Thu 17 Jul 2014
LOST AND FOUND AT YOUTUBE by Michael Shonk: PETROCELLI (1974-1976).
Posted by Steve under TV mysteries[18] Comments
LOST AND FOUND AT YOUTUBE
by Michael Shonk:
PETROCELLI. NBC, 1974-1976. Paramount Television / Miller-Milkis Production. Cast: Barry Newman as Anthony “Tony†Petrocelli, Susan Howard as Maggie Petrocelli, and Albert Salmi as Pete Ritter. Created by Sidney J. Furie and Harold Buchman. Developed for television by E. Jack Neuman. Executive Producers: Thomas L. Miller and Edward K. Milkis. Producer: Leonard Katzman. Executive Story Consultant: Jackson Gillis. Story Editor: Dan Ullman. Music by Lalo Schifrin.
“The Golden Cage.” 11 September 1974. Teleplay by Dan Ullman. Story by Leonard Bercovici. Directed by Joseph Pevney.
Guest Cast: Joseph Campanella, Rosemary Forsyth, Morgan Woodward and William Windom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0E3GOvbhDc
This was the series first episode and aired opposite two other new series, ABC’s Get Christie Love and CBS’s The Manhunter. (See my review of The Manhunter here.)
The series featured Anthony Petrocelli, a Harvard-educated lawyer and proud Italian, who decides to leave New York for the small community of San Remo, Arizona, to help the powerless and innocent. The first case involved the abused wife of the richest most powerful man in the county.
Petrocelli would last two seasons.
One note of warning, shows can come and go fast on YouTube and others remain there for years. This is one you might want to hurry to check out.
July 17th, 2014 at 1:43 pm
From http://www.tv.com/shows/petrocelli/
” … Petrocelli is unique in another way, as well. It was first a 1970 movie, entitled “The Lawyer”. In this film, Barry Newman played an attorney who was defending a doctor accused of murdering his wife, a case loosely based on the Sam Sheppard trial. In 1974, Newman was called back to do a similar made-for-TV movie called “Night Games”. Albert Salmi was now playing his investigator.”
I did some looking around, and both movies and the complete series are available on the collector-to-collector market. I remember the series slightly, so I’m tempted to buy a set. If it was on opposite GET CHRISTIE LOVE, that must explain why I remember PETROCELLI only slightly. I hadn’t thought about the series in years.
July 17th, 2014 at 1:52 pm
Haven’t seen this in years, but I remember it quite vividly. An enjoyable series. Some British TV comic at the time made the joke that he was a better lawyer than a builder, as his house never moved from being a mass of building materials over the two series.
July 17th, 2014 at 2:02 pm
You may notice I left out my opinion of the show. I have been spending a lot of time at YouTube finding lost forgotten series and have been wondering how to share those finds. I also have been looking for a way to do a short post to intermix with my longer research heavy reviews.
PETROCELLI was one of the 70s shows I watched but was never among my favorites (in those days we watched TV shows not because they were good but because it was the best thing on at that time period). I found the treatment of women in this episode pure 1970s and dated, but the ending surprised me.
July 17th, 2014 at 2:04 pm
Steve, the TV Movie and entire series (both seasons) are available to watch on YouTube.
July 17th, 2014 at 2:16 pm
2. BRADSTREET, the series is a good example of TV mystery heroes of the 70s in America and England. Ethnic idealist going up against the established corrupt authorities. The living in a trailer out in John Ford country was the producers attempt to give the series a unique look and gimmick, slightly similar to Harry Orwell’s boat.
July 17th, 2014 at 2:43 pm
Petrocelli was clearly in the watch it because nothing better is on list. I mostly remember Newman from this and a fairly good movie based on an Alistair MacLean novel, Fear is the Key.
I was out of the country for most of the seventies and while I have seen a lot in reruns over the years any first run episodes I saw would have had French dubbing, though I can’t recall any. To be honest the style and look of many 70’s series leaves me cold, all split screens, flat two dimensional look, and most seemingly all filmed on the same handful of sets. Republic westerns had more variety of settings.
The whole anti establishment thing always seemed half hearted in most of these. Ethnicity was about the only major new factor other than longer hair. Nowhere save in the television universe would Petrocelli have been considered to be in any way a young antiestablishment type.
July 17th, 2014 at 5:07 pm
Thinking about it, the 30-something Newman was probably one of the younger leads in TV detective series at the time. My memory is that the whole army of Columbo/Kojak/McCloud/Rockford were all over 40, and in some cases much older. I get the feeling that American TV perhaps tried to get hold of people who were already film stars, but perhaps beginning to slide. In Britain, the lack of a movie industry meant that they tended to cast people who were on their way up, but had not quite made it yet. Shows like SHOESTRING and BERGERAC had leads who were either in their late 20s or mid 30s.
British filmed series of roughly the same period tend to be slightly more imaginatively shot. One of the main reasons for this was that the series tended to be half the length of the US ones, meaning that that each episode was given several more days shooting time. It may also have been the case that the flat, simple style had become so ingrained that directors tended to adopt it without thought. I remember reading an interview with a Brit director who moved to US TV in the late 70s. After the shock of the reduced shooting time, he did what he had always done and tried out a few unusual camera and lighting settings. At first he was viewed as something of an eccentric for breaking out of the usual style.
July 17th, 2014 at 5:15 pm
6. David, BANACEK may have started the pc beginnings of I am proud to be a (fill in ethnicity)-American. Petrocelli reacted the same as Banacek to mispronouncing his name and his ancestry.
Notice Jackson Gillis was head writer so there was a PERRY MASON feel (taking the client for one dollar, rejecting money and power). Another seasoned pro was e. jack neuman who had been doing mysteries all the way back to radio. Executive producers Miller and Milkis are better known for sitcoms such as HAPPY DAYS.
I have read that PETROCELLI was the first or one of the first TV series to use flashbacks in the courtroom to recreate for the audience the crime or the person’s version of what happened.
July 17th, 2014 at 5:35 pm
7. BRADSTREET, the TV series director rarely has much say in the production. American TV has the writer/producer as main visionary. The showrunner wants a certain look, rhythm and style of every episode to match. In the past all weekly TV series used various directors to film the show. This sped up the process with one filming while another was in preparation for the next episode. And the more workman they were the more they worked.
Three camera sitcoms such as James Burrows and the MTM comedies were an exception.
Today, especially with the limited run cable series, a director can have a say in the shows look but only if he regularly directs the series, Even then, the showrunners must approve or trust the director to understand the visual voice of the show.
The RED DWARF showrunner found it impossible to convert to the America way of doing sitcoms. The Americans get a group of comedy writers in a room and everyone tosses jokes at the story, where the English usually have one writer writing the script and more focused on story and character.
July 18th, 2014 at 2:02 am
Yes, I remember reading about the current showrunner of DOCTOR WHO, Steven Moffat, trying to take his comedy COUPLING to the States. The original was noted for the intricacy of the scripts (one of them has the same 9 minutes repeated twice from different points of view,another has one of the characters trying to chat up a girl who cannot speak English, with the ‘conversation’ played first from his point of view, and then hers). The sheer amount of episodes wanted by the US network meant that he had to have lots of people in the writers pool, which meant that this sort of thing didn’t really get done. They also removed all of the dirty jokes, which didn’t help.
Someone once explained to me that one of the fundmental differences between US and British network TV was that the latter often tried to avoid the ’27 episodes a year’ pattern because of the difficulty of getting actors to commit to that kind of schedule. In the USA the idea that you will tie yourself into a seven year contract is much more part of the ethos of the acting profession.
July 18th, 2014 at 12:54 pm
The British system has become the American cable system. The networks old style series such as NCIS remain more popular with viewers, with AMC’s WALKING DEAD the only serious ratings challenge from cable for the mass audience.
The networks are changing. They are owned by huge corporations that own cable networks as well, so they are open to change. The major networks have become very serious about airing original programs through the entire year. The success of UNDER THE DOME last year convinced CBS to join the rest and begin to adapt. Because of that Americans are seeing more limited series airing, shows such as SLEEPY HOLLOW, ALICE IN WONDERLAND, CROSSBONES, and HOSTAGES.
The Emmys this year has brought the issue of length of seasons to the forefront. The critics squealed in protest after Emmys annual rejection of the networks this year including GOOD WIFE and James Spader and THE BLACKLIST. There is a movement to change the categories to take in account each series number of episodes.
The problem is the American audiences have short memories. Rating hits that have taken a break have often lost its audience during its absence. Will the fans of SLEEPY HOLLOW still be there when it returns months after ending its short run?
July 18th, 2014 at 4:45 pm
The chief reason the British system developed came out of BBC radio drama where actors would do a short run of a series, go off and do a film or a play and come back for more. This is how you end up with actors the stature of Judi Densch in situation comedies.
British actors were more often working professional actors than stars. They didn’t depend on the small screen for their success. Even today you find actors doing television, movies, and stage in England, though not as much as in the past.
Even long running series like Last of the Summer Wine did very short seasons. Doctor Who is probably doing more now at 10 a season than ever before.
The commitment of American television (Gleason did 39 episodes of the Honeymooners for one season) meant there wasn’t much time for actors to do other things.
That was one reason actors would disappear for parts of some seasons — they were doing a movie.
Cable is finally leveling things out a bit, but while Under the Dome is a hit, it is not that new and idea — summer replacement series were common in the past and some became hits. Today they get more respect, and there are three seasons of new material where in the past it was first one season of new material(fall through spring), then two (fall/winter and winter/spring with summer primarily reruns), there are now three seasons though summer still doesn’t have the cachet of the big Fall season.
I think we are still a long way from the end of the regular network series, but meanwhile with cable there are at least some semi grownup choices.
Coupling was a brilliant comedy, but there was no way they could ever do it on American television even as racy as Two and a Half Men and Two Broke Girls Are. And as pointed out one writer often handles a series in England, Last of the Summer Wine with every episode credited to its creator Roy Clarke for its thirty-four year run.
July 18th, 2014 at 7:17 pm
12. David, nothing television can do has not been tried before by television. Television has changed over the decades and continues.
Everything about television from the major networks to the TV set itself are facing major changes. Everything except the formats.
On the comedy side creative choices are limited to three camera sitcom (I LOVE LUCY) to the one camera format (MASH).
(Did you know cable is turning to more original comedies because the networks can’t make enough successful ones to fill syndication needs?)
On the drama side the key choice today is episodic TV series with stand-alone stories (NCIS) or the serial episodic TV series (WALKING DEAD). Today it is not uncommon to see the long term episodic TV with a splash of serial storyline (BLACKLIST). Series such as JUSTIFIED and PERSON OF INTEREST uses the first few episodes of the season as stand-alones then evolves into the serial storyline of the season. None of those formats are new nor going to vanish soon.
(Syndication depends on the TV series with stand-alone episodes. It is difficult to show a long running series if every episode has to be shown in order. Networks are finding they can make up their losses in syndication through increasing profits from sales to streaming services.)
Even the short form limited series are not new. The mini-series played a major role in 1970s television (ROOTS).
(One of the things that killed the mini-series was the lack of syndication sales. Streaming services don’t need 100 episodes of a series to make a profit.)
The major creative advancements in television have come from the technical side with digital replacing film, cameras and lighting improving, and special effects making a GAME OF THRONES possible.
The writing, acting and to a point even directing has approved on TV because the talent that worked in small budget dramatic and comedic movie gems have been forced out of films by the special effect blockbuster and the fewer films the studios produce each year.
What I miss most about 70s TV is its innocence and fun. The story in PETROCELLI is so simple, bad hat vs white. Much of today’s dramas are complicated and depressing. The scene when Maggie Petrocelli is alone with the two male visitors would be more violent, more “real” today (and if it had been on pay-tv we would have seen Susan Howard’s breasts).
July 18th, 2014 at 8:43 pm
I remember Petrocelli as being one of the very few “pure” whodunits on the air during this period – which is why it got my business in its first run.
The flashback structure mentioned above was the show’s principal gimmick; the emphasis was on Petrocelli’s averring that his alternative explanation fit all the facts we already knew about the crime – “fair play” defined.
I had forgotten that Jackson Gillis was involved with this show at an executive level; I suppose I ought to find a set somewhere, so I can see how many episodes he wrote himself (Olive Films, please take note).
A few other notes:
– In the theatrical The Lawyer, Tony’s wife was named Ruth, and she was played by Diana Muldaur.
I can’t recall Pete the sidekick’s last name in the movie, except that it wasn’t Ritter. The part was played by Ken Swofford, then just getting well-known as a character man.
I have no idea if either player was considered for the four-years-later TV series, before the hirings of Susan Howard and Albert Salmi (academic anyway).
– Sidney J. Furie was producer and co-writer of The Lawyer, which explains his “creator” credit; to the best of my knowledge, he had no connection with the series, beyond collecting a check every week.
– I’ve always wondered exactly what Barry Newman’s role in the creation of the Petrocelli series was.
The original movie hadn’t been a box-office success; 1970 was a crowded movie year, and The Lawyer, which got generally favorable reviews (as did Newman), got lost in a considerable shuffle.
Best guess scenario: Newman’s agents probably were urging him toward television (he’d had his first success on The Edge Of Night several years before), and together they decided that Tony Petrocelli might be a better fit on the small screen than the large.
The foregoing is pure speculation – but it does fit “the facts as we know them”.
July 18th, 2014 at 10:40 pm
14. Mike Doran, Jackson Gillis did not receive any written by (on air) credits. He was there for only the first season. Producer Leonard Katzman, best known for DALLAS but also did WILD WILD WEST and GUNSMOKE had several writing credits. Katzman produced all of the first season except one produced by Lou Morheim (episode 21).
Season Two saw a change in the opening credits. Here is a link to the first episode of season two:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-teLotiTLo
CBS owns all Paramount TV series of this era. I doubt you see an official DVD come out but CBS is selling rights to its library for streaming to (I think) Amazon prime, so it could pop up there. Until then you can try and find a bootleg copy to pay for or check it out for free on YouTube while you can.
August 6th, 2014 at 11:05 pm
#14, Mike, you are right the character Petrocelli first appeared in THE LAWYER (1970), but there was also a TV Movie pilot done in 1974 called NIGHT GAMES and featured the series cast and locations (including the homestead under construction).
August 7th, 2014 at 7:14 pm
Hello again, Michael:
One of the earlier commenters mentioned Night Games, the 1974 pilot, which is why I thought I wouldn’t have to.
That does tie in to my asking about what Barry Newman’s role was in turning The Lawyer movie into Petrocelli the TV series.
My proposed scenario as explicated in #14 still seems as good as any, don’t you think?
August 7th, 2014 at 10:20 pm
17. Mike, I have no problem with your scenario. But I guess Newman went to TV because he had no film offers. My guess is someone at NBC or Miller/Milkis remembered the movie and proposed to adapted it for TV, thus the TV Pilot.
Oh, I was wrong in #15 CBS sold its streaming library to Netflix not Amazon Prime.