FUGITIVE NIGHTS: DANGER IN THE DESERT. Made for-TV movie. NBC-TV, 19 November 1993. Sam Elliott, Teri Garr, Thomas Haden Church, Raymond J. Barry, Barbara Babcock, Geno Silva. Screenplay by Joseph Wambaugh based on his novel Fugitive Nights. Director: Gary Nelson.

   Teri Garr is good-looking enough, and about the right age to portray any one of the many female PI’s that have cropped up in recent years, and Sam Elliott has become scruffy enough to become her assistant while he’s waiting for his disability retirement to come through.

   If this is a pilot for a TV series, though, I think they’d better start hunting up some stories, since in this whole two-hour introductory affair, there’s only about 15 minutes worth of plot. Lots of byplay between the characters can fill up big chunks of time, that’s for sure, but it left me hungry for some meatier fair in nothing flat.

   Locale: Palm Springs. Villain: a bald Mexican fugitive, loose in the desert. Opinion: forget it.

— Reprinted from Nothing Accompliced #4, November 1993 (very slightly revised)