Nash Bridges (1996-2001) is a slickly produced police action-melodrama filmed in San Francisco and starring Don Johnson and Cheech Marin. More successful than you might remember, it ran for six seasons on CBS. It might have run even longer, but Paramount, producers of the series, crunched the numbers and decided that its $2 million/episode budget, combined with its backlog of 122 episodes, plenty enough to move it into syndication, didn't warrant another year's worth of shows.

For this reviewer, looking at Nash Bridges turned into something like Buyer's Remorse. The Complete Series sat in our unloved screeners stack for several days and, not having seen the show but curious about it, mainly for Marin's participation, got the better of me. It's not as though Nash Bridges is particularly bad, but very quickly I realized that it was an unexceptional if transitional cop show,...Read the entire review

Diagnosis Murder (1993-2001), a mystery series starring the irreplaceable Dick Van Dyke, was emblematic of CBS's senior-skewing prime-time line-up during the 1990s. Murder, She Wrote, with Angela Lansbury, had been a huge hit for the network for most of its 1984-96 run, spawning myriad imitators of which Diagnosis Murder was perhaps the most successful. Representative of the generally unambitious, personality-driven formula mystery shows of its period, it has no right to be as entertaining as it eventually became. But Van Dyke's genial presence as the show's anchor, a likeable supporting cast, and a we'll-try-anything approach in its later seasons, including appropriating characters from earlier classic television shows, even staging quasi-reunions for some episodes, made Diagnosis Murder a real wild card of a series. After a slow start of pretty ordinary mystery solving, Read the entire review

THE PROGRAM

Before "Unsolved Mysteries" and after "In Search Of…" there was "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World" a 13-episode miniseries intended to be an all encompassing overview of the many strange places and events that captivate the imagination of a 20th century audience, including but not limited to Sasquatch, UFOs, and the Tunguska Explosion. Hosted by Arthur C. Clarke himself, the series makes no false claims regarding the validity of the stories presented, instead offering first hand eyewitnesses to tell their stories and experts (some believable, some quite less so), to offer claims and evidence. Clarke himself acts as a voice of reason throughout, introducing the subjects, popping up sometimes mid-episode to not so slyly let the audience know he thinks some wild claims are hokum, before only reappearing a final time to wrap up what's been presented. The series holds up qui...Read the entire review