9/26/1990 Do cops rock?

September 26, 1990.  On this day one of television's weirdest experiments began. Steven Bochco, creator of Hill Street Blues, convinced ABC to air a grim, gritty urban police show in which characters inexplicably burst into song several times each episode.  I remember wondering "What were they smoking when they dreamed this up?"  It lasted eleven weeks.  TV Guide ranked it as the 8th worst TV series of all time. 

9/21/1993 NYPD Blue comes in, swearing

September 21, 1993.  One of TV's best cop shows, and ABC's longest running drama, premiered on this night.  NYPD Blue courted controversy at the start with nudity and bad language.  Once they got everyone's attention they settled down to some excellent character-driven drama.

One of the oddities of the show was that it was intended as a star vehicle for David Caruso, but he left at the start of the second season.  While he was replaced by Jimmy Smits and a trail of other good-looking leading men, it became clear that the soul of the show was Andy Sipowicz, the bigoted, alcoholic older detective played by Dennis Franz.  Andy survived the loss of three partners, a son,  and a wife and somehow turned into a decent person along the way.

The show had behind the scene problems.  Caruso was allegedly very hard to work with.  And in a later season a producer was supposedly writing dialog while the actors stood on the set waiting for it.  But the show was a heck of a ride.

9/20/1963 Burke's Law is in force

September 20, 1963.  There have been some TV shows with bizarre concepts.  My Mother the Car leaps to mind for some reason.

This day saw the premiere of Burke's Law, a show about Amos Burke, the chief of detectives of Los Angeles, who happens to be insanely rich and arrives at murder scenes in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce.

Two years later when The Man From Uncle became hugely popular the show changed concepts and became Amos Burke, Secret Agent.  Why not?

9/16/1966 T.H.E. Cat prowls

September 16, 1966.  T.H.E. Cat premiered on this date on NBC.  Am I the only one who remembers it?  Robert Loggia starred as Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat (and yes, I did remember those names without checking.  Don't ask me what I had for breakfast yesterday.) 

What was the show about?  Well, here was the intro:

"Out of the night comes a man who saves lives at the risk of his own. Once a circus performer, an aerialist who refused the net. Once a cat burglar, a master among jewel thieves. Now a professional bodyguard. Primitive... savage... in love with danger. The Cat!"

8/19/1967 The Fugitive's final TV Guide cover

August 19, 1967.  This week's TV Guide celebrated the end of the line for one of the most popular escaped criminals in television history.  If I am counting correctly, this is the fifth time David Janssen made the cover of the media's main magazine in four years of The Fugitive.

This was probably the first series in TV history to be given the dignity of an actual ending, as opposed to merely vanishing forever between summer and fall. After 120 episodes of chasing and being chased Richard Kimball finally catches the guy who killed his wife.  And TV Guide was there to celebrate.  

7/13/1952 Murder scores a knockout

July 13, 1952.  Once upon a time there was TV network called Dumont, and for four years it featured a show called Rocky King: Detective.  On this very night an episode called "Murder Scores a Knockout" premiered, and when I say premiered, I mean it was performed live.  If you don't believe me you can watch it here.

6/3/2012 Longmire is ready for his close-up

June 3, 2012.  This date saw the premier of Longmire, based on Craig Johnson's novels about the sherriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming.  The show has had five seasons, first on A&E and then on Netflix.  Australian Robert Taylor plays the laconic Walt Longmire, with backup from Katee Sackhoff and Lou Diamond Phillips, among others.

4/26/1975 McCloud rides onto the cover of TV Guide

April 26, 1975.  McCloud ran for seven years but only produced 45 episodes.  Sounds almost BBC, doesn't it?  No, it was very American, but part of NBC's Mystery Movie series, along with Columbo and some lesser lights.  Dennis Weaver starred as a Taos, New Mexico lawman shipped east to teach them New Yorkers a thing or two.  The ever popular fish out of water, rube- outsmarts-city-slicker theme.

This is his third appearance on the cover of TV Guide, and this time he brought along a couple of castmates.

4/23/2001 Nero Wolfe comes to A&E.

April 23, 2001.  There have been several attempts to bring Rex Stout's brilliant if somewhat pudgy detective to the big or small screen in the U.S.  Two unimpressive movies in the thirties.  A TV pilot in the late fifties with William Shatner as sidekick Archie Goodwin. A pilot/TV movie in the seventies that was pretty good but didn't air because the star, Thayer David, passed away.  In 1981 we had the William Conrad version which we will graciously ignore.

But on this day A&E introduced the best (and so far last) version.  A Nero Wolfe Mystery was produced by Tim Hutton, a dedicated fan of the Corpus, who played Archie Goodwin (inexplicably, he gave the Ohio-born gumshoe a New York accent).  Maury Chaykin was suitably grumpy as the fat man. 

I used to reread Stout books as comfort food when I had a cold.  Now I crank up a DVD of one of these.

4/13/1980 Sergeant Cribb meets PBS

April 13, 1980.  This day saw the premiere of Cribb on Mystery on PBS.  The British series was based on Peter Lovesey's brilliant novels about a Victorian copper.  Alan Dobie played the shrewd detective who could never get promoted because he came from the wrong social class.

 I saw them a year later and it used to drive me crazy because at the same time I could watch NBC's disastrous attempt to bring Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe to the screen in the person of William Conrad.  Why could the British do so well what Hollywood couldn't do at all?

The only bad thing about the series was that Peter Lovesey used up all his ideas for future Victorian stories on episodes of the show.  He never wrote another Cribb novel.

4/8/1992 John D. Carr's Treacherous Crossing

April 8, 1992.  On this day the USA Network showed a made-for-TV movie, Treacherous Crossing. It was based on Cabin B-13, a radio play written by John D. Carr (1943). Lindsay Wagner starred as the woman who claimed her husband disappeared on an ocean liner - but was he ever there at all?

The story had appeared on TV twice before under its original title, on the series Suspense (1949) and Climax! (1958). Oh, and it was a movie in 1953 as Dangerous Crossing.

And remember the original radio play was Cabin B-13? In 1948 that became the name of  a radio anthology show.  The titular cabin became the home of the ship;'s doctor who, each week introduced a strange tale from his various travels.  John D. Carr did find a lot of ways to use one idea.

3/29/1996 Nash Bridges shows up

March 29, 1996.  On this date Don Johnson, star of Miami Vice, returned to TV as Nash Bridges, a fun-loving San Francisco cop.   Cheech Marin played his partner.  The show was filmed in the city by the bay, with permanent sets on Treasure Island. 122 episodes of this San Francisco treat. 

3/4/1982 Police Squad!

March 4, 1982.  Sad but true fact about television: you can't assume the people watching it are actually watching it.  Maybe they are knitting, or reading, or doing God knows what, and just using their ears to follow what's going on on the tube.  That may have been what doomed Police Squad!, one of the funniest shows that ever lasted a mere six episodes.

It was full of scenes in which the main cops, Leslie Nielsen and Alan North, would be gravely discussing the crime investigation while utterly bizarre things went on around them.  For example, in one episode they were chatting in an elevator in the police station.  A woman in a bathing suit gets in on one floor and, at the next she dived out, straight into a swimming pool which happened to be just outside the elevator.  Neither of the cops found this particularly noteworthy.  And the half-asleep viewers missed it too.

Each episode began with a Special Guest Star being murdered, never to be mentioned again in the story.

Fortunately the producers, same folks who created Airplane!, recycled the idea as the Naked Gun movie series.  And in theatres, people were watching.

2/20/1989 Gideon Oliver on TV

February 20, 1989.  ABC's Mystery Movie series had some great shows: Columbo and Kojak, for example.  Gideon Oliver, which premiered on this day, was none of them.

It was based, loosely, on Aaron Elkins' series of books about a physical anthropologist, i.e. the skeleton detective.  But TV's Oliver (played by a wasted Lou Gossett, Jr.) was more of a general anthropologist, dealing with cults and tongs.  The result was not good.

Here is part of what reviewer Richard Meyers said in The Armchair Detective:

"I can imagine Aaron [Elkins] visiting Hollywood, nudging his lovely wife Charlotte, and going, 'Isn't that Gideon Oliver's femur over there?  Isn't that his sternum?'
"Gideon Oliver  is dead.  Long live Gideon Oliver."

1/31/1993 NBC commits Homicide

January 31, 1993.  This night saw the premiere of one of the great TV cop shows.  Homicide: Life on the Street was based on David Simon's memoir of a year as embedded reporter in the Baltimore Homicide Squad, and a lot of the best lines in the early years came right from the book.  As in Melissa Leo's explanation in the first episode: "This is Homicide.  We work for God."



Besides Leo the cast included Yaphet Kotto, Andre Braugher, Ned Beatty, Jon Polito, and Michelle Forbes, to name a few.  Richard Belzer played John Munch, a detective who transferred to New York when Homicide ended, and got a job with Law and Order: SVU.

Creator David Simon also did pretty well for himself, going on to Oz, The Wire, etc. 

At the end of the first episode the rookie detective caught his first homicide: the brutal killing of a young girl.  The cops pursued that case throughout the series, getting nowhere. One episode consisted only of the grim interrogation of the chief suspect.  At the end of that hour all that had changed was that the detective who was sure the suspect  had done it was left in doubt and the one who had been in doubt was now sure.

After the show ended they brought the entire cast back for a TV movie -- even the characters who had died -- but they never solved that one nagging death.

1/27/1980 Tenspeed meets Brown Shoe

January 27, 1980.  This day saw the premiere of an unsuccessful show that left a big shadow.

Consider the cast: Ben Vereen played Tenspeed, a con man playing detective to meet his parole requirements.  Jeff Goldblum was Brown Shoe, an accountant who dreamed of being a P.I. 

Consider the producer: Stephen J. Cannell, the guy who created or co-created The Rockford Files, The A Team, WIseguy, 21 Jump Street, etc.

How could this team create a loser?  Don't know, but the show - with a formula that was copied successfully by several hits - only lasted fourteen weeks.

1/21/1967 TV Guide is Avenged

January 21, 1967.  The issue of TV Guide with this date featured a very professional British spy and a very talented amateur on the cover.

Decades later someone asked Patrick Macnee  what it was like being the star of the hottest show on British TV when Swinging London was the place everyone in the world wanted to be?

He replied, approximately: "Don't ask me.  We asked fourteen hour days, went home, and collapsed."  But didn't they look cool?

1/16/1981 Nero Wolfe comes to NBC

January 16, 1981.  This date saw the premiere of Nero Wolfe on NBC, starring William Conrad and Lee Horsley.  As a major fan of Rex Stout's great detective I will restrain myself and merely  say that it was worse than bubonic plague.

1/8/1989 LIttle Gray Cells Come to TV.

January 8, 1989.  This date saw the premiere on ITV of Agatha Christie's Poirot, one of the most popular and long-running filmed versions of Dame Agatha's fiction  David Suchet starred as the wily Belgian detective and by 2013 he had filmed essentially everything Christie had written about him.  The series was nominated for countless awards and won several, including an Edgar for best TV episode..

1/4/1975 Police Woman, cover girl

January 4, 1975.  The issue of TV Guide with this date featured Angie Dickinson, the star of Police Woman.  The show premiered in September and ran for four years on NBC.