Remington Steele – Season Three
Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: C+ Episodes: C+
When Remington Steele debuted on NBC, some though
it would be a bad combination of Hart To Hart and their failed spy show A
Man Called Sloan. Who was this
Pierce Brosnan guy and what was Remington Steele, a new razor blade? Desperate NBC stuck by the show and Mary
Tyler Moore Production’s attempt to have a Universal TV Mystery series type hit
was successful enough to run five seasons.
Joining the show with the Season Three box set, featuring all 22
episodes on four double-sided DVDs, how good was the show and how does it hold
up?
Well, it is about as good as the later seasons of Hart
To Hart, which lost its way when switching from Fox to Columbia
Pictures. It holds up much better than
many other Hart imitators and certainly is more intelligent and classier
that Brosnan’s last two James Bond feature film disasters, The World Is Not
Enough and Die Another Day.
However, the show always featured humor that was too light and the
series barely exceeded a generic feel it had from the start. This was Doris Roberts second hit TV show
after Angie and before the grossly overrated Everybody Loves Raymond,
while Zimbalist was actually the star despite not being the title character. Though it was a hit, the show had nothing on
early Hart To Hart or early Moonlighting and the fact it could
not find its niche by the third season means it will always feel like a “second
stringer” in the genre. For what is
here, this is at least fun, dignified entertainment that is good enough to
explain its fan base with the show appreciating a bit in 20+ years, but Brosnan
moved on to larger stardom and it is a show that is not talked about much. The DVDs could change that a bit, but it
will remain as much a curio as anything.
At least it was classy enough, though many at the time thought it was a
joke. It is better than that.
The 1.33 X 1 image is not bad for its age and better than
most 1980s TV series we have seen, meaning MTM did not skimp on quality and/or
use cheap videotape tricks. It is also
very comparable to the transfers Sony just issued for the first season of Hart
To Hart, so fans of both should be pleased. The Dolby Digital 2.0 sound is monophonic on the episodes and
simple stereo on the featurettes. That
makes for a very watchable combination that is better than I remember the
broadcasts being. Extras include three
featurettes, including one on an episode Zimbalist wrote that points to a
direction the show could have gone into called Steele In The Chips that
also has one of two audio commentaries on this set.
- Nicholas Sheffo
