POLICE WOMAN — SEASON TWO: A Cosmopolitan Second Helping Of Cop-Show Thrills

Police Woman was a hit right out of the box.  It was the first big prime time hit built around a female star but in ret­ro­spect, it shouldn’t have been that big of a sur­prise.  For starters, it had a great pedi­gree: pro­ducer David Gerber had pre­vi­ously estab­lished his cop-show skills with the excel­lent Police Story anthol­ogy series and Police Woman was a spin-off that uti­lized act­ing alumni from that show’s first sea­son for all its lead roles.  It also helped that Police Woman had the ideal star in Dickinson: she had an old school Hollywood sex­i­ness as well as a quiet, resilient tough­ness that allowed her to work well in the tra­di­tion­ally mas­cu­line genre of the cop show.

Police Woman: Season Two main­tained the suc­cess of its first sea­son by stick­ing to the tem­plate it estab­lished for the show.  Dickinson toplines as Sergeant Pepper Anderson, part of a four-person inves­ti­ga­tion squad along­side boss Lieutenant Bill Crowley (Earl Holliman)  and detec­tives Royster (Charles Dierkop) and Styles (Ed Bernard).  Each week, the group tack­led a dif­fer­ent inves­ti­ga­tion that involved Pepper going under­cover to get evi­dence on the bad guy of the week.  Whether infil­trat­ing a bad guy’s oper­a­tion as a worker or pos­ing as bait for a killer/psycho, Pepper always put it on the line to get the job done.  Variation was occa­sion­ally pro­vided by episodes where Pepper and the inves­ti­ga­tion would play the b-plot to a char­ac­ter sketch of some­one else in the law enforce­ment or crim­i­nal worlds.

The result­ing for­mula was ver­sa­tile enough to pull off another solid sea­son of cop-show action and drama.  Surprisingly, the open­ing episodes are the weak­est ones of the sea­son: “Pawns Of Power” has a solid setup, includ­ing a nice turn from Roddy McDowell as a smarmy Fed who care­lessly plays havoc with Crowleys’ oper­a­tion, but has a rushed finale that side­lines Pepper while “The Score” suf­fers from some oddly incor­po­rated humor and doesn’t inte­grate the crook and cop plot­lines in a sat­is­fy­ing way.

That said, Police Woman: Season Two quickly picks up steam after the first few episodes: “The Chasers” fig­ures out a clever way for Pepper to stum­ble across the activ­i­ties of a pair of schemers (Ian McShane and Ida Lupino) who trick hos­pi­tal patients into insur­ance scams that favor the cof­fers of their so-called char­ity legal ser­vice while “The Purge” has Pepper team­ing up with a con man (David Huddleston) to clear Crowley’s name after a crim­i­nal frames him dur­ing a bust gone wrong.

There are also some inter­est­ing episodes that blend the usual Police Woman inves­ti­ga­tion for­mula with the kind of melan­choly char­ac­ter sketches you usu­ally saw on Police Story.  For exam­ple, “The Hit” fea­tures Pepper and the gang inves­ti­gat­ing the attempted mur­der of a boxer but the main focus of the episode is the mid-life cri­sis of a hit man (Harris Yulin) with bad luck.  Another effec­tive episode in this vein is “Paradise Mall,” in which the main plot deals with an inves­ti­ga­tion focused around a mys­tery rapist/killer but adds a per­sonal ele­ment into the mix when a cop (James  Wainwright) goes off the deep end when his wife becomes one of the killer’s victims.

Fans of cop shows will be pleased by Police Woman: Season Two’s blend of grit and action.  Since the show was a suc­cess, it’s obvi­ous that the sec­ond sea­son had a healthy bud­get to work because the show puts it to good use: there’s plenty of great loca­tion shoot­ing all over the Los Angeles area and vir­tu­ally every episode involves at least one car chase.  As a result, each episode feels like a t.v. scale ver­sion of the cop/action films of the era.

The show’s a-list sta­tus is also rep­re­sented in the strong guest cast it drew in for each episode.  In addi­tion to the afore­men­tioned guest stars, Police Woman: Season Two also fea­tures mem­o­rable guest appear­ances by up-and com­ing stars like Sam Elliott, Erik Estrada as well as famil­iar t.v. faces like Robert Loggia, Joan Collins and Robert Vaughn.  B-movie fans will be amused by the episode “Glitter With A Bullet,” which fea­tures sup­port­ing per­for­mances by cult faves like Robert Ginty of The Exterminator and Robbie Lee of Switchblade Sisters fame.

The final asset of Police Woman: Season Two — in fact, the glue that keeps it together — is the con­sis­tently com­pelling work of its cen­tral cast.  Dickinson proves her worth both as star and team player: she can carry episodes when she has to, like the “under­cover with a killer” episode “Cold Wind,” but is just as com­fort­able in episodes that require ensem­ble work with the rest of the team.  For an exam­ple of the lat­ter, there is a great scene in the “Don’t Feed The Pigeons” episode where Dickinson works with Bernard and Dierkop to give a three-person illus­tra­tion of how the “pigeon drop” bunco scheme works.

Holliman makes a strong co-lead for Dickinson as the squad’s boss — they really show off their chem­istry and chops in the afore­men­tioned “The Purge” episode — and Dierkop and Bernard offer the right mix of qui­etly strong sup­port and sly humor as the squad’s detec­tive team.  Dierkop even gets to stretch out a bit in “Double Image,” an episode where he falls in love with a trou­bled sus­pect he is sup­posed to be guarding.

Some fans are crit­i­cal of Police Woman’s sec­ond sea­son as pub­lic crit­i­cism of the first season’s “cheese­cake” ele­ments led to a ton­ing down of that ele­ment for the sec­ond go-round.  Whether that is an issue for a viewer is a mat­ter of per­sonal taste but the show’s focus on action and pace is likely to carry the day for most fans of this genre — One could argue that by design Season Two goes for an upscale ver­sion of the show’s tem­plater, with more elab­o­rate sto­ry­lines that led the team into higher-echelon crime sit­u­a­tions like thiev­ery rings and the inter­na­tional drug trade.  Best of all, Dickinson is sexy regard­less of what an episode has her doing.

In short, Police Woman: Season Two con­tin­ues to deliver the 1970’s cop show goods — and if you’re an Angie Dickinson fan, this is choice stuff.