User Reviews

You know, I found "A Clinic On 18th Street" to be so far removed from being that of a regular "Adam-12" episode that it's hard for me to believe that its producers seriously considered it to even be an episode of said-TV series at all.

And, even with Officers Reed & Malloy being out of the picture for a good part of this episode's running time - I still felt that "A Clinic On 18th Street" was certainly well-worth a view for its intense story about uncovering outright fraud in the medical business.

... and Jack Webb did win lots of them, as in hit TV shows including his own long running TV show in two incarnations - Dragnet as well as Adam-12 and Emergency!.

This had to be a pilot for a proposed Webb series that never took off. Officers Malloy and Reed investigate the death of an elderly diabetic man from hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) and his death is traced back to the use of some quack medical device that he was told by a quack doctor could substitute for his insulin injections. Except that the diabetic is not around to actually tell anybody this. The case is then handed off to a team of prosecutors and the regular Adam-12 cast disappears for the rest of the episode. That is part of the reason I think it was a pilot for a proposed series. The other reason is that the "guest cast" is just too consequential for it to be just another episode of Adam-12.

Jack Webb practically had his own stock company of supporting players. But here they have Ed Nelson as the head prosecutor and Frank Sinatra Jr. And Sharon Gless as the young assistant prosecutors. The cinematography gets cheesy as there are over the top melodramatic close-ups at key moments just in case the direction, acting, or script doesn't cue the audience in that this is an over the top melodramatic moment. Then towards the conclusion prosecutor Nelson breaks into a classic sneering Jack Webb style speech. It comes across as a bit hammy and made me appreciate Jack Webb's ability to pull off this kind of performance even more.

The odd thing? The weird belt that the diabetic fatally depended upon to control his blood sugar may have looked ridiculous in 1974, but today it eerily looks like the insulin pump belts worn by type one diabetics that perform continuous glucose monitoring and insulin injection. Minus, of course, the goofy blinking lights straight out of an Ed Wood movie.

Worth it for the novelty of it all.

I'm here to watch Adam-12. I want to see Malloy and Reed. I want to see the squad car. I want to see some good stories about our two heroes out on the mean, ruthless, peanut butter and banana covered streets of Los Angeles, California. What I don't want to see is the failed pilot for a proposed series apparently titled, "Fraud" (according to info here somewhere on IMDB pertaining to this episode) being burned off as an episode of my all time favorite Police series. This really must have caught viewers of 1974 completely off-guard. This was the final episode of the 6th season and Martin Milner and Kent McCord are relegated to "cameo appearance" status. Viewers back then must have been utterly confused and ultimately disappointed. Total bummer.

So since this was officially presented as an episode of Adam-12, I'm rating it as such. And as such, this was by far the absolute worst episode of Adam-12. I'd rate it a Zero, but give it a 1 for Martin Milner's cameo and another 1 for Kent McCord's cameo. 1 + 1 = 2. So this gets 2/10 stars from me.

If I were to rate this as an episode of a series titled, "Fraud", I'd rate it 1/10. These characters are flat out boring. The acting is lousy except for Sharon Gless and the little actress who played the blind girl. The writing is hammy. The direction is stale. The production seems to have been tossed together from discarded pieces of other TV series' laying around. It looks undeniably cheap. Then too, the story is simply too rushed. There's way too much crammed into a thirty minute run time. This needed to be an hour long series. Had it been 60 minutes and had this as a series been given time to work out all the kinks, then maybe it could have been something better. It also needed a whole lot of money thrown at it. This is simply awful television.

Bring on Season 7 and bring on Malloy, Reed and their awesome co-star squad car!