High Performance (1983)

Debuting March 2, 1983. ABC, 8/7pm Central

This high-octane action series was created by David E. Peckinpah for Warner Television and ABC but came and went in the blink of an eye in March 1983. The series featured former racecar driver Brennan Flannery (Mitchell Ryan), who is convinced by Blue Stratton (Jack Scalia), a former military intelligence officer, to expand his driving school into a bodyguard business. They are joined by Brennan’s daughter Kate (Lisa Hartman), a survival and karate expert, and Shane Adams (Rick Edwards), an aspiring racecar driver. Fletch (Jason Bernard) outfitted the team with equipment. Together, the team embarks on missions to protect people and valuable items. The security school is named High Performance and the team charges $5000 a day for their services. As exposited by guest star Alex Rocco in the debut episode, “You mean High Performance is a gear-jammer, a broad, and a guy named Blue?” Indeed.

Each episode of High Performance had the team undertake different rescue missions. In “Ice on the Road,” they protect a shipment of crown jewels used to finance a Central American civil war. “Juggernaut” sees the team rescuing a TV news reporter who infiltrated a survivalist group stockpiling illegal weapons. In “Deadly Performance,” the team works to prevent terrorists from stealing biological warfare material, with the terrorists enrolling in the Flannery School to learn how to breach security systems. Along the way, there were plenty of the requisite car chases…since it shared two producers with The Dukes of Hazzard (Paul R. Picard and Albert J. Salzer), this is hardly surprising.

Despite its action-packed premise and a serviceable theme by Barry DeVorzon and Joseph Conlan, High Performance was short-lived and not well-received. Critic David Bianculli called it “mindless, useless, and virtually unbearable”. Incredibly, this dreck replaced the wonderful Tales of the Gold Monkey as the lead-in show on Wednesday nights when ABC moved Gold Monkey to the late Friday night timeslot to die. But after only four airings, High Performance was replaced by The Fall Guy when ABC moved it up to the Wednesday lead-in timeslot. The show has not been re-aired in the US since its initial broadcast. Its obscurity is noted by the fact that no Wikipedia article exists for the show. All four episodes surfaced in 2021 as a torrent, which has since disappeared. The episode “Ice on the Road” popped up on YouTube last October, and a partial recording of the pilot is up at Internet Archive.