Will I ever get over the fact that Theodore Gershuny, who directed and wrote this episode, was married to Mary Woronov? Am I really that jealous of a person? Yes.

Based on a story by John Sladek, a former tech writer who was also the author of The New Apocrypha: A Guide to Strange Science and Occult Beliefs, in which he examined the supernatural from a materialist lens, this is the story of Susie (Jamie Ohar), who gets a stuffed bear from her parents (Marilyn Jones and Timothy Carhart). But is it just a teddy bear, or is it something more?

But did her parents even buy it? Neither of them remembers, and soon, bear marks are all over the house and anything that goes wrong is blamed on the bear. Basically: Kids are insane people who live in your house who are ready to kill you at any time. That’s what I learned from this. That and the fact that evil can be inside very small things, and perhaps you should just leave it alone unless you want to end up holding your child as a big bear breaks its way through a door.

The parents spend half the episode debating the logic of the bear’s existence. That’s because in Sladek’s world, the bear isn’t necessarily a demon; it’s a physical object that is simply wrong. The horror isn’t spiritual. It’s a failure of the physical world to behave in the way we want it to.

Plus, the bear acts as a surrogate for Susie’s own burgeoning agency and perhaps her resentment. More than her blaming the bear and trying to get away with it, she’s also in a psychodrama with her parents, as they are actually terrified of the idea that their daughter might be the one marking the house. The bear is just the medium for the chaos kids naturally bring into a sanitized adult world.

Desperate to save her granddaughter, Mary Jane, from an encroaching supernatural rot, the wealthy Mrs. Nugent turns to the only experts she can find: Nora (Phyllis Diller) and Jack Mills (Lawrence Tierney). Nora is a wisecracking, flamboyant medium, while Jack is a hard-nosed cynic. They are career con artists used to fleecing pockets and putting on dim-lit seances, but Mrs. Nugent’s $50,000 bounty is enough to make them ignore the smell of sulfur.

Mary Jane claims to be Aisha Candisha, a Moroccan demon of legendary malice. To prove her pedigree, she doesn’t just growl. She casually unhinges her jaw and consumes a silver spoon like it’s a communion wafer. Nora, realizing they are wildly out of their depth, tries to bow out, admitting they are merely fortune tellers. Jack, fueled by greed and a stubborn refusal to be intimidated, doubles down. He wants to try a transfer ritual, removing the entity from Mary Jane and trapping it inside a live pig.

Directed by T.J. Castronovo and written by Edithe Swensen, this ends with both Aisha and Gad finding new bodies to live in. As the demons argue over their prize, the con artists realize that playing at being the Warrens has invited a darkness that doesn’t care about their bank accounts.

Lew Feldman (Joe Bova) is on the phone, being a Hollywood agent, when Mr. Smith (Lenny von Dohlen) appears in his office. He tells him that he wants to speak to Gil Hurn (David Margulies) and wants the agent to find him. Feldman says that Hurn is a big writer now and doesn’t want to revisit one of his failures. Smith offers a $35,000 gold bar to find Smith and discuss his one-season-canceled show, Max Paradise.

Smith wants Hurn to write and direct six more episodes of the show, including the ending. He’s willing to pay him $2 million to make it happen, but Hurn is unsure, since he thinks the show was corny. Smith claims that fans are yearning to see how the story ends. To do that, they have to find the star, Van Conway (Darren McGavin), who has given up on acting and, well, life. Smith promises him money, and if he takes the pills he’s brought, he will feel healthy again, as he once did before he started drinking. He even rebuilds the studio where the show was set, with no expense spared, to ensure that a show nobody watched can come back.

Even when Conway walks away, Smith won’t give up, even removing his fear and need to drink. When asked why he’s doing all of this, he replies that he’s Conway’s greatest fan. Conway is amazed by Smith’s belief in him and wonders who the millions of people Smith refers to are who would watch a black-and-white show in modern times. All Smith can say as he watches the show being filmed is that it’s mythic.

It’s never said where Smith is from, but Hurn and Conway decide he’s from space, a place that saw the show years after everyone else and always wondered how it ended. As the Max Paradise theme plays and the cameras roll in that reconstructed void, Hurn and Conway realize they aren’t just filming a cancelled show; they are providing the “ending” for an entire civilization’s mythology. They find their own purpose by becoming the wanderers they once portrayed.

Directed by Bill Travers (his only directing job; he played Senator Boutwell in The Lincoln Conspiracy) and written by Theodore Gershuny (who was married to Mary Woronov) from a story by Andrew Weiner, this is one of my favorite episodes of the entire series. Max Paradise was based on Coronet Blue, which ran for only 11 episodes on CBS in the summer of 1967. Created by Larry Cohen, it was about an amnesia-suffering man (Frank Converse) chased by killers who only knew two words, which were the title of the show. It never returned after those episodes, and the mystery was never resolved.

Three Pittsburgh-centric episodes in a row, starting with Tom Savini directing, then John Harrison and now Michael Gornick behind the camera. The director of Creepshow 2, as well as episodes of this show and Monsters, also has the pedigree of being written by George Romero.

Luther Mandrake (Jerrt Stiller) is the kind of burned-out shock jock that horror movies are made about. He starts off mid-rant, late for his show, The Devil’s Advocate, and angry that the cops dared to question him after someone was found dead in his car. Mandrake has the midnight to 4 AM shift, the Art Bell time, the middle of the darkness when only crazy people are listening and even weirder people are calling in. 

Mandrake hasn’t had it easy: his mother died in a plane crash, his father died in a picket line, his wife is in a coma, and his son just died, the victim of a drunk driver. One of his callers — from Pittsburgh — reacts by calling him the devil, all as Mandrake begins to turn into a wolf. Before too long, callers from across time appear, complaining about President Wilson and World War II. That’s because — shudder — he’s become the devil’s advocate for real, broadcasting from hell, as he’d already killed himself in his car, and that’s the body the police found.

Still’s son, Ben, did his own version of this on his Fox show, presenting “Low Budget Tales of Horror.” Jerry would dress as a wolf again in the Monsters episode “One Wolf’s Family.” That brings the Pittsburgh connection full circle, because that one was directed by Jon Thomas, who worked as a sound mixer on many Romero projects.

Directed and written by John Harrison (First Assistant Director on Creepshow and Day of the Dead — not to mention his stunning turn as the villain of Effects), this episode is all about composer Pete Bancroft (Michael Warren, Hill Street Blues), who is burned out on playing the piano, out of ideas and seemingly discourages his daughter Justine (Lisa Bonet) from following in his footsteps. But then Wilson Farber (Philip Roth) offers him an electric piano out of the blue. It’s powered by thought, not by playing, and seems to turn his ideas into hit songs. But you know what they say: if an offer is too good to be true, well…the keyboard acts as a psychic parasite, feeding on Justine’s youthful vibrance. And this is after Pete ignored her talent! Now, he wonders how he can escape this Faustian deal.

At its core, the story explores the commodification of art. Pete Bancroft isn’t just a tired musician; he’s a man experiencing the soul-crushing weight of professional expectation. When Wilson Farber presents the thought-powered keyboard, it represents the ultimate shortcut of output without the labor of practice or the pain of composition. Keep in mind, this was made decades before AI.

Speaking of music, Harrison also composed the score, with cues very similar to those in Day of the Dead.

Directed by Sex Machine himself, Tom Savini, and written by Michael McDowell (Thinner, Beetlejuice), “Halloween Candy” centers on Mr. Killup, played with skin-crawling bitterness by Roy Poole. Killup is the ultimate holiday bad guy, a mean man who doesn’t just dislike Halloween, but actively has disdain for the joy of children. His constant bickering with his weary son, Michael (Tim Choate), establishes a claustrophobic, mean-spirited atmosphere that feels ripped straight from the cynical pages of an old EC Comic. After a night spent tormenting trick-or-treaters with “treats” like spoiled food and hardware, Killup’s karma arrives in the form of a relentless, silent goblin (John Edward Allen).

The goblin isn’t just a monster; it’s a lingering, supernatural pest that slowly erodes Killup’s sanity. The finale where the creature uses its dark magic to accelerate time features gruesome, high-tier makeup effects that make Killup appear as though he has been rotting in neglect for weeks.

Even better, Fluffy from inside “The Crate” in Creepshow is in this.

This feels like one of the best shows of the series. Savini brings a cinematic eye to a low-budget TV format with relenteless pacing, His focus on the visceral details of the monster makes the segment feel more like a short film than a TV episode. With its heavy shadows, autumnal setting, and themes of greed and consequence, it is the quintessential Halloween watch. It captures that specific October vibes better than even some movies.

After a few light entries in the series, “Parlour Floor Front” marks a welcome return to the grim, ironic horror that defined the show’s peak. 

The undisputed highlight here is Adolph Caesar as Mars. Caesar was a titan of the industry, legendary for his booming, authoritative baritone. While he is immortalized as the voice of the United Negro College Fund’s “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” campaign and dozens of iconic movie trailers, his on-screen presence was equally formidable (earning an Oscar nod for A Soldier’s Story).

In this episode, he radiates a quiet, dangerous dignity. As the long-term tenant of a stunning apartment, Linda (Donna Bullock) sees him not as a human being, but as an obstacle to her plan. She is the quintessential 80s social climber, willing to use psychological warfare to get what she wants. Her husband, Doug (John Calonius), is happy for the help that Mars gives him in fixing up the place. But she keeps pushing, not knowing that the old man does voodoo and should not be treated this poorly.

Richard Friedman, who directed this episode, also made Phantom of the Mall, Doom Asylum and Scared Stiff. This episode was written by Carole Lucia Satrina, who scripted three of Cannon’s fairy tale films: Puss in Boots, Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast.

This has a fantastic ending, and it’s nice to see the series return to horror rather than silliness.

A veteran reporter who suffered a heart attack says his best medicine would be the removal of his publisher. Jessica gets involved after the man ends up dead.

A veteran reporter who suffered a heart attack says his best medicine would be the removal of his publisher. Jessica gets involved after the man ends up dead.

Season 3, Episode 7: Deadline for Murder (November 16, 1985)

Reporter Haskell Drake (Harry Guardino) has a heart attack after his editor, Lamar Bennett (Peter Mark Richman), rewrites his interview with Jessica. He flips out, Bennett drops dead, and then the reporter asks Jessica to solve it. I mean, is it a heart attack or murder?

Who’s in it, outside of Angela Lansbury (and Jarry Guardino)?

Katherine Cannon is Eleanor Revere. She’s in The Hidden.

Lt. A. Caruso is played by Gretchen Corbett. She was in The Rockford Files TV movies.

Tim O’Connor plays Walter Revere, Dr. Elias on Buck Rogers.

Ken Olin from Thirtysomething is Perry Revere.

Eugene Roche is Billy Simms.

William Smith! He’s Clyde Thorson! William Smith makes everything better!

Glynn Turman plays Stan Lassiter.

In more minor roles, Sydney Walsh is Kay Garrett, Tom Henschel is Dr. Framer, Morgan Jones is Sergeant Tierney, Mary Wickliffe is Nurse Phillips, Lisa Nelson is a policewoman, Dorothy Meyer is Nurse O’Hanlon, Matt Roe is a guard, and Erwin Fuller is Harry. Barbara Allyne Bennet is a secretary. Party guests are played by Robert Buckingham, Fritz Ford, Robert Hitchcock, Ethelreda Leopold, Mike Paciorek, Anthony Pecoraro, George Sasaki, Walter Smith and Geoff Vanderstock. Frank Slaten is an assistant, Steve Hershon is a waiter, Donald Chaffin is a reporter, and Freeman Love and Len Felber are detectives.

What happens?

Lamar Bennett bought the Sentinel, a newspaper, and consistently mocks the individuals who miss the days when it wasn’t a tabloid. He’s done this to tons of other papers, and this demoralizes Drake so much that he doesn’t want to live until Bennett dies, and he gets the chance to investigate with Jessica doing the in-person snooping.

It could be any of the reporters who want him dead. But it looks like…

Who did it?

Bennett’s assistant, Billy Simms, who knew about his illegitimate daughter Kay, took care of her for her entire life, all before Billy informed his boss who she really is and demanded that he fire her. Billy has enough and…well, that’s how we get to this episode’s death.

Who made it?

This was directed by Seymour Robbie and written by John Kennedy, Michael McGough and Tom Sawyer.

Does Jessica dress up and act stupid? Does she get some?

No. She needs to find the right costume party that also has everyone put their keys out, if you know what I mean.

Was it any good?

Sure.

Any trivia?

This is the first of two appearances by Harry Guardino as Haskell Drake.

Give me a reasonable quote:

Haskell Drake: I have been offered a big overseas assignment in Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok…

Jessica Fletcher: Oh. Haskell Drake: …by Newmonth, no less.

Jessica Fletcher: Haskell, that’s marvelous. When?

Haskell Drake: Oh, well, um, a-as soon as you hand me my trousers. And by the way, you can tag along if you want to. I figure that, uh, a couple of years of, uh, hard work, who knows, you may turn into a half-decent newspaperman.

What’s next?

YES! YES! YES! Jessica comes to the assistance of Thomas Magnum when he’s framed for two murders that occurred during her vacation in Hawaii!