Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Season 01 (1985)

NBC's 1985 revival of the classic suspense anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents begins with the two-hour pilot episode, made up of four new versions of classic Hitchcock episodes from the 1960s: "Incident in a Small Jail," "Man from the South," "Bang, You're Dead," and "An Unlocked Window." Although Alfred Hitchcock had been dead since 1980, he still manages to introduce each episode, via colorized excerpts from the original black-and-white series. After this extra-length opener, the series proper gets under way with a remake of the original 1955 Alfred Hitchcock Presents debut episode, "Revenge," with Linda Purl taking over from Vera Miles in the role of a traumatized rape victim. Indeed, virtually all of the episodes seen during the revival's first season are remakes of vintage Hitchcock efforts. The best of these include "Method Actor," an updated version of 1962's "Bad Actor," directed by Burt Reynolds and starring Martin Sheen in the old Robert Duvall role; "Final Escape," a gender-switch version of the 1964 nail-biter with Season Hubley replacing Will Hutchins as an escape-happy convict; "Breakdown," with John Heard as the paralyzed accident victim originally essayed by Joseph Cotten; and the Ray Bradbury shocker "The Jar," with Griffin Dunne stepping into the part created by Pat Buttram. Also in the manifest is "Four O'Clock," an abbreviated remake of a one-hour playlet that Alfred Hitchcock had directed for the 1957 anthology series Suspicion. Only handful of "originals" -- that is episodes expressly written for the 1985 version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents -- were seen during season one. These include "Prisoners," directed by series producer Christopher Crowe and starring Yaphet Kotto as a fugitive and Cristina Raines as his extremely willing hostage, and "A Very Happy Ending," with Leaf Phoenix (aka Joaquin Phoenix) as a deaf boy who holds the fate of a murderer (Robert Loggia) in his hands. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi