Scarecrow and Mrs. King, S1E1
For absolutely no particular reason, I watched the first episode of Scarecrow and Mrs. King the other night.
(I almost said “re-watched” because I can’t imagine I haven’t seen this before, but it’s been 43 years since it aired, so who can remember...)
The show was a moderate success in the 80s, running for four seasons between 1983 and 1987. It was Bruce Boxleitner’s first notable thing after Tron, and Kate Jackson’s first after Charlie’s Angels.
It was… cute. Boxleitner is an agent for “The Agency,” and Jackson is a recently divorced single mom. He runs into her on a train platform and gives her a package before he gets roughed up by some KGB agents. That draws her into a plot involving a cooking show that is secretly communicating orders to kill other agents (shades of Wayne Newton’s character in License to Kill). By the end of the episode, she’s been recruited as his “civilian partner.”
There’s a weird amount of killing (I counted six people in that episode alone, most of it off-screen), and some plot holes and very convenient coincidences that don’t quite make sense. But it otherwise holds up, so long as you remember this was primetime in the early 80s.