Mike Hammer, Private Eye

Mike Hammer (Stacy Keach) is a hard-boiled private investigator in New York City. Velda (Shannon Whirry) is his loyal assistant. In the pilot, Mike is looking for the killer of his friend Mike Farrell. The episode ends with Mike hiring the son Nick Farrell (Shane Conrad).

Stacy Keach returns in the late 90's to relive his earlier 80's success. In a way, I think this is a missed opportunity. They are now fully in the computer age and Mike Hammer is a complete computer illiterate. He is a man outside of his time. He is a 50's character living in the 90's. That's what this show should be about. He should be smoking and prevented from smoking in every other episode. They may have made that point once. There is one episode where he tried a cell phone and it looks utterly weird. I'm glad that he dumped it at the end of the episode. He should be having more fun with that aspect.

The franchise is populated by babes with boobs and men with bent noses. That does not bode well acting-wise. In fact, 90's erotic thriller queen Shannon Whirry is the best actress in most episodes. There are few future stars in the cast list. I've been rewatching a lot of the old shows and the good ones have surprising future stars in them. It's not the case here. This show is what it intends to be. Stacy Keach gets to return to his former glory. The humor is rather clunky. They need to get rid of the pizza in the opening credits. This show would work better if he is the old guy working the new world. This feels old and it refuses to revel in it.

Stacy Keach is the only reason this 2nd incarnation of him as Mike Hammer is watchable.

I was a huge fan of the original Stacy Keach Mike Hammer series. Along with a lot of TV movies he did with the same character, he created a pretty good little franchise for himself. That being said, this 2nd incarnation of this great detective is just not that great. It has quite a few earmarks of a low budget and the first is the actors. All of em except Shannon Whirry are just plain bad. Shane Conrad is an absolute joke in this. You can tell he got the job just by who his father was. Worse than the acting is the script writing. The dialogue is so bad it's not even borderline laughable or believable, it's just laughable and unbelievable.

Regardless of the fact that this show pale's in comparison to Stacy Keachs' original series, he's the reason this show is still worth a look. He plays the same character with the same flair. It's petty obvious that Keach brought this character back to make a buck. It was successful the first time so why not try again. It just wasn't as good this time around.

Most know when they hear "Mike Hammer" they think of Mr. Keach himself. There's a reason for that, he is Mike Hammer(sorta).

I must disagree with TC-4. The "grittiness" he describes, I would call "cheap".

I think the original CBS series of 1983-87 was superior to this one. With Don Stroud as Pat Chambers, Donna Denton as "The Face" Lindsay Bloom as Velda and the other regular supporting actors, it was a class act all around.

While Shannon Whirry makes a tasty Velda, the rest of this production was just a bargain-basement attempt at bringing back a good series. Obviously, it didn't work, with so few episodes shot.

Stacy Keach was good as always, but I miss his previous co-stars.

Stacy Keach's Mike Hammer can be divided into the 80s version and then this one, the 90s version. In my opinion the 80s Hammer was much better. Look, call me a chauvinist, but beautiful women and cleavage are part of the Mike Hammer mystique. It's one of the things that made the 80s Hammer so popular. Unfortunately for the "new & improved" 90s private eye, Keach's wife Malgosia Tomassi, who also plays the useless yoga instructor, insisted there be less emphasis on skin. Can you say Yoko Ono?? I knew you could.

Also, say you're a private dick in New York. You carry a .45 for protection. Suddenly you round a corner and get jumped by two huge gorillas who begin pounding you with baseball bats. Obviously they intend to kill you or at least maim the crap out of you. Do you...

A) Grab your gun and repay the favor, or B) Lay there like an 88-year-old woman and take it.

If you said "A" then you're more of a man than THIS Hammer is. I don't know how many episodes I've seen this pathetic scene played out. I kept yelling at the TV "Grab Betsy, dumb ass, that's what you have her for!!" But alas, Keach never heard me. (BTW, "Betsy" is his gun) Until they release the 80s Mike Hammer on DVD, I'd suggest watching two Hammer movies Keach did: "Murder Me, Murder You," and "More Than Murder," both from the 80s. And both B.M.T. (Before Malgosia Tomassi).

The episode I just watched was number 20 of 26 that are packaged in one Mike Hammer set from 1997 and '98. The production values were low budget filming in Ventura, CA for New York. There are some exterior establishing shots of The Big Apple, but much of the location sets look like anywhere but New York.

The episode is called The Maya Connection. Some of the dialog is haunting and maybe prophetic. The very first line in this show is a voice-over saying, "Saddam Hussein... We should have got him when we had the chance." The accompanying visuals show someone loading a rifle.

There are a couple of establishing shots that show The World Trade Center towers. Later in the story we hear a voice-over saying, "The real victims of war are the people who live at Ground Zero." It all takes on a new meaning in today's world.

Maxwell Caufield is good as the guest star. I could visualize him in a James Bond type role. He is a secret agent in this. Maxwell is at his best in Grease 2. There is a lot of action and plenty of wise cracks, especially from Stacy Keach, our Mike Hammer.

The story is much too disjointed to follow. It doesn't matter. It has some action and comedy and some really weird stuff. A scene in the back seat of a taxi seems to be an Altoids commercial. The best comedy sighting in this is Stacy in drag as an Iraqi woman.

Worth the $11.99 for 26 episodes.

Tom Willett