Fri 25 Mar 2016
A TV Pilot Episode Review: SPENSER: FOR HIRE “Promised Land” (1985).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV mysteries[3] Comments
“PROMISED LAND.” The pilot episode of Spenser: For Hire. ABC-TV. Season 1, Episode 1. 20 September 1985. Robert Urich, Barbara Stock, Avery Brooks, Geoffrey Lewis, Donna Mitchell, Ron McLarty, Ruth Britt, Richard Jaeckel, Chuck Connors. Based on the novel by Robert B. Parker. Director: Lee H. Katzin.
The fourth of the Spenser novels, Promised Land was published in 1976, and was awarded an Edgar for best novel by the Mystery Writers of America in 1977. Fans of the series will also know that this is the book that introduced Spenser’s friend Hawk to the series, although for a while we do not know at the beginning whether he is a friend or not.
It has been a while since I read the book, some 38 years, and while I don’t remember the details of the printed version, I think this two-hour TV movie version (before the commercials were deleted) follows the story line fairly well.
To wit: Spenser is hired by a real estate developer to find his wife, who after 20 years has left him to find herself. A lot of women were doing that back in 1976. Unfortunately her two new friends are not only interested in women’s liberation, they are also in robbing banks and using the money to buy guns for South American revolutionaries.
Also unfortunately the real estate broker has a gunman named Hawk on his trail. It seems he owes a lot of money to a crime kingpin named King Powers (Chuck Connors), and somewhat coincidentally Spenser, the tough PI from Boston, has had a brief run-in with Powers in recent days.
And that about sums it up. Robert Urich as Spenser is tough enough to play the part and also soft enough, but to my mind’s eye, he doesn’t look the part. I happen to think that Spenser looks like his creator, Robert B. Parker in his younger days, in exactly the same way that Mickey Spillane was the perfect person to play Mike Hammer.
At first Barbara Stock looked maybe five years too young to play Susan Silverman, but by the movie’s end, as she semi-rejects Spenser’s offer of marriage, she had at least started to convince me. Perfectly cast, however, is Avery Brooks as Hawk. He was so good, in fact, that when the primary Spenser series ended in 1988, Brooks was cast as the leading character in another series in 1989 called A Man Called Hawk. (It didn’t last long, however, only 13 episodes.)
There is a lot of pop psychology that is at the root of this movie, which I am not saying is a bad thing, but it is something you should be aware of if pop psychology is not your thing. The series was filmed on location in Boston, and with real snow on the ground. There are also a lot of close-ups, which occur at regular intervals when certain conversations are deemed more important than others.
But there is plenty of action, too. My favorite line, though, comes when the wife of Spenser’s client asks him, after she has been rebuffed after making what are called in the vernacular “romantic advances.” She looks at his shelf of books and asks, Have you read all of these?
His reply: Yeah, and boy are my lips tired.
March 26th, 2016 at 1:51 am
It was a very good series, as were the films with Joe Mantegna as Spenser, and yet somehow it was not quite Parker’s Spenser no matter how good everyone was. Brooks, however, was exactly how I saw Hawk in my minds eye, and that great voice only added to it.
I liked this series a lot when it ran, but it isn’t one I have cared much for in reruns since. There is something about series from this period that just don’t seem to hold me now. There is a sameness to the way they look despite this one using Boston so well.
But we should all be grateful we got a series this faithful and this well done from Parker’s books, though at some level I always felt the best of them, like this one, deserved the big screen, and big screen actors, and something television never quite captured about the books.
That may be just me, but much as I liked Urich, and great as Avery was, and as well as they did Spenser there was something missing I could never quite lay may hand on until I saw the adaptation of Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder novel A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES, and it occurred to me that what was missing overall from Spenser, hinted at in this review when it talks about Urich and Barbara Stock, was the weight behind Parker’s books.
Parker was a heavyweight in the literary ring and this vision of Spenser was never more than a good middleweight at best.
March 26th, 2016 at 7:37 pm
I enjoyed the series when it was on the first time around, and I thought this first episode was rather well done. But when I watched the second show on this season set of DVDs, it didn’t seem to rouse the same level of enthusiasm in me.
Your last line may be part of the reason, David. So far, the series just doesn’t have all that much staying power. As you say, something seems missing.
It may also be that the first episode was based on a Parker novel, and the shows on the rest of the season weren’t. Parker eventually did wrote many of the episodes, but he didn’t do the second one, and it showed.
January 16th, 2024 at 9:34 pm
Dr Parker agreed, thought Urich was too Blue Blood, when Joseph Mantagne reprised the role after Urichs death, Dr Parker said Joe was the type of actor to portray SPENSER, he handpicked Tom Selleck for Jesse Stone, had selected Helen Hunt to portray his other character,SUNNY RANDALL