Philip Marlowe on the small screen

POWERS BOOTHE AS PHILIP MARLOWE, CIRCA 1983

Seeing as how I've got a new book coming out in a couple of months, it's probably no surprise that I've got books on the brain. So when I get the chance to talk about both television and books, it's a good day. This usually happens when I'm reading (or writing) a book about television, but on occasion a show will draw me to a non-television book. And that's my inspiration for this week.

For reasons that don't bear repeating at the moment, a viewing of a particularly unsatisfying detective program drove me to our library, where I pulled out my copy of Raymond Chandler's The Simple Art of Murder. I found what I was looking for there (something that proved the point I was trying to make to myself), but instead of putting the book back when I was done, I started leafing through it. I've read it before, of course, but there was something so satisfying, so spare and pure about Chandler's prose, that it helped me get the bad taste from the program out of my mouth. And it got me to thinking, not for the first time, how we've never had a really great version of Chandler's most famous character, Phillip Marlowe, on television. There have been many superior versions of him on the big screen, most notably from Dick Powell, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart, but on the small screen, we haven't been quite so successful.

Marlowe is, to my mind, the prototype of the private detective as we have come to see him, a knight both noble and tragic. And so much of the appeal of Marlowe stories lies in Chandler's way with words, from his dingy description of Los Angeles to the utter futility that Marlowe sometimes experiences, and those are moments that simply can't be captured on screen. In fact, the most famous passage from Chandler's classic The Big Sleep, the concluding line that explains the title of the book (and is the only time the title is used in the manuscript) never even appears in the most classic version of that story, the Bogart/Bacall movie.*

*It does, however, make an appearance in voiceover in Robert Mitchum's 1978 version. Mitchum makes for a compelling, older and tired Marlowe, but stick to his first of two Marlowe turns, 1975's Farewell, My Lovely.

Marlowe's made it as a regular on the small screen twice. The first time was a 1959-1960 series on ABC, starring Philip Carey. I liked what I've seen of it, although, as the always-reliable Wikipedia points out, the show wasn't very true to the character.  Check it out for yourself and see what you think.

The more successful version aired on HBO from 1983 to 1986, starring Powers Boothe in the title role. Booth did well; he certainly carried more gravitas than Carey, although he very much lacks the charm of Bogart in The Big Sleep, or especially Powell in Murder, My Sweet (the renamed Farewell, My Lovely).* It's difficult to picture Boothe playing chess or reading the classics, as Marlowe was known to do under the spell of Chandler's typewriter; actually, he might have been better cast as Mike Hammer. Still it's a significant upgrade in both style and substance from the previous effort.

*Powell would play Marlowe again on television a decade after Murder My Sweet, on the dramatic anthology series Climax! in 1954. Nobody seems to have a copy of it, though. Pity; his Marlowe is, in my opinion, the definitive version.

I've written before of my disappointment that the private detective, once a staple of television, has pretty much disappeared from the airwaves. One of the reasons, I suspect, is that procedurals have become so completely reliant on technology, the type that goes far beyond wiretapping in its intrusiveness. Sure, private detectives can (and do) engage in this kind of work as well, and can be very effective doing it, but you have to admit it doesn't quite have the romance of the fog-shrouded, rain-slick streets, the lonely truthseeker with the brim of his fedora worn low and the collar of his trenchcoat pulled high to keep the chill away. After all, he's a knight, not a technician, remember? And as for the detective's traditional antagonism with the police force (every private eye had a frenemy in the department), just make him a rebel within the force itself; all the procedurals are full of quirkbots like that.* Heaven forbid he should show too much individualism, though. We don't seem to like that much.

*They don't come much quirkier than Elliot Gould's big-screen portrayal in The Long Goodbye, a reimagination that calls for much more space in a blog devoted to movies. Like this one.

Another reason might be that detective fiction seems to work best in a period atmosphere. One of the challenges with Stacy Keach's Mike Hammer series was that it tried to tell the story within a contemporary time period (a flaw inherent in James Garner's otherwise perceptive Marlowe, an adaptation of Chandler's The Little Sister), which merely solidified Hammer as a desperate anachronism, a character that was resolutely not of this time. To the extent that it worked, it was due to Keach's ability to see the anachronism, but the detective as we know him—the Marlowe prototype—seems to thrive more in the noir grime of the last century's first half.

The most recent big screen adaptation of Marlowe, 2023's eponymous version starring Liam Neeson, was not successful, possibly in part because it was adapted from a Marlowe novel that wasn't written by Chandler in the first place; both the book and movie suffered from what one critic described as being "irksomely postmodern in its audience pandering," and that sounds about right to me.

At any rate, from Philip Marlowe to Jim Rockford, from Richard Diamond to Peter Gunn, from Darren McGavin's Hammer to Stacy Keach's, the private detective has been a welcome presence on television. You'd think it might be about time for "prestige" television to revisit Marlowe, or some of the other great literary detectives of the past. A revival of The Rockford Files is on the way, and while there's some apprehension from fans, James Garner's daughter is quite excited about it, and that doesn't count for nothing. At any rate, let's hope that's part of a comeback, one that's a little grittier than, say, Moonlighting or Remington Steele, hmm?  TV

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Policing the beat: British police and detective dramas

Jack Warner as Dixon of Dock Green

This week, I'm pleased to present to you John Berry, who we all know from Cult TV Blog. When John answered the call for guest essays and offered to give me a hand with the Wednesday pieces, I asked him if he'd be interested in writing about British police and detective series. I've always enjoyed British police and private detective (or "inquiry agent," if you prefer) series through the 1970s—the time period that we're both interested in. They have a combination of darkness, grit, and depth that make them quite fascinating to watch. He gladly accepted the challenge, and so, as an American might say, Here's John! 

by John Berry

MMitchell asked me to do a guest post on the history of British crime/detective/police TV shows, however, I'm afraid what I've done for him is far from being a systematic history. It is important to remember that thanks to the policy (of both the BBC and commercial TV stations) of wiping and reusing tapes, a huge proportion of British television before 1978 has disappeared forever. This means that the remaining TV shows are not always representative of what was actually made and broadcast, representing only what was arbitrarily selected to be archived. I've therefore decided to focus on shows that people can actually still watch and that I would recommend.

From the 1950s to the end of the 1970s TV police shows performed the function of reflecting the nature of UK policing and the public's attitude to the police. The attitude started off hugely deferential, with the famous Dixon on Dock Green (1955 to 1976), which depicts what we would now call community policing, with the titular Dixon more inclined to deal with minor misdemeanours with a clip round the ear than actually deal with serious crime. The depiction of policing was more realistic in Z-Cars (1962 to 1987) and the long run of shows in which the legendary Stratford Johns played Detective Inspector Barlow in one form or another (Softly Softly, Softly Softly Task Force, and Barlow, between the sixties and seventies) to a total of 345 episodes over multiple shows. Johns was so typecast that he even made guest appearances in other shows as his character and never really played anything else.

Patrick Mower is an actor who also had a rather typecast career in the seventies as a mouthy police officer who didn't get on with anyone else and was definitely what my mother would have called a sexy piece of work. He was in the interesting series Special Branch (1969 to 1970, 1973 to 1974) which is really two completely different shows about counterintelligence and counterterrorism. From the first block of episodes to the second, the show changed completely, becoming much less 'square' and more character-driven. It also featured the classic trope of two officers who really don't get on. Special Branch has excellent, imaginative scripts, and paved the way for the police TV of the late 1970s.

The events of the 1970s taught the public that the police were far from sea green incorruptible and this was of course reflected on TV. Perhaps the best known series along these lines was ◀ The Sweeney* (Cockney rhyming slang for Flying Squad, 1975 to 1978) and its more violent competitor Target (1977 to 1978, which also starred Patrick Mower) and The Professionals (1977 to 1983, which picked up on the trope of detectives who didn't really get on). These shows depicted police as corrupt, venal, frankly incompetent, violent, and positively criminal.

*Starring John Thaw (later to portray Inspector Morse in the series of the same name) as Detective Inspector Jack Regan and Dennis Waterman as his partner, Detective Sergeant George Carter.  

We do also have some much more kindly TV detectives. I would highlight Inspector Purbright (played by Anton Rodgers) in Murder Most English (1977), adapted from Colin Watson's detective novels set in the eccentric town of Flaxborough, as a definitely 'cosy' approach to policing. Rodgers also played David Gradley in Zodiac (1974), probably the man least suited to be a police detective ever. You don't hate him, though, because he's just rather drifted into it after Harrow. He teams up with an astrologer (played by Anouska Hempel) to solve crime in this series.

However there is a much richer vein on British TV depicting detectives or detection outside of the police. These shows frequently either set in the 'Swinging London' culture of the 1960s or grittily portray the life of desperation on a cold, wind-swept island off the continent.

Perhaps the detective least able to get on with other people, Sherlock Holmes, was portrayed in two 1960s BBC series, Sherlock Holmes (1965) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes (1968), Holmes being played by Douglas Wilmer in the former and Peter Cushing in the latter. Peter Cushing is my favourite Sherlock Holmes just as he is my favourite Doctor Who and for the same reason: he comes across as wonderfully cerebral and I think gives an idea of what Conan Doyle's Holmes would actually have been like. Both series suffered from extensive junking but the remains of both series have been commercially released.

The show which possibly best epitomises the hard-bitten private detective who is well beyond being cynical, is Public Eye ► (1965 to 1975), starring Alfred Burke as Frank Marker. I often think that to be a private eye you either have to have had something terrible to happen to you, or else if it hasn't, a few years of doing the job would make sure you never wanted to trust another person again. Marker even manages to get sent to prison at one point, which ensures that, as well as seeing all the evil of the world, the police are also against him.* The show's scripts specialise in a lot of human motivations and relationships, with complex and strong exposition as part of Marker's investigation. Public Eye is known for its grittiness, but The View from Daniel Pike (1971 to 1973) makes Public Eye look like the Magic Roundabout. The reason for Pike's utter cynicism is never made clear, like it is with Marker, and this is very much the ethos of the show: it just states the hard-boiled facts without bothering too much with motivation or introspection. To go with this, Pike is frank, verging on rude with people, and yet this isn't done in a gratuitous way; it goes with the show, and having him insult his customers just seems to fit the situation. This show has not been commercially released but is online.

*Mitchell previously wrote about Public Eye here.

There is, of course, a long tradition of policemen who leave, retire or are kicked out, for whatever reason, becoming private eyes. Of those depicted on UK television I would draw your attention to Mr Rose (1967 to 1968), who is actually retired but can't stop investigating things. Bulman (1985 to 1987) is about a policeman who has also retired but keeps on. I prefer Bulman in many ways to Strangers (1978 to 1982), the show which actually depicted Bulman as a police officer, because I feel a greater sympathy for him being out of it, but still having his somewhat problematic relationship with his former employers.

There are some lesser-known series about private detectives that I think are well worth seeking out. One is ◀ The Big M (1967) about a private detective, Treherne, who begins investigating the absolute den of iniquity which is the seaside town where he lives, after the owner of the local strip club walks into his office and promptly dies. If you try The Big M, please watch at least a few episodes, because it introduces so much stuff, it takes a few episodes for it to get into its stride. And the other I like recommending to people, which nobody has ever heard of, is The Rose Medallion (1981) about an inquiry agent (private detective) called Harry who is a complete failure with women and looks after his cousin. His cousin manages to dig up a skeleton, and the rest of the mini-series is about the identity of the skeleton. Unfortunately, The Rose Medallion suffers because some misinformation about it has got loose online, and of course, people tend to copy it from each other. Possibly more people have heard of Hazell (1978 to 1979), an excellent pastiche of film-noir detectives such as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, but it's a great show if you haven't. And of course, everyone has heard of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969 to 1970), the show in which one of the detectives has the advantage of being dead. This is also the only TV show I know of where I like its remake and reimagining of 2000 just as much as the original.

Finally, I have to make an honorific mention of a series that isn't currently available but does periodically find its way online before the copyright holder gets it taken down again (it is just plain contrary to enforce copyright for a sixty-year-old TV show while also not actually making it available). This show is an anthology show called Detective ► (1964 to 1969). Because it is just called Detective, it is, of course, difficult to find when it does turn up, and also episodes tend to get uploaded by the title of the individual episode, so it's honestly like hen's teeth. Being an anthology series, of course also the episodes are variable and won't be to everyone's taste, but they are quality adaptations of a wide variety of different detective stories by a broad range of authors and are great viewing.

In conclusion, there is a great history of police and detective shows on British television, it's just that Mitchell asked the wrong person to write a sensible history of the genre. TV

Mitchell here, and I very much doubt I asked the wrong person, John! A terrific look at the genre, and certainly some very interesting programs to check out if you've got a region-free DVD player or have a hankering to go surfing on YouTube.

Thanks again to John, and a reminder that if you'd like to see your name in lights—or, at least, on the splash page of It's About TV, leave a comment, send me a message via the contact form, message me on X or Facebook, or, if you're one of the lucky ones with my email address, reach me there!  

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True-or-false jeopardy

This seems like an appropriate time to talk about jeopardy, given that I'm probably putting myself in jeopardy if I continue to talk about the publication of Darkness in Primetime, which drops this week. You're probably sick and tired of hearing me talk about it, and, of course, you could eliminate all this stress if you simply buy the book. Then I'll have to go back to finding more interesting things to write about, but at least I'll have the consolation of doing so with more money in the bank account, and wouldn't that make you feel a whole lot better about life in general? (Speaking of which, if you think this plug was bad, wait until you see the one I've got for you next week.)

But we were talking about jeopardy, weren't we? And the kind that I'd much rather talk about is the kind that we find on our screens with some degree of frequency. For instance, it wasn't that long ago that we were watching an episode of 77 Sunset Strip in which our hero Kookie (Edd Byrnes) was arrested on a trumped-up murder charge and thrown in a small-town jail. It left us breathless, wondering if our hero would escape the clutches of the crooked police and live to fight another day, or if this was Warner Bros. message on how they take care of stars involved in contract disputes. Well, what do you think? It was so predictable that Kookie would not only escape, he'd find out who it was framing him and why, and uncover the true murderer. We were able to fast-forward to the end for the juicy details.

The following week while we were watching an episode of Mannix, our hero Joe (Mike Connors), who happened to be in a small town investigating a murder, found himself arrested on trumped-up charges and thrown in jail. Will our hero escape and find the real killer before the crooked cops finish him off? What do you think? It was so predictable that Joe—well, you get the point. We were able to fast-forward to the end for the juicy details.

That these two episodes aired, at least in our household, on consecutive weeks, probably exacerbated my already-intense dislike of a hoary television trope that I like to call "false jeopardy." (Actually I only started calling it that a minute ago as I was typing this, but we'll let that go for the present.) 

False jeopardy—and I'm not referring to a game show hosted by someone other than Art Fleming or Alex Trebek—is what I call it when one of the lead characters in a TV series is put into an extreme life-or-death situation that is supposed to keep us in suspense. Now, I don't mean the ordinary kind of risk that private detectives or policemen encounter on a weekly basis, like being shot at, run over, beaten up, caught in a room filling up with water, being trapped between two walls of spikes closely closing in on you—well, you get the point. After all, these shows would be pretty dull without some kind of action.

No, what I'm talking about is the kind of jeopardy that serves as the catalyst for the entire episode. For at least two of the four acts, Kookie and Joe were slapped around by bully boys in blue, menaced by fellow prisoners, or threatened by corrupt officials. Their protestations of innocence were ignored; their basic constitutional rights were trampled. It's all very manipulative, designed to work the viewer into a simmering rage against the injustice of it all. And when the bad guys got their comeuppance, as they invariably do, it wasn't nearly satisfying enough to make up for it all. 

I don't want to say that this kind of thing happens all the time, but any drama that runs for more than a season or two will have at lesat one episode involving false jeopardy, whether through imprisonment, kidnapping, a hostage situation, a life-threatening disease, or something of the sort. And for the better part of an hour, we're supposed to think that the outcome is in doubt. 

What it does do is create impatience on the viewer's part; since we already know how things are going to end (at least insofar as the lead character is concerned), we just want to hurry up and get to the end so we can see the happily-ever-after ending. That's about the time when I reach for the fast-forward button on the remote. (And suggest, once again, that the person who invented the fast forward button should have won the Nobel prize.) I think we're supposed to be curious as to just how things wind up the way they do; who the real killer is, how the police find out where the hostages are, what the doctor comes up with at the last minute. Maybe I'm just not that curious; I'm a cut-to-the-chase kind of guy.

Perhaps we're supposeed to put ourselves in the place of the lead, what it would feel like if we were the ones in a seemingly impossible situation. What we would do, how we might escape. If you ask me, the best series at creating that kind of atmosphere was The Fugitive; after all, the prospect of being executed for a crime you didn't commit has got to be horrible. (Think about it; you didn't even get the satisfaction of murdering someone you hated like the guilty parties in Perry Mason.) But in The Fugitive, this wasn't a gimmick; it was the premise of the whole series. There's a big difference. Sure, there were episodes that put Kimble in the same kind of false jeopardy I'm talking about, and those episodes are subject to the same criticism. But you can't use the premise of The Fugitive as an excuse for the other series that put their leads in false jeopardy.

I remember an episode of Hawaii Five-O in which McGarrett (Jack Lord) was temporarily blinded. Maybe I should say apparently temporary, because the doctors weren't sure he'd regain his sight. Now, we all know that he's going to see again, because the name of the series is Hawaii Five-O, not Longstreet. But I'd argue that the threat of permanent blindness was nothing more than a McGuffin. The suspense wasn't in whether or not McGarrett would recover; it was how he'd cope with being blind while the bad guy was out there looking to finish the job. Of course, that outcome wasn't in doubt either. The point is that this was a battle of wits, with the false jeopardy just a backdrop against which the real drama was played out.

Defenders of these plotlines would, I suppose, say that this is the point with all of these false jeopardy stories, that we're supposed to be taken in by the chess match between good and evil. But this isn't The Seventh Seal we're talking about, and it's only a superior storyline that can make the suspension of disbelief work long enough to get to the end of the episode. And the word I keep coming back to is manipulative. 

We're supposed to hate the dirty cops that keep Kookie im jail, the corruption and the injustice in the system. That's not suspense; that's advocacy. We're supposed to hate the killers that hold Cannon and his client hostage, and thirst for the retribution that awaits when they get what's coming to them. And that's great, until you realize the writers have stacked the deck, that they're counting on you to react that way. Once you figure that out, the anger lessens. So does the suspense, though. It can't make us worry about the lead, because we already know he or she is going to be all right. (Unless we've read in the trades that their contract is up for renewal.) And the premise is too sustained, over the course of an hour, to keep the level of suspense high enough to take us along on the ride.

That leads to another kind of false jeopardy, one that's become much in vogue over the last decade or two: the season-ending cliffhanger. One of the first, and most famous, cliffhangers (I can't remember right now if it was a season-ender or not) was the "Who Shot J.R." episode of Dallas. It was a great gimmick, because it kept people all over the nation talking for months. It was also a shrewd one, one that kept the concept from slipping into the clutches of false jeopardy.

What was shrewd about it was that the purpose of the cliffhanger was not to keep us guessing as to whether or not J.R. was going to pull through; without Larry Hagman, there's no Dallas. No, what the braintrust did was to make us guess who shot him, and this created some real suspense. Nobody could be ruled out; a trial could have sent ratings shooting even higher (no pun intended). A clever team of writers could have figured out how to keep the storyline going without endangering the tenures of any of the regulars. If need be, they could even have played it all off as a dream, right?

I know that all entertainment is manipulative, to some extent. Whether it's music, literature, movies or television—they all play on our emotions, condition us to respond. That's OK; we like being manipulated, just as we like being scared. We don't want it to be too obvious, though; we don't like knowing that it's happening. And that's how I feel when I see the lead in false jeopardy. 

It doesn't have to be that way, of course. A series like The Fugitive baked the jeopardy into the equation from the very beginning, and because of the skill of the writers and the talent of David Janssen, we managed to be gripped by what happened even though we knew what would happen, because there was usually more than one story to worry about. Would Vera Miles escape her abusive husband, would the autistic child get the treatment he needed, would Doctor Kimble manage to treat the sick or injured without giving away his status as a fugitive pediatrician? That was really the question, not the one about whether or not Kimble would avoid arrest. Of course he would; the entire premise of the series depended on it. And it worked. In lesser hands, it might not have.

I imagine that just about every writing room in the history of series television has at least one, if not more than one, script handy for just such a purpose, one that probably comes complete with blanks to fill in for the lead character's name, the location, and the other details that prevent you from being able to claim that the episodes are exactly the same. And that's OK, once in a while, Not, however, once a season, for each series on the air.

When I get in a mood like this, I have to remind myself that I've never worked on a television series, never written a script, and so those who have are automatically miles ahead of me when it comes to playing the game, and so what gives me the right to complain. And they're right, in a way. I think we're also right, though, that we're entitled to a game that offers us more than true-or-false jeopardy. And if you don't agree with me, that's perfectly all right. Just prepare to find yourself in jeopardy next week, when I start reminding you of Darkness in Primetime again. TV  

Around the dial

Now that's my kind of car!

We lead off the week at Comfort TV, where David reviews the TV career of the late Tony Roberts, who first came to my attention as one-half of the legal series Rosetti and Ryan, co-starring with Squire Fridell; I was a captive viewer from back in the days of the one-station in the World's Worst Town™. 

RealWeegieMidget is back on the TV-movie circuit with the 1984 teleflick Obsessive Love, which stars Yvette Mimieux and Simon MacCorkindale and carries with it more than a whiff of Fatal Attraction. It's part of the "So Bad It's Good" Blogathon, which perhaps tells you all you need to know. 

At bare•bones e-zine, Jack's Hitchcock Project continues apace with the seventh-season story "The Children of Alda Nuova," Robert Wallsten's adaptation of his own short story, with Jack Carson starring as a criminal who makes a wrong turn into a wrong town.

Let's continue with crime, as John wraps up his "Private Detective Season" at Cult TV Blog with 1967's The Big M, with all the requisite sleaze that P.I.s thrive on. John also looks at some additional series, including the very good Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, with Powers Boothe.

At The Saturday Evening Post, Bob Sassone's "News of the Week" includes two pertinent questions about the TV ratings system: is it accurate, and does it even matter? Read the story, and stick around for this year's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees.

Travalanche has an excellent look back at the ubiquitqious John Charles Daly, urbane moderator of What's My Line?, anchor of ABC's evening news program, and one of my absolute favorite television persons ever. I may be coming up on 65, but I still say that I want to be like him when I grow up.

It's only tangentially related to classic TV, but unless you've been under a rock for the last couple of years, you know about the disintegration of cable television. Variety has an in-depth look at the future of Comcast, including USA Network (which produced many an original show in the day), and what it may bode for the industry as a whole.

Speaking of, it looks as if the long relationship between ESPN and Major League Baseball is over at the end of the upcoming season. Did MLB undervalue its product? And what could this mean for a new television partner? Sports Media Watch has all the details, including what happens to ESPN.

Wrapping things up with The View from the Junkyard, Roger continues his episode-by-episode review of The New Avengers, with "The Tale of the Big Why," an example of how the series handles comedy with a deft touch—unlike, perhaps, the original. TV  

Around the dial

We'll start off the week with a twin bill from the "American TV" series I do with Dan Schneider: episode #1 is a look at the history of ABC and its reputation as a network willing to take chances, while episode #2 is a fun change-of-pace, in which we answer questions about how our series started, some of our favorite shows, early TV crushes, and more! 

My friend Alan Hayes has some exciting news on the horizon: Escapades: An Exploration of Avengers Curiosities, a new book co-authored with J.Z. Ferguson, which takes a deep dive into aspects of the classic series that haven't been previously covered, such as the London stage play, the South African radio series, a couple of unmade TV scripts, and a Mexican wrestling film—and that's just for starters! The book is available for pre-order here, and I'd encourage all you Avengers fans to look into it. And stay tuned to this space over the next few weeks, for an interview with Alan and a review of the book.

Let's work it a little more, as Roger's review of The New Avengers continues at A View from the Junkyard, with the latest episode being "Target!" He sees it as "another superb episode in a season that hasn’t put a foot wrong yet," and even ventures that it's better than the original series. What do you think?

The Broadcast Archives has several classic TV stories this week, covering everything from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me to the first made-for-TV movie. They're all fun, but why not start out with the single-season series Mr. Lucky, a Blake Edwards creation starring John Vivyan. 

At bare-bones e-zine, Jack's Hitchcock Project continues with "Total Loss," a fourth-season episode by J.E. Selby that is most assuredly a product of its times. Nancy Olson and Ralph Meeker star; find out if the bad guy gets away with it.

The Rose Medallion is the next series in line in John's continuing "private detective season" at Cult TV Blog. John says that we have to watch this 1981 series about an uncovered skeleton and the quest to find out the rest of the story, and he's a pretty good judge of shows.uuu

The Globe and Mail has this essay on ditching streaming in favor of DVDs. I've been in this camp for quite awhile; aside from the fact that it's difficult to find some of the more obscure programs on streaming, it's too often a case of "here today, gone tomorrow." I'll always be a believer in physical media.

David's journey through 1970s TV at Comfort TV has now come to Wednesday, 1975, and if we can't remember When Things Were Rotten, Kate McShane, and Doctors' Hospital, we can certainly recall Little House on the Prairie, Starsky & Hutch, Cannon, and more.

At RealWeegieMidget, Gill (and Darlin' Husband) take a look at movie recommendations from January, including a miniseries with Barry Bostwick and Stefanie Powers, a movie with brothers Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez, and Gary Coleman as a pint-size arsonist!

Do we ever get tired of the latest schemes cooked up by Sgt. O'Rourke and Corporal Agarn at F Troop? Not if we're Hal at The Horn Section, and the latest sure-to-fail scam, "The West Goes Ghost," involves ghosts, the railroad, and the two passing themselves off as medical men, for starters.

At Drunk TV, Paul reviews the second season of Simon & Simon, one of the quintessentially '80s series of, well, the '80s, with Gerald McRaney and Jameson Parker as the brothers running the Simon & Simon detective agency. Thrilling cases and beautiful women galore!

Martin Grams, who wrote one of the definitive books on The Twilight Zone, looks at books containing adaptations of Rod Serling's TZ scripts (done by Serling himself), as well as adaptations and original stories written by Walter Gibson, all of which were quite successful.

I've written before about Turn On, the legendary one-episode ABC series that was virtually cancelled before that one episode was done. But was it really as bad as history says? Not so fast, says Travalanche, who believes it was far from the worst show of all time. TV  

Around the dial

We'll begin the week with couple of blog updates. First, if you read Wednesday's article on Combat!, you'll notice that I've added the series to my Top Ten favorites. With this, the revised Top Ten is now complete; you can view the list here, or through the link on the sidebar.

Speaking of updates, I've also updated the links to my podcast appearances, which you can find on the "Video and Podcasts" tab on the top; they're also available on the It's About TV YouTube playlists page. I'm hoping to add more material to that in the future, by the way.

Finally, I've been pleased to publish several excellent guest essays here over the nearly fourteen years, of this blog. If you have something you'd like to share, please email me, and we'll talk. As I get closer to completing my latest book, your contribution not only entertains our readers, it helps me devote more time to the book.

Now, on to something more interesting, beginning with the latest look at private detective series from John at Cult TV Blog. The series is The View from Daniel Pike (a series that sounds like it's right up my alley), and the episode is "The Manufactured Clue." Try it; I think you'll like it.

At The Horn Section, Hal is back on the F Troop route, with "The West Goes Ghost," Am I giving anything away by saying that it involves another scheme courtesy of O'Rourke Enterprises? And that said scheme is doomed to failure? Probably not.

A week or two ago I mentioned the passing of baseball "legend" Bob Uecker; this week, Inner Toob takes a look at some of the Ueck's more memorable TV appearances, both as himself and as an actor. I'm not sure there was much of a difference; what you see is what you get, and it's always funny.

Roger is back at A View from the Junkyard with another in his continuing series of reviews of The New Avengers, and this time it's "Cat Amongst the Pigeons," which plays very much like an episode from the Emma Peel era, but done in the style of the new series. 

At The Hits Just Keep On Comin', JB has a nice remembrance of the famed NBC radio program Monitor; if you're not familiar with it, I urge you to check out the links JB provided, or to read my review of the definitive book on the program, Dennis Hart's Monitor.  

At Television's New Frontier: The 1960s, it's the 1960 episodes from the single-season sitcom Angel, with Marshall Thompson and Annie Fargé. It comes off somewhat as an imitation of I Love Lucy, but with somewhat less success. However, thanks to Classic Flix, it's out on DVD; take advantage of it. TV  

Around the dial

Xet's start this week across the pond at Cult TV Blog, where John has turned his attention to the private detective genre, one of my favorites. The show is the 1979-80 series Shoestring, the star is Trevor Eve, the premise is that he's a "private ear" for a radio station, and the episode is "Stamp Duty." Intriguing.

At RealWeegieMidget, Gill takes her monthy tour of TV movies and miniseries watched last month, including Baby Snatcher with David Duchovny; the miniseris Mistral's Daughter, based on the novel by Judith Krantz; Till We Meet Again, starring Barry Bostwick (another Judith Krantz story); and Ring of Musketeers, which wasn't by Krantz but was made in Germany and stars David Hasselhoff. 

Doorbells aren't what they used to be; people come to the door a lot less often than they used to, and when someone does ring it, you're not always sure you want to answer it. But such was not always the case, and at Comfort TV, David loos back to when doorbells were an essential part of classic television, as well as life. 

A few hours before I started typing this, the news came that David Lynch had died, age 78. It wasn't terribly surprising, but sad nonetheless, and a great loss to both movies and television. At A Shroud of Thoughts, Terence looks back at the career of the great man and his accomplishments. We'll never know what really happened to Dale Cooper now, and I think that would have pleased David Lynch. And for a bonus Shroud, Terence talks about the 60th anniversary of NBC's music show Hullabaloo, which made a wonderful cameo appearance in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.

Baseball announcer Bob Uecker died on Thursday as well, age 90. He was not only a beloved announcer for the Milwaukee Brewers, he was a terrific raconteur (just watch him on The Tonight Show), a very good actor in both television and the movies, and the star of a memorable series of commercials for Miller Lite. It's often a cliche to call someone an "original," but Uecker truly was, and both baseball and television are richer for his life and poorer for his death. Farewell, Mr. Baseball.

Martin Grams has reviews of five recent classic television books: Five Fingers: Elegance in Espionage, starring David Hedison as a Cold War CIA agent; The History of Hiram Holliday, about the post-Mr. Peepers series starring Wally Cox; Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: A TV Companion, based on the sci-fi series of the early 1980s; Banacek: A Behind-the-Scenes History and Episode Guide, which was a series I really enjoyed (George Peppard is especially good in it); and The Jeffersons, about, well, The Jeffersons. You can get the authors' names and more details on their books at the link.

At Drunk TV, Paul looks at the second season of The Odd Couple, a season which saw some fairly substantial changes made in the wake of the show's inaugural season. I guess it's been a while since I've seen the series; while I remember getting rid of the laugh track, for example, I'll have to go back and look at the changes made by going from a one-camera to three-camera layout.

And the latest issue of Opera has a review of my friend Nancy Spada's book Beyond the Handsomeness: A Biography of Thomas Schippers, the dynamic American conductor whose career would have known no limits had he not died at 47. Schippers, you will remember from this blog, was the conductor for the landmark telecast of Amahl and the Night Visitors, as well as other operas for NBC Opera Theatre, and was a wonderful talent. TV  

Around the dial

At Cult TV Blog, John concludes a week's worth of posts on The Guardians with part 9, "I Want You To Understand Me." Isn't that the way we all feel? But if you're ready for political intrigue that has nothing to do with the upcoming election, here it is.

The Twilight Zone Vortex continues its way through the fifth and final season of the series with "Uncle Simon," It's an episode that, truth be told, seems like it would be a better fit for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. That being said, it's still worth watching, as are so many of the Serling-written episodes.

A Shroud of Thoughts and The Last Drive-In both offer tributes to the late Gena Rowlands, who died a couple of days ago at the age of 94. You can read what Terence has to say here, while Monstergirl's is here. And before you ask, I'd suspect we'll have a post or two about the great Peter Marshall, who died August 15, in next week's roundup.

Television's New Frontier: The 1960s looks at the final 13 episodes of Bronco, the Ty Hardin-starred series that served as one segment of the three-part wheel series that included Cheyenne and Sugarfoot. Many of the episodes from this final year deal with the reconstruction of the United States following the Civil War.

At Realweegiemidget, Gill takes us to the delightfully dishy 1980s primetime soap Dynasty, with five reasons she loves Alexis Carrington, played by the vivacious vixen Joan Collins, said reasons focusing on the lady's serial marriage history. If you're going to do a soap, you'd better do it right, and few shows did it better than Dynasty.

I've written many times about private detective shows on TV, a genre that could stand a revival, but in the meantime Martin Grams has a look at a terrific new book featuring, for the first time, the collected Continental Op stories (including two novels) written by Dashiell Hammett. These truly revolutionized detective fiction; why doesn't one of the prestige networks do a series based on them?

We're back to The Avengers at A View from the Junkyard, as Roger and Mike debate the merits of the sixth-season story "Homicide and Old Lace," a kind of throwback to the old Avengers, where the stories were a little more grounded. What's the verdict? Well, you'll just have to check it out. TV  

True-or-false jeopardy

A couple of weeks ago, we were watching an episode of 77 Sunset Strip in which Kookie (Edd Byrnes) was arrested on a trumped-up murder charge and thrown in a small-town jail. Will our hero escape the clutches of the crooked police and live to fight another day? What do you think?

The following week while we were watching an episode of Mannix, Joe (Mike Connors), in a small town investigating a murder, finds himself arrested on trumped-up charges and thrown in jail. Will our hero escape and find the real killer before the crooked cops finish him off? What do you think?

That these two episodes aired, at least in our household, on consecutive weeks, probably exacerbated my already-intense dislike of a hoary television trope that I like to call "false jeopardy." (Actually I only started calling it that a minute ago as I was typing this, but we'll let that go for the present.) 

False jeopardy—and I'm not referring to a game show hosted by someone other than Art Fleming or Alex Trebek—is what I call it when one of the lead characters in a TV series is put into an extreme life-or-death situation that is supposed to keep us in suspense. Now, I don't mean the ordinary kind of risk that private detectives or policemen encounter on a weekly basis, like being shot at, run over, beaten up, caught in a room filling up with water, being trapped between two walls of spikes closely closing in on you—well, you get the point. After all, these shows would be pretty dull without some kind of action.

No, what I'm talking about is the kind of jeopardy that serves as the catalyst for the entire episode. For at least two of the four acts, Kookie and Joe are slapped around by bully boys in blue, menaced by fellow prisoners, or threatened by corrupt officials. Their protestations of innocense are ignored; their basic constitutional rights are trampled. It's all very manipulative, designed to work the viewer into a simmering rage against the injustice of it all. And when the bad guys get their comeuppance, as they invariably do, it's seldom satisfying enough to make up for it all. 

I don't want to say that this kind of thing happens all the time, but any drama that runs for more than a season or two will have at lesat one episode involving false jeopardy, whether through imprisonment, kidnapping, a hostage situation, a life-threatening disease, or something of the sort. And for the better part of an hour, we're supposed to think that the outcome is in doubt. 

What it does is create impatience on the viewer's part; since we already know how things are going to end (at least insofar as the lead character is concerned), we just want to hurry up and get to the end so we can see the happily-ever-after ending. That's about the time when I reach for the fast-forward button on the remote. I think we're supposed to be curious as to just how things wind up the way they do; who the real killer is, how the police find out where the hostages are, what the doctor comes up with at the last minute. Maybe I'm just not that curious; I'm a cut-to-the-chase kind of guy.

Perhaps we're supposeed to put ourselves in the place of the lead, what it would feel like if we were the ones in a seemingly impossible situation. What we would do, how we might escape. If you ask me, the best series at creating that kind of atmosphere was The Fugitive; after all, the prospect of being executed for a crime you didn't commit has got to be horrible. (Think about it; you didn't even get the satisfaction of murdering someone you hated like the guilty parties in Perry Mason.) But in The Fugitive, this wasn't a gimmick; it was the premise of the whole series. There's a big difference. Sure, there were episodes that put Kimble in the same kind of false jeopardy I'm talking about, and those episodes are subject to the same criticism. But you can't use the premise of The Fugitive as an excuse for the other series that put their leads in false jeopardy.

I remember an episode of Hawaii Five-O in which McGarrett (Jack Lord) was temporarily blinded. Maybe I should say apparently temporary, because the doctors weren't sure he'd regain his sight. Now, we all know that he's going to see again, because the name of the series is Hawaii Five-O, not Longstreet. But I'd argue that the threat of permanent blindness was nothing more than a McGuffin. The suspense wasn't in whether or not McGarrett would recover; it was how he'd cope with being blind while the bad guy was out there looking to finish the job. Of course, that outcome wasn't in doubt either. The point is that this was a battle of wits, with the false jeopardy just a backdrop against which the real drama was played out.

Defenders of these plotlines would, I suppose, say that this is the point with all of these false jeopardy stories, that we're supposed to be taken in by the chess match between good and evil. But this isn't The Seventh Seal we're talking about, and it's only a superior storyline that can make the suspension of disbelief work long enough to get to the end of the episode. And the word I keep coming back to is maniuplative. 

We're supposed to hate the dirty cops that keep Kookie im jail, the corruption and the injustice in the system. That's not suspense; that's advocacy. We're supposed to hate the killers that hold Cannon and his client hostage, and thirst for the retribution that awaits when they get what's coming to them. And that's great, until you realize the writers have stacked the deck, that they're counting on you to react that way. Once you figure that out, the anger lessens. So does the suspense, though. It can't make us worry about the lead, because we already know he or she is going to be all right. (Unless we've read in the trades that their contract is up for renewal.) And the premise is too sustained, over the course of an hour, to keep the level of suspense high enough to take us along on the ride.

That leads to another kind of false jeopardy, one that's become much in vogue over the last decade or two: the season-ending cliffhanger. One of the first, and most famous, cliffhangers (I can't remember right now if it was a season-ender or not) was the "Who Shot J.R." episode of Dallas. It was a great gimmick, because it kept people all over the nation talking for months. It was also a shrewd one, one that kept the concept from slipping into the clutches of false jeopardy.

What was shrewd about it was that the purpose of the cliffhanger was not to keep us guessing as to whether or not J.R. was going to pull through; without Larry Hagman, there's no Dallas. No, what the braintrust did was to make us guess who shot him, and this created some real suspense. Nobody could be ruled out; a trial could have sent ratings shooting even higher (no pun intended). A clever team of writers could have figured out how to keep the storyline going without endangering the tenures of any of the regulars. If need be, they could even have played it all off as a dream, right?

I know that all entertainment is manipulative, to some extent. Whether it's music, literature, movies or television—they all play on our emotions, condition us to respond. That's OK; we like being manipulated, just as we like being scared. We don't want it to be too obvious, though; we don't like knowing that it's happening. And that's how I feel when I see the lead in false jeopardy. 

It doesn't have to be that way, of course, and next week we'll look at a series that understood how to play the inevitable outcome for all it's worth, and succeed spectacularly. TV  

Philip Marlowe on the small screen

POWERS BOOTHE AS PHILIP MARLOWE, CIRCA 1983

Often, when I find myself looking for a little less heavy reading, I find myself catching up with one of my old friends on the bookshelf: Raymond Chandler.

Chandler's Philip Marlowe is, to my mind, the prototype of the private detective as we have come to see him, a knight both noble and tragic. And Chandler himself was not merely a great writer of detective fiction, he was a great writer, period. I've said in the past that I'd put Chandler up favorably against Fitzgerald any day; I found The Long Goodbye a far superior book to The Great Gatsby, among other literary classics I'm supposed to be impressed with.

Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer is another favorite of mine (as you can see, I tend not to go for genteel detective stories), but Hammer is a far rougher, more violent man than Marlowe. The writing is similar; Spillane is nowhere near the wordsmith Chandler is, but he can tell a cracking story. And perhaps that's why Mike Hammer has come through better on television than Philip Marlowe. So much of the appeal of Marlowe stories lies in Chandler's way with words, from his dingy description of Los Angeles to the utter futility that Marlowe sometimes experiences, and those are moments that simply can't be captured on screen. In fact, the most famous passage from Chandler's classic The Big Sleep, the concluding line that explains the title of the book (and is the only time the title is used in the manuscript) never appears in the most classic version of that story, the Bogart/Bacall movie.*

*It does, however, make an appearance in voiceover in Robert Mitchum's 1978 version. Mitchum makes for a compelling, older and tired Marlowe, but stick to his first of two Marlowe turns, 1975's Farewell, My Lovely.

Marlowe's made it as a regular on the small screen twice. The first time was a 1959-1960 series on ABC, starring Philip Carey. I liked what I've seen of it, although, as the always-reliable Wikipedia points out, the show wasn't very true to the character.  Check it out for yourself and see what you think.


The more successful version aired on HBO from 1983 to 1986, starring Powers Boothe in the title role. Booth did well; he certainly carried more weightines than Carey, although he very much lacks the charm of Bogart in The Big Sleep, or especially Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet (the renamed Farewell, My Lovely).* It's difficult to picture Boothe playing chess or reading the classics, as Marlowe was known to do under the spell of Chandler's typewriter; actually, he might have been better cast as Mike Hammer. Still it's a significant upgrade in both style and substance from the previous effort.

*Powell would play Marlowe again on television a decade after Murder My Sweet, on the dramatic anthology series Climax! in 1954. Nobody seems to have a copy of it, though. Pity; his Marlowe is one of the very best.


I've written before of my disappointment that the private detective, once a staple of television, has pretty much disappeared from the airwaves. One of the reasons, I suspect, is that procedurals have become so completely reliant on technology, the type that goes far beyond wiretapping in its intrusiveness. Sure, private detectives can (and do) engage in this kind of work as well, and can be very effective doing it, but you have to admit it doesn't quite have the romance of the fog-shrouded, rain-slick streets, the lonely truthseeker with the brim of his fedora worn low and the collar of his trenchcoat pulled high to keep the chill away. After all, he's a knight, not a technician, remember? And as for the detective's traditional antagonism with the police force (every private eye had a frenemy in the department), just make him a rebel within the force itself; all the procedurals are full of quirkbots like that.* Heaven forbid he should show too much individualism, though. We don't seem to like that much.

*They don't come much quirkier than Elliot Gould's big-screen portrayal in The Long Goodbye, a reimagination that calls for much more space in a blog devoted to movies. Like this one.

Another reason might be that detective fiction seems to work best in a period atmosphere. One of the challenges with Stacy Keach's Mike Hammer series was that it tried to tell the story within a contemporary time period (a flaw inherent in James Garner's otherwise perceptive Marlowe, an adaptation of Chandler's The Little Sister), which merely solidified Hammer as a desperate anachronism, a character that was resolutely not of this time. To the extent that it worked, it was due to Keach's ability to see the anachronism, but the detective as we know him—the Marlowe prototype—seems to thrive more in the noir grime of the last century's first half.

At any rate, from Philip Marlowe to Jim Rockford, from Richard Diamond to Peter Gunn, from Darren McGavin's Hammer to Stacy Keach's, the private detective has been a welcome presence on television. In light of HBO's recent successes with both period and crime dramas, it might be a good idea for them to revisit Marlowe, or some of the other great literary detectives of the past. At any rate, let's hope there's a comeback one of these days, and that it's a little grittier than, say, Moonlighting or Remington Steele, hmm? TV  

Captain Kirk is Archie Goodwin!

You all know by now that Nero Wolfe is a favorite in the Hadley household, both in written form and in the legendary A&E series with Maury Chaykin as Nero Wolfe and Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin. There was another Wolfe series, in 1981, with William Conrad and Lee Horsley doing the honors; that one's fun enough, I suppose, but it never really did it for me. But did you know we might well have had yet another Nero Wolfe series?

Back a few years ago I mentioned an item in a 1959 TV Guide issue about a pilot being shot, with Kurt Kasznar playing Wolfe and William Shatner in the role of Archie. At the time, I remarked how I'd like to see that sometime, but the pilot was thought lost. No longer, though; a couple of months ago at Lee Goldberg's YouTube channel, what should pop up but the original pilot, in a very clear print, for all to see!


So what did you think? Comparing it to other versions, it does very well. It's certainly better than the radio adaptation with Sydney Greenstreet; he plays Wolfe a little too avuncular, as if he were channeling Kasper Gutman from The Maltese Falcon. It's also superior to the Conrad version; had Conrad played Wolfe with a little less of Frank Cannon's good humor (perhaps a little more like the hitman he played in The Killers), it would have been better. And of course, Horsley falls far short of the Archie Goodwin standard set by Timothy Hutton.

But this is actually a pretty fair adaptation, and while Kasznar hits the right notes (especially the accent; Wolfe, after all, is from Montenegro), it's our old friend William Shatner who who is a pleasant surprise. After watching him, it dawned on me that Archie is really James T. Kirk in a suit and tie. I mean, look at the smirk in that picture under the header. Doesn't that look just like Kirk after he's pulled a fast one on the Klingons? While Shatner did have the tendency to talk a little too quickly, there was none of Kirk's mannered emoting that we sometimes have fun with—just a same kind of smartass cockiness that describes Archie to a T. It's nice to know Kirk would have had something to fall back on if the Starship thing didn't work out.

It's hard to tell if the quality would have remained over the course of an entire season; while the script picks up many of the mannerisms that distinguish the characters in print, it's also true that the pilot often hits marks that a subsequent series struggles to match. I would have liked to have seen it, though—even a single season would have been well worth it. Pfui! TV  

Around the dial

Let's start this week with another edition of "The Hitchcock Project" at bare-bones e-zine. This week Jack's back with a follow-up on Emily Neff, the author of the short story "Partner in Crime," about which Jack wrote a couple of years ago. One of the many things I like about Jack's project is that he goes so far beyond what most episode guides provide - you not only find out about the episode, you learn about the original source material, differences in how the story is adapted, other versions that may exist, and - as in this case - background on the authors.

Of course we need to know seven things about Tina Louise - that should go without saying. And that's just what Rick gives us this week at Classic Film and TV Café. Did you know that prior to movies and television (and Gilligan's Island), Tina was a successful Broadway actress? Or that in 1957 she released an album called It's Time for Tina? Go to Rick's place (I've always wanted to say that) to find out the rest.

At Garroway at Large, Jodie looks back to the first time Dave appeared in a full-length article in TV Guide - it was the July 10, 1953 issue (the 15th issue in the magazine's national history!), and he appears on the cover with the ubiquitous J. Fred Muggs. As Jodie says, it's a nice reminder of just how big a star Dave Garroway was at the time, and for many years thereafter.

One of the things I always have to be careful about as a blogger is the constant temptation to give someone a piece of my mind. In the first place, I don't have that many pieces left, and second, the web is dominated with people who seem to dedicate their lives to shooting their mouths off, often in the most vulgar way. However, there are times when I'm tempted to make an exception - but at Comfort TV, David spares me the trouble by taking on "The Worst Entertainment Critic on the Planet," someone who understands nothing about classic TV. I have only one thing to add: what a bollock.

As if to belie what this twit wrote, at Criminal Element, Julia Keller writes about the detectives that were "Too Cool for TV" - five detectives from the classic era of television. Take that!

Here's a very cool story - DC Video's restoration of the oldest color videotape of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. It's from August 24, 1964 - you can see a few minutes of the footage at the website. Those were the days - unless, of course, you're the worst entertainment critic on the planet, in which case television might as well not even have existed! TV