March 27, 1974
The Rockford Files premier episode.
The Rockford Files is an American television drama series which aired on the NBC network between September 13, 1974 and January 10, 1980. It has remained in regular syndication to the present day. The show stars James Garner as Los Angeles-based private investigator Jim Rockford and features Noah Beery, Jr. as his father, a retired truck driver.
The show was created by Roy Huggins and Stephen J.
Cannell. Huggins had created the
television show Maverick (1957–1962), which had also starred Garner, and he
wanted to try to recapture that magic in a "modern day" detective
setting. He teamed with Cannell, who had written for Jack Webb productions such as Adam-12 and Chase (1973–1974, NBC), to create Rockford.
The show was credited as "A Public Arts/Roy
Huggins Production" along with Universal Studios and in association with Cherokee Productions.
Cherokee was the name of Garner's company, which he ran with partners Meta Rosenberg and Juanita Bartlett, who doubled as story editor during most of Rockford's
run.
The series theme by composers Mike Post and Pete Carpenter was released as a single and went to #10 on the Billboard Hot 100, remaining on the chart for 16 weeks. and won a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement for 1975.
In 2002, The Rockford Files was ranked #39 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time.
Producers Roy Huggins and Stephen J. Cannell devised
the main character to be a rather significant departure from typical television
detectives of the time, essentially Maverick as a modern detective. Rockford had served time in
California's San
Quentin Prison in the 1960s due to a
wrongful conviction. After five years, he received a pardon. His infrequent
jobs as a private investigator barely allow him to maintain his dilapidated mobile home (which doubles as his office) in a parking lot on the
beaches of Malibu,
California.
The show's title sequence began with someone leaving a
message on Rockford's answering machine, which were still novel in 1974. A
different message was heard in each episode. These frequently had to do with
creditors to whom Rockford owed money, or deadbeat clients who owed money to
him. They were usually unrelated to the rest of the plot. As the series went
on, this gimmick became a burden for the show's writers, who had to come up
with a different joke every week. Suggestions from staffers and crew were often
used.
In contrast to most television private eyes of the
time, Rockford wears low-budget "off the rack" clothing and does his
best to avoid fights. He rarely carries his Colt
Detective Special revolver, for which
he does not have a permit, preferring to talk his way out of trouble. He works
on cold
cases, missing persons
investigations, and low-budget insurance scams, and he repeatedly states in the
series that he does not handle "open cases" to avoid trouble with the
police.
In early episodes of the show's first season,
Rockford's trailer is located in a parking lot alongside the highway (address
2354 Pacific Coast Highway) and near the ocean; for the rest of the series, the
trailer is at Paradise Cove (address 29 Cove Road), adjacent to a pier and a
restaurant ("The Sand Castle", now known as the "Paradise Cove
Beach Cafe").
In the series of television movies from 1994 to 1999,
Rockford is still living in a trailer, but it has been extensively enlarged and
remodeled.
In an interesting piece of homage, the trailer serving
as a home for Mel Gibson's "Martin Riggs" character and his
girlfriend, shown near the beginning of Lethal Weapon IV, appears to be located
at nearly the exact same spot.
The show went into hiatus late in 1979 when Garner was
told by his doctors to take time off because of his bad knees and back, as well
as an ulcer. He sustained the former conditions largely because of his
insistence on performing most of his own stunts, especially those involving
fist fights or car chases. Because of his excruciating physical pain, Garner
eventually opted not to continue with the show a number of months later, and
NBC cancelled the program in mid-season. It was also alleged that Rockford became
extremely expensive to produce, mainly due to the extensive location filming
and frequent use of high-end actors as guest stars. According to some sources,
NBC and Universal claimed the show was generating a deficit of several million
dollars, a staggering amount for a nighttime show in those days, although
Garner and his production team Cherokee Productions claimed the show always
turned a profit.
A pilot for a remake of the series was written and
produced for NBC by David Shore in 2010, with Dermot Mulroney playing the title character, but was not picked up by
the network due to complaints that it was not written well and the lead was
miscast. NBC then gave it to Peter Berg to rewrite and produce. As of January 2011, the
project is still in development at NBC.
March 30, 1964
Jeopardy debuted on NBC-TV.
March 30, 1994
First episode of Ellen (originally titled These Friends of Mine for season one).
Ellen, Ellen DeGeneres' popular show about single thirty-somethings in Los Angeles, premieres. The show quickly became one of the country's Top 15 most watched shows and drew even more attention when, in April 1997, the gay title character "came out" to her friends in a high-profile episode featuring cameos by Oprah Winfrey, k.d. lang, Demi Moore, Billy Bob Thornton, and Dwight Yoakum. Some 42 million viewers watched the special hour-long program. Ellen became the first prime-time sitcom to feature a gay leading character. However, the show was not renewed the following season.
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