Top Cops and Slick Dicks

This isn’t the first time I’ve addressed the question of the greatest detectives in TV history, and it undoubtedly won’t be the last. As long as people are free to exercise independent judgment, such matters will go unresolved. Nonetheless, I feel the overwhelming need to tell TV Squad contributor Bob Sassone that he’s full of shit. But I say that in the nicest way possible, since I generally respect Sassone’s writing in TV Squad, Salon, and elsewhere. It’s just that, when he got around to making lists of American TV’s five greatest police detectives and eight greatest private eyes, he seems to have abandoned his keen sense of the differentiation between “great” and merely “good.”

Here, for instance, are his greatest police detectives picks:

1. Lieutenant Columbo, Columbo (Peter Falk)
2. Sledge Hammer, Sledge Hammer! (David Rasche)
3. Steve McGarrett, Hawaii Five-O (Jack Lord)
4. Detective Robert Goren, Law & Order: Criminal Intent (Vincent D’Onofrio)
5. Dr. R. Quincy, Quincy, M.E. (Jack Klugman)

And of course, I must follow with his rundown of the P.I.s he thinks are most deserving of plaudits:

1. Spenser, Spenser: For Hire (Robert Urich)
2. Sherlock Holmes (Jeremy Brett)
3. Thomas Banacek, Banacek (George Peppard)
4. Jessica Fletcher, Murder, She Wrote (Angela Lansbury)
5. Carl Kolchak, Kolchak: The Night Stalker (Darren McGavin)
6. Mike Hammer, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (Stacey Keach)
7. Robert McCall, The Equalizer (Edward Woodward)
8. Thomas Magnum, Magnum, P.I. (Tom Selleck)

Given that he’s no dumb guy, Sassone justifies his 13 choices here--some more ably than others. The problem is that he’s simply wrong in touting a few of these characters, while failing to mention more deserving candidates. I mean, how could anyone promote annoying Jessica Fletcher over, say, Jim Rockford (James Garner), who as far as I’m concerned should be at the very top of any list of best TV private eyes. And while I can agree with most of the five police detectives he mentions, and certainly endorse his selection of the dogged Columbo for the numero uno spot, was Sassone smoking crack and drinking Cuervo by the bucketful when he decided that the ridiculous Sledge Hammer--a parody of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry--should follow the unassuming L.A. cop on this roster? What’s more, Kolchak wasn’t even a private eye, unless you use the most liberal description of the job, in which case--though I liked Night Stalker as much as the next TV geek--a number of investigating attorneys, from Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) to Tony Petrocelli (Barry Newman), as well as Wild West gun-for-hire Paladin (Richard Boone, from Have Gun--Will Travel), would qualify as contestants for placement on this list--and perhaps be more deserving of inclusion than McGavin’s rumpled reporter-cum-monster slayer.

Rather than just dump on Sassone here, though, I would like to suggest my own nominees in both categories--and then let you, the readers, have a say on these subjects, too.

Me first. My top five choices for TV private eyes are:

1. Jim Rockford, The Rockford Files (James Garner): Hands-down, Rockford is the best private eye in an American TV series, a sleuth with a heart of gold but a bank account seriously in need of funds, and less bravery than bunco talent to go around.

2. Harry Orwell, Harry O (David Janssen): I just got through gushing all over Janssen’s dour detective, so I won’t bore you with more enthusiasm. But I will add that the pantheon of TV “eyes” who can make you happy to have watched an episode of their series, even when its plot was thin or transparent, is pretty damn small; Harry O, though, deserves a spot in those exalted ranks.

3. Jake Axminster, City of Angels (Wayne Rogers): Rogers left his plum role on M*A*S*H to star in this 1976, Stephen J. Cannell/Roy Huggins-created NBC series about an often frustrated and confused, but still determined gumshoe working the Depression-hit streets of L.A. in the 1930s. Sadly, City of Angels didn’t get a sufficient run and Rogers later dissed it for bad scripting. Others knocked it for its obvious debts to 1974’s Chinatown. Yet some of this series’ stories (particularly the three-part opener, “The November Plan,” based on a real-life undercover conspiracy by big-money businessmen to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933), were both novel and memorable. If anyone out there has tapes of City of Angels episodes that they’d like to share, I’ll be the first to put in a request.

4. Spenser, Spenser: For Hire (Robert Urich): Here, I’ve got to go along with Sassone, who writes that the eponymous character, adapted from Robert B. Parker’s still-continuing series, “was smart, clever, caring, a wiseass, and ridiculously moral. What else do you want in a private eye?” ’Nuff said.

5. Sherlock Holmes (Jeremy Brett): Again, when Sassone is right, he’s right. And even though part of me thinks membership on this list ought to be restricted to characters who originated on television, not also those who leapt to the small screen from the printed page, Brett’s decade-long portrayal (1984-1994) of Holmes in a series of Granada Television films was outstanding. Better than any other actor who has played Holmes (sorry, Basil Rathbone, wherever you are), he captured the incisive intelligence, antisocial air, and tendency toward manic behavior that are all part of the “consulting detective” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle left to the ages.

As I said, I’d make fewer modifications in Sassone’s rundown of estimable police detectives. Columbo’s an obvious winner, and plaudits are certainly due for D’Onofrio’s Goren, who seems perpetually to be right on the edge of exploding--shattering his intense and brainy front to show that, underneath it all, he’s no less crazy than some of the malefactors he pursues. I’ll even give Sassone Steve McGarrett, though I was never a huge fan of Hawaii Five-O. But I have to insist that Sledge Hammer be nixed in favor of NYPD Blue’s Sergeant Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz), a character who evolved tremendously over Blue’s dozen-year run, from a drunken and bigoted malcontent to someone who demonstrated what may be the best human weakness of all: our inability to remain rigid in our opinions and biases when faced with evidence of our misapprehensions about others. And since this list doesn’t yet contain any women, allow me to suggest Detective Sergeant Christine Cagney (Sharon Gless) from CBS’ Cagney & Lacey as a substitute for Klugman’s Quincy (who I liked initially, but whose development as a protagonist eventually left me wanting). Like Sipowitz, Cagney was forced to overcome realistic disappointments and tragedies in her life, but--with help from her partner, Mary Beth Lacey (Tyne Daly)--she managed to overcome the worst of it without sacrificing either her humanity or, thank goodness, her sanity.

But what do you think?

In The Rap Sheet’s second readership poll (see the two silver boxes near the top of the right-hand column on this page), we put the questions to you: Who’s the best TV police detective in history? And, Who’s the best TV private eye in history? Sassone’s choices in both categories can be found among the contenders, as can my alternatives and several other nominees that I thought might be appropriate (and test your knowledge of TV sleuths).

Feel free to vote for your favorite characters in each group. I’ll tally the results and announce the winners in a future Rap Sheet posting.

And if you have other series protagonists you’d like to nominate in either of these categories, tell us about them in the Comments section of this post.

FOLLOW-UP: The results of this poll can found here.