Jake & The Fatman – Season One, Volume One (CBS DVD)

 

Picture: C     Sound: C+     Extras: C-     Episodes: C-

 

 

If Batman is too much for you to handle, maybe you can turn to the Fatman!  Fatman?  Yes, amazing as it is, Jake & The Fatman – Season One, Volume One has arrived on DVD and sadder still, it arrives before William Conrad’s version of Nero Wolfe (which would make a good single-season, complete series set) is even announced for DVD, despite the fact that both are owned by CBS.  Conrad is the Fatman and Jake is played by Joe Penny in one of the unlikeliest hit TV shows of all time and one that is an all time mess.

 

Jake is an investigator and our Fatman is a lawyer, while both are detectives.  Silly, corny, boring, dud action and mysteries that would not make it in Dynamite Magazine, this package deal managed to headline a cycle of bad dramas aimed at the very aging audience of CBS starting in the late 1980s and we have dubbed that whole cycle “fuddy duddy television” as suggested by a friend of ours.  Nothing can be taken seriously, Conrad seems bored and shrill, Penny walks through scenes and you hope there are more murders so they will talk and appear less.

 

It is rightly thought of as a joke and marked the end of the great cycle of detective TV show that started in the late 1960s.  They were dead by this time and though Conrad proved a draw that did not include good scripts.  Any guest star was just taking a paycheck.

 

The 1.33 X 1 image is poor to awful, with digititis all over the place.  Though the show was shot on film, it was finished on analog NTSC video to save costs on doing titles and even visual effects.  If this comes out on Blu-ray before Nero Wolfe, especially needing much more work than most filmed shows, I will not be too happy.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is a little better, but flat and nothing to celebrate.  The only extra is a set of promos, one for each unexciting episode.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo