Source:The Action Blog
“Broken Badges “Westside Stories” Episode 3, part 4.”
From CBS
If you believe never hearing of the CBS 1990 cop drama Broken Badges makes you special, you need to take a trip back to the drawing board especially if everything else about you is normal. You try to put a fan club together for a series that would barely qualify as a mini-series when we’re only talking about 10 episodes or so and you might fill up a phone booth, but leaving room for people to breathe and move inside of it.
Which is fine because unless you’re a big fan of Eileen Davidson ( from the great soap opera The Young and The Restless ) or big fans of Ernie Hudson or Miguel Ferer, Charlotte Lewis even, or CBS is not only your favorite network but has been your whole life and perhaps you’re the President of the CBS Fan Club and can name everything that great network has ever produced from the flops like Broken Badges to great shows like M*A*S*H and not just grew up with the network and it remained your favorite network as an adult as even a middle age adult, your’e probably not familiar with this show either.
I only got into Broken Badges myself when I started watching The Young and The Restless and Days of Our Lives several years ago when Eileen Davidson was working on both shows. And I was thinking I think I knew who she was before I started watching these shows, because I’ve seen her in a few other things and started looking into what she’s also done, because she’s great on both soaps and great to look at as well. ( And water is still wet )
And started thinking about a certain b-movie that she did like in the late 1980s which of course was Easy Wheels where she plays a biker goddess who is the leader off a female biker gang. And then thinking didn’t she play a tough but sexy cop on a cop show from like the late 80s or early 90s when I was in high school. That is how I got into Broken Badges myself and watched every single episode of that short lived series last weekend in preparation for this piece. Broken Badges, obviously did flopped or it wouldn’t have started in late 1990 and barley made it to 1991, but there were some good things about it and it did have a good cast.
The whole premise of Broken Badges where you have the rebellious officers and detectives who had issues with rules and following them and are always in trouble with their superiors, that are lead by a detective sergeant ( played by Miguel Ferer ) who was fired by the New Orleans PD and then broth in by the Bay City ( fictional town and PD ) because he wouldn’t follow department rules, regulations, take orders, thinks he smarter than everyone else, pretty much explains why this show barley qualifies as a series. This show would’ve been suited if it was based on a private detective agency where the detectives are all ex-cops who are talented but fired by their department for breaking the rules, that are brought in by a guy starting his own new detective agency after he was fired from his department.
But a lot of pilots fail and perhaps most do, but that doesn’t mean they’re complete failures if they have good casts that were good on those pilots and become stars later on and the failed pilots that they were part of become like jumpstarts for their careers. Easy Wheels and Broken Badges, didn’t make Eileen Davidson, Ernie Hudson, Miguel Ferer, or Charlotte Lewis stars. Hudson and Ferer, were already somewhat known from shows and movies from earlier in their careers. Hudson, with Ghostbusters and Ferer with Robocop. And Broken Badges allowed for Eileen Davidson to be on network TV and be seen which lead to other and much better roles for her.
Just to talk about Officer Bullet ( played by Eileen Davidson ) she plays this very tough and yet sexy, gorgeous, very cute even. What would be called a vice detective where she goes undercover a lot and works with dangerous people that would kill her if they discovered she was a cop. And she’s doing this work with a look of a badass biker chick very similar to Easy Wheels which came out right before Broken Badges went on the air in 1990. She’s always wearing this sexy black leather biker jacket , blue Levi’s jeans, black western boots, and there are a few scenes where she’s wearing black leather chaps over her blue Levi’s denim jeans. And she’s kicking ass in the movie a lot but always kicking bad guys ass, because of course her character is addicted to danger as the background of her character says. Eileen Davidson, is all the reason I need to watch this show and it also has a lot good humor and funny scenes in it as well.
The Action Blog 