I have finally finished season one episode reviews of Ironside. It took me a long time – I wasn't trying to kill myself doing this. I had already done a few episodes when I first started doing the usual "anal-ysis" of Ironside in 2017, but I updated all those reviews recently. I am going back now and cleaning up the first season review page -- https://www.ironsidetv.com/ironside-1.htm – for grammar, typos and so forth.
Overall, I found doing reviews of this show a tough slog.
It seems to me that many of the episodes were overwritten (i.e., they would take more than an hour of time), so that parts were edited out of them without too much thought as to the results of doing this. There were also discrepancies with the time of the 28 first season episodes, up to two minutes in some cases. Who knows why there is such a difference? I don't think this was because of music rights issues. If you look at my H50 first season page, you will see the timings of those episodes are pretty consistent, very close to 51 minutes, for example.
I recall reading somewhere that Jerome Coopersmith in an interview said that when writing for Classic H50, he was instructed to keep to a certain number of pages, which would represent around 60 minutes (minus the commercials).
As well, it seems to me that the writers for Ironside are often trying hard to be clever. There is a limit as to how clever they can be, though. We are talking about a TV show, not Shakespeare. You often find gaps in the story, which is trying to go from Point A to Point B, but in order to get to Point B, you have to "know something" which is never referred to.
This "cleverness" reminded me of the H50 reboot where the writers would often refer to something obscure or geeky which they had probably researched on Wikipedia. Ironside writers didn't have that option, so I guess we should give them credit for digging up something obscure in encyclopedias or whatever.
Here is an example. In the pilot episode, Ironside is researching locations connected to the person who shot and paralyzed him at the beginning of the show.
Ironside suddenly has a brainstorm, wanting to talk to the field agent to the local Department of Agriculture and also the office of the local Boy Scout troop. The scouts, whose leader is Wally Cox, scour the area at night where the shooter was likely standing, even though it has already been vacuumed with special police equipment. They don't find anything, but Eve [one of Ironside's team] does, totally by accident -- the shell casings from the rifle that fired the shots that hit Ironside are far away from where the shooter was standing.
Ironside has a theory that a packrat would have taken acorns from a faraway oak which is in the area not used as a base for the shooter and swapped them with the six shell casings from the shots that paralyzed him. This is actual pack rat behavior, according to Wikipedia.
I got so fed up with some of the Ironside first season episodes that I just chose another show from a later season at random. But it turned out to be the two-part opener from season three (originally a two-hour show), the continuation of a soap opera-like episode from season one which starred Vera Miles as a woman who has totally lost her memory!
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