Today, as part of TV Bingo Tuesday, we play TV Bingo with In the Heat of the Night!
You know the concept, I use a TV Bingo card (one for dramas and one for sitcoms) and I’ll go through the episodes in order and see how quickly I hit a bingo. In case you don’t know how bingo works, the idea is that you mark off a box (in traditional bingo, someone will draw ping pong balls with numbers and letters on them like a lottery machine) and when you check off five boxes in a row (whether left to right, up and down or diagonal) then that counts as a “bingo.” Here, we’ll be going episode-by-episode and seeing whether they match any of the boxes on our bingo card. When we hit five in a row, that’s a “bingo”!
My pal Bill Walko and I went over the TV drama bingo card and came up with the current (I think improved) version of the card. Here it is…
Today, in honor of the passing of Sidney Poitier, who never did a regular TV series, we’re looking at the acclaimed drama, In The Heat of the Night, which was based on the film, In the Heat of the Night, that won Poitier’s co-star, Rod Steiger, a Best Actor Oscar (and the film won Best Picture).
I bet that this is going to be a tough one, as Carroll O’Connor notably fired the original showrunner of the series because he specifically felt that the show WAS too cliche and he wanted it to be its own thing, so it seems hard for me to believe it will hit enough cliches for a bingo, but I could be wrong. Let’s take a look!
Season 1’s “A Necessary Evil” sees a bigamist poisoned to death.
Season 1’s finale, “…And Then You Die,” saw Althea get taken hostage.
Season 2’s “The Creek” involves Virgil haunted by nightmares of his past.
Season 5’s “A Woman Much Admired” hit on two cliches, love interest killed and character learning they have a kid.
Season 6’s “Brother’s Keeper” has Luann’s sketchy brother visit once he gets out of prison.
I think that’s it, really…
Let me know if you think I missed something that would cause it to hit a bingo!
Feel free to make suggestions for other shows you’d like to see me use the current bingo cards for! Just e-mail me at brian@popculturereferences.com.
Really cool how little cliches it used! Is that the least amount so far?
And it’s sad to say, but the next bingo surely has to be Full House, right? Lots of honors lately. I’m actually curious where it hits a bingo. I can recall about a dozen cliches from memory, but some of them… I don’t know if a bingo can be made.
Correction: I forgot about diagonals. Think we’ll get a diagonal if anything.