Kimble’s Stumbling First Steps

I try to keep a watch out for crime-fiction-related anniversaries, but I missed a big one yesterday. As Terence Towles Canote wrote in A Shroud of Thoughts, “It was sixty years ago that the running began. On September 17, 1963, the classic show The Fugitive debuted on ABC. The show starred David Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble, who had been wrongfully convicted of his wife’s murder. While he was being shipped to death row, the train carrying him derailed and he managed to escape. Dr. Kimble then went on the run, all the while searching for the one-armed man who had really killed his wife. Pursuing him was Stafford Police Lt. Phillip Gerard, an officer dedicated to the enforcement of the law.”

Over the years, I have read occasional articles about The Fugitive. But I don’t remember learning how difficult it was for creator Roy Huggins to get that hour-long crime drama on the air. Again from Canote:

While Roy Huggins thought the had a great idea in The Fugitive, he initially had trouble interesting anyone in the concept. He showed it to fellow writer Howard Browne, with whom he had worked on such shows as Cheyenne and Maverick. Much to Roy Huggins’s surprise, Howard Browne thought it was a terrible idea for a show. Undeterred, Roy Huggins showed it to his agent … who had nearly the same reaction that Howard Browne had. After he had taken the position at 20th Century Fox, Peter Levathes, then in charge of 20th Century Fox’s television division, asked Roy Huggins for any ideas he had for television shows. He told him his idea for The Fugitive. In the biography Roy Huggins: [Creator of] Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, and The Rockford Files by Paul Green, Roy Huggins said, “When I finished he sat in stricken silence, staring at me as if I had just turned rancid before his very eyes.”

It was while Roy Huggins was still at 20th Century Fox that he received a call from Burt Nodella, who was the executive in charge of development at the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). The two had become friends when Roy Huggins was still at Warner Bros., whose shows were aired by the network. Burt Nodella asked Roy Huggins to pitch some idea for TV shows for ABC. He then found himself in a Beverly Hills Hotel suite pitching the idea for The Fugitive to eight ABC executives. The ABC executive[s] sat in silence after Roy Huggins finished his presentation, then let him know that they thought it was a bad idea. Fortunately, Leonard Goldenson, the head [and founding president] of ABC, was also present at the meeting. The various executives turned to him to see what he had to say. Mr. Goldenson loved the idea, stating, “You know, Roy, that is the best f***ing idea I have heard for a television series in my life. When do you want to go to work?”

There’s much more to Canote’s post. Enjoy it all here.

Chasing After Fame

It was 50 years ago today that The Fugitive, the American drama series created by Roy Huggins and starring David Janssen, debuted on ABC-TV. That program about a physician accused of his wife’s murder, and his subsequent struggle to track down the One-Armed Man he’s convinced holds the answers to her slaying, eventually ran for 120 hour-long episodes over four years, becoming one of the most respected small-screen productions in history. Stephen Bowie opines in the A.V. Club blog that it “may be the perfect television drama.

That’s not to say that The Fugitive is superior to today’s best dramas, or even to its finest contemporaries, like The Defenders and Ben Casey. But The Fugitive achieved a perfection of form that was unique: It was part crime procedural, part action-adventure, and part character-driven melodrama. It was fusion TV. The push and pull between the contrasting generic elements meant that episodes were highly varied, but with so many different traditions to draw from, nearly always satisfying. The Fugitive achieved a phenomenally consistent level of quality--which makes this a particularly tough list to compile.

You will find my own tribute to The Fugitive--posted four decades after its final episode aired, on August 29, 1967--by clicking here. And in celebration of today’s 50th anniversary, Bowie provides an interesting alternative ending to Richard Kimble’s saga here.

Fate Moves Its Huge Hand

I’ve been so occupied lately, that I completely missed the sad news that Barry Morse, who played the doggedly pursuing Lieutenant Philip Gerard in the 1963-1967 TV series The Fugitive, passed away this last Saturday in London at age 89. Television historian Ed Robertson broke the news to me this morning, and I submit here part of a fine Morse tribute he posted yesterday in his own blog:

Barry proudly considered himself a “character actor” in the truest sense of the word. In a career that spanned 70 years, he brought to life literally hundreds of different characters on stage, screen and television throughout the U.S., U.K. and Canada. His vast body of work covered everything from Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, to Gore Vidal and A.R. Gurney, to his own critically acclaimed one-man show, Merely Players, to memorable appearances on hundreds of television shows, including The Twilight Zone, The Untouchables, The Outer Limits and The Invaders, as well as groundbreaking miniseries like The Winds of War, War and Remembrance and Sadat.

But in the annals of American pop culture, it is the character of Philip Gerard, “the police lieutenant obsessed with the capture” of the wrongly convicted Dr. Richard Kimble (David Janssen) on the Emmy Award-winning ABC series The Fugitive, for which Barry Morse is best remembered. Twenty years before Larry Hagman, J.R. Ewing and Dallas, Barry’s portrayal of Lt. Gerard was the original “man you loved to hate.”

Perhaps Stephen King said it best. “Lt. Gerard really scared me as a kid,” he said to me when I interviewed for my book The Fugitive Recaptured. “Barry Morse was so good, he brought an element of reality to Gerard that a lot of TV characters didn’t have. Whereas most series characters remain emotionally static, Gerard actually seemed to grow less and less tightly wrapped as the show continued. Gerard was completely nuts--at least, I thought so. Kimble had made him crazy, and as The Fugitive went on, you could see him heading further and further into freako land.”

Having gotten to know Barry a bit myself as a result of The Fugitive Recaptured, I can tell you he got a quite kick of Mr. King’s assessment. Though his years on The Fugitive represented a small fraction of his collective work, he remained proud of his association with the series and its impact on American dramatic television. We spoke many times during the three-year period in which I researched and wrote the book. He was a marvelous storyteller with uncanny powers of recollection, tremendous warmth and compassion, and great fondness for David Janssen and Quinn Martin. Plus, being veddy, veddy British, he also had a cheeky sense of humor. With the possible exception of Suzanne Pleshette, he was as refreshingly down to earth as any actor I’ve come to know.

Rest in peace, Lt. Gerard.

To learn more about Morse’s life and career, click here.

READ MORE: “Richard Kimble Is Innocent,” by J. Kingston Pierce
(The Rap Sheet).

“Richard Kimble Is Innocent”

You probably don’t remember this, but it was 40 years ago this week (actually, 40 years ago yesterday) that the final episode of The Fugitive was broadcast on American television, bringing to a dramatic close the story of Dr. Richard Kimble’s pursuit of the elusive One-Armed Man and supplying answers to the mystery of who murdered his wife--and then left Kimble to be accused of the heinous crime.

That ABC series, of course, featured David Janssen (later to headline the mid-’70s detective series Harry O). It was allegedly based on “a six-page format, inspired by Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables” and written by Roy Huggins (who also created the landmark series Maverick and The Rockford Files). After four years, The Fugitive finally concluded its popular run on Tuesday, August 29, 1967--better known by fans as The Day the Running Stopped--with the second installment of a two-part episode titled “The Judgment,” in which a dramatic confrontation between Kimble and the One-Armed Man at a Southern California amusement park ends with the cop who, for all this time, has been chasing after the wrongly accused doctor, shooting the real killer. When it originally aired, “The Judgment: Part 2” was the most-watched U.S. TV episode of all time, with 45.9 percent of American households having tuned in. (As of my last check, however, that show had fallen to the No. 18 spot, but remained the only program in the top-30 rundown that was broadcast prior to the year 1970.)

This is particularly ironic, when you consider that The Fugitive--with its William Conrad (Cannon) narration and tension-packed introduction--almost didn’t make it to the small screen. As Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer columnist J. Peder Zane recalled,

The moral question at the heart of the upheavals of the 1960s also infused “The Fugitive”: Should laws and traditions guide our actions or personal conscience? To appreciate how path-making the show was, consider the resistance creator Roy Huggins encountered when he first pitched his idea about “an innocent victim of blind justice” in 1959. Everyone from family and friends to network executives found the idea repulsive. ABC, the last-place network desperate for new programming, finally bought the series in 1963.

In most episodes, a moment comes when Kimble’s true identity is revealed to someone he has known a short while. The character must decide: Do I turn in a man society brands a wife killer, or do I trust my own instincts, which say the authorities are wrong, and help him escape?

However, The Fugitive turned out to have tremendous viewer appeal, for several reasons, according to the Museum of Broadcast Communications:

Using the general format of an anthology show, but with continuing characters (in the manner of the contemporary Herbert Leonard series Naked City and Route 66), the producers, writers and directors were given license to deal with characters, settings and stories not usually associated with what was in essence a simple man-on-the-run theme. Under various nondescript aliases (but most frequently as “Jim”), Kimble traversed the United States in pursuit of the One-Armed Man and along the way became involved with ordinary people who were usually at an emotional cross-roads in their lives. ...

Not unlike the Western hero, which U.S. television had embraced since the 1950s and with which it still had something of an infatuation, Kimble had the appeal of the rootless wanderer whose commitments to jobs, women or society were temporary, yet who at the same time deserved our sympathy as something of a tragic figure. The series’ and the introspective character’s success lay largely with the appeal of actor David Janssen’s intensity in the part (Janssen’s first television hit had been as the lead in the slick Richard Diamond, Private Eye series of 1957-60). The drama of the stories came not so much from the transient occupations of the fleeing hero, such as sail mender in Hank Searls “Never Wave Good-bye” or dog handler in Harry Kronman’s “Bloodline,” but from the dilemma of the Kimble character himself, something Janssen was able to convey with an almost nervous charm.

This month’s release of The Fugitive: Season One, Volume 1 on DVD is an excellent reminder of Janssen’s talents, and will likely bring this series to the attention of generations too young to have watched it the first time around. The same ones who associate The Fugitive only with the 1993 Harrison Ford film remake or the short-lived 2000 CBS-TV revival series starring Tim Daly (formerly of Wings).

More welcome reminders of the Janssen series come from a recent installment of Talking Television with Dave White, broadcast on “global radio station KSAV.org.” Moderated by Ed Robertson, author of The Fugitive Recaptured: The 30th Anniversary Companion to a Television Classic (1993), this episode featured an enlightening discussion of The Fugitive and its final chapter (the follow-up to a Talking Television tribute to “Famous Final Episodes” that was broadcast in late July). It deals particularly with the networks’ hesitancy about buying The Fugitive, the copycat shows that came in the wake of its success, and the networks’ general resistance to offering final episodes of any TV series. You can listen to the show here. (Note: The first half deals with The Fugitive, while the latter half brings in Robert Newhart, son of Bob Newhart, who talks about the famous 1990 surprise ending of Newhart.)

To get a flavor of The Fugitive, or be reminded of its assets, here’s the opening segment from the last episode:



READ MORE: “15 Greatest TV Characters of the 1960s: Richard Kimble,” by Rick29 (Classic Film and TV Café); “The Fugitive Broke New Ground to Become an Unlikely Hit,” by Stephen Bowie (A.V. Club); “Serge Krizman, 1914-2008,” by Stephen Bowie (The Classic TV History Blog).

Happy Birthday, David Janssen

And here I was, thinking I would be the only person to remember that today would have been the 76th birthday of actor David Janssen (who died in 1980). But no, mystery maven Elizabeth Foxwell got the word out first in her blog, The Bunburyist.

Janssen, you’ll recall, was the star of three well-remembered American TV series: Richard Diamond, Private Eye (1957-1960), The Fugitive (1963-1967), and of course, Harry O (1974-1976). Born David Harold Meyer in Naponee, Nebraska, on this date back in 1931, he was the son of a banker and a former teenage Miss Nebraska turned Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, Berniece Graf. But his parents’ marriage didn’t last, and Janssen’s mother relocated them to Los Angeles, where Berniece eventually married a man named Eugene Janssen. With his mother’s encouragement, David began acting at age 13, and by his 25th birthday, “he had appeared in 20 films and served two years as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army,” according to Wikipedia.

He caught his first big break in the late ’50s, when longtime film actor Dick Powell, who had spent four years as the voice of ex-OSS man turned New York City private eye Richard Diamond--“radio’s singing gumshoe”--decided he didn’t want to star in a new version of Diamond for the then-young medium of television. Instead, Powell became the series’ producer and hired Janssen as its lead. As Kevin Burton Smith notes at The Thrilling Detective Web Site, TV watchers who remember Richard Diamond, Private Eye in the least often remember it best for its gimmick: the answering-service girl, Sam, who took all of Diamond’s phone calls, but whose face you never saw on-screen, only her legs. Turns out, those prize-winning gams belonged to Mary Tyler Moore.

After Diamond’s end, Janssen took a lot of other TV work, guest-starring on Death Valley Days, Checkmate, Route 66, and Naked City, before being cast as Dr. Richard Kimble, a pediatrician falsely accused of murdering his wife, in the Roy Huggins-created ABC-TV series The Fugitive. That show took a while to build up an audience, but eventually proved to be a hit, winning an Emmy Award in 1966 for Best Dramatic Series. (Janssen himself was nominated for Emmys three times during the show’s run, but lost in each case--twice to Bill Cosby, for I Spy--and was never nominated again). The Fugitive ended after four years, when Janssen declined a fifth-year contract.

Instead, he turned to movie roles, appearing in John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), a science-fiction film called Marooned (1969), and a Western called Macho Callahan (1970), in which he played a Confederate army deserter who breaks out of a prison camp and, with his old partner, goes hunting for the man who landed him in that brutal stockade. But the lure of TV series (and the money that went along with them) led Janssen back in 1971 as the star of O’Hara, United States Treasury, a Jack Webb serial that had Janssen playing a Treasury agent (“T-Man”) who traveled around the country on assignment with assorted law-enforcement agencies. As The David Janssen Archive puts it none too delicately, O’Hara is “considered to be the only stinker of the four series in which Janssen starred. It lasted one season.”

The good news was that O’Hara’s cancellation made it possible for Janssen to star three years later in one of the best private-eye series of the 1970s: Harry O. I qualify that because the ’70s was a particularly fecund period for TV P.I.s, some of them excellent (like Jim Rockford and Miles C. Banyon) and others who never should have been given a license to practice (such as Richie Brockelman and Wade Griffin). Though darker in tone than The Rockford Files, Harry O was a nice complement, the two exemplifying divergent paths taken by modern fictional gumshoes. In a piece that originally appeared in the magazine Television Chronicles, TV historian and author Ed Robertson wrote:

Harry Orwell ... wasn’t like most private eyes. He owned a car, but rode the bus because his car was often “sick.” He couldn’t run well because of a bullet lodged in his back from his days on the San Diego police force. He really didn’t have to work: while his disability pension didn’t make him rich, it afforded him a life of simple pleasures. Though he didn’t work for free, he didn’t always work for money: he once let a client pay off his fee by working on his boat, The Answer. He could also afford to work “on the house” occasionally, if he truly believed in a client, or if he somehow felt he had let the client down. Jim Rockford would never do that.

Harry O was born out of the fertile mind of Howard Rodman (Naked City, Route 66), the award-winning writer/producer of over 1,000 teleplays, screenplays and radio shows. Sometime in 1972, Warner Bros. commissioned Rodman to script a pilot based on the box office smash Dirty Harry. The studio soon learned, however, that the prolific scribe had ideas of his own. As Rodman explained in Murder on the Air (Mysterious Press, 1989), rather than re-create Clint Eastwood, he found his initial inspiration in the pages of Nathanael West’s classic novel, The Day of the Locust.

There is a page or two describing this guy walking up Sweetzer--that slope between Santa Monica and Sunset Boulevard--on a very hot day. He’s a door-to-door salesman going through bungalow courts and he’s got his jacket off, his thumb through the hanger loop holding it over his back, and his shirt is all wet ... That is the image I used to create Harry O. I mean that literally. That’s where I started.

Rodman’s Orwell owned a gun, but rarely used it; he didn’t own a car at first, relying instead on the buses for transportation. He lived near the ocean--alone, but not lonely (he goes to bed with a lot of different women). Though he wasn’t particularly friendly, he was a good friend to those who knew him. He was different (for television, at least), yet he was also rooted in the tradition of the literary gumshoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. In fact, Rodman’s title for the script, Such Dust as Dreams Are Made On, was itself an homage to the classic line from the film version of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, “This is the stuff that dreams are made on” (which screenwriter John Huston in turn cribbed from Shakespeare’s The Tempest).

However, that original, 1973 pilot film for the series was less than enthusiastically received, and it took a second (and far superior) pilot film, 1974’s Smile Jenny, You’re Dead, guest-starring Andrea Marcovicci and Clu Gulager, to sell ABC on Janssen’s often dour, cynical, and antisocial, but determined and emotionally vulnerable San Diego private eye. The series premiered in September 1974, and though it lasted only two years, it won significant critical acclaim. “Harry O is possibly TV’s only truly successful interpretation of the Chandler/Macdonald/Spillane first-person narrative,” wrote Max Allan Collins and John Javna in The Best of Crime and Detective TV (1988), while Richard Meyers, in TV Detectives (1981), calls Harry O and The Rockford Files “the finest private-eye shows ever.” I wouldn’t even think to disagree with that.

Although Harry O still hasn’t made the transfer to DVD, I’ve lately been fortunate--thanks to a taped-from-TV DVD collection purchased from a Web site called Old Time Favorites--to revisit the series. I remember watching it only periodically, so many of these episodes are new to me. And I’m pleased to finally see them. Janssen lacked the flashy presentation of many TV “eyes” of the ’70s, and he could be downright grumpy at times--an obvious contrast to James Garner’s humorously self-effacing Rockford. Yet you always knew that Harry Orwell cared about the people he worked for--often at a cost to his faith in civilization’s worth or sanity. “As time went on,” Meyers remarks, “it became obvious that Harry wanted to give of himself, but he had learned never to rely on anything or anyone. His car did not work. His body did not work. ... Everything he had done in the past was for nothing. Everyone he touched seemed to get hurt.” That included his San Diego policeman friend, Lieutenant Manny Quinlan (Henry Darrow), who--in a remarkable incident, given his previous status as a regular--was shot to death at the end of the series’ first season. By then, Harry O was ranked among U.S. television’s top-20 shows.

So why was it cancelled a year later? Meyers writes that

The answer came from Anthony Zerbe [who played Los Angeles cop K.C. Trench in the series’ second season] in 1980 at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Connecticut, where he was starring in Cyrano de Bergerac. David Janssen had died earlier in the year at the age of 49 [actually, 48]. When asked about the demise of the Harry O series, Zerbe responded with the story that [TV exec] Fred Silverman had just come over to ABC from CBS to “fix” the third-place network. The first thing he did was to get rid of the shows he had nothing to do with. Harry O was one of them.

There is no way of telling if Harry O would have continued to add depth to the private-eye character. All that can be said is that it was unjustly killed long before its time. It remains a monument to Janssen’s work as an actor and television detective.

Janssen was soon back to guesting in TV flicks, such as Mayday at 40,000 Feet! (1976), Superdome (1978), and The Golden Gate Murders (1979). He also appeared in the anthology series Police Story and the miniseries Centennial, based on James A. Michener’s 1974 novel of the same name. According to the Internet Movie Database, Janssen’s last dramatic appearance was in a 1981 theatrical film titled Inchon, but for some reason, his scenes were deleted prior to release. He died from a sudden heart attack on February 13, 1980, six weeks shy of his 49th birthday.

Much too soon.

READ MORE: “A Star, Not Merely a Fugitive,” by J. Kingston Pierce
(The Rap Sheet).

Huggins’ Writing Workshop

Now, here’s something that’s just downright cool.

Apparently, author-blogger Lee Goldberg had a chance to talk with screenwriter-producer Roy Huggins--the prolific creator of such TV series as Maverick, The Fugitive, 77 Sunset Strip, The Outsider, The Rockford Files, and City of Angels--in 1998, less than four years before his death. That six-hour interview, conducted and taped on behalf of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Archive of American Television, is now available online.

Their 10-part exchange covers everything from Huggins’ growing-up years and his idolization of his older brother, to the birth of 77 Sunset Strip and his blacklisting as a “former communist,” to his creation of Maverick and the “Movies of the Week” concept, his habit of driving out into the California desert and dictating seasons’ worth of TV episodes into a tape recorder, and his respect for fellow TV writer Juanita Bartlett. I haven’t yet finished watching all six hours (hey, I do have other things to do, even on a weekend), but already I’m utterly charmed. Huggins was a TV-writing master, and Goldberg does an exceptional job of ... well, not drawing him out exactly, since Huggins pretty much runs away with the interview, but inviting his subject to relive some of the seminal and little-understood experiences from his 87-year-life.

Go here to read Goldberg’s recollections of how this interview came about; and the first installment of the Huggins interview can be viewed here. Any fan of Roy Huggins’ work over the years would be a fool to miss this. Fantastic stuff!

READ MORE: “R.I.P., Adele Mara,” by Ivan G. Shreve Jr. (Thrilling Days of Yesteryear); “What’s a Turn-On?” by David Thomson (Salon); “Black List, White Wash,” by Stephen Bowie (The Classic TV History Blog).