Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

FAT – FATTER – FATTEST – FATIGUE

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/fat-fatter-fattest-fatigue-1885757a6541

They say ”fat” is a disease, and yet I do not understand why so many people who have been fat all their lives, suddenly lose a tremendous amount of weight when they get old. I always think of Ronny Coutteure who had made the choice of getting obese because, as an actor, there was a fair demand of fat actors, and he liked it. Born in 1951, he died in 2000 at the age of 49.

This series also contains a mystery. Alan Campbell is Assistant D.A. Derek Mitchell. He is always used marginally and several times, but not many, he is entrusted with a case in court, and I do not remember any really brilliant victory. Mediocre result or failure. We have to say his boss, the Fatman, alias J.L. McCabe does not trust him very much and does not push him up in his career, though he knows he, as an obese and even ever getting more obese D.A., will need a successor soon and his assistant should be his privileged choice.

Another mystery: what did this actor Alan Campbell become? Not much indeed if we ask IMDb, not much at all, a lot more with Wikipedia, but mostly what they call “guest-starring,” those apparitions for one very limited part in TV episodes, but no main parts, no real characters the actor could be associated with, and very few films. He probably made a clean income over the years, but he will probably only survive as Assistant D.A. in Los Angeles and Hawaii with The Fatman and Jake: five full seasons, practically all the episodes. True enough, he has been kept within very rather narrow limits by his Boss, McCabe. He could have done more.

Joe Penny, alias Jake Styles did a lot more and better. His IMDb page is impressive, just as much as his Wikipedia page. His great quality is that he is flexible and can intervene in many situations that can be very different and this within two minutes on the screen, from one sequence to the next. He is a perfect hypocrite when questioning people and a monster when dealing with those that dare be bad losers. It is obvious he is English by origin. Maybe this series overused his naked backside in sexual situations a little bit too much, at least in the first three seasons. That’s a cliché of American detective stories of any kind. The “sheriff” or one of his deputies is nothing but a sex-machine. Check Banshee for example. I do wonder why Columbo did not fall into the trap. But the English characters on this line, like Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes, never did that kind of bed gymnastics because they are English, of course, so no sex, please.

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 6:21 AM