Category: Michael Hayes
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So I missed the penultimate episode because streaming rights or something but I wouldn’t be surprised to find it had more of a conclusive feel than this episode. Something about the one feels like they held it from an earlier airdate and retooled it. Though there was a recent plot point where someone made fun…
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It’s an almost entirely middling episode with a great as always guest star performance from Joanna Gleason—she’s married to family values congressman, Jim Haynie, who’s schtupping Godly campaign worker Gina Philips—and they’re getting death threats because Haynie wasn’t pro-gun enough with the Republican party’s white supremacist base. The episode opens with David Caruso on a…
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The entire episode hinges on Allison Smith’s performance as a Patty Hearst-type who falls in with a post-Waco vengeance militia. Or at least if it were good it would. The performance. The episode’s not bad, with decent guest star turns from Byron Minns as a suspicious ATF agent, and then Linda Carlson and Frank Converse…
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It’s recognizable guest star week on “Michael Hayes.” Lots of guest stars. Sadly former “Facts of Life” co-stars Meredith Scott Lynn and Charlotte Rae don’t share any scenes. But there’s also the return of Larry Miller—he gets a “special appearance” credit—and does his best Gene Hackman in “The Conversation” (or Gene Hackman in Enemy of…
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I desperately wanted Joe Spano’s guest spot to be the worst part of the episode. Even as Spano continued to try to chew the scenery, his mouth open, half-chewed chunks falling out all over the place, if Spano were the worst thing… it’d be tolerable at least. Sadly, no, they go full “plans within plans”…
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“Michael Hayes 4.0” continues with zero emphasis on David Caruso’s character, other than his potential as a righteous savior. And writers Ray Hartung and John Romano (it may be Romano’s best episode or maybe second best, but it’s aces compared to his usual) find a great place for him to save—upstate New York cop Brian…
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Despite some better than necessary acting from the guest stars and nicely competent direction from Mel Damski (though Damski can’t make the silly black and white flashbacks to last episode work and every time they’re jarring and terrible and there are a lot of times), it’s a reductive conclusion to the big conspiracy two-parter. Given…
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Well, it makes sense why the previous episode closed off two plot threads with big ol’ cop outs—“Michael Hayes” has got a new pair of drivers. This episode adds Michael S. Chernuchin (single writing credit on the episode) and Michael Pressman (director of the episode) as executive producers. Their big idea for what to do…
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Even with some big cop outs—so big it’s practically another soft reset of the series—it’s either the best or second best episode with show co-creator John Romano’s name in the writing credits. Most of the episode is a “day in the life” of the people working at the U.S. Attorney’s office; more of a few…
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An episode after I list Anne Kenney as one of the show’s reliable writers, she turns in this whiff of an episode. Obviously it’s not all her fault—there are multi-episode stories and Helen Slater’s guest star arc in play—but even taking those elements out… there’s a lot of problems. Actually, the Slater stuff—while disappointing—isn’t even…
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In addition to the omnipresent Christmas theme, the episode also showcases a bunch of new second unit location shooting of New York—including, possibly, even David Caruso and guest star Helen Slater on location there. Maybe they filled in somewhere else. It’s fairly convincing, especially since every other time there’s a suggested street scene it doesn’t…
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The curse of the John Romano co-writing credit continues. Otherwise it’s an excellent episode about David Caruso’s old cop partner, Scott Lawrence, coming for help. An FBI informant (a slimy but not too slimy—or not in it enough to be too slimy—Alan Blumenfeld) is threatening fetching bank teller Tracy Douglas over bad checks. Douglas goes…
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I wasn’t looking forward to this episode. “Michael Hayes” has been struggling the last couple and it was never on firm grounding to begin with. Then the opening title sequence hit and… the rest of the legal team actors’ names were in it. Episode nine is where Hillary Danner, Rebecca Rigg, and Peter Outerbridge get…
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It’s the first episode without either show “developer” Paul Haggis or show co-creator John Romano getting at least a co-writing credit so I thought “Michael Hayes” must be on solider ground. If they’re going to trust credited writers Richard Kletter and Gardner Stern, it must be because it’s safe. Or Haggis and Romano just didn’t…
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This episode is about a proto-Alex Jones (a just okay Daniel von Bargen) who incites one of his listeners to kill an ATF agent as payback for Waco (back when the sovereign citizens weren’t running government agencies) and the good guys having to figure out how they can get von Bargen for murder. It’s the…
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Paul Haggis has a co-writer credit on the script, which seems to mean—among other things—Hillary Danner is going to get some things to do and Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s going to be good because the writing for him is better. Santiago-Hudson has less to do than last episode, when the writing wasn’t Haggis and was bad, but…
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There are some really big obvious things to talk about with this episode of “Michael Hayes,” like the Catholic Church and the romanticization of terrorism, specifically the IRA, and how popular American entertainment portrayed both right up until mid-September 2001 for the terrorism and, I don’t know, the late 2010s for the Catholic Church. They…
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I’d forgotten how once upon a time the evils of liberal Hollywood meant trying to warn how for-profit healthcare in the United States was a terrible thing and now we’re twenty years on and it’s even worse. It’s such a lovely combination of distressing and depressing. This episode opens with governor’s goon Gregg Henry (who’s…
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So, given the episode uses footage from the pilot—the pilot, not the “Prequel” episode they made after they brought on Paul Haggis to save the show, but the original, Haggis-less pilot—to kill off Dina Meyer, who was in stable condition after being shot last episode… it makes sense she’d be less than interested in coming…
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It makes sense they did another episode to run as the first episode instead of this pilot. What doesn’t make sense is CBS green-lighting the series based on this pilot episode. It’s also interesting to see who they got to come back for the previous episode after they clearly didn’t work out in the pilot;…
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This episode of “Michael Hayes” isn’t on IMDb. It’s been a while since I’ve watched something not on IMDb. Something made in the 1990s and airing on one of the Big Three networks? I don’t even know. What’s amusing is the New York Times review of the episode is a top Google result. So this…
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