The Untouchables

"The Untouchables" had many great elements:

1. An excellent cast, including several familiar faces from TV and films: Tom Amandes ("Everwood"), William Forsythe ("John Doe," "UC: Undercover," "Out for Justice"), John Rhys-Davies ("The Lord of the Rings," "Raiders of the Lost Ark"), and David James Elliott ("JAG").

2. Some entertaining -- if historically unrealistic -- stories, combining gangster action stories with looks into the personal lives of the characters, especially the relationships with Al Capone (Forsythe) and Eliot Ness (Amandes) and their respective wives and children.

3. Fantastic theme music by Joel Goldsmith (I'm still humming it, and I haven't seen the show in 10 years). I wish they had released a soundtrack album for the series.

Though the show was on for only a year and a half, "The Untouchables" was able to tell a complete story, fleshing out both the heroes and the villains into complex characters, and it wrapped up most of the plot lines by the final episode.

This series would make an ideal DVD box set. Are you paying attention, Paramount?

Enjoying the airing of the Untouchable series on Polish TV in English, I find the story as fascinating as the times I´ve watched it before. Aside from the excellent choice of actors/actresses, the tragedy and funny side of the topic is clearly tangible in almost all episodes. Especially when Ness is forced to rescue Nitti from a revengeful boy who´s cop dad was killed. Irony at its best.

Although the story happened nearing a century ago, it is as vivid and valid as ever.

Excellent scripts, great actors, and a fascinating story untouched by time.

I saw this show early on in its first few episodes and was very favorable impressed by the great performances of Tom Amandes as Elliott Ness( by the way, Mr Amandes looks enough like Jimmy Stewart to almost be his twin brother, I could,'t believe the very close resemblence), and Robert Forsythe, who played Al Capone. Mr Forsythe brought a measure of depth to the usual Capone gangster portrayal. I hope that this show will still be viewable even as reruns. It was canned way too soon.I would even like to see it on vhs. It would be well worth the buying price.

One of my favorite movies of the 80s was "The Untouchables," and when I saw that a show was coming out on the same subject, I thought it would be another crummy TV spinoff like "Uncle Buck."

But, despite the fact that the TV show didn't have the big names of the movie version, I found the show to be much more believable and suspenseful, without the glaring anachronisms that the movie had (e.g. Frank Nitti being killed at the Capone trial in the movie).

William Forsythe (Capone) does an INCREDIBLE job...he AT LEAST equals the great Robert DeNiro's performance of the same character. Also, John Rhys-Davies and Tom Amandes give great performances and the show's writing was excellent. It's a shame it had such a crummy time slot and was canned so soon.

Yes, this really was a great show. Two corrections to make on the previous comments that were left: a) The show DID last more than one season; it was on for two. The show ran from January 1993 to September 1994 (the last new episode aired in June 1994). b) Second, it was not on FOX, but on UPN (or whatever they called themselves in the early 90s; it may have been "Universal 9" here in the NY area.)

I think the show ended because William Forsythe announced he was not coming back for a third year. Also, I remember there was some controversy back in 1993 because there was a healthy dose of ethnic slurs on the program, directly mostly towards Italians, Irish, and Poles, and some Italian-American groups were offended by it.