RoboCop: The TV Series (1994)

RoboCop: The TV Series (1994)

Feature-length pilot and 21 episodes, approx 44 minutes each.

Wisely ignoring the existence of RoboCop 2 and 3 (like many people tend to do), the cheapo TV series is set two years after the events of the first film.

It feels like something I'd have sat down to watch on a Saturday evening as a kid after The A-Team had ended and before the crap variety show with Jimmy bloody Tarbuck came on. If you stumble upon the series while channel-hopping you may give it little more than five minutes before hopping some place else. That's because it takes a couple of episodes before the show begins to justify its existence.

There's a lot of attempted humour; not quite slapstick and certainly not sophisticated, it sits somewhere between the two and ends up mostly face-palm bad.

The aspect that stayed me from pressing the stop button is the relationships. When it finds the human element that's buried within the machine parts it becomes mildly entertaining and raises itself out of the shit-bin for a time. It's still bad, but it has measurable heart beneath the clumsy scripts and the awful villains.

Robocop (Richard Eden) is partnered with officer Lisa Madigan (Yvette Nipar), who knows his real identity, which creates a shared burden and secret bond. He's helped also by a holographic woman named Diana (Andrea Roth), who's an interesting addition to the team, allowing the writers to pull some quick fixes for bad writing out of their collective asses a number of times. She's a likeable sort and brings some cheer to proceedings, so it's often a forgivable tactic.

Each episode has a satirical news bulletin similar to what Verhoven did in the original film; it never gets too scathing but is still fun to see. Better still, Commander Cash, an animated superhero that encourages kids to be good OCP product consumers, is featured regularly; the animation is styled like The Jetsons. It's arguably the best part of the show. The joke could wear thin after a while, but the producers are clever enough to keep it brief and entertaining.

It's not a series that I'd recommend to everyone, but if it came up in conversation I wouldn't be ashamed to voice my support for what it tried to do, while acknowledging that it didn't manage to meet its own targets. I can relate to that.