The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #7

Series Title: Crime Story | Years: 1986-1988, NBC | Starring: Dennis Farina, Anthony Denison, Bill Smitrovich, Steve Ryan, Paul Butler, Bill Campbell, Stephen Lang, John Santucci | Theme Music: Del Shannon

In the mid-1980s, with two successful years behind him as the executive producer of ratings winner Miami Vice, screenwriter and director Michael Mann decided that his next TV series would take him from the pastel hues, string bikinis, and glass cliffs of Florida’s largest city back to the place of his birth: Chicago, Illinois. On September 18, 1986, NBC debuted Crime Story, his underworld saga that substituted a grim, malevolent verisimilitude for Vice’s stylishness and more distant violence, and wound up being touted by Time magazine as one of the decade’s best small-screen treats.

The series’ two-hour pilot movie, which like the rest of the early episodes was set in 1963, established this program’s tone and pace. As The New York Times’ John J. O’Connor wrote after seeing it:

During a robbery in progress at a flashy Chicago club, a customer is killed by a vicious thug, who then starts taking hostages. Rushing to the scene, a police lieutenant, Mike Torello, warns the murderer that if anyone else is hurt, “I’m gonna kill whoever you love most--your mother, your father, your dog.”

Then comes the inevitable highway chase, complete with a thumping rock score, during which one of [the] screaming hostages, a gorgeous blonde, is shoved through the bullet-shattered back window to hang onto the trunk of the speeding car. Finally, trapping his quarry in a quiet residential neighborhood, Torello puts a bullet through the killer’s head as two children in pajamas watch silently from a nearby window. It is a bit like Steven Spielberg gone gory. And we haven’t even got to the opening credits yet.

To play the lead in Crime Story, Mann and the show’s creators, Miami Vice veteran (and ex-Windy City cop) Chuck Adamson and former Wall Street international investment banker Gustave Reininger, enlisted a relative newcomer to Hollywood, Dennis Farina. With a dark mustache broad enough to sweep streets and a pockmarked face that looked like it had been reclaimed from the scrap heap at Mount Rushmore, Farina made a most convincing Mike Torello--and why not, since he had actually served 18 years with Chicago’s police force before moving into film consulting and then acting. There was impatience, cynicism, and perpetual disgust in Farina’s heavy-lidded gaze. Viewers had little trouble accepting him as the head of the Chicago Police Department’s Major Crime Unit (MCU), “an elite cop squad that goes after big scores and high-ticket crooks,” to quote from TV Guide’s 1986 Fall Preview edition write-up on the series. Other notable MCU members included Torello’s second-in-command, Sergeant Danny Krychek (played with volcanic authority by Bill Smitrovich) and cigar-chomping Detective Walter Clemmons (Paul Butler), who kept his thoughts--and his guns--close to his chest.

With a story arc that followed Torello and his ever-underpaid law-enforcement colleagues from America’s Rust Belt to its spit-shined buckle at Las Vegas, Crime Story reveled in period details. The automobiles sported whitewalls, bat-wing tail-fins, and front grilles as broad as shark grins. Furnishings bore sleek lines and often exaggerated, futuristic configurations. The cops seemed to have been issued fedoras and baggy overcoats along with their badges, and white socks peeked out beneath their black shoes, while the crooks--the climbers and the jamokes both--favored pricey sharkskin suits and hair slicked back with Brylcreem. The women either dressed demurely, like June Cleaver, or--if they were riding the high times with some punk--like exaggerations of whatever Vogue had most recently declared chic. It was an era when boys pitched pennies on street corners, gasoline cost a whopping 25 cents per gallon, and cigarette smoking was still considered stylish. Into the neon-lit nights, hi-fi players carried the rhythms of Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away” and Johnny Mathis’ “Chances Are.”

The art department for this show was frequently compelled to run newspaper advertisements in search of just the right atmosphere-producing accouterments, but the extra effort (while expensive) paid off in terms of transporting viewers backward through the decades. If it didn’t “slavishly re-create the early ’60s ...,” Dick Fiddy, a TV historian and consultant to the British Film Institute, told The Daily Telegraph in 2004, “it always had a tang of authenticity.” The fact that Crime Story was filmed in Chicago, at least until the action moved west partway through Season One, also gave it gritty credibility.

The series’ plots turned primarily on three characters, as the Times’ O’Connor explained: “Torello ..., the tough cop who can be as sadistic as the criminals he stalks; Ray Luca (Anthony Denison), the young and completely amoral mobster on the rise; and David Abrams (Stephen Lang), a liberal lawyer who, through his own criminal father, is keenly aware of all the justice that money can buy.”

Most of Crime Story’s tension was born from the rivalry between Torello and the pompadour-topped Luca, a good-versus-evil relationship that claimed victims on both sides, physically as well as emotionally. Torello’s dick-swinging pursuit of the flashier but equally hot-tempered thug-on-the-rise consumed him entirely, and was a contributing factor in the failure of this cop’s “beauty and the best” marriage. Torello’s brainy wife, Julie (Darlanne Fluegel), whose role early in the series was to tease out his post-Neanderthal humanness, remarked to him in the pilot that “They haven’t invented the hard time we can’t handle.” Yet she eventually grew tired of playing second-fiddle to Torello’s 24-hour job and putting up with his growing detachment and jealousy. Complaining that she wanted “attention and affection,” she first had an affair on him, and then abandoned Torello entirely, leaving our hero to become, I think, a less-dimensional figure, a blunt instrument to be wielded against the wiseguys of the world.

Meanwhile, Lang’s bespectacled courtroom advocate played a more nuanced and evolving part in this crime drama. For all of his self-doubts about what he was doing, whether he was really making a difference in terms of upholding the law and helping people, David Abrams was in many respects a reflection of Torello’s conscience--at least in the beginning, before he, like the lieutenant, was changed by the very corruption he’d sworn to overcome. Abrams also helped to illuminate some of the social and justice issues that confronted Americans during the 1960s. For instance, in one particularly good first-season episode, “Abrams for the Defense,” the lawyer defends a poor black apartment dweller on trial for assaulting his Polish slumlord. The case looks like a loser from the opening gate, but Abrams is too idealistic to bow to the odds against him; instead, he goes about the business of gathering evidence to demonstrate how the living conditions his client and that man’s family have had to endure provoked his aggression. And over the course of it, Abrams becomes enamored of an African-American investigative journalist, portrayed by former blaxploitation actress Pam Grier (later the star of Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film, Jackie Brown). In those days, inter-racial relationships were frowned upon--often by both sides--and even Abrams isn’t blind to his violating cultural taboos in the name of love.

Mann told reporters that the concept of Crime Story had been influenced by scripts he’d worked on for Police Story, an acclaimed 1973-1978 NBC anthology drama created by cop-turned-novelist Joseph Wambaugh. He wanted his new series to contain long story- and character-development arcs, rather than depend on standalone episodes, and he predicted it would have a five-year lifespan. According to the movie blog Radiator Heaven:

Mann said that the first season of the show would go from Chicago in 1963 to Las Vegas in 1980 where the characters would have “very different occupations, in a different city and in a different time.” He said, “It’s a serial in the sense that we have continuing stories, and in that sense the show is one big novel.” Mann and Reininger’s inspiration for the 1963-1980 arc came from their mutual admiration of the epic 15+ hour film, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Mann said, “The pace of our story is like the speed of light compared to that, but that’s the idea--if you put it all together at the end you’ve got one hell of a 22-hour movie.”

Things didn’t go quite as Mann had planned. Yes, Torello and company made it to Vegas, becoming federal agents--shades of The Untouchables!--still in hot pursuit of Ray Luca, who’d been sent by godfather Manny Wisebord (Joseph Wiseman) to establish mob operations in the casino capital. But all of that transpired with unbelievable speed--the series never did move forward through the 1970s, but instead remained in the “hip” ’60s. And yes, Crime Story offered some outstanding episodes, including the aforementioned “Abrams for the Defense” and a cliffhanger ending to Season One, in which Luca and his loyal but dimwitted henchman, Pauli Taglia (John Santucci), tried to escape by driving across Nevada’s Yucca Flats--just as an atomic bomb was being tested! (The story goes that the producers didn’t think this series would be renewed, so wanted it to go out with a bang.) However, Season Two was rather a disappointment, despite interesting twists such as the launching of a high-profile investigation into American organized crime (modeled on Estes Kefauver’s 1950 hearings, but with Kevin Spacey playing a more John F. Kennedy-like U.S. senator).

Thanks in part to Mann’s clout, Crime Story drew scores of distinguished guest performers, among them David Caruso (who did an excellent turn in the pilot as a mob boss wannabe), Julia Roberts (in her first TV appearance), Ving Rhames, Laura San Giacomo, Stanley Tucci, and even jazz trumpeter Miles Davis.

It also boasted one of television’s coolest opening sequences. Singer Del Shannon provided the theme song--a reworking of his 1961 hit, “Runaway”--while the visuals leaned toward period imagery. The original version, shown below, combined historical film footage from Chicago (cops on motorcycles, airplanes landing at Midway

Airport, commercial neon, etc.) with cuts of the flashing lights and chrome embellishments on vintage gas guzzlers.

After Crime Story’s action moved out west, its main title sequence--embedded at the top of this post--shed what had been dark and moody elements in favor of bursting, effervescent neon from the Las Vegas Strip, combined with appreciative sweeps over gambling tables. Mike Torello and his squad were literally outshone by all the flash and dazzle of Sin City at its glamorous height. (It may be no coincidence that this second opening sequence for Crime Story is reminiscent of the main titles to Robert Urich’s first private eye drama, Vega$, which Michael Mann created.)

Despite these and other strengths, Crime Story failed to live up to NBC’s inflated expectations. As Radiator Heaven recalls:

When the show debuted on September 18, 1986, following Miami Vice, the two-hour pilot had a 20.1 national Nielsen rating and a 32 percent audience share. The ratings dipped when it was counter-programmed against ABC’s Moonlighting. By October, the show dropped below a 22 Nielsen share, where a series is deemed a “failure.” Despite low ratings, Crime Story was picked up by NBC to finish the 1986-87 season. This prompted the network to move the show to Friday nights after Miami Vice on December 5, 1986, where its ratings improved but it still lost to Falcon Crest. NBC temporarily pulled Crime Story off the schedule on March 13, 1987. In order to get more people to watch, Farina and other cast members promoted the show in five U.S. cities.

It was a noble effort, to be sure--enough to win the show a second season. But the optimism didn’t last. The final episode of Crime Story--another cliffhanger, in which most of the regular cast appeared to have been killed when their plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean--was broadcast on May 10, 1988.

So, was that the end of Mike Torello, Ray Luca, and the rest? Viewers will never know. Executive producer Mann went on to make one more TV series, the police procedural Robbery Homicide Division (2002-2003), but was also responsible for such films as Heat (1995), Miami Vice (2006), and this year’s Public Enemies. Dennis Farina continued doing television, starring in the short-lived comedy-detective series Buddy Faro and then a not-half-bad sitcom called In-Laws before joining the cast of Law & Order for a two-year stint. Shaking off the psychotic killer-rapist mantle he’d worn as Luca, Anthony Denison portrayed an undercover agent in Wiseguy and now plays a cop on Kyra Sedgwick’s TNT-TV crime drama, The Closer. Stephen Lang is currently the co-artistic director of the Actor’s Studio in New York City, and can be seen in the new comedy film, The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Despite periodic calls for a full-length theatrical film that would answer the questions left dangling after Crime Story signed off for the last time 21 years ago, no such production appears to be in the offing. We’re left to watch, and rewatch, the DVD releases of Season One and Season Two and wonder, What happened next?

The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #8

Series Title: Homicide: Life on the Street | Years: 1993-1999, NBC | Starring: Yaphet Kotto, Andre Braugher, Clark Johnson, Melissa Leo, Richard Belzer, Jon Polito, Ned Beatty, Kyle Secor, Daniel Baldwin | Theme Music: Lynn F. Kowal

A Baltimore Police homicide detective taught me how to carry a wallet. OK, it was a fictional TV detective, but so what? Detective Frank Pembleton, brought to life with brilliant intensity by Andre Braugher on Homicide: Life on the Street, explained to his partner, Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor), that men should carry their wallets in the front pants pocket. Like most men, I had always carried mine in my back pocket. Pembleton pointed out that carrying the wallet in the back pocket throws off proper alignment of the spine whenever you’re sitting down and makes it easier for a pickpocket to grab your wallet undetected. I’ve carried my wallet in the left front pocket of my pants ever since.

Homicide: Life on the Street ran for seven seasons on NBC-TV, from 1993 to 1999. It was based on a non-fiction book by David Simon, a longtime crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun (and the husband of newsie-turned-novelist Laura Lippman). In 1987, Simon took a year off from the newspaper to shadow a team of homicide detectives from the Baltimore Police Department. His book about that experience, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, was published in 1991. Although the TV show was fictional, it often depicted situations from actual cases worked by Charm City police detectives.

The show’s best-known main title sequence (embedded above) is done entirely in black-and-white, signaling a no-frills, serious-minded program to come. The drums-heavy music by songwriter and composer Lynn F. Kowal is more a series of punctuation notes than a melodic theme. You see, one by one, the shadowed faces of the cast. You see a burning cigarette in an ashtray next to a half-drunk cup of coffee. You see a large dog barking aggressively at someone on the other side of a chain-link fence who’s out of our sight. You see a random set of storefront signs flash by. You see a mid-’50s Ford passenger car making a left turn. You see an old photo of Baltimore cops from the early 1900s. And finally, as you look at the door to the Homicide unit, you hear a telephone ringing until Detective John Munch’s voice announces “homicide.”

It’s what novelist-screenwriter Lee Goldberg would call a “mood sequence.” It conveys the “feeling and tone” of the show it introduces.

Homicide was a great ensemble series, blessed with strong writing and a superb cast. Lieutenant Al Giardello (Kotto) led a squad of eight detectives, who were paired off in teams of two: Stan Bolander (Beatty) and John Munch (Belzer); Steve Crosetti (Polito) and Meldrick Lewis (Johnson); Frank Pembleton (Braugher) and Tim Bayliss (Secor); Beau Felton (Baldwin) and Kay Howard (Leo). The detectives’ job, as Giardello delighted in reminding them, was to turn the names written in red on the squad room’s case board (open) into names written in black (cleared). Here, the lieutenant waxes poetic about that board:

“It’s pretty, isn’t it? The way the board just stands there. A silent sentry to the dead and gone. I love the way the red and black meld together in harmony. A haiku of color and vengeance.”

The unit’s interrogation room, where detectives coaxed, tricked, sweet-talked, and browbeat suspects into confessing their crimes, was known as “The Box.” Pembleton was the acknowledged master of The Box; he owned The Box. Here, he addresses a fellow detective who will join him in questioning a suspect:

“What you will be privileged to witness will not be an interrogation, but an act of salesmanship as silver-tongued and thieving as ever moved used cars, Florida swamp land, or bibles. For what I am selling is a long prison term to a client who has no genuine use for the product.”

Every fan of the show has favorite Homicide episodes, and I’m no exception. But the one episode that caught the widest attention--and drew the highest critical acclaim--was titled “Subway.” It aired on December 5, 1997, during the sixth season. In this hour, played as real-time 60 minutes, a man named John Lange falls (or was pushed) between a subway car and the edge of the platform and is crushed between the two. Although the paramedics soon realize that if the subway car moves, Lange, whose spine is broken, will die instantly, he recognizes the hopelessness of his predicament only gradually. Vincent D’Onofrio (Law & Order: Criminal Intent) earned an Emmy nomination for his tour-de-force portrayal of Lange. In a second Emmy-nominated performance, Andre Braugher, as Detective Pembleton, stays with Lange the entire hour. Watching the relationship between those two strangers develop is an emotionally compelling experience. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more powerful hour of dramatic television.

The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #9

Series Title: Perry Mason | Years: 1957-1966, CBS | Starring: Raymond Burr, Barbara Hale, William Hopper, William Talman, Ray Collins |
Theme Music: Fred Steiner

I can already imagine the disappointed and disgusted e-mail notes I’ll receive after choosing this classic TV main title sequence as one of the best ever produced. Those communications are sure to be filled with adjectives synonymous with “boring” and sent by otherwise upstanding folk who prefer the more action-oriented introductions to, say, Magnum, P.I., The Equalizer, Simon & Simon, Starsky & Hutch, and Riptide. How could I choose the opening of Perry Mason, the writers will ask, from among so many other options?

Well, we’ve already written on this page about some of those other openers, and there are still eight more specimens to be analyzed. However, none of them rivals this black-and-white Perry Mason introduction when it comes to subtlety, clarity, and elegant simplicity. All you have here is lawyer Mason (played by Burr), seated at the defense counsel’s table in what’s supposed to be a Los Angeles courtroom (but is undoubtedly just a stage set), apparently going through a brief on his latest murder case. Suddenly, he stops reading and looks up as if considering whatever he’s just discovered, his eyes shifting back and forth as he ponders the implications. He doesn’t make a big deal of his find, but a knowing smile lifts his lips just a little bit. You can tell he’s realized something that no one else has--not his client, not the local constabulary, not his usual antagonist, District Attorney Hamilton Burger (Talman), and not even his essential sideman, hard-boiled yet boyish private eye Paul Drake (Hopper). Mason has unearthed the key to his client’s release. It’s why they pay him the big bucks.

Accompanying this restrained mini-drama is one of the most recognizable TV themes ever created. It actually has a name--“Park Avenue Beat”--and was the work of Fred Steiner, a New York-born composer and arranger, who, believe it or not, also created the theme for The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. (Steiner, who celebrated his 86th birthday last month, has contributed his talents as well to Hawaii Five-O, Star Trek, Lost in Space, Gunsmoke, Have Gun--Will Travel, and the Hec Ramsey pilot film.) Together, this opener’s music and message set the stage for what Richard Meyers, in TV Detectives (1981), called the “most influential, most entertaining, and most popular judicial series ever made, Perry Mason.”

As most everybody must know by now, Mason was the creation of Erle Stanley Gardner. Born in Massachusetts in 1889, at age 10 Gardner relocated with his family to California. He went on to leave college before graduating, and later apprenticed in a law firm in order to pass the California bar exam. He married in 1912, became a successful attorney in Ventura, California, but wasn’t satisfied, so he began writing short stories at night.

In The Perry Mason TV Show Book: The Complete Story of America’s Favorite Television Lawyer (1987)--thankfully, available online--authors Brian Kelleher and Diana Merrill explained how Gardner broke into print:

The first worthwhile piece of fiction that Erle Stanley Gardner ever sold was published, indirectly, as a result of a cruel inside joke. It happened in 1923. Writing under the pen name Charles M. Green, the California-based lawyer-writer submitted a novelette titled “The Shrieking Skeleton” to a pulp magazine called Black Mask. The story was so bad the magazine’s staff sent it to their circulation director as a joke, pretending that the piece was going to be the lead featured in their next issue and asking him to work up some publicity ideas to promote it. The circulation director read the story and, thinking the editorial staff had taken leave of its collective senses, fired it back to them with comments such as “this plot has whiskers like Spanish moss,” and “the characters talk like dictionaries.”

With the gag played out, the staff returned the story to Gardner accompanied by the usual form-letter rejection slip. However, perhaps fatefully, the circulation director’s note blasting the story was mistakenly sent to Gardner as well. Gardner found the note and read the brutal, uncensored criticism. It may have been the best thing that ever happened to him.

Gardner took the story apart and, in three days, put it back together again. He worked so hard on it that his fingertips bled onto his typewriter keys. He resubmitted it to Black Mask with a letter explaining that he had seen the circulation director’s comments and had taken the criticism to heart. The magazine bought the revised version of “The Shrieking Skeleton” for $160.

After that, there seemed to be no stopping him. “In his first year of writing, he earned less than he made in a month as a lawyer,” fellow novelist Dorothy B. Hughes explained in her 1978 biography, Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason. “In his fifth year, his earnings had risen to $6,627. By the early thirties, his sales from writing had mounted to more than $20,000 yearly, a sizable income any day and particularly so in those depression times. At the pulp payment of a few cents a word, this meant a tremendous number of words pounded out on his typewriter night after night. He was prodigiously productive. The quota he set for himself was 1,200,000 words a year, or a 10,000-word novelette every three days, 365 days a year.”

Gardner developed “at least three dozen characters for the pulps,” according to The Thrilling Detective Web Site, among them con artist Ed Jenkins, gentleman thief Lester Leith, and his early model of a crusading attorney, Ken Corning. Perry Mason never made an entrance in the pulp magazines; his first outing was in the author’s debut novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933), which Hughes said he “wrote” by dictation, just as he might have composed a letter or a legal brief. “It took three and a half days. He admitted freely and frequently that it would be more accurate to say four days, as he spent an initial half day ‘thinking up the plot.’”

Over the next 37 years, until his death on March 11, 1970, Gardner turned out 81 more full-length novels starring his rugged-jawed, gimlet-eyed, and seemingly infallible advocate--a character that Hughes said was based on the author himself, only “dramatized and glamorized a bit.” (That this wasn’t even Gardner’s total creative output; that he also wrote, or at least dictated, many other books--most notably his Bertha Cool and Donald Lam series--simply boggles the mind.) Sales of his work skyrocketed, no doubt goaded upward by Mason’s appearances in more than half a dozen motion pictures (beginning with 1934’s The Case of the Howling Dog) as well as the 12-year run of a Perry Mason radio series.

But it was Mason’s transference to television that sealed his fame for generations. As National Public Radio reporter Nina Totenberg explained in a 2002 retrospective, Gardner was disappointed in his protagonist’s adventures in films and on the “wireless.” So, she explained, “when TV came calling, Gardner decided to form his own production company--almost unheard of at the time. He picked the cast, reviewed all the scripts, hired lawyers as writers, and split the profits with the [CBS] network.”

Perry Mason debuted on September 21, 1957, with British Columbia-born actor Raymond Burr leading the cast. “In retrospect,” critic Richard Meyers wrote, Burr “was the perfect choice [to portray Mason], but at the time the various network and studio executives must have been aghast that the Mason role was not to be played by a handsome leading man. In fact, in many of the films Burr appeared in before taking on Perry Mason, he embodied villains beautifully. ... His hulking form and prominent brow made him a fine bad guy, but his famous portrayal of reporter Steve Martin under trying circumstances (both on screen and behind the scenes) in Godzilla (1955) and his performance as [a] fiery district attorney in A Place in the Sun (1951) may have helped him win the Mason role.”

Of course, Burr wasn’t the only one who made Perry Mason a crowd-pleaser. The cast also included Barbara Hale as Della Street, the lawyer’s bright, trusty secretary and never-quite-realized love interest (a funny circumstance, when you consider that Gardner himself married his longtime secretary, Agnes Jean Bethell, after his estranged wife’s demise). William Hopper, the only son of notorious Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, played Mason’s thoroughly capable but drolly humorous private eye associate, Paul Drake, who had an office down the hall from his most frequent employer. William Talman, who’d played a ruthless killer in the noir film The Hitch-Hiker (1953) signed on to the thankless task of portraying D.A. Burger, destined to lose his cases to Mason on every Saturday night’s broadcast, while radio and stage actor Ray Collins took the role of dogged police lieutenant and Burger ally Arthur Tragg.

When I was a boy, watching Perry Mason with my beloved grandfather--a loyal fan of the show--I didn’t recognize how formulaic its episodes were. But the Museum of Broadcast Communications’ Web site spells things out succinctly:

Most episodes follow this simple formula: the guest characters are introduced and their situation shows that at least one of them is capable of murder. When the murder happens, an innocent person (most often a woman) is accused, and Mason takes the case. As evidence mounts against his client, Mason pulls out a legal maneuver involving some courtroom “pyrotechnics.” This not only proves his client innocent, but identifies the real culprit. These scenes are easily the best and most memorable. It is not because they are realistic. On the contrary, they are hardly that. What is so engaging about them is the combination of Mason’s efforts to free his client, perhaps a surprise witness brought in by Drake in the closing courtroom scene, and a dramatic courtroom confession. The murderer being in the courtroom during the trial and not hiding out in the Bahamas provides the single most important image of each episode. The murderer forgoes the Fifth Amendment and admits his/her guilt in an often tearful outburst of “I did it! And I’m glad I did!” This happens under the shocked, amazed eyes of district attorney Burger and the stoic, sure face of defense attorney Mason.

“It made no difference if the solution did not make sense or was impossible to follow,” remarked Meyers. “As long as Mason sounded convincing and the perpetrator admitted his or her culpability, the viewers swallowed anything. As a change of pace, Perry actually lost a case during the 1963 season [‘The Case of the Deadly Verdict’], but it was because the client was covering for someone else and allowed herself to be found guilty. Perry discovered the true villain anyway and got the stubborn victim out of jail.”

Raymond Burr won two Best Actor Emmy Awards for his work on Perry Mason, while Barbara Hale picked up her own Emmy for Best Supporting Actress. Over the course of this series’ nine seasons and amazing 271 episodes, it hosted an abundance of screen legends (Bette Davis and Walter Pidgeon among them), in addition to numerous rising talents (Burt Reynolds, Barbara Eden, Dick Clark, Robert Redford, Adam West, Angie Dickinson, Daniel Travanti, and others). What’s more, Perry Mason provided work for such recognizable writers as Jonathan Latimer (Solomon’s Vineyard) and Stirling Silliphant (who later created the James Franciscus private detective series Longstreet and put together the screenplay for In the Heat of the Night).

Although fans like my grandfather never tired of seeing Perry Mason wipe the courtroom floor with Hamilton Burger, CBS’s decision to move this show around on its prime-time schedule undermined its popularity. With Burr growing tired of the program’s pace, and with its ratings finally declining, the network announced that it would drop Perry Mason after the 1965-66 season. Meyers notes that the final episode, shown on May 22, 1966, “was a family affair in that the line producer had a bit part, the stage hands made up a crowd scene, and the presiding judge of the last courtroom battle was played by none other than Erle Stanley Gardner himself.”

However, Los Angeles’ best-recognized attorney would not go quietly into the night. In the fall of 1973, CBS sought to reawaken the magic with a show called The New Adventures of Perry Mason. The cast was led by Monte Markham, whose face was familiar from many guest-starring roles, with the blond Sharon Acker appearing as Della Street and the much-better-than-serviceable Harry Guardino stepping into Burger’s shoes. The Museum of Broadcast Communications contends that “Markham’s Mason was closer to the one featured in the original novels. Both were brash, elegant and coolly businesslike in their dealings with clients, something Burr never was.” Yet this new TV version ran just 15 episodes before being yanked off the air, never to be seen again, I fear. (It would be awfully nice if Paramount Home Video, which is in the midst of issuing DVD compilations of the original Perry Mason series, would include those “lost” Markham Masons as extras in one of its sets; however, I won’t hold my breath in anticipation of such a thing happening.)

Not until TV producer Dean Hargrove took on the task was Perry Mason successfully resurrected. By that time, Collins had died of emphysema, William Talman had succumbed to lung cancer (after filming landmark anti-smoking commercials), and William Hopper had perished of pneumonia at age 55. However, Burr (who’d gone on to star in the also-memorable Ironside) was still around, and so was Barbara Hale. After dusting off Fred Steiner’s iconic “Park Avenue Beat” theme (which had been replaced with a much less distinctive tune on The New Adventures of Perry Mason) and giving it a slightly bouncier beat, the two-hour made-for-TV movie Perry Mason Returns was broadcast on NBC in December 1985. It was the first of 26 Mason teleflicks shown over the next eight years, all with Burr and Hale. After Burr died in 1993, four more “Perry Mason Mysteries” were made, most of them featuring Hal Holbrook as a cunning country lawyer. But without Burr’s presence, those films seemed flaccid.

Fortunately, the original black-and-white Perry Mason episodes continue to be shown many places in reruns. If you can’t catch them that way, a number are available via the Fancast site--complete, of course, with one of the best main title sequences ever.

If I do say so myself.

The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #10

Series Title: The Streets of San Francisco | Years: 1972-1977, ABC | Starring: Karl Malden, Michael Douglas, Richard Hatch |
Theme Music: Patrick Williams

“Ah, yes,” everyone says. “That was the one with Michael Douglas and the bridge, right?”

Michael Douglas, the bridge, and a lot else besides. Running to five seasons on ABC between 1972 and 1977, The Streets of San Francisco showcased actor Douglas (son of the legendary Kirk Douglas) in his first major TV or film role, plus the already well-established Karl Malden. A variety of big names also passed through the sets as guest stars--Leslie Nielsen, Robert Wagner, Patty Duke--along with a smattering of waiting-for-the-big-break performers, such as Larry Hagman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Bosley, and Stefanie Powers.

The producer, Quinn Martin, was known for bringing us Cannon, The Fugitive, Banyon, Barnaby Jones, The Untouchables, and so many other familiar shows. One of this series’ scriptwriters, James J. Sweeney, picked up an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his Season 4 tale, “Requiem for Murder.” The inspiration for the series apparently came from the 1972 crime novel Poor, Poor Ophelia, by Carolyn Weston, whose books were selling well for British publisher Gollancz at the time.

The stories revolved around long-serving Lieutenant Mike Stone (Malden), who had been assigned to the Homicide Detail of the San Francisco Police Department’s Bureau of Inspectors (Detective Division), and his 20-something assistant inspector, Steve Keller (Douglas). It was a pretty conventional pairing; however, the two actors brought to it a depth and periodic poignancy that lifted this program out of its format. There was the inevitable mechanic of youthful Keller learning the difficult art of urban detective work, of course, but also a developing--and at times raspy--relationship between the veteran cop and his less time-worn colleague. Oddly, the predictable friction between instinct and empirical investigation was reversed: the older man tended to go by his “gut,” whereas the younger detective, with his college education, was occasionally the more methodical one.

The plots of Streets episodes were at times quite unusual--remember the one about the stolen snake venom?--and the San Francisco setting (the show was shot entirely on location in that Northern California city) was shown as by turns scenic and seedy (in the way that it was again in the Dirty Harry movies, which began to appear at the same time).

And, of course, there was the bridge. The title sequence has stuck in people’s minds, I think, because of the way it uses an almost subliminal motif which sets up the dynamic between the two main characters even before we meet them. A set of graphic bars opens diagonally across the screen, letting us into the space between the sloping cables that hold up the suspension span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (aka Bay Bridge). Right away, we’re shown the motif of space and tension. As the following images slot into place--carried along by the staccato, metallic-edged jazz theme (composed by Pat Williams, who also created the themes for such series as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Magician)--we’re constantly being shown how things stand in relation to one another: a tanker slides past the Bay Bridge, those big old ’70s cars move past each other on the Golden Gate Bridge, towers stack up next to one another on the skyline, buildings face each other on opposing sides of the streets, cable cars cross paths. Amid this jagged assemblage, the image of a crab on the Fisherman’s Wharf sign looks ominously threatening, and the words “Have a Pleasant Trip” on the road sign are loaded with irony. It’s a subtle, almost insidious presentation of the dynamic played out in the stories: the way the two cops stand opposite each other, complementing each other but also with tension between them--like the tense cables of the suspension bridges themselves, or the power cables connecting some of the buildings.

When the “diagonal bars” open up again to show us broken-nosed Karl Malden in his archaic fedora hat (at least, I think that’s a fedora) and then Michael Douglas in his smooth college-boy jacket, this motif of “tense pairing” is crystallized: we see a brief shot of the two in mid-discussion before the familiar images of the city begin to pile up again--Coit Tower, the Ferry Building, Chinatown. When the “diagonal bars” show us the episode’s guest stars, those faces too seem to be opposing each other, caught in some confrontation which we want to know more about, just as we want to see what’s at the end of the tunnel unfolding behind them. Having established this motif, the images take us on a rapid-fire travelogue of San Francisco: statues, crowds, busy streets, streetcars of course, but also a gathering dusk until neon signs light up. Again, the illuminated words and images seem to stand in opposition to one another and to the darkness itself. Even in the final shot, there’s a tense partnership between the clock tower and the arch of the bridge in profile against the twilight.

The Streets of San Francisco went into decline after 1976, at least in terms of audience numbers. Michael Douglas left the show in favor of bigger-time Hollywood exposure (his production work on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had been rewarded with an Oscar for Best Film of 1975). His exit was explained away with a clunky decision that the Steve Keller character should leave the police to become a teacher. Douglas’ replacement, Richard Hatch (later to star in Battlestar Galactica), gave a workmanlike performance, but the odd dynamic between the two cops seemed to lose its energy. The series was canceled after the fifth season completed its run in June 1977.

There were reports last year that CBS-TV has started work on a pilot for a new series of The Streets of San Francisco. No doubt it will be a delight if it materializes, but I wouldn’t want to be the person who has to come up with a title sequence to rival the original. Have a pleasant trip, indeed.

EDITOR’S TRIVIA: In his 1994 reference work, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa: A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television, author William L. DeAndrea had more to say about the adaptation of Carolyn Weston’s Poor, Poor Ophelia into the 1972 pilot for The Streets of San Francisco:

The novel was set in Santa Monica, and the characters were Sergeant Al Krug and Detective Casey Kellog. In the book, it is the younger detective who identifies with the falsely accused young executive; in the telefilm, it is the older cop. Weston wrote another Krug/Kellog novel, Susannah Screaming [1975], but it was never adapted for the series. Each episode did acknowledge her creation of the characters, however.

There was apparently a third Al Krug and Casey Kellog book, as well: Rouse the Demon (1976).

The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #11

Series Title: Ellery Queen | Years: 1975-1976, ABC | Starring: Jim Hutton, David Wayne, Tom Reese, John Hillerman, Ken Swofford | Theme Music: Elmer Bernstein

During the mid-20th century, Ellery Queen was three of the most famous figures in American crime fiction.

Introduced as the protagonist in a 1929 novel, The Roman Hat Mystery, Queen was a New York City-based mystery novelist and amateur sleuth of extraordinary perspicacity. He started out as indolent, condescending, and often mannerless (“one would not mind reading about him, but one would also not particularly want to know him,” opined bookseller-editor Otto Penzler in The Private Lives of Private Eyes, Spies, Crime Fighters, and Other Good Guys, 1977). But eventually Queen became an exemplar of the reliably rational detective, occupying a “genius” class along with Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, and others. His popularity during the 1900s was furthered by presentations of his adventures on radio and the silver screen, as well as his appearance in four separate TV series--the last of which provides this week’s exceptional main title sequence.

However, Ellery Queen was also the pseudonym shared by two real-life authors from Brooklyn--cousins and former advertising writers Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay. After creating their amateur sleuth in 1928 as part of a mystery-writing contest sponsored by McClure’s magazine, they worked together for more than four decades, writing the acclaimed Queen series, editing collections of their own work and anthologies of others’, and bringing to press a crime-fiction digest, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, that remains influential and in publication today, 67 years after its launch.

Penzler regards Lee and Dannay’s choice of a nom de plume “as one of the most brilliant and far-sighted promotional decisions ever made ... Noting that many people remember the name of a favorite detective hero, but often forget the name of the author, they decided to give their detective the same name as the one they selected as their byline.” That choice, though, did present the cousins with some challenges. “In 1932,” recalled University of Michigan-Flint student Cathy Akers-Jordan in a 1998 thesis presented as part of her master’s degree studies in American Culture, “Ellery Queen had attained such eminence that he was invited to give a lecture on mystery writing to the Columbia University School of Journalism. Not wanting to give away the author’s secret identity, Dannay and Lee flipped a coin to determine who would give the lecture. Lee lost and appeared as Ellery Queen, giving the lecture in a mask to maintain his anonymity; the audience was charmed.”

The conceit of these stories was that they were written by the young fictional ferret himself, who had agreed ever so reluctantly to record his investigations in print. (That reluctance was further supported by the notion, raised in The Roman Hat Mystery, that “Ellery Queen” was actually a pseudonym adopted by the wordsmith-detective to safeguard his privacy.) The tales portray Ellery as the weapon of last but welcome resort wielded by his father, much-decorated Inspector Richard Queen of the New York City Police Department, to solve seemingly impossible or impenetrable crimes. Both sire and son understand how advantageous Ellery’s intelligence can be in apprehending non-habitual malefactors, who don’t behave according to familiar patterns. Ellery is the one most able to “think outside the box,” to employ an overworked cliché. As their mutual friend, judge and stockbroker J.J. McCue explained in his introduction to The Roman Hat Mystery,

In matters of pure tenacity, when possibilities lay frankly open to every hand, Richard Queen was a peerless investigator. ...

But the intuitive sense, the gift of imagination, belonged to Ellery Queen the fiction writer. The two might have been twins possessing abnormally developed faculties of mind, impotent by themselves but vigorous when applied one to the other.

As I mentioned earlier Ellery--like many early fictional sleuths, including snobbish Philo Vance, who may have helped inspire this character--was not at first an especially sympathetic figure. The excellent Ellery Queen: A Web Site on Deduction explains that when we first met the snooper cooked up by Lee and Dannay, he was “a fairly recent Harvard grad wrapped in shapeless tweeds and sporting pince-nez,” something of “a stiff shirt wearing his lorgnet, a thin silver watch and falconer, a gray costume and walkingstick.” Ellery was made somewhat more likable by the fact that he and his stoop-shouldered but energetic father had a relationship that, while it appeared contentious at times, was basically warm and affectionate. We saw their interaction frequently, as they worked together and also shared an apartment on the third floor of a brownstone on Manhattan’s West 87th Street. (Ellery’s mother, said to have been the daughter of a wealthy family, was deceased before this series commenced.)

Only over time did Ellery’s superciliousness recede. “This change came about through the influence of the other media (magazines, movies, radio and TV),” explains the aforementioned Ellery Queen site. “His early days were punctuated by an arrogance that gave way to a sense of humor. The writers made him more human and thus fallible. He even admits what the reader has known from the start--that the human factor in his cases is as important as the logic and deduction--and begins to lighten up. The pince-nez disappears, and there’s more humor in the books, peaking with the two novels set during Ellery’s (frustrating) stint as a Hollywood writer: The Devil to Pay (1938) and The Four of Hearts (1938).”

Filing off some of Ellery Queen’s more unsociable edges undoubtedly also improved this crime-solver’s longevity (unlike Philo Vance--once described by Raymond Chandler as “probably the most asinine character in detective fiction”--who has pretty much disappeared over the last half century).

He debuted as a cinema star in 1935’s The Spanish Cape Mystery, adapted from a novel of the same name and featuring Broadway actor Donald Cook as young Ellery. The character would appear in nine films over the next seven years, the best four of them starring Ralph Bellamy. While those photoplays are hardly considered masterpieces, movie historian Jon Tuska insisted in his 1978 book, The Detective in Hollywood, that Ellery Queen, Master Detective (1940) is “an excellent film.” Bellamy, he added, “combined the bookishness of the Ellery of the novels with a worldliness that the character needed to appeal to a larger audience.”

Four years after the first of those movies reached theaters, the author-sleuth became an evening radio star in The Adventures of Ellery Queen, many episodes of which were written by Lee and Dannay, and later by author, editor, and critic Anthony Boucher. That half-hour show remained on the air--although it switched networks--until 1948, with actor Hugh Marlowe (later of the TV soap Another World) being the first performer to fill the title role. Hoping to attract a larger female audience, the show’s producers gave Ellery a love interest and secretary named Nikki Porter (played by Marion Shockley). Nikki appeared, as well, in most of the movie series, being best portrayed by Margaret Lindsay. And I understand that she finally found her way, too, into Lee and Dannay’s novels, debuting in 1943’s There Was an Old Woman. The cousins introduced another recurring woman player, agoraphobic gossip columnist Paula Paris, into the series in The Four of Hearts (1938), but she didn’t win a place in the radio drama. (If you’d like to listen--for free--to some old Adventures of Ellery Queen episodes, simply click here).

“America’s master crime solver,” as Ellery was often promoted in those days, made the leap to television in 1950. Again titled The Adventures of Ellery Queen, the new series gave Richard Hart the part of Ellery; unfortunately, he died of a heart attack after appearing in just a few episodes, and was replaced by Lee Bowman, who’d carry on with the show as it made its transition from the old DuMont Television Network to ABC in ’51. Bowman kept the role until Adventures was canceled a year later. (While it lasts, a complete 1950 episode of that series, “The Hanging Acrobat,” can be seen on YouTube. It’s split up into five parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5.) Two more Ellery Queen series came and went during the 1950s, one returning Hugh Marlowe to the Ellery role, the second--retitled The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen--starring George Nader and later Lee Philips. Neither mined ratings gold.

Television hadn’t seen the last of Ellery Queen, though. In 1971, Universal Studios turned Lee and Dannay’s 1949 novel, Cat of Many Tails, into an NBC teleflick entitled Ellery Queen: Don’t Look Behind You. Fans of the books probably looked forward to this movie’s debut, only to be disappointed by the results. Although Harry Morgan of Dragnet fame seemed nicely cast as Inspector Richard Queen (even if he didn’t boast the mustache that was so familiar on that character’s visage in the novels), hiring English-born actor Peter Lawford to play Ellery was a tremendous mistake. Far from being the bookish intellectual of the series, Lawford re-imagined Queen as an overaged, British “hipster,” with egregious results. The TV movie had been conceived as the pilot for a series that would have debuted as part of the original NBC Mystery Movie “wheel series.” Fortunately, network executives passed on the show, and instead filled the third Mystery Movie slot with McMillan & Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James. Whew!

Only three years later, Richard Levinson and William Link, the creators of Mannix and Columbo, took another crack at adapting Ellery Queen for the small screen, and came up with the finest results yet. They began by reviving the amateur sleuth and his “pater” in a two-hour pilot film based loosely on a 1965 novel called The Fourth Side of the Triangle, which had been at least partly ghost-written by American Jewish author Avram Davidson. Perhaps the screenwriters’ smartest decision was to make their teleflick a period piece, to set it in the late 1940s--the heyday of the Ellery Queen books and radio show. Cast as Ellery was tall, lanky Jim Hutton (the father of Leverage star Timothy Hutton), who brought charm, engaging innocence, and more than a bit of absentmindedness to the part; while his inspector progenitor was played by David Wayne (who I still remember best as the Mad Hatter on Batman). The pair looked their parts (though again, Wayne was clean-shaven), and their relationship on screen showed all the warmth that readers of the Queen books had come to expect.

Following the success of the pilot, Ellery Queen debuted on Thursday, September 11, 1975. It was deliberately old-fashioned, not only by the fact of its period setting in Truman-era New York City, but because it used many of the hoary conventions of crime fiction, to camp effect. A murder was committed, Ellery and his father investigated, clues were sprinkled about here and there for observant TV addicts to gather, and in the run-up to the conclusion of each episode, Ellery would suddenly turn to the camera and announce that he’d figured out the mystery--but, he wanted to know, had viewers done the same? (That “challenge to the reader” had earlier been a factor in the books.) Then, after a commercial break, all the suspects would be gathered into some room, where Ellery laid out how the crime of the week had been committed--and who was responsible.

Although that format struck some viewers as too moss-grown, the series offered ample humor to go along with it. It also boasted an abundance of famous weekly guest stars, including Ray Milland, Murray Hamilton, Geraldine Brooks, Ida Lupino, Donald O’Connor, Eve Arden, William Demarest, Eva Gabor, Craig Stevens (Peter Gunn), Anne Francis (Honey West) Don Ameche, and others. In addition, Levinson and Link introduced a couple of secondary players with tremendous appeal: radio drama host Simon Brimmer (played by a pre-Magnum, P.I. John Hillerman), who was touted as “America’s favorite criminologist, raconteur, and aficionado of the exotic and the bizarre”; and Frank Flannigan (Ken Swofford), a corners-cutting newspaper reporter who had the tendency to speak in attention-getting headlines. Tom Reese, a Tennessee-born actor who had appeared in many western and crime series over the years, was cast as Sergeant Thomas Velie, Inspector Queen’s right-hand man. He played the policeman just as Otto Penzler described Velie from the novels: “Not overly intelligent, he is less antagonistic than most other cops who have to deal with amateur detectives, even going so far as to call Ellery ‘maestro.’”

And what of Ellery Queen’s main title sequence? It was understated but brilliant. As you can see in the clip topping this post--taken from the episode “The Adventure of the Lover’s Leap”--each week’s installment began with a teaser about the suspects to come. (That teaser has, sadly, been lopped off many subsequent, syndicated presentations of this series, to make room for more commercial interruptions.) After the teaser, the opener commenced with a camera pan shot over an old manual typewriter, presumably the one on which Ellery wrote his mysteries. The jaunty, brass-dominated theme music was composed by Aaron Copeland protégé Elmer Bernstein, who is best remembered nowadays as the man responsible for the themes of The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape (1963). While the title and credits flashed on the screen, the scene behind rolled across what looked like a black-and-white-tiled floor, but could just as easily have been a giant chess board (suggesting the competitive nature of crime solving). Ripped photos, mementos of Manhattan’s famous Stork Club, and a paperweight shaped like the Statue of Liberty slid past ... along with artifacts suggestive of violence: a cracked pair of spectacles; a telephone receiver, its cord cut; a deadly sharp letter opener; and, last but not least, a chess queen, snapped in half.

Even more than three decades after Ellery Queen’s original broadcast, I still feel a tingle of expectation when I watch that introductory sequence. Its combination of imagery and music sets precisely the right mysterious tone for the show.

Sadly, though, neither that theme nor the big-name guest stars could keep Ellery Queen on the air. As critic Richard Meyers wrote in his book TV Detectives (1981),

All too quickly the thrill disappeared. Even though the new Ellery Queen series had all the complexity it would ever need, it had almost no compassion. For a fictional character who spent most of the sixties and seventies agonizing, the Hutton portrayal was annoyingly lifeless. He just did not seem to care about the victim or the guilty party. Hutton approached each murder as the most boring of mental exercises. Playing Queen as an even-tempered, absentminded bookworm, his apathy soon spread to the audience. After a season, this series was canceled.

I had never read an Ellery Queen novel before the Levinson and Link series debuted, but I was inspired by it to look back at the works of Manfred Lee and Frederick Dannay. Since that time, I’ve enjoyed a number of Queen novels. But I still think fondly of the 1970s drama (one of only two TV shows highlighted in this Rap Sheet series that aren’t currently available in DVD format, the other to be discussed soon). While some of its plots were too easily figured out, and I agree that Hutton could have brought more depth to his role, Ellery Queen might be said to have left behind a valuable TV legacy. Certainly, the later Levinson and Link-created series Murder, She Wrote followed a similar storytelling pattern and also focused on an author and amateur investigator. So does the Nathan Fillion series Castle, which is set to debut on ABC-TV in early March of this year.

One day I expect that TV producers will look around at each other and ask themselves, Why are we trying to copy Ellery Queen, when we could just as easily revive the character once more on the small screen? And so, the dogged police inspector and his brainy son will have another chance to inquire, Whodunit?

READ MORE: Ellery Queen TV Series Companion; “Just Who WAS This Ellery Queen, Anyway?” (Dr. Hermes Reviews).

The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #12

Series Title: Baretta | Years: 1975-1978, ABC | Starring: Robert Blake, Tom Ewell, Michael D. Roberts, Edward Grover, John Ward, Dana Elcar | Theme Music: Dave Grusin

One of the most interesting things about the 1970s cop drama Baretta is how it made it on the air in the first place. We have a combination of an actor’s reticence, a writer’s innovation, and James Garner’s willingness to return to television to thank for it.

TV historian and radio host Ed Robertson provides the twisted background details in the opening chapter of his book Thirty Years of The Rockford Files: An Inside Look at America’s Greatest Detective Series. As he explains it, in 1972 writer-producer Roy Huggins--already the brains behind such hits as Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, and The Fugitive--came up with the idea for a series about a private investigator who took on only “closed cases.” However, he had to set that aside, because he was already involved with another project. It was a police drama based loosely on the real-life career of Newark, New Jersey, cop David Toma, who was known for butting heads with his superiors, using disguises to bring down malefactors, and showing compassion for some of the criminals he sought. With the backing of Universal Television, Huggins put together a pilot for Toma, starring Tony Musante, Simon Oakland, and Susan Strasberg; it sold to ABC-TV. Toma debuted in the fall of 1973, with TV Guide describing its protagonist as “a maverick who prefers to work alone, enjoys taking big risks, and doesn’t like to use his gun.”

That series, which highlighted not only Toma’s work on the streets but his life at home with his wife, Patty (Stasberg), and their two children, got off to a fairly slow beginning. But by the end of the season it’s renewal seemed assured. There was just one problem, and it was daunting: Musante wasn’t interested in coming back to the show for a second year. He wanted to do other things (he eventually racked up a long résumé of theater performances), and had evidently made that clear, even before Toma debuted. But Huggins and Universal apparently thought they could change his mind. They couldn’t. So ABC had an arguable hit on its hands with no star. The solution was to drastically retool Toma, without losing its popular essence. Huggins might have taken that task on himself ... except that by then, he was developing his private-eye series for the fall 1974 season: The Rockford Files, to which he’d finally signed Garner, despite the actor’s wariness of TV work, after the failure of his 1971-1972 Western series, Nichols. Instead, Huggins handed the Toma re-conception off to one of his most able associates, writer Stephen J. Cannell. (While it’s impossible to know, it would certainly be interesting to see how different Baretta might have been, had Huggins remained at the writing helm.)

To replace the intense and talented Musante, Cannell turned to Robert Blake, “a terrific actor who had been doing great movie roles since 1959 but had never been given a chance to shine,” as Richard Meyers explains in TV Detectives (1981). Meyers continues:

Blake started his film career as Mickey Gubitosi in the Our Gang short comedies of the late thirties and early forties. As Bobby Blake he worked in the Red Ryder Westerns playing the Indian lad, Little Beaver. That led to many other parts in films like Humoresque (1947), in which he played the John Garfield character as a boy, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Leaving a hellish home life, he progressed on a self-destructive cycle which included juvenile delinquency, several arrests, and drug addiction.

Pulling himself out of the nosedive, Blake started back up the mountain, reaching a high plateau with his performances in In Cold Blood (1967) and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969). But even after these films, he was still known around Hollywood as a “talented unknown.”

Considering Blake’s background and presence, he seemed like an awfully square peg to be shoving into the round hole left by Tony Musante’s departure. As a consequence, more than just the name of this crime drama had to change before its reintroduction on ABC in January 1975 as Baretta. “Toma lived in a nice little house with a beautiful wife,” Meyers recalls. “[Anthony Vincenzo ‘Tony’] Baretta lived in the rundown cellar of the King Edward Hotel with a cockatoo named Fred. His best human buddy was Billy Truman (Tom Ewell), a former cop and presently the rummy manager and house detective at the hotel. ... Toma carried a gun, but did not like to use it. On his show, he rarely had to. On Baretta, the world of pimps, racketeers, prostitutes, rapists, crooked officials, and slum violence was laid out for all to see. Baretta did not like to use his gun either, but he would use anything when he had to, and he had to often. Even his best stool pigeon was a pimp named Rooster (Michael D. Roberts).”

Like Dave Toma before him, plainclothes cop Tony Baretta employed a theater’s worth of disguises as he chased down and cuffed petty crooks and mob bosses. The idea of fictional sleuths masquerading during the course of their jobs was hardly new; Sherlock Holmes was an early advocate of the practice, and was followed by Craig Kennedy, Arthur B. Reeve’s “scientific detective,” James West in The Wild Wild West, Jeff Cable in Barbary Coast, and many others. Some of Baretta’s get-ups defied belief, especially the more flamboyant ones. He was more at home in the T-shirts, jeans, and caps that comprised most of his personal wardrobe. Such attire--and the unlit cigarette that was so often found dangling from his lips or tucked behind an ear--reflected what viewers understood as his real personality: solidly blue-collar (“the orphaned son of poor Italian immigrants”), short on education but long on bravery, and not exactly contemptuous of authority, but undeniably resistant to its strictures. The randy and rowdy Baretta had more in common with some of the underworld figures he pursued than he did with the bosses to whom he reported, Inspector Karl Shiller (Elcar) and Lieutenant Hal Brubaker (Glover).

The series’ main title sequence was a splendid match with Baretta’s street-smart and cool air. Its visuals--interspersing action sequences with still, colorless images of Blake and the grimy streets his character knew best--quickly established this as a gritty, urban serial. Its theme music came from jazz pianist and composer Dave Grusin, who had previously created the themes for Dan August, It Takes a Thief, The Name of the Game, Assignment: Vienna, and other American shows. Most viewers probably remember the Baretta theme as having lyrics, cooked up by Blake’s friend, singer Morgan Ames. But when the series debuted, those lines were nowhere to be found. There was just the music peppered with what sounded like cockatoo squawks. A Web site called The Dave Grusin Archive explains the evolution of the Baretta theme, including how its vocals disappeared, and how they were eventually restored:

When time came to lay down the instrumental track, [prior to Baretta’s debut, Morgan Ames] had no words ready, save the couplet for a gospel-flavored piece she’d been thinking about (“keep your eye on the sparrow when the going gets narrow”).

It was all she had to offer Dave Grusin as they arrived at the studio. With session musicians standing by--top artists like Lee Ritenour and Harvey Mason just waiting around--he sat down at the piano and composed the tune right there, and by the end of the rhythm date, had recorded what top producer Jo Swerling Jr. has referred to as “the best main title theme ever created.” Not to mention one of the most popular tracks Dave Grusin has recorded (on the memorable “Discovered Again” album).

Morgan Ames now had her inspiration, and she put down the jaunty lyrics which make the song such a dazzler (all the while giving credit to Dave Grusin for the lines “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time”). ...

When Universal executives heard the recording, however, they were up in arms. It sounded “black,” they said. “No way” was their response. Star Blake, who’d been highly enthusiastic about the production of “Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow,” however, failed to defend it, and so it was only the instrumental version which played over titles in the first season (vocals having been removed and overdubbed by guitar which played it wrong, and distorted the composer’s concept).

However, true to the Hollywood tradition of hypocrisy, the song which sounded “too black” for the first season was augmented in the second by the Morgan Ames lyrics--sung by none other than Sammy Davis Jr.!

Theme songs with lyrics aren’t exactly commonplace in televised crime dramas--or for that matter, any other sorts of series (probably because enough of those that actually made it to the air have been abysmal, a prime exception being this one). Even Isaac Hayes’ famous theme vocals from the 1971 film Shaft were expunged when private eye John Shaft was transferred to television in 1973. Yet, the Baretta lyrics worked well in concert with what else was going on in that series’ opener. (A full version of the song can be found heard.)

Baretta had a good four-year run on ABC, attracting a succession of estimable guest stars and drawing on a high-quality stable of writers (among them future novelist Robert Crais). It was by no means, though, an easy endeavor, according to TV Detectives:

Blake made Baretta work on sheer force of personality. Everything was written for and around him, or else he would rewrite it to his satisfaction. By the second season he had basically taken control of the production--eating, sleeping, and dreaming Baretta. The crew was reportedly devoted to the feisty actor and together they presented Blake’s fantasy points of view to a watching world.

Blake stressed antiviolence, but Baretta lived in a violent world of mobsters, nun-rapers, child molesters, and psycho hoods. The show tried to be honest yet still very entertaining. It was as if the leader of the Bowery Boys had grown up to be a super cop. Blake’s mangling of the English language lived on after the series’ demise in 1978. His “You can take dat to the bank” and “Dat’s the name a’ dat tune” are still being quoted.

Blake’s road since the cancellation of Baretta has been rocky, to say the least. He tried to return to series television in the early ’80s playing a Bogart-esque gumshoe in Los Angeles named Joe Dancer, but despite his enthusiasm and the filming of four TV movies built around the Dancer character--one of them penned by Crais--no series was forthcoming. Blake went on to star as mysteriously vanished labor leader Jimmy Hoffa in the 1983 miniseries Blood Feud, and he portrayed a tough, inner-city priest in the short-lived 1985 NBC-TV series Hell Town. However, as one might have expected, his arrest and prosecution for the 2001 murder of his second wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley, did nothing to endear him to the fans he once had. (He was ultimately acquitted in the criminal case, but found liable in a later civil case for the wrongful death of Bakely.) The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) says that Blake’s last big- or small-screen role was in David Lynch’s 1997 film, Lost Highway.

The premiere season of Baretta was released on DVD in 2002. There’s also a cheaper, three-episode “Best of Baretta” disc for those who would like just a taste of Blake’s best-remembered work. (No word yet on the release of any subsequent seasons.) Before revisiting Baretta, though, it’s necessary to put aside the sordid recent history of its star, and view this series as people did when it first came out. The show certainly has its flaw; Blake played his detective as a bit too boyish and naïve at times, and unbelievably tough at others. Yet there was an uncluttered honesty about Tony Baretta that remains watchable, even 30 years later.

And you can take dat to the bank.