TV Reviews : McCloud Is Back in the Saddle on Sunday

He’s baaaaack!

McCloud’s back and riding high on a steed through urban streets--in this case landmarked London--and still cracking wisdom, our sagebrush Charlie Chan: “Sometimes,” he reflects, “you look at the whole prairie and it’s so diffused with sunlight, well, you kind of miss the little critters that are hurtin’ by the side of the road.”

At the heart of “The Return of Sam McCloud,” airing at 9 Sunday night on CBS, it’s nice to see all the usual suspects rounded up again looking perfectly quaffed.

There’s Marshal Sam (Dennis Weaver, also co-executive producer and a co-writer), now a U.S. senator from Taos, N.M., and taking the world’s ozone burden on his sturdy back. Plus the beauteous Chris (Diana Muldaur), now living in London; Sgt. Joe Broadhurst (Terry Carter), elevated to NYPD detective chief, and grumpy Chief Clifford (J. D. Cannon), now police commissioner and conveniently on vacation in London.

The plot is stupendously routine about a rotten multinational drug company that tries to suppress cures for cancer.

Don’t ask anymore. All McCloud fans need to know is how he gets a horse. It’s during the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, when the assassins take shots at a key scientist, also beauteous, a guardsman’s horse rears and Sam leaps on it, sweeps up the lady and storms off to safety, passing a lot of great sites along the way.

“You can’t tell how fast a horse will run by the color of his hide,” Sam says at one point. It’s apropos of nothing--but it’s wise.