User reviews

Here we are introduced to Tony Petrocelli in a made for TV movie. This is the pilot of a 70's detective show. Here he finds himself defending a woman whose husband has been found dead after being struck in the head and thrown over an upstairs railing. There are some bad guys who get in the way and the story is adequate. The charm of this show is that Tony presents and alternate case to the jury each time and allows them to mull over it. It has a decent cast.

Although I grew up in the mid-1960s, I rarely ever watched detective shows...although they were very popular through the 60s and 70s. I just was too young to appreciate them...and recently I've made up for this by binging various cop and detective shows...most of which I love (such as "Hawaii Five-O", "Mannix" and "Columbo"). A few I wasn't impressed by ("McCloud") but for the most part, I think these shows are far better than most stuff you see today. So, when I saw that YouTube had the pilot episode of "Petrocelli" I was excited to see it.

I noticed in the pilot that the show was not quite like the "Perry Mason" TV series in that the leading man (Barry Newman) is a lawyer but he occasionally dabbles into investigating a bit outside the courtroom. I am not sure if this will be the case in the rest of the shows...but it was so in the pilot.

Tony Petrocelli is an enigma...and in many ways the opposite of McCloud...a Marshall who came from New Mexico to inexplicably work in New York City. Here, Petrocelli is a Harvard-educated lawyer who surprisingly moves to Arizona to practice criminal law. Today this might be seen as usual, but back in the 1970s, Arizona was a far more rural state...a place filled with deserts, cowboys and little else. So his moving there is definitely NOT the norm!

The case he's working on in the pilot involves the murder of a man and his pretty wife (Stephanie Powers) is accused of the killing. However, Petrocelli works hard to use the same evidence to present a far different motive and far different killer. Will this work? And, will he live to see this case through (well, considering it's the pilot...I think it's not a spoiler to say he does)?

The acting and writing were quite good here. What I also appreciated was the vagueness of the ending. His client probably was innocent...then, possibly she wasn't. It's a vagueness that I think made the show more interesting and it definitely left me wanting more.