1 9 9 1 (USA/Canada)
1 x 120 minute pilot
8 x 60 minute episodes
Tommy Logan (DW Moffett) is an expert cat burglar and jewel thief just back from a stretch in Attica. Inexplicably, he is hired by eccentric hotel magnate Arturo Taft (Tony Lo Bianco) as head of security for his international Palace Hotel chain.
Executive vice president for publicity and public relations Christy Cooper (Marcy Walker from Santa Barbara) – a leggy blonde former B-movie actress – becomes his new boss, and she doesn’t like the prancing, self-obsessed ex-thief one bit. Unfortunately, their Moonlighting-style tiffs are tiresome and predictable.
Logan crawls through ventilation systems (with convenient man-sized air ducts), hacks computer systems like a pro software developer, flies by executive jet to Acapulco to investigate a suspicious death and a missing teen, takes on a well-trained gunman and subdues him *unarmed* and can knock a man unconscious with his fists and throw a hand grenade from one helicopter to another! (eat your heart out Cy Young). And that was just in the two-hour pilot episode.
Although supposedly set in San Francisco, the series was filmed in Vancouver (Canada).
Creator Stephen J Cannell received much-deserved praise for The Rockford Files, The A-Team and Hardcastle and McCormick, but Palace Guard did a lot to lower his average.
The show was critically mauled, and CBS cancelled the series after airing only the pilot and two of the eight completed episodes.
Tommy Logan
DW Moffett
Christy Cooper
Marcy Walker
Arturo Taft
Tony Lo Bianco
Sy Hertzog
Allen Garfield