Stingray is one of my favorite shows from the 80s. It's one of the seemingly unlimited shows from the mind of Stephen J. Cannell, the TV producer behind such shows as The A-Team and The Rockford Files. After those two shows, Cannell produced, developed, and created, a lot of other TV shows. The Greatest American Hero, 21 Jump Street, Wiseguy, Renegade, Silk Stockings, The Commish, Tenspeed and Brown Shoe,and Sonny Spoon among others. And that was after he built a career as a script writer for shows like Adam-12, Ironside, and Columbo. Pretty impressive for a guy who was diagnosed with dyslexia and rarely used a computer.
In 1995 Cannell switched to writing crime novels, including the Shane Scully series. He proved a success at that as well, and sadly died in 2010.
Stingray is one of the odder shows Cannell produced, or that was on TV. The one and only regular character on the show had no name and no background. He was commonly known as "Ray", but that was primarily because of the '65 Corvette Sting Ray he drove. That, and because they had to call him something besides "Hey, you". Played by Nick Mancuso, Ray was a "man of mystery" with little bits of his background dribbling out of the two seasons that the show ran on NBC. He was an ex-spy, had trouble with his then-boss (played by Robert Vaughn in a first-season episode), quit, and went into private contracting.
If you needed help, you placed an online ad for a '65 Stingray. Ray would contact you and if he thought your cause was just, he'd offer to do you a "favor". But you had to pay him back down the line with a favor for him: whenever he asked and whatever he asked. No one ever refused, and as the show started Ray already had a backlog of favors built up. Ray spent two years doing "favors" and then calling in the favors he had collected to help other people by doing favors for them.
Ray was a polyglot, a speed-reader, a martial artist, an expert driver, a computer hacker, and could slow his heartbeat down to feign death. Making him basically Batman without a spiffy costume. Ray's main talent was... "improvisational disguise", for lack of a better term. He never bothered to disguise himself, but he could slip in and out of roles. If Ray needed to become a preacher, or a movie director, or a handicapped military vet, or a psychiatric patient, or a doctor, or an aeronautics engineer, he'd slip effortlessly into the role. If he didn't have the skills to pull off the role, he'd call in a favor with someone who did and had them take his place temporarily. Ray also left a trail of fake identities behind him, which connected him to the California governor and the White House at one time or another.
It helped that Stingray had one of the best TV themes in all of TV eternity, thanks to TV theme song composers Mike Post and Pete Carpenter. And it's from the era when men were men, sheep were nervous. and TV themes were big, bold, sssasssy and brassy! (no known antidote, definitely recommended for human consumption). And how many TV opening credits include Da Vinci's Vetruvian Man? Check it out.
The concept proved so popular they kinda/sorta borrowed it for another show, Vengeance Unlimited, in 1998-99. Michael Madsen played the lead character, a mysterious man who was only known as Mr. Chapel. They gave Chapel a partner and threw a slight twist into his favors: you could pay him a million dollars, or do him a favor down the road. Also, Chapel tended to seek out clients rather than have them come to him. But that's a review for another day.
Stingray was a mid-season replacement, went the rest of the season, got renewed, and ran for 23 episodes in 1986-87 until NBC cancelled it. During that time, Ray took on a wide variety of cases. Serial killers, drug dealers, Indian spirits, a TV actor in over his head with the Yakuza, a corrupt military academy commandant, an oceanic researcher, a crooked hospital administrator taking organs from homeless people, and a lot more. The flexibility of the format leant itself to... well, anything. Including comedy, which brings us to "Autumn" and "Caper".
Anyone remember the good old days when Maverick would parody every Western in sight? No. Ah, you young whipper-snappers (get off my lawn!). While Stingray never went quite that far, "Autumn" and "Caper" are intentionally or not parodies of Murder, She Wrote and Mission: Impossible, respectively. The show ventured into comedy more in its second season.
Let's start with "Autumn". An unseen writer starts typing out a mystery story, which features Ray. It's a pretty standard case for Ray, and the kind of 30s noir detective story Cannell had parodied quite a bit on Tenspeed & Brownshoe. Where one of the main characters was obsessed with 30s noir detective stories.
A beautiful woman asks Ray to find her missing father. It's a dark and stormy night when he meets her, and he refuses the case because he's not convinced that it's "righteous" enough. And there isn't much of the case, and maybe the father is off somewhere sipping margaritas on a beach with a woman half his age. As he leaves, the woman, Harmony, (Shannon Tweed) comes running out with a man in pursuit. The man runs off, Ray gets Harmony to the house, and he starts looking into the father's disappearance. Ray checks out the father's architect office and runs into an overly hammy receptionist named Marla (Kit Fredericks). The father isn't there, but Ray does find a gun and a threatening note. The father was doing some work for water districts committee, some farmers didn't like it, and ya-da ya-da ya-da.
Ray goes back to Harmony's house and finds a woman and her two young daughters living there, and the mother has never heard of Harmony. When Ray goes back to the architect's office, it's abandoned and cleared out except for the gun. The gun has a serial number but it doesn't turn up on the records.
From time to time they've cut back to the writer typing on an old-style typewriter (Cannell-ism!) and narrating what's happening to Ray, including his supposed innermost thoughts and feelings. We finally discover the "narrator" is Audrey Brewster (Bibi Osterwald), who is basically a parody of Jessica Fletcher on Murder She Wrote. She's an elderly old-school mystery novelist who lives in a big drafty house with her sister Amelia (Mary Jackson). They fight a lot and Amelia does all the chores while Audrey writes the novels and brings in the money. But Audrey is out of ideas, so after she heard of Ray, set up a case for him and is going to let him lead her instead of her leading a fictional character.
However, Amelia is tired of living in Audrey's shadow, and pours small doses or arsenic into the cups of tea that she brings to her sister. Meanwhile, Ray finally catches on to what's happening when he sees "Harmony" in a TV perfume commercial. He does one of his "slip into a role" bits by going to her actor agency and pretending to be an overly-excitable director looking for the actress who played Harmony. He gets her an address and pressures her into taking him with her to the park where she and the other actors in the scam that Audrey hired. Amelia arrives and hands them checks, and afterward Ray chats with them. Nick Mancuso is good with the smarmy charm, and he turns it on full-strength here.
Ray gets Audrey's address from the driver registration papers, goes there, and finds the manuscript as well as the arsenic. Amelia has been sending Audrey's manuscript to her own agent, pretending that she wrote it. The sister come back, Ray hides in Audrey's room, and a few minutes later Amelia hears her sister's body hit the floor. The police show up and say that they're going to do an autopsy just as a precaution. Ray confronts Amelia and she lays out the whole plot and her motive, she confesses, and shoots Ray. But Ray already put in blanks and fakes being dead. Audrey steps out and immediately starts berating Amelia about confessing crimes to the people she's going to kill, which is a tired old cliché for mystery writers. The sisters have a rather touching chat about how Audrey never knew Amelia was mad at her, and Amelia just wanted something of her own.
The police take Amelia away for attempted murder, but Audrey figures she'll get a jury's sympathy not-guilty vote and if she doesn't, Amelia will nag everyone so much that the authorities will just quietly let her go. Part of the fun of the show is the same thing they did on Vengeance Unlimited: the reaction of the people either when they learn they owe a favor or that they've paid off their favor. On VU it was typically a "Thank God!" Here Ray ominously reminds Audrey that she's going to owe him a favor one day and he'll collect.
"Autumn" is a departure from form for the show. It's not the first time someone knows about Ray and manipulates him. Osterwald and Jackson do a good pair of dueling sisters that love each other even though they get on each other's nerves. You can see why Amelia would want her sister dead but still loves her in the end.
Ray doesn't have a lot to do in this one. He's there and the story wouldn't take place if he were absent. But it's pretty much coincidence instead of deductive skills that put him onto the whole scam. Mostly he just smirks and puts up with the hammy actors surrounding him. Who turn out to actually be hammy actors.
The second story is "Caper", which is one of my favorite TV episodes of all times. I have strange tastes. Ever play Dungeons & Dragons? And the characters come up with some big elaborate plan that falls apart from Step 1? That's what "Caper" is like.
Alternately, did you ever watched Mission: Impossible or Leverage or Ocean's Eleven or Now You See It and wished that just once, the team's clockwork plan would fall apart? Not just one little plot-contrived "malfunction" that the team either allowed for or has a backup plan? But an entire earth-shattering series of FUBAR events that turn the whole thing into a comedy of errors?
No? Well, I did and still do. And if you do, "Caper" is the episode for you. It starts with about ten minutes of a precision well-timed plan. Ray boards an ocean liner along with a thief, a male con artist disguised as a liner captain, and a femme fatale. The femme fatale, Carla (Judith Chapman), pretends to be a company rep and forces the existing captain to get off the liner because his papers aren't up to date. The disguised actor, Redler, (the late Robert Mandan, who passed away in April of this year) takes over. The ship has clear sailing, and the thief has attached clamps to the side of the liner.
Once the liner is underway, the thief and Ray swing over from the cabin they've "borrowed", get into the hold where Russian agents are holding an elderly doctor. The Russians want to use the doctor as leverage to force his defecting daughter to return to the USSR to continue her genetic research.
Carla comes in and distracts the guard, while Ray and the thief break into the neighboring electrical room, cut the communications, and cut through the wall with a blow torch. They get the doc and get out, Carla gets out... and we cut to real life, where Ray finishes describing the plan to the daughter and saying that while there might be a few bumps, that's basically what the plan is. He admits his teammates will be people paying off favors, just like the daughter will one day pay off her favor.
Then we get the real plan, and that's where the comedy begins. Ray finds Carla hustling drunks at poker in a smoky bar. The thief ended up unexpectedly in jail. He refers Frankie Doyle (Todd Susman), supposedly a thief as good as the original one. Hint: he's not. To put it charitably, Frankie is an idiot. This becomes clear to Ray and Carla after about three seconds.
There's a brief scene where Ray talks to an architect and the guy says he can build a three-quarter structure that's transportable. Then Ray waits at the ship for his three teammates. And one of the things I always wished happened to an IMF team happens: the others get lost trying to find the docks. They're driving around wildly, trying to find the place. We're introduced to Frankie's continuous mantra: "piece of cake". We discover Redler is a washed-up commercial actor who played a liner captain on TV in what is apparently a parody of The Love Boat.
They get to the liner just as it departs, and more shit hits the fan. The real captain has his papers on hand so they can't sub in Redler. That leaves Redler walking the ship in an admiral's outfit, while an overly helpful waitress (Beverly Elliott, Granny on Once Upon a Time) tries to work out where she's seen him before. For some reason Frankie is timing the Russian agents' movement, and he's doing it out loud to the point where one passenger (an obvious Russian bogus spy who looks a little like Stephen Cannell but isn't) asks what the time is. Frankie says that it's such-n-such "and counting" and tries to pass it off.
The cabin the team was going to use has been taken by newlyweds and the groom makes it clear he doesn't want to be interrupted. The best part of the episode acting-wise is watching Nick Mancuso turn on the obvious bogus tears, claim Carla is his wife and it's their anniversary cruise, and Carla is going to die so they wanted to cruise in the cabin they sailed in a year ago. The bride takes sympathy on them and tells her disgruntled new husband they're moving.
The real captain notices Redler, who punches him out and hides him in a restroom. And then pretends to be the captain, except the liner is sailing into an unexpected storm. Redler knows nothing about sailing and makes a botch of it. Frankie has attached the clamps--badly--and lost the keys to the outside door. He happens to have a wad of plastic explosive in his pocket and blows the door open. The electrical room schematics are ruined by the rain, and the spy has captured Redler and made the actor take him to the electrical room. It's around this point that Mancuso starts rolling his eyes as he realizes that the whole thing is falling apart. Frankie's "helpful" comments ("What Plan B?" "Making sure Plan A works!") aren't helping at all.
The leaking water forces the Russians to move the crate, which means that there's no cover when Ray and Frankie cut into the hold. The guard on duty is a lot more... sexually aggressive than Ray anticipated, and Carla alternates between seducing him because she's a divorced wife on a cruise, and trying to hold him off. All while trying to keep the guard from turning around and seeing her teammates cutting through the wall. When the guard starts groping her, Frankie takes offense, Carla yells "It's my ex!", Frankie punches the guard without effect, and Ray knocks the guard out.
The Russians come in and find nothing amiss because the guard plays dumb. The doctor is still apparently in the crate. But when the Russians reach the next port, they unload the crate and discover the spy is inside (Ray knocked him out earlier). The Russian office on the docks collapses, revealing it was the structure they foreshadowed 30 minutes ago with the call to the architect. The team is on the main deck and cheerfully waves to the Russians as the liner sails away.
At the end, father and daughter are reunited. The team watches from the deck and Ray tells Carla and Redler their favors are paid off. The looks of relief on their faces are priceless. Frankie, who is still clueless, asks when their next caper is. Ray glares at him. And cut to black.
If you've ever had to sit through one of those perfect caper things, then "Caper" is hilarious. Nothing goes right, and the description of the perfect plan in the first ten minutes just makes the next 30 minutes that much funnier. Ray is cool and suave and all Ethan Hunt-like in the fake scenes. And does a slow burn until totally losing it as everything flies apart on his master plan.
Mandan is okay as Redler. He keeps hurting his hand punching people with his "TV action sequence punches", which is one of several gags throughout the episode. But Todd Susman, a HITG (Hey, It's that Guy!) actor is the standout. You can't believe a guy can be so dumb, but Frankie keeps proving that he is. Again, and again, and again. He does slapstick (his auto-winch that drops him down of the ship activates, pulling him up as he whoa-whoas!), he does verbal comedy (Ray talks about the Domino Principle, and Frankie wonders if he's one of the dominoes), he does prop comedy (while looking for the key in his pocket dangling the middle of a storm, Frankie pulls out several absurd items), and he does dumb straight man (his closing line).
Both seasons of Stingray are available on a single DVD set, and it's going relatively cheap on Amazon. It's the kind of thing you used to find in your Walmart stores in the bargain bin, too. And it's probably online somewhere. Check it out if you get a chance.
But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?
Written by Gislef on Oct 14, 2018
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