I knew nothing about this series until stumbling across the title while checking Mr. Bronson's IMDb page to see what I'd missed among his legendary body of action flicks. Glad I did.
Theses stories are rather uneven in plotlines, but most are reasonably well done for TV fare of that era - including mostly above-average fight scenes. The casting is sound. A perk of seeing this now is catching future stars (Angie Dickinson, Gavin MacLeod, Sebastian Cabot, William Conrad, among others) in pre-fame roles. The format sending Kovac to many locales to snap his pix allowed a raft of one-and-dones for anyone with a union card.
But most important is this phase in the evolution of the Bronson persona we vividly remember. Few recall when Katherine Hepburn easily beat him up in 1952's Pat and Mike. By this time, he'd changed his name from Buchinsky, en route to becoming the hero of so many gritty westerns and contemporary crime flicks. This Kovac character was tough, but not yet primed to go Full Bronson on the bad guys. His won-lost ratio in the fist fights and shootouts was still lower than it was about to be for the next few decades. The best was yet to come, but this was still pretty good.
Theses stories are rather uneven in plotlines, but most are reasonably well done for TV fare of that era - including mostly above-average fight scenes. The casting is sound. A perk of seeing this now is catching future stars (Angie Dickinson, Gavin MacLeod, Sebastian Cabot, William Conrad, among others) in pre-fame roles. The format sending Kovac to many locales to snap his pix allowed a raft of one-and-dones for anyone with a union card.
But most important is this phase in the evolution of the Bronson persona we vividly remember. Few recall when Katherine Hepburn easily beat him up in 1952's Pat and Mike. By this time, he'd changed his name from Buchinsky, en route to becoming the hero of so many gritty westerns and contemporary crime flicks. This Kovac character was tough, but not yet primed to go Full Bronson on the bad guys. His won-lost ratio in the fist fights and shootouts was still lower than it was about to be for the next few decades. The best was yet to come, but this was still pretty good.