The Buddy System

This evening’s installment of TV Confidential, broadcast on Shokus Internet Radio, will feature author Darlene Quinn, who collaborated with the late actor Buddy Ebsen on Sizzling Cold Case, a 2006 mystery novel starring Ebsen’s TV detective, Barnaby Jones. That episode will premiere at 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT (with encore presentations to come later in the week). Quinn is scheduled to “talk about working with Buddy” in the program’s second hour.

You can learn more about TV Confidential here.

Well Doggies!

Almost two decades since its cancellation, the CBS-TV series Barnaby Jones suddenly seems to be all over the news. A couple of weeks back, we reported on the coming DVD release of that Buddy Ebsen-led private eye show. Now we hear that Ebsen’s series co-star, former Miss America Lee Meriwether, will be making a special guest appearance this next week on the Internet radio program TV Confidential to talk about her years on Barnaby Jones, as well as some of her previous acting work.

From the program’s Web site:

Film and TV icon Lee Meriwether is scheduled to join us on the next edition of TV Confidential, premiering Monday, Nov. 30, at 10 p.m. ET, 7 p.m. PT on Shokus Internet Radio, with a rebroadcast Tuesday, Dec. 1, at 11 p.m. ET, 8 p.m. PT on Share-a-Vision Radio, KSAV.org.

Known to many of us for playing Betty Jones on the long-running private detective series Barnaby Jones (CBS, 1973-1980), as well as The Catwoman in the original Batman motion picture from 1966, Lee Meriwether has been a film and TV icon for more than four decades. We’ll talk about these famous characters, plus her roles on such classic series as Star Trek, The Fugitive, Mission: Impossible, Dan August and Perry Mason, her work with such legends as John Wayne, Rock Hudson, Andy Griffith, Jonathan Winters, Irwin Allen and James Garner, and a whole lot more.

If you want to be part of our conversation, if you have a question for Ms. Meriwether about her career or any of the films and TV series in which she’s appeared, we invite you to join us for our live broadcast Monday, Nov. 30 beginning at 10pm ET, 7 p.m. PT on Shokus Internet Radio. Phone number is (888) SHOKUS-5 / (888) 746-5875. Email address is talk@tvconfidential.net.

Sounds like a purr-fectly delightful experience.

Jonesing Once More

Barnaby Jones enthusiasts, take note. The Web site TV Shows on DVD announced yesterday that CBS DVD-Paramount will release the opening season of that 1973-1980 detective series to disc on February 16 of next year. The news prompted Ivan G. Shreve Jr. to recount the appeal of that Buddy Ebsen drama:

Contrary to people’s memories, Barnaby Jones was not a good-old-fashioned, folksy crime drama--no doubt considered so due to the participation of friendly Buddy Ebsen--but a fascinating study into the evil minds of some really twisted people.

The basic storyline of a Jones episode usually involved a nice, middle-class husband and wife who commit a depraved act in a temporary mindset of idiocy, and then commit blunder after blunder as the noose tightens around their necks. They’d race around like mad trying to cover up their crime ... and there’s ol’ Barnaby, everywhere they go, just being his folksy, avuncular self until he had the evidence he needed to convict the hapless pair and send them to the chair. It used to remind me of Tex Avery’s Droopy cartoons, where the wolf character would literally bust his ass running away from the Droopster (usually representing the law) only to find Droopy greeting him with his typical deadpan cheer: “Hi there.”

Shreve’s full piece can be found here.

The Other Centenarian

Much will be made this spring of what would have been spy novelist Ian Fleming’s 100th birthday, on May 28. (He died in 1964.) But today marks the 100th anniversary of another memorable player in the crime-fiction sphere, Buddy Ebsen. Yes, he portrayed Jed Clampett in television’s The Beverly Hillbillies and almost became famous as the Tin Man in the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz (but the powdered aluminum irritated his skin, and he had to be replaced by actor Jack Haley). What really matters to us, though, is that for seven years he played elderly, milk-gulping private eye Barnaby Jones in an eponymous CBS-TV series. (The last show produced by the once-ubiquitous Quinn Martin, as it turns out.)

I was never a Barnaby Jones fan. I found the series too formulaic, not innovative enough. But it certainly had many other followers, one of them apparently being “Rick,” a Kentucky banking industry employee who gives a pretty good précis of the series at his blog, On My Mind:

Barnaby Jones was a retired private investigator who left the business to his son Hal. When Hal was murdered while working on a case--he was shot to death while calling his dad--Barnaby came out of retirement and along with Hal’s widow, played by Lee Meriwether, solved Hal’s last case and caught his murder. They worked well together and they decided to keep the Jones detective agency open. Like Columbo, many crooks mistook his home-style country ways and his age as making him seem a bit slow. They really masked a keen detective mind. Their mistake gave Barnaby the upper hand in solving the crime. Later Mark Shera, formerly on the show S.W.A.T., [joined the series] as his young cousin Jedediah Romano (“J.R.”) Jones. He did Barnaby’s legwork on investigations while also study[ing] for the bar to become a lawyer. He was a welcome addition to the cast, but it always seemed funny that J.R. would chase the crook through half the city. The only way he caught the crook was when Barnaby would show up, gun in hand, at the end of the trail. He usually said “Hold it right there!” With Barnaby in front of him with a gun and J.R. coming up from behind, the villain knew he was cornered and gave up. When the show Cannon was on the air the two shows would often cross over.

Sadly, Ebsen died in 2003, after a brief but noteworthy return to television for the 1984-1985 season of Matt Houston, during which he played actor Lee Horsley’s retired CIA operative uncle, Roy Houston. According to Wikipedia, “During the mid 1990s, Meriwether and Shera expressed interest in a Barnaby Jones reunion TV movie, but could not talk Ebsen into joining the project. However, in 1993, Ebsen reprised the role of Barnaby Jones in the big-screen remake of his most famous TV series, The Beverly Hillbillies. It would be his final theatrical appearance.”

Despite his absence from the festivities, we’ll drink a toast today--appropriately, with milk--to Buddy Ebsen for his TV crime-drama contributions. By the way, if you’re feeling as nostalgic as we are right now, pay a visit to the Absolute Barnaby Jones site, or click below to watch the pulse-quickening intro sequence to Barnaby Jones.

READ MORE: “Hand Me Down My Walking Cane: Old Dicks,” by Kevin Burton Smith (The Thrilling Detective Web Site).

“One Man Will Fight the Wrong Around You”

A Barnaby Jones novel, written by Buddy Ebsen with Darlene Quinn and offered by a print-on-demand vanity press? Lee Goldberg investigates here.