T.J. Hooker (TV Series) The Snow Game (1984) User Reviews

The Snow Game

[coltras35 · 6/10 · 28 August 2022]

Hooker, Romano, Stacy and Corrigan are involved in an undercover operation to nail a large cocaine dealing ring, when a highly respected fellow officer is killed, execution-style, by the ring, who are on to him. Tracking down one of the thugs involved, Romano is badly injured by a gun-shot wound, before Hooker captures the goon, who gives the lead of a crooked bail-bondsman who is involved with the dealing. Against the wishes of a DEA, Hooker and Corrigan go undercover as drug dealers, with Stacy posing as one of their carriers, to infiltrate the dangerous ring via the bail-bondsman and catch them in the act...

William Shatner directs this fairly decent episode where a James Darren is gnarling at the bit to get the hombre who shot his fellow police office during an undercover sting operation, Adrian Zmed gets shot whilst protecting TJ and Heather Locklear goes undercover.

Snow Shovel

[JasonDanielBaker · 19 April 2014]

Drug Enforcement Agency operative Twill (Gary Lockwood) teams with Veteran cop Sgt. T.J.Hooker (William Shatner) and his LCPD colleagues to attempt to take down a Chicano cocaine ring. Things go sour and an undercover cop is killed whilst his back up is out of position. The deceased was highly popular amongst his colleagues. Hooker, partly blaming himself for the death, vows to find the killers.

After his young partner Vince Romano (Adrian Zmed) is badly wounded saving his life Hooker enlists Officer Stacy Sheridan (Heather Locklear) and Officer Jim Corrigan (James Darren) to join him in an undercover sting. They all want to avenge the loss of a brother officer and near loss of another (Romano).

This is a mildly entertaining episode compared with so many if not most T.J.Hooker entries. But it illustrates the identity crisis the show had. This entry and others features Hooker and his colleagues doing things beyond the normal details uniformed patrol cops are assigned to do. This is explicitly alluded to but never adequately explained. Indeed this episode illustrates what can happen when cops aren't where they are supposed to be.

This show began as a series about grizzled cop Hooker returning to teach police academy classes before taking top rookie Vince Romano as partner and then going out on patrol with him. By the third season there was no need for any attachment of the main character to police academy training or the Academy Precinct or indeed uniformed patrol.

With this series making sense or depicting realism wasn't a priority. But for whatever reason ties to the police academy and the main character driving a patrol car in uniform were. In this episode and others they even have him doing roll call. Why not put him on dispatch or parking enforcement whilst also making him chief of detectives? One of ten episodes in this series directed by William Shatner.