Donald Trump-type Guthrie Brown (Frank Converse) is making life miserable for rent control tenants in one of the apartment buildings he owns. He wants to run the fixed income seniors living there out so that he can put up a multi-million dollar condo tower.
Rents in New York City being exorbitant they can find nowhere to go but looking for vacancies they do come across one intriguing ad - "Odds Against You?...Need help?...Call The Equalizer...212-555-4200".
As a fan of the show I nevertheless continually wondered how people were able to puzzle out what the wording in the absurdly oblique ad meant. It could be anything from a mortgage broker to a pest control service yet they all seemingly clue in on what it is really about evidently by reading between the lines.
Robert McCall (Edward Woodward) - former black ops guy & intelligence community troubleshooter is settling in to his non-profit but nevertheless rewarding sideline as a philanthropic vigilante.
As the holidays approach he shops for gifts & mulls vacation plans with his adult son Scott until he is contacted by these terrorized tenants who need the help of someone more like McCall used to be & becomes again off and on when needed.
The subtle character development in this series comes through via a few lines of dialogue. McCall is asked by an elderly woman who he is helping why he does it all for free. His response is that he doesn't fully understand it himself sometimes.
We in the audience can infer our own interpretation of his motives - benevolent but nevertheless drawn from a thousand dark places in his consciousness. There can be a form of atonement in his actions - assuaging of guilt over something he did or didn't do during his days in the intelligence community.
Plagued by an incursion of sleazy goons sent in to the building to facilitate a pogrom McCall indirectly equalizes it by situating a burly, drunken meathead (Charles Hallahan) bouncer from an Irish pub - folksy enough to get along with the real residents but big enough, mean enough and desperate enough for lodgings to be impossible for the goon squad to outlast.
But where it gets complicated is when McCall discovers that Guthrie Brown is also trying to have his estranged wife (Marisa Berenson) killed in order to get custody of their son. Somehow this gets tied in with the fate of the residents of the building leading to rising tensions and a gripping finale.
While by no means the best episode of the series this solid early entry is among those that built for it a loyal following which kept it on the air for four seasons.
