A Blessing In Disguise

To celebrate our 40th episode, Nathan and Eppy take a look at the second Rockford Files TV movie, 1995's A Blessing In Disguise. The premise is that Angel has become a televangelist preacher, so it's worth watching for that alone! Though padded out in some odd ways to our eyes, this movie really showcases how rock-solid Garner and Margolin are in their roles as Jim and Angel, no matter how much time has passed since the original show.

As a 2-hour TV movie, we use our entire episode to go through it, with overall impressions and digresses about the highs and lows of the storytelling. We certainly enjoy the performances and the character arc of the actual center of the story, an aspiring actress played by Renée O'Connor (Gabrielle from Xena: Warrior Princess). However, it does feel more like a victory lap than a really sharply rendered story, with too many scenes that don't seem to do anything past provide a gag, and a story that simply drops threads as the movie goes on without any impact to the story. It's always a pleasure contrasting these movies with the original show, but we are still left a little wanting compared to the best 70s episodes.

Want more Rockford Files trivia, notes and ephemera? Check out the Two Hundred a Day Rockford Files Files!

Support the podcast by subscribing at patreon.com/twohundredaday. Big thanks to our Gumshoe patrons! Check them out:

• Richard Hatem
• Victor DiSanto
• Jim Crocker - keep an eye out for Jim selling our games east of the Mississippi!
• Shane Liebling's Roll For Your Party dieroller app
• Lowell Francis's Age of Ravens gaming blog
• Kevin Lovecraft and the Wednesday Evening Podcast Allstars
• Mike Gillis and the Radio vs. The Martians Podcast
• And thank you to Dael Norwood, Dylan Winslow, Bill Anderson, Adam Alexander, Chris, and Dave P!

Thanks to:

• zencastr.com for helping us record
• fireside.fm for hosting us
• thatericalper.com for the answering machine audio clips
• spoileralerts.org for the adding machine audio clip
• Freesound.org for the other audio clips

Two Hundred a Day is a podcast by Nathan D. Paoletta and Epidiah Ravachol. We are exploring the intensely weird and interesting world of the 70s TV detective show The Rockford Files. Half celebration and half analysis, we break down episodes of the show and then analyze how and why they work as great pieces of narrative and character-building. In each episode of Two Hundred a Day, we watch an episode, recap and review it as fans of the show, and then tease out specific elements from that episode that hold lessons for writers, gamers and anyone else interested in making better narratives.