Date of airing: January 16, 1999 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 9.90 million viewers, 6.5/12 in Households
written by: Sean Clark
directed by: Randy Roberts
Was there a thing going on with the story of Al Capone during the 1990s? The movie THE UNTOUCHABLES came out in 1987, so the story of the prohibition agents may not have been as hot as it was then. Geraldo Rivera hosted his Capone vault TV special even before the movie was released, in 1986, which has been turned into a joke in 1990s pop culture media. Maybe it is because EARLY EDITION is set in Chicago, and after depicting a couple of random and no-name mobsters, it was time to get to the real one and tell a story about Al Capone and a hidden treasure (the syndicated action fun hour RELIC HUNTER would do the same in October of 1999, the treasure being a gun Capone allegedly used). The fact that the series even delivered a Capone-centric episode was too predictable, however, making this hour less fun than the show already is. Not to mention that the writers continued to turn EARLY EDITION into something of an action show. Now characters are shooting off machine guns. Besides wanting to make the show younger and more hip, were the forced action beats also a production note from CBS or the studio?
This episode looked like the writers got a specific idea and turned it into a whole episode, without thinking about if any of it makes sense. Yes, the story in this episode followed the show's recently established logic (meaning: go wild or do not even come to the office to write an episode), but for some reason, it does not want to come to me why Chuck would have been such an idiot in the previous years and cheat the tax system like that, giving his best friends a potential headache as soon as the next tax season comes around. So much for Chuck and Gary being best friends after this – the guy who ran away and lost all the money he got in the second season finale almost got his best friend in prison. If there is ever a doubt for Gary when to call it quits with Chuck and tell him that he will cut off his fingers every time Chuck tries to contact him, that doubt is no more. And let's not mention the notion that Gary's tax problems were literally resolved after Treasury Agent Carolyn Burns just dropped a huge file on Gary's desk and said that this is it. I guess that is what Gary gets as a gift from the government for helping out in solving the final Capone mystery?
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| Lately, Gary is looking too often into the barrel of a gun. |
Generally speaking, I was not feeling it for the story. As a non-American who has never visited Chicago (and I am not planning to), I do not care for the Capone story, nor have I ever watched anything Capone-related that came out of Hollywood, with the exception of a couple of TV episodes that took his name and made a story out of it (the aforementioned RELIC HUNTER episode, as well as an hour of the NBC time travel adventure TIMELESS). The urban legends of there still being boxes of riches out there that once belonged to Capone are exactly that: legends. That means that Geraldo Rivera's attempt at opening up a vault and getting rich off of its content was the last hurrah for the legend that is Al Capone, and that TV special aired before I was born.
I also did not care whether MacGruder was looking for justice and money, or seeking revenge, when planning to talk to or murder Antonio Birelli. The story itself was extremely weird, as both MacGruder and Birelli were constantly changing their affiliation and their character – was one the law-abiding officer and the other a thief and a killer, or did they switch their roles at some point in their lives? The episode could have made the story funnier by focusing a lot more on those two old men, but Gary's tax issues and the inclusion of the two "tourists" Marco and Vincenzo, as well as Treasury Agent Burns, destroyed that potential and turned this episode into a simple 1990s crime drama, when it could have been a comedy about two old men on opposite sides of the law, constantly getting into trouble, which Gary needed to get them out of every couple of hours. By the way, I hope Agent Burns had a warrant for trailing and surveilling the two old men and Gary, but I can already see that there was nothing legal in that regard, and if Gary ever needs to get his name before federal agencies, he could sue the Treasury Department for that little surveillance (although the Department also helping him out with his taxes would be a thing of the past, too).
Also, I have no idea how Burns thought that Gary was too deep into this mess and essentially figured that he had something to do with all of this, and knows every answer to all the questions that would be asked of him. I am sure that Burns had the file on Gary Hobson on her when she was dealing with him, which is when she should have seen that Gary's contact with MacGruder and Birelli was established very recently, and that Gary had absolutely no other connection to anything related to Capone. Not to mention that, if Burns really was surveilling either MacGruder or Birelli, or both, she did see that it was Birelli who broke into Gary's apartment (maybe he should move, that was not the first time someone potentially villainous encountered Gary in his own apartment) and had certain "issues" with the guy. Yes, what I want to say is that the whole surveillance story that was put into the episode for one scene makes no damn sense at all.
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| Two old men exchange some fisticuffs. |
This episode delivered convenience on top of convenience, which is what it looked like when Marco and Vicenzo revealed themselves as the bad guys in the end. Of course, the two guys randomly inserted into the story during the beginning, randomly being brought in by Gary as “strays,” and randomly replacing MacGruder and Birelli as the villains of this episode, were the ones pulling the strings, because the writers were unable to imagine how to old and bickering men could have been the villains. This may have been one of the episodes that established how the writers were thinking quickly when creating a story, and moved on to the next one as soon as they have written a draft. Maybe that is a sign of having to keep a TV show alive for 22 episodes a year (which is hard and stressful work, I do not need to be a TV writer myself to know how crazy the job can be), but maybe it is just the "eh, screw it, let's move on" attitude that I keep seeing on EARLY EDITION ever since it went into season two.
