Bad Judgment on TV? Imagine That ...

I don’t remember ever watching David Cassidy--Man Undercover, a 1978-1979 NBC series that starred the former Partridge Family teen heartthrob as a Los Angeles policeman infiltrating the youth scene. And that’s probably for the best, as this spin-off from the popular anthology drama Police Story finds a place today on Paul Goebel’s TV Squad list of “Ten Bad Shows That Happened to Great People.” Also making Goebel’s roster are Cop Rock, a bizarre, short-lived Steven Bochco series from 1990 that tried to combine police drama with musical theater, and The Judge and Jake Wyler.

That last project was actually an unsold pilot made in 1971 for NBC, starring a then-in-her-mid-60s Bette Davis as a retired hypochondriac judge who’s turned to operating a private-eye agency with the assistance of an ex-con she’d once put away, as well as assorted other parolees. Doug McClure (formerly of The Virginian and Checkmate, and later of Search and Barbary Coast) played Wyler, the “leg man” who’s grateful--well, most of the time, anyway--for the judge’s help. (Goebels says the film teamed Davis up with Robert Wagner, but that’s not correct. Perhaps he’s confusing it with Switch, another TV pairing of a lawman with a quondam crook.) James McEachin, who’d eventually earn the title role in Tenafly, played another of the judge’s parolee associates.

Despite having been created by William Link and Richard Levinson, who also gave us Mannix, Columbo, Ellery Queen, and other highly rated TV mystery series of the late 1960s and early ’70s, The Judge and Jake Wyler wasn’t picked up as a weekly series. (It wasn’t even released as a teleflick until 1972, with added footage.) However, in 1973, Levinson and Link, together with writer David Shaw, resurrected the concept in another pilot called Partners in Crime, with Lee Grant playing Judge Meredith Leland and Lou Antonio serving as ex-con leg man Sam Hatch. That one didn’t sell either, though I have fond memories of the revamp, and would almost certainly include it on my long-dreamed-of DVD collection of Great TV Crime Series that Didn’t Make It Past the Pilot Stage.