The only episode of that series I watched was the one where he went undercover as the agent of a rising pop star (Barbi Benton of Playboy and Hee-Haw fame).
I had to switch it off after a half hour because my brain started to hurt.
I loved Due South but my impression is thtat it was a niche show even when it was on the air.
“There ya go!”
It’s funny how one’s brain isn’t yet developed in some subtle way, so that at 13, McCloud seems like a perfectly fine show, no different than M&W or Colombo, or Banacek. And then something changes, and you see how stupid it really is. And you wonder, “didn’t the people working on it not see how stupid it was?”
And then you look at what’s popular, and you realize that some people’s brains never changed. 
125 posts and no Miami Vice.
It must have inspired this series:
It turns out to be an undercover-operative ploy by the Romulans to seize control on Vulcan, with the hope that Spock will be their useful idiot. This, of course, doesn’t work, and Spock winds up concluding that the Romulans are instead on an inexorable evolution toward a Vulcan philosophy that — with his help — they’ll reach.
Or CSI: Miami:
The only ep. I can recall now is where the lead is “undercover” and his persona’s defining aspect is his eyepatch. Well dontcha know he ends up injuring the other eye, but insists to his boss that he can simply switch the patch to the other side and the crook won’t notice. Except that he immediately does. McCloud of course manages to wriggle out of it anyway; I get the impression that he was intended to be a slightly more competent Inspector Clouseau, in a 10 gallon hat and matching accent.
They run a billion $ fashion empire. I think they are doing ok.
My dad ran a hotel on Miami Beach in the 1980s.
The renaissance in South Florida engendered by that show was real.
Speaking of China Beach, I was sure there was another show during that time with a similar theme (because we were in that Platoon, Full Metal Jacket era of movies too) and there was, it was called Tour Of Duty. It also had a load of music that likely interfered with its ability to be repeated or released on DVD.
Tour of Duty ran for only two seasons, and the first was much better than the second. The guys were moved from combat patrols to guarding an air base and interacting with a female war correspondent who couldn’t even say “in country” right.
The same was true of Crime Story, which had a great first season. The producers ruined it by killing off the main antagonists and then trying to bring them back.
I think the H&I channel shows reruns of Tour of Duty on weekends with a bunch of other Army-themed shows. It’s one of those shows that I don’t remember at all from its original run but must have had enough episodes to go into syndication.
The Tour of Duty theme was the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black.”
For syndication to “traditional” over-the-air TV stations, the general rule-of-thumb had been that four seasons was the magic number for success in syndication. Four seasons typically meant ~100 episodes in total, which allows a local TV station to “strip” a series, i.e., run it in the same time slot, five days a week, M-F, and be able to run it that way for 20+ weeks without re-running an episode.
However, the rise of digital TV subchannel formats, which are themselves syndicated (such as MeTV, H&I, Ion, etc.), and many of which primarily, if not exclusively, re-run old TV series, has meant that a lot of older series which never did well in traditional syndication, due to not having enough episodes, now get shown. For example, MeTV runs Kolchack: The Night Stalker on Saturday evenings, despite the fact that that series was only produced for one season, with only 20 episodes.
Except that it is on DVD. I own it. All THREE seasons. You don’t miss the music as much as, say, you do with WKRP. Except for the theme! Paint It Black was a much moire aggro opening and really set the tone than the generic music they replaced it wit
I missed an entire third season? 
That was an awesome show and I think it’s still available to stream. The creator was the same guy responsible for Miami Vice and it shared some of the same style.
I watched this back in the day but only because I worked at the local CBS station helping with the news and it was in the nine o’clock slot (CT). I’m also surprised it lasted three seasons. Not because it was bad but I remember reading the premise was that any of the characters could die at any point because it’s about Vietnam. They didn’t. Not in the first season that I saw, anyway. I understand.
“Of course truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
You can’t tell someone’s story and then kill them off before it’s done. People/viewers wouldn’t like that. I wonder if they would be willing to do that today? Tell the rest of the story either in the background or the others remember them and talk about something. I do agree that this has disappeared with other similar shows.
Thanks for the discussion!
The medic, who was just about to go back home, was killed in what I think was the last episode of the first season, when the NVA overran the US fire base. The squad’s peacenik disappeared after being seriously wounded.
Peripheral characters died fairly frequently, including a newborn Hmong and a GI wannabe who threw himself onto a grenade.