Make a Note

Here’s something to make you feel old. It was 30 years ago this week--on January 28, 1984, to be precise--that the hour-long drama Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, starring Stacy Keach, debuted in America on CBS-TV. That was actually the second small-screen series built around Spillane’s tougher-than-thou gumshoe and boasting an identical title; the previous, half-hour-long program had aired in syndication from 1958 to 1960, with Darren McGavin in the title role. Keach’s show ran only a year before being cancelled, but it was then resurrected in September 1986 as The New Mike Hammer and broadcast until May 1987. A subsequent revival, titled Mike Hammer, Private Eye, was shown in syndication from September 1997 to June 1998. Below is the opening from the original Keach series.