USA Network has a new series “Kojak”, based on the 70s series starring Telly Savalas. This time, Ving Rhames plays the title role. It looked interesting from the teasers and so I set my TiVo to record the pilot. What a mistake that was.
The show opens with a set of two detectives interrogating a suspect. They’re asking him about the location of something and who hired him — you know, the usual clichéd detective-suspect chatter. One detective is apparently named Crocker and the suspect mocks him about this, including some crack about how he must have been called “Betty Crocker” as a child (or something). Obviously, these detectives aren’t having much luck and so they walk out of the room, warning the suspect that Kojak is on his way.
Instead of having Rhames walk in at that moment, the producers treat us to a drawn-out introduction to Ving-Rhames-as-Kojak as he walks down a hallway. He’s mostly shot from behind or in silhouette — <sarcasm>ooh, he’s mysterious!</sarcasm>. Finally, Kojak reaches the interrogation room with his trademark lollipop dangling from his lips. He walks in and places his lollipop on the interrogation table; he then proceeds to empty his revolver (revolver!) of its bullets. He inserts a single bullet and spins the chamber, wild-west style.
You'll never guess what came next. Oh, wait, you can see this coming from a mile away? Quelle surprise. Naturally, Kojak slams the suspect’s head onto the table and places his revolver against the perp’s right temple. At first, the suspect calls Kojak’s bluff and continues his jibber-jabbering,but Kojak pulls his trigger a few times as the gun clicks emptily. The suspect soon realizes that the single bullet is soon coming his way; Kojak demands the location of the event and who he’s working for and the suspects whimperingly mumbles the relevant bits to our hero. Triumphantly, Kojak removes his gun and strolls off.
The next scene features Kojak at the scene of the event with a cadre of policemen, thwarting whatever crime was to take place. This was at about the ten-minute mark into the show (out of an hour) and I just stopped watching; I deleted the episode and removed the Season Pass from my TiVo. Clichés aside, I was annoyed by Kojak’s methods in this series (and I speak only of this Ving Rhames version as I’ve never seen Savalas’ version). The best part of detective shows (and, yes, I mean you, Monk) is the lead character’s puzzle-solving abilities. Here it was just brute force, which doesn’t make it much of a detective show, now does it?
I try to keep an open mind about “new original series” on cable (as they like to call them) as many of them can be quite good. But, this time around, I just don’t know what they were thinking. Kojak didn’t hold up as a traditional detective show and it didn’t have enough action to fill that genre either (unless something miraculous happened after that eleventh minute). If you were on the fence about this new edition about Kojak, you needn’t bother.