Land's End. And Beginning Again.
Recently I watched the 1995 pilot of a show called Land's End.
Fred Dryer was apparently a football player, but I know him as an actor. He was on a few episodes of Cheers as a sportscaster and old team mate of the series lead Sam Malone (played by Ted Danson). He went on to star in Hunter, a long running 1980s cop show about an LAPD detective named – wait for it – Hunter. The description of the show is: “Rick Hunter is a renegade cop who bends the rules and takes justice into his own hands.” Which sums up why I have never watched this show (Or maybe I unwittingly did and just confused it with the literally hundreds of other cop shows with this exact same premise). It was created by Frank Lupo, best known for co-creating The A-Team and Wiseguy. Two very different shows.
Besides embracing his receding hairline (which, as a middle-aged man I can only say, more power to him) Dryer also starred in (and co-created) the very short-lived series Land's End. Running for one season from 1995-1996, it was one of many syndicated action shows that proliferated in the 1990s. There are many reasons for this, and many reasons why this was a short-lived phenomenon, but between the late 1980s until the early 2000s there were many such shows. Most of which only lasted a season or two. Some of which are classics (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Babylon 5, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Xena: Warrior Princess). A few of which were just horrendous. Most of which were just forgettable. They often aired at odd hours, too hey often didn’t have to be that great. Whatever was on TV at 2 am was held to a lower standard.
One of these shows was Lands End, which is not about a midwestern clothing company (if you’re like me, you’re picturing a cross between The Office and Fargo, which I totally would have watched, and would have been a better show than this) but instead features an LAPD cop named Mike Land who quits in the opening few minutes. Which is a good audience call back to his previous show and way to introduce the character, I have to admit. Whatever else I might feel about the “master criminal gets off after bribing the jury so angry, committed detective quits” cliched premise of the show.
Land end up in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico after getting a call from an old friend Willis P. Dunleevy (a great name), played by the late character actor Geoffrey Lewis. Look at his photo and the man will be instantly recognizable. One of those actors you’ve seen dozens upon dozens of times in everything from dark drama to absurd comedy. Here he plays an oddball with get rich quick schemes, who can be called into action when needed. I kept thinking of him as the Walter Brennan figure. The problem is that I don’t think he’s funny enough or dramatic enough as written. As an actor he’s good, but he really needed more to do.
Similarly Tim Thomerson plays Dave “Thunder” Thornton. The show might not have been great, but they knew enough to give characters fun names. I know Thomerson from Trancers and Quark (the fact that I watched and remember both probably tells you something about me), and here he plays another slightly comic but also adventurous sidekick.
The blandness is what keeps the show from being better or more interesting. It’s all vibes, in other words, no character. Or much in the way of plot.
But again, if it was 2 am and you’re awake and you have this show about some middle aged guys having adventures in this beautiful Mexican beach town, with women in bikinis and gorgeous blue water in the background of half the scenes, do you care?
Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who among his many writing credits was part of the original writing team responsible for Lost, wrote a great article about “operational theme” in a television show.
I won’t say that Lands End was a good show, but it did have a good operational theme.
It also understood the market. The other action shows of the era tended to be fantasy (Beastmaster, Forever Knight, Hercules), science fiction (Time Trax, Tekwar), cheap action shows (Thunder in Paradise, Acapulco HEAT) or things like Baywatch. This was an effort to do something a little different. This was Dad TV before the term existed. The kind of show that was entertaining but also innocuous enough that it could air at 2pm or 2am, about a few middle aged men having adventures.
This was a laidback show. About middle aged but still vigorous men whose life wasn't over, were still having adventures.
Land’s wife was murdered before the show opened - by the mobster in the pilot - but by facing and then (presumably) killing the mobster, though the body was not recovered, the show moves past that setup to the theme of the show which is rebirth, revival, a second chance. Land's End is a physical location in Cabo, which can be seen in the opening credits of the show, but the “End” in the title becomes about a new beginning. A new way of life, a new job, a new city, a new country, a new love interest.
Having not seen Dryer’s previous show, maybe this is very similar in approach to how his old show was? Kinda bland and well done but also, not that exceptional. Nothing to make it stand out. It’s good enough to be on TV and found an audience who kept coming back same time, same channel.
I said it was well-placed for the market, but this is an odd point where a lot of television was still made on a fairly barebones budget. Or at least not like budgets like we’ve seen the past twenty years. We’ve moved past where the big action scene is someone running (The Six Million Dollar Man) or tearing a door off a car (The Incredible Hulk). There are shootouts and there’s scuba diving scenes here, but they’re also fairly dull. Again, if you’re watching on a Saturday afternoon or in the middle of the night, it’s just exciting enough to not bother you.
Think, the action of a Roger Moore Bond movie made cheaply every a week.
What bothers me most is the generic characters and the generic setting. Because the show is set in Cabo San Lucas. It was shot (at least some of it) there. And yes there are Mexicans speaking Spanish, there are resorts, there are boats and scuba diving. But it doesn’t really have a setting. There's not enough sense of place.
In the pilot as he’s packing up his office, Land holds up an old photograph of LA and says, the city used to look like this. Which is to make the scenes where he’s walking along the beach hit. That as much as the beautiful women in bikinis catch his eye, it's the quiet and the ocean and the natural beauty that affect him. Again, it’s a show about middle age reinvention and starting over.
This is where my own bias shows, because I think specific city is important when it comes to a story. Setting is important. And far too many action shows are generic. In part because they’re either set in a fictional city, or they’re set in one place and shot somewhere else.
I think about shows that came a little later that were set in these bland cityscapes like Human Target - a show I liked with actors and characters I liked, but the show just kept feeling bland and poorly thought out in many respects. But then a show like Burn Notice was set in Miami and it could have been set almost anywhere in the country, but they leaned into the setting. Republic of Doyle is a story about PI’s and a story about a family, but also a story about St. John’s. Keen Eddie, which was a show about London and an American learning to navigate the city. Spenser: For Hire was about Boston and A Man Called Hawk was about DC. Bosch and Barry are very different shows set in Los Angeles. Justified, or the sequel miniseries, both of which leaned into their settings to make them a part of it. Swamp Thing may have been set in a fictional town, but the setting was so well crafted and rendered that it felt real. The NCIS shows that based on what little I’ve seen and heard from people, really do lean into their settings whether Hawai’i, Australia, New Orleans.
I’m not saying all those shows are good, I’m not saying they all worked, but in specificity there is something to be gained. In both character and setting. Geography is destiny, after all, at least according to some. It’s not essential, but if the solution is to set it “nowhere”, then I think that’s a failure of imagination and a failure of understanding.
This is the problem. Like a lot of people - and guys especially - we want this platonic ideal of a show with action and adventure, that’s engaging and not intense, but also, not stupid. We want something that we don’t have to think too hard about it and can just enjoy, but that doesn’t mean we want to watch something stupid that’s targeted at a little kid. It sounds easy, but it’s not.
Of course these days every time there’s a show like that, too often it’s one case stretched out to 8,10,13 episodes. And so even if they have good characters, whatever good parts of the show there were, they get buried in a storyline that’s stretched out to the length of boredom. I’m not going to say that’s the only problem with Countdown, Reacher, Professionals, and other recent shows, but it’s a big problem. (Of course one could argue that we do have a proven good length to tell an action story, it’s the 90-150 minute movie. But that’s a whole other story)
ACTORS
Watching the episode got me to thinking about Bryan Cranston, who plays the mobster in this pilot episode who gets away with murder in the opening. He gets shot in the episode’s climax, though his body is never found. Today he’s, well, Bryan Cranston, but for years he was the journeyman actor who alternates between playing comedic roles (like Seinfeld’s Tim Whatley) and villains like this. Then came Malcolm in the Middle, which changed things, before he became known as a great dramatic actor, when he had the chance.
It made me think of Garrett Dillahunt, who’s a great character actor who spent a lot of his career playing dark characters before he landed one of the leads in Raising Hope. Since then he’s been in comedies (The Mindy Project, Sprung) and dramas (Hand of God, Fear the Walking Dead) but never had that big breakout role. Or at least not yet. I keep hoping.
Of course, it took Titus Welliver many years before he was Harry Bosch. Michael Emerson and Terry O’Quinn were great character actors before Lost made them recognizable and Emmy winners. Viola Davis was a theatrical legend when she made the leap to television. Hannah Waddingham was acclaimed but little known outside of British theater before Ted Lasso. The list goes on.
As Meryl Streep narrated in that season 3 episode of Only Murders in the Building, the constant grind of work and rejection, waiting to hear, “where have you been?"
I think for a lot of working actors, they tend to work in these extremes. Of playing silly goofy characters that may lean into lovable or absurd, but they show up and have a few scene that they throw themselves into before disappearing. Or they play a long list of thugs, drug dealers, killers, and mobsters, not all of whom have names. Usually they end up doing both, which is how they can play both comedy and drama so well, spending much of their time workin in extremes and having to make these extreme characters seem interesting and human. I think it can force one into a way of working and of being that can be invaluable, and when they get the opportunity to do more, it can be a revelation.
There’s probably a lesson in there for the rest of us.