Nighthawks

Most shows have an episode or more with 'flashbacks'. About the money sillies. Editing shows from already owned film stock saves a bundle. But a great episode in a great series reaped before ITs time.

Pause at end scene. Nice touch. Just like this painting I used to visit...

I really like the wit and humor of this show. Big fan of Mandy Patinkin. He gives a strong performance here. But this episode really felt like the writers threw sand in the gears. Totally interrupted the flow of the series. With recycled Scenes linked by a throwaway excuse of a subplot.

Really seemed like there were some behind the scenes drama going on in the writers room or production.

I was just re-watching the first season of Dead Like Me when I got to episode 12 "Nighthawks". This must have been a filler episode to make the first season 14 episodes. It really surprises me the a show needs to do a clip show in the first season. I'm sure it makes it worse that I watched all the previous episode in a couple of days.

There is a small plot there so it is not a complete waste of time watching it. My guess is that there is an 20-25 minute episode and they needed sometime to bring it up to a normal length show. To this day I think this was one of the best shows and that it was canceled way to soon. But every show has to have a weak episode or two and this just happens to be it.

Some people disparage this episode as a review of past episodes, which relies on clips from those old eps to fill up space that could have been spent on original content. But such shows are a TV tradition and appear in all decent sit-coms.

The real art in this type of episode is to select the scenes that best make the point of the writer, and to spin a yarn in which it makes sense to do so. On both counts, this ep succeeds.

I would rate this ep in the center of the curve. Not too high for the reasons cited by the haters of the ep, but definitely better than they would judge all such episodes of good shows.

It's a clever short story - maybe one third of an episode - padded out to the full runtime by showing us gobs of barely-relevant clips. Should've just skipped this one, guys.