Among Steven Spielberg's TV work, this gets classified as a "movie" alongside "Something Evil" and "Duel" simply in virtue of being the pilot for a TV series that was never picked up. It feels like it. It's well put together, and has some good performances, but has all the marks of a TV show including being timed mostly around commercial breaks, and it just doesn't highlight what Spielberg does well.

Spielberg closes out his TV commitments with one of those TV-movie-pilots. The script feels for all the world like one of the less compelling Columbo episodes, and the formula falls kind of flat without all the customary chewing of scenery, but Spielberg's dressed it up with all the gratuitous foreshortening and constant short cuts he can muster. As it happens, the network did not pick up Martin Landau's high-flying investigative reporter who never seems to get around to the "reporting" part.