I'm here to watch Adam-12. I want to see Malloy and Reed. I want to see the squad car. I want to see some good stories about our two heroes out on the mean, ruthless, peanut butter and banana covered streets of Los Angeles, California. What I don't want to see is the failed pilot for a proposed series apparently titled, "Fraud" (according to info here somewhere on IMDB pertaining to this episode) being burned off as an episode of my all time favorite Police series. This really must have caught viewers of 1974 completely off-guard. This was the final episode of the 6th season and Martin Milner and Kent McCord are relegated to "cameo appearance" status. Viewers back then must have been utterly confused and ultimately disappointed. Total bummer.
So since this was officially presented as an episode of Adam-12, I'm rating it as such. And as such, this was by far the absolute worst episode of Adam-12. I'd rate it a Zero, but give it a 1 for Martin Milner's cameo and another 1 for Kent McCord's cameo. 1 + 1 = 2. So this gets 2/10 stars from me.
If I were to rate this as an episode of a series titled, "Fraud", I'd rate it 1/10. These characters are flat out boring. The acting is lousy except for Sharon Gless and the little actress who played the blind girl. The writing is hammy. The direction is stale. The production seems to have been tossed together from discarded pieces of other TV series' laying around. It looks undeniably cheap. Then too, the story is simply too rushed. There's way too much crammed into a thirty minute run time. This needed to be an hour long series. Had it been 60 minutes and had this as a series been given time to work out all the kinks, then maybe it could have been something better. It also needed a whole lot of money thrown at it. This is simply awful television.
Bring on Season 7 and bring on Malloy, Reed and their awesome co-star squad car!