siebertws13

This episode's opening pre-credits teaser is one of the series' longest & most memorable, six minutes, with a unique and disturbing murder.

Unfortunately, the entry that follows is mediocre. What at first seems like a huge conspiracy turns out to be a pedestrian solution. It shouldn't require the involvement of Department S but Sir Curtis has a personal involvement.

The strikingly beautiful Alexandra Bastedo (from ITC's 1968 superhero/spy-fi series THE CHAMPIONS) makes parts of the episode easier to watch than others, and it's cool that the story is set along the French Riviera. Plus the smart and attractive investigative trio are always fun to hang around with; this just proves to be one of their lesser adventures...other than the spectacular opening!

I recently rediscovered this favorite television series from my tweens that ran in the early 1970s for a single season.

This 75 minute pilot film entry to THE MAGICIAN introduces Bill Bixby as Tony Blake, a benevolent David Copperfield type with a hugely successful Las Vegas show and who lives on a luxurious private plane so he can jet around the nation doing amateur crime fighting stuff (though I've read that this gets dropped in the second half of the season when Blake moves into Hollywood's Magic Castle).

The fast-paced TV film opens with an audience member at Tony's Vegas show dying of a heart attack while he's performing, which is tied to a different audience member in a way that sets a missing persons plot in action. Tony chooses to get involved and the story climaxes with a big stunt late in the third act.

The pilot introduces Bixby's unique titular hero and a supporting cast of characters who apparently get replaced halfway through. They were ahead of their time, however: The pilot is black, one researcher is in a wheelchair, the intellectual is anti-Establishment and lives with a woman who is not his wife.

So far I've seen this pilot and the first episode of the weekly series and liked them both but liked the series opener better. Still, this is a solid introduction and Bixby is great. A charming old school TV star.

After the successful 75 minute film pilot debuted a half year earlier, this debut episode of the single season Bill Bixby detective series opens with a BANG: A fast-paced mystery when the titular stage illusionist & escape artist's close friend, a San Francisco author and investigative journalist (whom the pilot suggests as a sort of secularist San Francisco Aleister Crowley-lite) is targeted for assassination for reasons unknown.

Like the pilot, the opening episode of S01 builds to a wham-bang climax for the savvy amateur crime fighter in the third act, with an exciting and impressive action sequence in which Bill Bixby is clearly doing at least some of the stunt.

Bixby was a multi-decade TV star from MY FAVORITE MARTIAN to COURTSHIP OF EDDIE'S FATHER to THE MAGICIAN to THE INCREDIBLE HULK -- the first big role as a young reporter who discovers a crashed landed alien in the 1963 sitcom to the final of five HULK TV movies in 1990 after five successful TV seasons adapting the Marvel comic book in the late 70s/early 80s.

I never missed an episode of THE MAGICIAN when I was 11 and 12, and lamented when it ended. I've recently rediscovered it on DVD and the first two entries have been hugely satisfying feel-good entertainment. We'll see how the final 20 episodes go.