jag

(******6/10)

Starring: David James Elliott, Catherine Bell, Patrick Labyorteaux, John M. Jackson, Karri Turner, Chuck Carrington, Scott Lawrence, Zoe McLellan, Tracey Needham, Andrea Parker

Notable guest stars (according to my person, biased definition of ‘notable’): Adam Beach, Dominique Swain, Gabrielle Carteris, Ian Ziering, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jolene Blalock, Lochlyn Munro, Mark Harmon, Michael Weatherly, Nanci Chambers, Neal McDonough, Pauley Perrette, Sean Murray, Stephen McHattie

I must confess that during its run of ten seasons on the air, I never once saw an episode of JAG. The only thing I knew about it was that it starred that guy (David James Elliott) who had a recurring role on my mom’s favourite Canadian show Street Legal and that super-hot babe Catherine Bell who was on the cover of the Stuff magazine that lived for four years on top of the toilet tank in the bathroom of the college apartment I shared with four other guys. Which meant that until Paramount Home Entertainment released the complete collection on DVD April 14th, this was the only thing I knew about JAG:

catherine_bell_l4

Then I started watching, right from the beginning, and there was no Catherine Bell at all! I guess they went through two other actresses before finally settling on Bell in the second season. But that was a lot of JAG to get through, and at the time of this review I was only 2/3 of the way through season one. Which left me, at the time of this review, doing little but wondering what had become of Tracey Needham, the original co-star and eye candy of JAG for season one.

needham

It turns out…nothing, really. I’ve seen her as a guest star on various types of CSI incarnations, and Criminal Minds and so on. But that’s it. Too bad, I thought – she was pretty good. And pretty. I guess she should have done more shoots for Stuff and Maxim to hang on to her job.

I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying JAG. Yes, it’s a televised, pared-down cheesy version of Top Gun, with fighter jets flying around in nearly every episode. But where I had been expecting a courtroom drama, it really isn’t – it’s a navy crime investigation show. Just like NCIS, which is a spinoff of JAG. Or NCIS: Los Angeles, NCIS: New Orleans and NCIS: Lanark County which are all spin-offs of NCIS. JAG and NCIS were created by the same guy – Donald P. Bellisario, who really found his niche with navy folk investigating crimes.

That being said, JAG was only his third-coolest TV show. It was better than Tequila and Bonetti and MUCH better than Airwofl. Remember Airwolf? (Not the Canadian version that ran after the original series was canceled, the American version that didn’t last very long.) But finishing third to NCIS and the always-magnificently-cheesy Magnum P.I. is not such a bad thing. And now, if you like, you can get all ten seasons of not-such-a-bad-thing, to binge watch over the next 6 years.