Roddy McDowall stars as an unsuccessful actor, and he overacts this part. He goes on a pointless killing spree, and both he and his story clash with the show's otherwise realistic approach. I wondered immediately why one of the other 7,999,999 available stories had not been green-lighted instead.
The story is set in the NY theater milieu, with Roddy up for the lead in a play at Circle in the Square in Greenwich Village, This provides for some cliched satire of theater folks and beatniks and hipsters (the usual mainstream propaganda), but the clues leading to identifying Roddy as the killer are contrived and unconvincing. His going crazy and murdering many people for just a few bucks is hardly the stuff that great crime stories are made of. And the show's anticlimax finish is terrible.
The main gimmick is Burke sending a young woman undercover to get the goods on McDowall, and her crash course in learning how to act that role is meticulously spelled out and interesting. But again, it clashes with her adversary McDowall's phoniness. The melodrama of the undercover policewoman's death is ridiculous, and even worse is the reaction of the stereotyped theater director, in a scene where Bruce Dern is wasted, getting just one line of dialogue. It all adds up to an incompetent segment.
He masdd.