Welcome to “Plots That Wouldn’t Happen With Cell Phones.” Within five minutes of the opening of this movie, we’re seeing someone who could quite easily have made a phone call. Instead, he’s got to run for a pay phone. There are ways you could get around that, I suppose, but not a lot of them. Pay phones on that stretch of the California coast were fewer and farther between in those days, too, before the call box system that made it much easier to summon an ambulance.
Aura Lee Benton (Melissa Greene) gets a lift with a state senator (Robert Webber) who accidentally hits and kills a man. A couple of weeks later, she is murdered. Her boss happens to be Sara Butler (Lindsay Wagner), Jim’s client from the pilot. She finishes paying off her debt to Jim and hires him again to find out who killed Aura Lee, whose death has been written off as just another drug overdose. They tie Aura Lee to the senator, who then appears to swim out to sea.
This was, of course, long after the Summer of Love. This show could only have been made in the ’70s, based on the fashion and so forth. However, 1974 in California still had people drifting in from all over the country, hoping for a better life. This is because that’s what California seems to be for, for teenagers from all over the US. And not just teenagers. It’s no surprise that a girl like Aura Lee could end up in California, with no family and no other contacts. It’s also not surprising that her death would be brushed off as yet another overdose by yet another lonely kid.
In fact, this is the first episode that aired in 1975; it’s an era when the “corrupt politician” plot wasn’t exactly breaking new ground. Even if the specific corruption in this case seems initially to be no more than a little petty fooling around—naturally, Jim automatically suspects the guy of murder. To be fair to Jim, this is the kind of thing that shows up in a lot of detective novels. Of course, we also don’t have a whole heck of a lot of characters in this episode to be the killer.
Southern California for the Tourist: the senator’s being interviewed at one point. While I didn’t recognize her on sight—it’s been a long time since I watched local news in LA, after all, and she hasn’t been working at it in a while—the name of the woman playing “commentator” was instantly recognizable to me. For 28 years, Kelly Lange was an anchor for KNBC-4 in Los Angeles, the first local news anchor to earn a million dollars a year, apparently, and the first woman to anchor local news for an NBC affiliate. Embarrassingly for all of us, she got her start as “Dawn O’Day,” hosting the news in a silver lame jumpsuit. She also used to be married to William Friedkin.
Take Care of Rockford Files: Threatened at gunpoint.