Strange's foil. Sadly, there are only a handful of episodes, so the considerable potential of this series remains mostly untapped. Which is sad, as I would rather have watched this than Supernatural.