“The Death of Richie”: Teens of the 1970s will remember this made-for-TV classic from 1976. Perhaps your parents even encouraged you to watch it so you could learn the dangers of illicit drugs the television way. At a minimum you learned about melodrama. Robby Benson played Richie, after the book of the same name, a nice middle-class boy who gets hooked on the hard stuff; gets mightily frantic, if I recall; starts (again if I recall) amassing those velvety black-light posters; locks the doors to his room; and tears his family apart. Straight-arrow dad Ben Gazzara is forced to make the ultimate sacrifice: To save the boy from his living hell, he offs him. With heroin experimentation on the rise again and Lava Lamps available in stores everywhere, this couldn’t be a more appropriate time for WLS-Ch. 7 to do the public service of rerunning “The Death of Richie” (1:35 a.m.).
