The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo

Hey.

RTN is showing this series (perhaps along with B.J. & The Bear?) on Sunday afternoons/evenings.

When it was running the first time, the NBC affiliate for Tampa Bay refused to air it in its network-mandated time slot for something else (I forget just what) and put it on some horrible late-night slot on Sunday night/Monday morning. So I saw the tail end of an episode for the very first time yesterday.

I don't know if I would have liked it back in '79~'80 when I was turning teenager and was beginning to get overloaded on car chase genre action shows. This show is just so TYPICAL. You have the old man Sheriff, the goof-ball deputy, the pretty-boy deputy, and then the usual Central Casting darlings you see in all these shows. The writing and production values are standard-level, neither all that great or all that awful. No wonder it never clicked like some of the others had at that time.

Okay...I'll say one thing in defense of this series--it was better than "Border Pals."

I admit it -- I like "The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo." And I don't consider myself a fan of lowbrow TV. I hate stuff like "The Dukes of Hazzard" and "Baywatch," and I don't watch wrestling. "Lobo" was the show critics loved to hate when it was on the air. And since then, the word "Lobo" itself has become synonymous with bad TV.

But it's not a bad show. First, the cast had a genuine chemistry. Claude Akins and Mills Watson had a terrific rapport. If they had been on any other show, critics would have praised them as a terrific comic team. They really clicked. (On any other show, Watson would have become a superstar.) The rest of the cast was solid, and the show had good guest stars, including Pat Paulsen, Sid Caesar, and Larry Storch.

And while it wasn't Shakespeare, the writing was much better than the critics would have you believe. Unlike "The Dukes of Hazzard," the show did have different story lines. It wasn't the same show every week, like the Dukes. (And it didn't have anywhere near as many chases as the Dukes.)

I believe that the "Dukes" connection is the main reason critics hated the show. "Lobo" came along at the same time as the Dukes, it was also set in the South, it also had car chases, and it also had scantily-clad women. It was easy to dismiss "Lobo" as a Dukes clone because of some similarities on the surface.

But look closer, and you'll see the two shows were very different. "Lobo" had better scripts, better performances, better production values, etc.

Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying "Lobo" is a great show; I'm not suggesting it didn't have problems. There were too many car crashes. The show's writing could have been sharper. It should have made more of an attempt to SATIRIZE police shows. And the move to Atlanta in the second season was a mistake. It was much better in Orly County.

But it's not junk, as some critics would have you believe. It's better than most of the stuff on TV today. And I'll say it again: Akins and Watson were a terrific team.

And the first season theme song -- sung by Frankie Laine -- was fantastic. I'd love to hear it on a TV theme song CD.

All I know is that my family watched Sheriff Lobo and enjoyed it quite a bit. It's been so long since I've seen an episode that I can't bring any real specifics to mind, but I know I always looked forward to Perkins' antics, week by week.

Of course, my taste in television wasn't critically-acclaimed, by any means. I watched the Dukes of Hazzard, religiously, but I never had much feeling for B.J. and the Bear. It was only recently I found out this show was a B.J. spinoff.

It would be nice to have this on TVLand (since there's no longer a TNN to show reruns of hick shows) so I could see if it really WAS any good.

...Yeah...too young i was when in open TV Lobo was aired in the fresh 80's, for many years LOBO was the almost stellar night TV show and in Thursdays too many kids stop which they would to make it for watch almost an hour comic outrages courtesy of Chieff LOBO&officers (Perkins the best...)Almost Glenn A Larson prods. wasn't to targeted for "critic tastes" or to get rank of "fine art TV show" , just 9-10 night o'clock entertainment or i must say, a bit of laughing before get on bed to stand the entire day dealing with a bunch of idiots with use to fight everyday yet wasn't used the term "bullying" but in my personal case, i get enough inspiration to solve this drawbacks using fists, with entirely style of LOBO's watermark...kicking assholes whit a smile

i was probably around 6 when this show came out but my family watched it every week and i have very fond memories of it. i knew even back then that it was a spin off of bj and the bear. the weird thing is that in bj and the bear, sheriff lobo was a badguy in the boss hog vein. when he got his own show, suddenly hes a good guy.

my main memories of the show are it being similar to dukes of hazard. small, out of the way hick town constantly being bombarded by various city slicker bad guys. sheriff lobo would clean up the town with his bumbling deputy perkins(who i thought was way funnier than rosco p. coltraine). i remember there being two hot chick sidekicks with cool cars. i think one may have been a corvette.

for whatever reason, pieces of the theme song are still clear in my head, even though i haven't seen this show since about 1981. being a huge simpsons fan, i delight in all of their pop culture references and this show was referenced close to a half dozen times. its worth checking out for that reason alone, i think.