Date of airing: April 11, 1998 (CBS)
Nielsen rating information: 10.60 million viewers, 7.0/14 in Households
So, Gary learned something about his grandfather in this episode? Gary’s family always had a connection to McGinty’s, which means that Gary was always supposed to get the paper, considering McGinty's is also somehow connected to Lucius Snow? Was this a serious attempt at bringing some backstory into Gary’s family life, or will all of it be forgotten by the end of this episode, and the writers move on to topics that have absolutely nothing to do with what has been established here? This could have been an episode doing a lot more than just remaking REAR WINDOW for a 45-minute television format, as it had a wonderful chance to build a character's past by including mystery, a bit of mythology, as well as a backstory, but this hour barely did any of that. This is kind of a shame, because the idea that the world was incredibly small for Gary (the random new waitress he just hired is the granddaughter of a woman who was possibly having some naughty funtime with Gary's grandfather) is intriguing to me.
It was a fun little episode, and one which made me
think of how awesome it would be for a random sports bar like McGinty's to do theme nights and
have all its patrons show up in 1940s dresses one evening, so they can have a dance
night as depicted in this hour. First of all, would that actually
bring in money for the bar owner? And secondly, those theme nights
simply have to be happening already, right? It makes me want to wish
to be stuck in the 1940s for a hot minute, just so I can be present
during one of those dance nights, because they seem rather cool and sexy. With those theme nights, you could also bring in some education – with a 1940s jazz night, there isn't much more until you also tell today's customers stories about past customers. Those who lost their lives during the war, for example. And with that, you create a customer for life, as you are building a deep and meaningful connection with them via (educational) theme nights.
 |
| Something strange is happening in the neighborhood. |
One factor of 1990s television is that, if a show wasn’t interesting enough to sustain life for multiple seasons because of its limited premise (and let's be honest here, Gary getting tomorrow's newspaper today is a limited premise, as he is doing the same thing in every episode), it goes off copying premises of movies, turning episodes into 40-minute remakes of those movies. My first-ever favorite TV show SEVEN DAYS has done that quite often, which had me learning about the practice of TV shows "remaking" successful movies, and looking out for that kind of episodes ever since (“Pinball Wizard” being an attempt at WARGAMES, “Deja Vu All Over Again” was LOLA RENNT). I don’t mind the idea of remaking movies for 40-minute episodes at all, but there is always a sense of the writers not knowing what they really wanted to do and how to keep their show unique and fresh.
This episode at least looked like the writers knew what they wanted to do with the premise of REAR WINDOW, although the story of Gary stuck in his apartment with nothing to do but take a binocular and spy on his neighbors across the street isn’t really much of a premise, even in a 45-minute format, and especially when the story turned into something else halfway through after Gary started having dreams about a dance party in the 1940s. With Gary sitting in a wheelchair, there was not much to do for him in this episode, hence the twist in the story, so the similarities to REAR WINDOW essentially dropped, which I was grateful for. That way, the episode was still able to tell a story on its own instead of having to rely on a popular feature film.
However, the writers employed some incredibly stupid twists to advance the plot. How Gary was unable to notice
the paper coming from 1944 is beyond me (he only noticed the small
headline of the woman shot and killed, and didn’t even read the accompanying
article that could have told him the woman was shot at McGinty's and not
in her apartment), and how (now retired) Detective Crumb wasn’t listening to Gary, after he
has come to learn that the young man is usually right about those things he is
saying, is also beyond me, but that is at least just a necessary part of
the story, as Crumb couldn’t just go in midway through the episode and
solve the case. The killer never gets found after 20 minutes when there are still 25 minutes left.
 |
| Welcome to Chicago! You will always look into the barrel of a pistol here. |
The red herrings this episode was filled with gave me chills of the negative kind, and
making the mystery writer look like he is the murderer weirded me
out, especially the whole scene with the writer buying the gun from the
old guy. With that scene having been shot the way it was, turning it into a full-blown distraction for the audience, it transforms this episode into one that doesn’t feel like it was produced during the late 1990s, but instead comes straight from the
1960s. It's almost like this episode of EARLY EDITION had the same age as the Hitchcock movie REAR WINDOW. At least if Gary could have been more active
in the narrative, something could have been salvaged. But what can you do with a character who is in a wheelchair? The show hasn't even figured out what to do with the blind woman.
