I had to mull over the invitation for a spell. Had the same question been addressed to me before Ward’s article appeared, I would surely have suggested writing about Rockford, which has always been a favorite on mine. Instead, I pitched him on a piece about TV “wheel series,” which once ushered many mystery and crime dramas onto the small screen (among them Columbo, Banacek,
and The Name of the Game). After that, and having lost out on the opportunity to remark on Jim Rockford’s escapades, I proposed revisiting the next best private eye series of the 1970s, David Janssen’s Harry O.(Left) Promotional illustration by Ted CoConis.
My editor was immediately intrigued. “I’ve never seen it,” he wrote back, “but if you say it’s next after Rockford, I’m sold.” That was all the impetus I needed to start filling my leisure-time TV-viewing schedule with Harry O episodes—all 44 of them, plus two pilot films. You can already imagine the negotiations I had to go through with my wife in order to rewatch the entire run of a largely forgotten detective program from more than four decades ago. (There were many hours of rom-coms and quaint periods dramas I had to screen in exchange.) But it was all worth it in the end, for it led to my 19th (and probably longest) CrimeReads story, which was posted earlier today.
As I explain in that remembrance, Harry O almost didn’t make it to the boob tube. And even after it did, it faced budget woes (which led eventually to the series’ action being relocated from San Diego to Los Angeles) and continual efforts by hand-wringing network execs to make it “a different sort of detective show with no differences at all.” Janssen was outstanding in the role of wounded cop-turned-shamus Harry Orwell, his performances overcoming some uneven and disappointing scripts; and the late Season 1 addition of Anthony Zerbe to the cast, playing a Santa Monica police lieutenant, imparted a bit more humor to the show and gave Janssen’s gumshoe a fit foil. Unfortunately, those changes weren’t enough, and Harry O—Janssen’s fourth and last series—vanished from the air after just two years.
If anything, binging this series on CrimeReads’ behalf left me fonder of it than I had been before. As I write in my piece, “It says a lot, don’t you think, that although I only recently rewatched Harry O in its entirety, I’m nearly ready to start all over again?”
Just don’t let my wife know that yet.
* * *
In the interview embedded below, likely dating back to early 1975 and filmed for KBAK-TV in Bakersfield, California, David Janssen talks about his history of portraying law-enforcement figures, the concept behind Harry O, and his popularity in Turkey—plus an “interesting” experience he had while visiting that country in June 1974 (click here to learn more, beginning at the bottom of page 26).READ MORE: “The Origins of Harry O,” by Steve Aldous; “Here’s What Happened to Actor David Janssen Before, During and After Starring in The Fugitive,” by Ed Gross (Closer Weekly).
4 comments:
Where did you find this? I looked all over television, Netflix, Amazon, and IMDB and couldn't find it. I live in Kirkland, WA and I looked at SPL and KCLS and they didn't have it either.
Thanks,
Bill
Hey, Bill:
I actually bought a bookleg DVD copy of the whole series many years ago. But Harry O has since been released on regular DVDs, by Warner Archive.
Cheers,
Jeff
Thanks.
Love the blog.
Bill
Great piece on Harry O (and thanks for your wonderful blog) but with all due respect to Jimbo, Rocky and Dennis Becker, I’d argue that Harry is the quintessential California PI, at least on television (perhaps with honorable mention to another short-lived TV PI, The Outsider, David Ross). While it can be argued that Harry O, the series, was not as consistently well written as The Rockford Files and certainly not as long-lived, Harry the character has always been, for me, the closest incarnation of Lew Archer, fiction’s greatest private eye. Consider: Harry and Lew are both former cops, both regretfully divorced), both shun violence despite the violent nature of their professions, and both are unexpectedly articulate and empathic about the people whose lives they investigate. How easily could one of Archer’s observations become one of Harry’s voiceovers? “I had to admit to myself that I lived for nights like these, moving across the city’s great broken body, making connections among its millions of cells. I had a crazy wish or fantasy that some day before I died, if I made all the right neural connections, the city would come all the way alive” (Archer in The Instant Enemy). Or better still: “I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people.” (Archer in The Goodbye Look). I wonder how disappointed Ross Macdonald was with the failure of Brian Keith’s Archer in 1975 to capture the essence of his iconic creation, when David Janssen’s Harry Orwell had already embodied the character and voice of Archer in pitch-perfect fashion.
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