Spenser: For Hire: Season 01 (1985)

Member Rating:

Season One of Spenser:For Hire begins with the two-part "Promised Land", one of a handful of the series' episodes actually based on a "Spenser" story by novelist Robert B. Parker. In this one, tough but ethical Boston private eye Spenser (Robert Urich) is hired to find the wife of a powerful businessman, only to realize that his client may not be 100 percent trustworthy. In addition to Spenser himself, the series' inaugural season introduces Avery Brooks as Spenser's fearsome but loyal street contact Hawk (Avery Brooks), his guidance-counselor girlfriend Susan (Barbara Stock) and his liasons at the Boston PD, Lt. Quirk (Richard Jaeckel) and Sgt. Belson (Ron McLarty). Subsequent episodes found Spenser protecting a volatile police witness, going after a duo of thrill killers, butting heads with a crooked landlord, protecting the so-called twin sister of a neurotic woman, exposing a team of "dirty" vice cops, going undercover to trap a gang of heroin pushers who have infiltrated a private high school, attempting to dissuade the clueless Sgt. Frank from romancing a white supremict, and trying to avoid extermination by that most terrifying of adversaries, the Woman Scorned. Among the season's guest star are George Grizzard as Susan's ex-husband Frank Silverman, Shirley Knight as Lt. Quirk's wife Katie, and a young Jimmy Smits as a firebrand Mexican dockworker in an episode reminiscent of On the Waterfront. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi