Hunter: Season 04 (1987)

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Season Four of the cop drama Hunter brings back Fred Dryer as unorthodox LAPD homicide cop Rick Hunter, Stepfanie Kramer as his partner (and, it is hinted, his lover) Dee Dee McCall, and Charles Hallahan--promoted to star billing this year--as their bombastic superior Captain Devane. Among the season's best episodes are the opener "Playing God", wherein the discovery that a recently deceased pillar of society may have had mob connections nearly prompts Hunter and Dee Dee to quit the force in disgust; "Allegra", in which a woman from Hunter's past is the victim of a spectacular murder; "Black Dahlia", a speculative reopening of the infamous unsolved murder case of the 1940s, featuring such venerable character actors as Jeanette Nolan and Lawrence Tierney); "Fourth Man", in which Hunter is again suspected of being a "dirty cop" when an old drug-bust case comes back to haunt him; and a rare light-hearted episode, "Murder He Wrote", a parody of you-know-what series with Marge Redmond as "Jessica Fletcher" clone Jennifer Brasher and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as the archetypal "murder victim who needs killing." The season also serves up a brace of intriguing multipart episodes. In the two-parter "Naked Justice", Hunter tries to ascertain the link between a murdered movie star and a mysterious street person. And in the three-part "City of Passion", adapted from a novel by Dallas Barnes, Hunter and McCall explore the possibility that a serial killer is tied in with a Satanic cult. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi