TheFearmakers

Watching the first season of Knots Landing again as it's on Prime for 7 more days... I had watched this season years earlier, and it's basically an episodic soap opera but not one with cliffhangers, etc...

Mostly dealing with post hippie issues like the environment and progressive nonsense that was already being replaced with more intriguing aspects of what the show would turn into by season 2, a bonafide nighttime soap, with cheating and backstabbig, the likes of its source series, Dallas...

However, the episodes that are linked to Dallas, like JR or Bobby or, in this case, Lucy visiting is too much looking back and not enough moving forward...

Which some episodes do as this has a good cast... Richard in particular is intriguing as, playing a weasel lawyer, he's the closest thing to an antagonist...

Ironically the dullest characters are the ones directly related to Dallas, Gary and Valene... They're just nice people without many problems... And this is their episode, and it's not great...

But seeing Charlene Tilton, one of the cutest actresses ever, is always nice... however, she had her own show that was a better show, so she's slumming here while keeping the cast from growing their own story-lines...

Basically, you already know (especially at this point) that Lucy won't stay with them because you already know she's a co-star on Dallas... It's all pointless...

Enough of the Dallas stuff... connection to that series about the oil business is flimsy to begin with...

JR and Bobby's brother Gary Ewing on Dallas (originally played David Ackroyd) was never an important enough character to even merit a spinoff.

After becoming a legendary yet sometimes difficult actor, Gene Hackman would put vulnerable young directors through the ringer, ranging from two of his best known films, HOSSIERS and THE ROYAL TENNENBAUMS... and years earlier, the Oscar-winning blockbuster that turned him from a recurring co-star into a bonafide movie star, THE FRENCH CONNECTION, was not much different...

Except that William Friedkin didn't bend to Hackman's initial reluctance to fully embrace the sordid, uncompromising nature of New York City cop Popeye Doyle within the pallid purgatory aesthetic... ironically invaded by classy and sophisticated French drug-smuggler Fernando Rey aka "Frog One" (with vicious henchman Marcel Bozzuffi)...

Ignited by Doyle and comparably affable partner Roy Scheider as Buddy Russo's instinctual hunch on well-dressed Tony Lo Bianco, only suspicious for spending too much money at a nightclub...

Resulting in the titular FRENCH CONNECTION... the bigwig criminal and the nervous climber planning a potential heroin deal of epic, never-heard-of proportions...

With all-night stakeouts, claustrophobic surveillance, sporadic shootouts, a high-octane car chase and the tensely suspenseful conflict of a working-class cop desperately tailing a millionaire kingpin, THE FRENCH CONNECTION is a groundbreaking hybrid of slow-burn/old-school police procedural and viciously rugged 1970's exploitation that... with a jarring soundtrack featuring eerie high-pitched violins that would inhabit Friedkin's THE EXORCIST... is never dull or predictable, thrusting the viewer onto dangerous streets with both the good guys and the bad...

But Hackman's cocky, temperamental Doyle is as equally flawed as he's heroic: from beating up black perpetrators to busting up black barrooms to picking up loose hippie chicks, here's a cop movie that criminals can embrace - providing a lawman's vantage from exploding/shattering glass.