Barnaby Jones: A Short Happy Life (1979)
Season 7, Episode 21
1/10
I agree with the person who hated this one!
4 August 2021
While I did not appreciate a two and a half sentence review, I agreed with the sentiments of the reviewer who hated this episode and thought it suffered from poor writing and terrible acting. This is pretty much how I felt and I couldn't wait for it to end...or the character 'Foxey' to become a murder victim!

When the episode begins, Foxey lands at the Hollywood airport to visit her cousin, Betty. It's likely the first thing you'll notice about Foxey is that she talks non-stop and is more annoying than a migraine! Well, it's obvious she annoyed the crap out of the guy she was sitting next to on the plane but he pretends to like her so he can hide a key inside the sole of Foxey's VERY thin soled shoes. Now HOW she could walk even a foot or two with this key under the sole is beyond me...it would have been like having a large pebble in your shoe! The remainder of the episode consists of bad people trying to find her to retrieve that key. Sadly, this is their first concern...not killing Foxey!! Yes, she's THAT annoying.

In addition to Foxey being a character straight from the pit of hell, the show suffers from the worst cliche the show used (or, should I say OVERUSED). Through the course of the series, Betty must have had friends or family members in peril several dozen times! Now having this happen once or twice could be believed....but several times every season? This just shows very lazy writing and a certain amount of contempt for the audience. Now I know it wouldn't have been so obvious during the initial run of the show, as the most you could see were an episode a week as they aired. Now, you can binge on the series...and that's when this awful trope becomes more obvious and more annoying.

Overall, a terrible episode as it annoys from start to finish and features a character almost as annoying as the godawful Starlight Sisters from season 5. As for the Starlights, they managed to be worse simply because they were featured in TWO episodes. Oh, and by the way,.... Cassie Yates played not only Foxey but one of the Starlight Sisters!!! Surely, there should be some sort of punishment for having done this!! Now I don't completely blame Yates....she was just getting paid to act...though in the four episodes in which she appeared, the HIGHEST rated ones earned 3s from me and the other two 1s. But the writers...uggh!! They are the real culprits here! A rare episode that is so annoying I cannot actually believe I kept watching it!
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