Tue 29 May 2012
A TV Movie Review by Michael Shonk: DEAR DETECTIVE (1979).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV mysteries[23] Comments
DEAR DETECTIVE. Made for TV movie. CBS, 28 March 1979. Two hours. Roland Kibbee & Dean Hargrove Production in association with Viacom. Cast: Brenda Vaccaro, Arlen Dean Snyder, Jack Gingas, M. Emmett Walsh, Michael McRae, Jet Yardum, Corinne Conley, Lesley Woods, Ron Silver, John Dennis Johnston. Music by Dick & Dean DeBenedictis. Written and produced by Roland Kibbee & Dean Hargrove. Director: Dean Hargrove.
Dear Detective is a television cozy. Detective Kate Hudson is brilliant at her job, wonderful as a mother, yet now faces a real challenge – a new boyfriend. Brenda Vaccaro is delightful as the likeable detective.
The mystery features a serial killer who stabs Councilmen to death while they are standing in the middle of a crowd. The mystery is the most interesting part of the TV-movie, but its overwhelmed by the need to establish all the characters in the three separate worlds of Kate Hudson.
It’s 1979, and a female detective is not always welcomed, but this is not Prime Suspect. Kate ignores the negative comments, lets the detectives she commands pamper her, accepts she can answer more of the questions on the Commander’s test than her cowardly Captain (M. Emmett Walsh), and is always one step ahead of everyone else.
The romance and personal sides of the story are too often unbearably cute. Kate and her new boyfriend, College Professor of Greek Literature Richard Weyland (Arlen Dean Snyder) meet when he is riding his Moped and she knocks him down with her car.
Home life features a daughter in fourth grade at a Catholic school (Jet Yardum), an understanding mother (Lesley Woods), and a wacky aunt (Corinne Conley). Kate has to phone her ex-husband so he could tell his daughter why he won’t be at her birthday party.
The cozy mystery has no suspects, only a trail of victims with one thing in common until Kate discovers another link. Clues are few and ultimately only lead to where the killer can be found. We learn who done it only when the killer attacks idiot and Kate’s rival, Detective Brock (Michael McRae). Of course, Kate knows there is trouble and arrives to save the day in a stupid-funny car chase that predates OJ.
A very short clip from one of the one-hour episodes:
Writers and producers Roland Kibbee and Dean Hargrove (who also directed) are familiar names to NBC Mystery of the Week fans for their work in Madigan (1972), Columbo (1973-75), and McCoy (1975) as well as TV Movies The Big Rip-Off (1975) and Return of the World’s Greatest Detective (1976). Kibbee died in 1984, while Hargrove continued with such series as Matlock and the Hallmark Channel mysteries, Jane Doe, McBride, and Murder 101.
The show was based on the French film Dear Inspector, aka Dear Detective (1978), starring Annie Girardot and Philippe Noiret and directed by Philippe DeBroca. Oddly, the movie was not mentioned in the credits, instead the closing credits had: “suggested by characters created by Jean Paul Rouland and Claude Oliver†and “based on a story by Philipe DeBroca and Michel Audiardâ€.
This TV-Movie was not the entire pilot for the series. Networks have been trying to find better ways to find the next hit series since television networks began. After the success of the mini-series Dallas in April 1978 lead to the hit weekly series, CBS decided to try again with four mini-series pilots, Married: First Year (four episodes), Miss Winslow & Son (six episodes), Time Express (four episodes) and Dear Detective (one TV Movie and three hour-long episode).
From Broadcasting (April 9, 1979): “We think it’s a good idea to test shows in the spring for possible fall airing.†Mr. Grant (Bud Grant, CBS Vice President of Programming) said, “We may pay more per episode in a limited run, but this way we give the public an opportunity to participate in the show’s development.â€
Despite a weak lead in from Miss Winslow & Son (24 share), this TV Movie had a 32 share, but still fell behind ABC reruns Charlie’s Angels (43 share) and Vegas (37 share) (Broadcasting, April 9, 1979).
The next week Dear Detective first hour-long episode would drop to a 26 share. (Broadcasting, April 16, 1979). The mini-series pilot finished in the season’s (September 11, 1978 through April 15, 1979) final ratings 44th out of 114 series with a 30 share (tied with Incredible Hulk and Hawaii Five-O) (Broadcasting, June 18, 1979).
According to TVTango.com, the hour-long episodes were opposite ABC’s first run series Mackenzies of Paradise Cove and NBC’s rerun of Wheels.
I actually enjoyed Dear Detective, mainly because of Vaccaro and her character. But like most cozy mysteries, there was too much cute romance and character comedy, and not enough mystery in this two-hour movie. I remain curious about the three one-hour episodes and if any of the mysteries were able to overcome the clutter of Kate Hudson’s life.
While this TV-Movie is available on pre-recorded VHS and in collector-to-collector format, the three one-hour episodes appear to be lost and forgotten.
May 30th, 2012 at 12:03 am
What do I mean by cozy? The murders take place in a crowd. The victim is standing in center attention then suddenly falls dead with a knife in his back. There is no blood and they are each covered by a sheet from there on. All three die this way.
There is a great deal of time spent with Kate’s family and new boyfriend. I did not take a stopwatch to it but the family/romance stuff seemed to take up the majority of time.
The ending scenes where the killer is captured are more cute and funny than violent nor imply any real threat of life.
Think MURDER SHE WROTE without suspects.
May 30th, 2012 at 11:05 am
Michael
Without being able to see the remaining three episodes, it may not be possible to answer this, but given the big boost of four episodes to show what the series was or would have been like, why didn’t it catch on?
Was it the cozy factor? It sounds as though it would attract viewers who don’t like a lot of violence in their mysteries.
I am thinking of MURDER SHE WROTE here, and you may have answered my question in the last line of your comment.
If anything, MSW made sure that there was a puzzle to be solved in every episode, and even without violence, the series was immensely popular.
You liked Brenda Vaccaro in the role, but would another actress have been better for the part and attracted more viewers? Or was the series in a sense built around Vaccaro?
The competition on the other networks does not seem to have formidable. MACKENZIES in particular seems to be awfully lightweight stuff and is, if anything, even more forgotten than DEAR DETECTIVE.
I think I remember watching DEAR DETECTIVE once or twice, but that may be my memory acting up again more than anything else.
I’ve found a cheap copy of this two-hour movie on VHS. I haven’t thrown away my player yet, so I’ll give it spin when it arrives.
May 30th, 2012 at 11:46 am
Today those ratings look great when a 10 share today is a hit, but the ratings were a disappointment. Both MACKENZIES (which premiered on another night) and DEAR DETECTIVE had their ratings fall after the first episode. And when you do a 26 share against MACKENZIES and a rerun, your future is not too bright.
Timing played an important role. ELLERY QUEEN failed in the 70s. It was a time of Spelling type camp. And as silly as this show got, it lacked the T&A of the popular shows of the time.
Kate Hudson was supposed to be a woman past her dating age. A normal average woman. Look at Anne Girardot who played the character in the French film. Vaccaro was among the few of that age who could play the average looking woman and who had the ability to handle the drama and comedy parts of the role without demanding to look gorgeous for the camera.
When you watch it, notice the music soundtrack. It, more than anything else, reminded me of MURDER SHE WROTE.
May 30th, 2012 at 5:26 pm
I think that all of us who comment here tend to make the same mistake:
We all assume that the quality of a show – how good or bad it is (or we think it is) – has anything to do with its success or failure.
Then as now, the main consideration in TV is how many heads are watching.
You gotta get more heads in your tent than the other guy gets in his tent.
Biggest crowd wins.
Lately, you add the junk science known as Demographics – getting the right (younger) age people in your tent.
Biggest crowd of them wins.
How good the show is – how well done, how good looking, how well performed – if you get that combo, that’s a bonus.
But those few extra heads in the tent make the decision for the brass.
(Especially if they happen to be younger heads … )
This comment is written in haste, at the end of business, thus its brusqueness.
I’ll think it over some more when I get home.
May 31st, 2012 at 9:12 am
Mike Doran
Everything you say is valid. In idle moments, such as I have, I have been investigating short-lived TV shows from the last dozen years on IMDB, and the comments on almost all of them are from people who really liked the shows and wonder why they were cancelled so soon without giving them a chance.
Invariably they blame the suits at the networks for pulling the plug too soon. But if people aren’t watching, it’s hard to blame them. Sometimes, though, the guys in the suits are to blame: for showing the episodes in the wrong order, jumping the series around in a different time slot every two weeks after skipping two, demanding changes in the cast or changing story lines in the middle of production, and so on.
But there are all kinds of reasons good, quality shows don’t make it. Just being ahead of its time is one of them. Michael suggested that this may have been one of the reasons DEAR DETECTIVE didn’t make it, being on opposite CHARLIE’S ANGELS, which was what people wanted to see back then.
Another may have been one you mentioned, demographics. DEAR DETECTIVE may have been skewed toward an older viewing audience, and a mostly female one, too. Michael suggests that it would have been a perfect fit for the Hallmark Channel, had it existed back then. I think he’s right. JANE DOE, McBRIDE, and MURDER 101 have mostly escaped any kind of critical notice, but they seem to have been successful, to have lasted as long as they did.. I’ve never watched but the pilot for one of them, MYSTERY WOMAN, I believe, one which Michael didn’t mention. It was good but not great, and I never felt tempted to watch it when it became a series, but if it’s been released on DVD, I see no reason why I shouldn’t. (I never thought to check and see, until now.)
May 30th, 2012 at 6:13 pm
Back in my newspaper days, I once got to name my regular column. No one understood why I called it “Between The Commercials.” I tried to explain in the world of network TV the commercials were all that mattered, the rest was filler.
It is getting better. “Fringe” and “Chuck” get a chance to do a final season, not because more people will watch but the networks know they have to reward loyal viewers if the arc shows have a chance.
The pay-TV networks are after number of subscribers and not interested in ads. Cable makes its money from what your local cable provider pays them as well as from advertisers. Their programming needs are different from the big four.
DEAR DETECTIVE would be a perfect fit for the Hallmark Channel. It is not surprising co-creator Dean Hargrove has been so successful producing mysteries for Hallmark.
But even those, JANE DOE, MCBRIDE, MURDER 101, never really excited anyone compared to the flashy stuff on USA or TNT.
May 31st, 2012 at 10:10 am
MYSTERY WOMAN was the best of the Hallmark series. I didn’t mention it because Dean Hargrove was not involved where he was with the others.
Again this is another example of how cable has different needs than networks. Hallmark showed these mystery series on the weekend during the day where they competed with sports.
I mentioned in RENEGADE that the viewers needs change with the time period. Shows we would enjoy on a slow rainy Sunday afternoon are probably not what we want to watch on Wednesday prime time.
The rules and reasons of TV programming are always changing. In the 1970s what hurt DEAR DETECTIVE was it was a good but not great series that lost viewers from its original broadcast. I don’t know what the critic’s view at the time was but I doubt many complained about its end. Nor did many of us notice the end of the Hallmark mysteries.
May 31st, 2012 at 10:31 am
I am wondering if the discussion we are having here about DEAR DETECTIVE is more than occurred at the time in newspaper TV columns around the country.
May 31st, 2012 at 12:22 pm
I’d like to try and clarify my comment from yesterday.
I always wince when I hear a show called “too good for the mass audience”, or that sentiment’s first cousin “over their heads”.
I’ve never considered myself “superior” in my tastes to anyone, which automatically disqualifies me from being a professional critic of any form of entertainment.
Reading “pro” critics of movies, TV, books, music all my life, the preponderance of them always struck me as the worst kind of snobs. I have no idea where many of them got their bona fides; in many cases I’ve suspected those to self-inflicted (much like my own).
In my perhaps over-simplified worldview, entertainments are either enjoyable or they aren’t. When they are, I try to figure out why, and that search usually leads me to other things, mostly in the same line.
But when I don’t enjoy something, I want to figure that out too; and since so many things I’ve come to dislike are ‘critical darlings’, I can never entirely rule out that my dislike might be my failing, rather than the show’s (see my earlier comments about Moonlighting, among others).
This is, of course, why I come to this blog, as well as many others where the other commenters are (I like to think) like me: we aren’t out to trash or to worship, but to share what we know, what we enjoy – and what we’ve learned.
During a given day, I visit any number of other blogs where the comments are either mean-spirited or incredibly illiterate – frequently both. I don’t stay long, but it does give me cause to worry about just how much of the cyberpopulace is that mean – and that dumb.
Thankfully, that doesn’t happen here, for which I’m grateful.
May 31st, 2012 at 1:23 pm
The problem with the internet is that it’s possible to be extremely abusive and mean, yet still retain anonymity. I’ve had people be outrageously rude to me on-line in a way that I’m sure that they would never be in real life (if for no other reason that I’m a burly six-footer, and they might be worried that I could turn nasty;) I like it here (and at similar blogs)because people are more interested in sharing information and opinions than in striking a pose or showing off. It’s a bit like a group of friends with similar interests coming together to have a quiet drink and chew the fat. I’ve been introduced to stuff that I’d never heard of before, and I’ve been gratified to hear that some people on this blog have been influenced to try out stuff that I’ve suggested. I like that.
May 31st, 2012 at 1:33 pm
When I was paid to be a entertainment critic the hardest part of my job was trying to understand why anyone cared why I like DEAR DETECTIVE or not. My first column was called “Thumbs” (the publisher/editor named it, I hated the title). I was to do a straight review column and declare a show good or bad. I was miserable.
You have to have an ego to post or comment, you have to believe you have something to say (or a sad need to be noticed if you are a troll). But I long ago gave up trying to save the world, now I seek to understand it. Traveling the internet and reading the comments at places such as this enlightens me in re. to other view points.
In film there is an argument over truth and the documentary. I belong to the group that believes there is no truth just point of view and no reality just perspective.
One of the reasons I am fond of quoting media of the era such as “Broadcasting” is to illustrate more than is it good or bad. TV is a reflection of its time. With DEAR DETECTIVE I was surprised to learn the TV Movie was not the pilot, but the entire mini series was. It also explained to me why, until recently on the web, I had never heard of TIME EXPRESS. It was a time when anything under a 30 share was a failure. A time when masses rule, where a BUFFY or LOST never could have made it.
I love the mechanics of the creative arts. Everyone has a talent, mine apparently is looking at something and not just declaring it good or bad (that is up to each person’s POV) but to explain why.
I find it fun to argue with Mike over MOONLIGHTING or David Bushman over Stephen J. Cannell. Such discussions force me to back up my opinions and not just accept my perfection.
DEAR DETECTIVE was a nice show but not special enough to survive the time. A show like so many others,it was entertaining but forgettable.
May 31st, 2012 at 1:44 pm
Michael, call me cynical, but I would be very surprised if Fox and NBC left Fringe and Chuck, respectively, on for a final season to reward loyal viewers. I personally completely buy into the argument that networks are commercial enterprises that have to answer to bosses who have to answer to stockholders, and decisions of this sort are always going to be financially motivated (forgive me if I am getting off-topic here). I think if you see a network stick with a show that doesn’t have great numbers it’s because the execs believe the show will eventually catch on, or there is something very appealing about the demographic, or it is a “prestige” show that brings in pricey sponsors, or they don’t have another show ready to go that they think will work in that time slot, or there is money to be made in syndication, or the network exec championed the show and feels his/her reputation is on the line, etc.
Regarding Dear Detective, this was — in my opinion — a pretty tough time for prime-time drama. The show premiered in March 1979, so we are still talking about the 1978-79 TV season. There were NO dramas in the top 10 that year — the highest- rated, at Number 11, was Eight Is Enough. Charlie’s Angels, at Number 12, was the highest-rated crime drama; next came Vega$, Barnaby Jones, and CHiPS, at 22, 23, and 24. I want to be careful here to say that — in my opinion — this was a particularly unexciting time for private-eyes and cops.
I BELIEVE the next truly impactful show was Magnum, in 1980, and then Hill Street in ’81.
May 31st, 2012 at 1:46 pm
#10. BRADSTREET, I like the nice respectful attitude here. But I can handle the rude and mean. In my evil youth before the internet I was known to make men cry with just my words. As with many who possess a vicious wit, I mellowed (or got bored) over the years.
I tend to respond to people with the same attitude they show me. It is nice here where we act as if discussing Miss Marple over tea than Mike Hammer at the local dive.
May 31st, 2012 at 2:07 pm
#12. David, thanks for adding the fact about a lack of drama in the top 10. I had forgotten this was an era of the sitcom.
CHUCK survived in part because of NBC’s near empty cupboard of programs to replace it.
But the networks are listening to viewers who refuse to sample certain series because they fear getting involved with a program only to see it cancelled without closure. Arc series have adjusted to featuring a season arc connecting to the larger series arc. FRINGE does that. ALCATRAZ tried. AWAKE tried. The audience wasn’t buying.
The aftermath of the end of AWAKE interests me. How that series and others like it failed is changing the way TV programs certain series. If the networks want another LOST, they will have to show the commitment cable networks are starting to show, such as FX’s deal with Charlie Sheen’s new comedy (if I remember right its a ten episode order that if meets certain numbers automatically becomes a 100 episode order).
Can certain series only succeed on cable? Unless the networks show some loyalty to the viewers they will give those viewers just one more reason to find their entertainment elsewhere. And unless you are CBS who is interested in only the masses, the networks are starting to try to convince viewers its safe to get involved.
May 31st, 2012 at 7:52 pm
One note about the series creators. Both got their starts in comedy.
Kibbee started in radio and wrote for Fred Allen and Groucho Marx. His movies include A NIGHT IN CASABLANCA, CRIMSON PIRATE, VALDEZ IS COMING, and VERA CRUZ.
Hargrove started with the Emmy award winning sketch comedy series THE BOB NEWHART SHOW (NBC, 1961).
You can watch one here:
http://www.tvscomedy.com/tv.cfm
Scroll down the page and click on Bob Newhart.
While Kibbee reportedly also wrote for NBC’s THE BOB NEWHART SHOW, I saw only Hargrove’s name in this single episode credits.
June 1st, 2012 at 3:54 am
DEAR DETECTIVE is a show that I’m pretty sure never played over here. Given that in 1979 practically every single cop show, good or bad, short or long-lived, tended to play here at some point (I can even remember watching BERT D’ANGELO, a Paul Sorvino show so obscure that for years I thought that I’d imagined it) that’s pretty strange.
Whilst I can understand TV companies getting rid of shows that don’t do the business that they hoped, it can be counterproductive. There’s a comedy series on BBC at the moment called NOT GOING OUT. It’s getting good ratings, being given space in newspaper TV reviews, and is generating a buzz. What is interesting is that it is on its fifth series. Over time, the creators have added and subtracted characters, tinkered with the format, and decided what does and doesn’t work. They have been given time to fine tune the show. The problem with TV on both sides of the Atlantic is that shows are expected to hit the ground running, and so few of them do.
June 1st, 2012 at 12:54 pm
A few odds and ends:
– Roland Kibbee was the first producer-head writer of Bob Newhart’s 1961 sketch show; he left at mid-season, along with the first director, due to disagreements with Newhart over the show’s format. As the credits show, Ralph Levy took over.
– Dean Hargrove’s credit came as a surprise to me; his IMDb page only goes back to 1964, and only shows scripted dramas from that point.
I’ve always wondered if he was any relation of Marion Hargrove, who was a major scripting presence on Maverick, both the original series in the ’50s and the ’80s revival. IMDb was little or no help here.
– For BRADSTREET:
My knowledge of British broadcasting jargon is limited, acquired mainly on the fly.
With that in mind, my understanding is that “not going out” refers to a program – sorry, programme – that isn’t going to be shown for whatever reason. Is that what Not Going Out, the series, is about? Just curious …
– In past posts, I don’t believe I ever mentioned one of the main reasons we’re always groping around for reasons why this show succeeded and that show failed:
After all these years, we still don’t really know anything useful about TV ratings.
I started getting curious about this as a kid, watching TV on Chicago, and wondering why some shows kept going on, year after year, while others seemed to vanish in mere weeks.
The TV columnists – “critics” they called themselves – were no help at all. When they mentioned the ratings, it was rarely anything more than a one-paragraph kiss-off of the Top 10. Networks in competition, night-by-night timeslot battles, shows building up an audience (or gradually losing an audience), scheduling strategies – the “critics” never bothered us poor dumb civilians with those details; as far as they were concerned we were all just sheep who wouldn’t understand any of it.
Over the years, the situation changed, but only slightly; a newer breed of columnists came forth with bits and pieces of the puzzle that we hadn’t seen before, but nearly all of them had personal agendas of one sort or another that skewed their columns into annoying preachment, usually of an anti-TV nature. (On request, I can provide examples of some of the really egregious “critics” we had here in Chicago, who put self-promotion ahead of informing their readers.)
Anyone out there who follows sports can find references that provide incredibly detailed facts and figures about their favorite games, whether professional or amateur.
Not so for the TV buff. There’s no Big Book Of Ratings to tell us just how our faves did on a week-to-week or even year-to-year basis.
Oh, sure, there are books out there that tell what was in the Top 10 in a certain season. Once in a while you might find the list of the Bottom 10 for a year.
But those short lists came from much larger ones, often with more than 100 shows in a given season.
That’s one helluva middle to ignore.
To pick one example out of the blue:
Ozzie & Harriet ran on the ABC network for 13 (thirteen) seasons.
During all that time, it never was in the Top 10.Given ABC’s short station lineup, it could never have been.
But there it was, year after year, always sponsored, rarely bounced around the schedule (at least far less than other series were) … good ol’ Oz must have had something on someone, right?
Or maybe he was doing something right?
Who knows?
My point is … even after all these years, we don’t.
Back in the day, our parents didn’t.
Today, we don’t.
In the future, any body who troubles to look this up … won’t know either.
They can guess, like we do … but whatever facts could back any of the speculation up are simply in the wind.
Meanwhile, we all plow away, trying to make “educated inferences” (guessing, really), in order to make sense of this strange interest we all have.
Man, just trying to put all this into words is taking it out of me.
So I’ll back off for the nonce.
June 1st, 2012 at 2:11 pm
#16. BRADSTREET,
BERT D’ANGELO SUPERSTAR had at least two advantages over DEAR DETECTIVE. BERT was a spinoff of STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO, so it could be sold together (packaged). BERT had 13 episodes compared to DEAR DETECTIVE. I am surprised DEAR DETECTIVE TV Movie did not appear over there. The show fits with the British style of mystery.
As giving a show time to develop, we sometimes do. MASH, REMINGTON STEELE, and many others were nearly cancelled after a first year with bad ratings. Why they survive and others don’t is the judgment of the network programmers (or in the old days, the advertisers).
June 1st, 2012 at 3:09 pm
#17. Mike, once you understand that nothing in the creative field makes sense, it is easier to understand the system. Sports has the reality of math, someone wins, someone loses. But what is good and what is bad is different with every person.
Back when the advertiser did the programming and the networks sold the time, why a series survived was up to the sponsor. Coverage was as important as numbers.
The media has never understood ratings. Heck, the advertisers and networks often act as if they don’t have a clue.
Today, everyone seem to have forgotten the purpose of demographics. When I attempted to open an ad agency in the early 80s I had a hard time making advertisers understand they did not want their commercial on the show with the most viewers, they wanted it on the show with the most number of their target customers. You don’t sell Axe for Men on the Lifetime Channel aimed at women nor do you waste your money trying to sell feminine hygiene products on Spike. No matter how high the ratings.
While the networks and advertisers see ratings broken down in categories other than just age, the media has always focused on the age breakdown. Why, because the media, especially in this soundbite world, can not handle any complex issue. They simplify it all, dumbing it down to the most basic thought (let’s exclude David and the Paley Center from this).
The 18-49 rating receives the highest rates (cost of ad to sponsor), because that audience is the group in highest demand by sponsors. Why? We make most of our consumer decisions before we reach 25 years old. As we grow into adulthood we are at our most open to new ideas. This is the time advertisers can make a customer for life. Coke or Pepsi, Bud or Miller, Ford or Chevy. It takes a ad disaster such as New Coke to shift our brand loyalty. So they claim.
The basic problem is when demographics were created the 18-35 audience was the mass audience, and all they had was Network TV.
Today the mass audience is growing older (one of the reason the high end of the age keeps get pushed back). We still like TV but it ignores us, chasing a younger more desirable audience that is smaller in number and has an interest in programs beyond Network TV.
CBS, better than anyone else, understands this, but they still have to please the advertisers and Viacom, their corporate Masters.
As for critics, my favorite Chicago TV critic (now at AOL) is Maureen Ryan who has done some impressive stuff covering genre TV, especially SyFy’s BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.
The future of television is changing. In not too far a future, ratings and networks will be meaningless. Ratings will always mean something,like the overrated and fixed Best Seller system for books. But programming such as web series are surviving on tiny but devoted audiences. Choice of content and how you view it will increase to the point when they may even make more TV for us old folks.
June 1st, 2012 at 4:34 pm
Marion Hargrove was Dean’s dad.
June 2nd, 2012 at 3:52 am
MIKE: As far as I’m aware, the title of NOT GOING OUT refers to the rather dead social life of the main character (as in ‘I’m not going out on Saturday night’).
MICHAEL: As far as DEAR DETECTIVE fitting in with the ‘British style of mystery’, I think that timing is an important factor here. At the end of the 70s cop programmes like THE SWEENEY were in the ascendant in the UK (a pre-Morse John Thaw as Jack Reagan drinking hard,sleeping with any female that came along, and slamming villains against walls, was the top telly cop). The BBC tried their own version, the truly nasty TARGET, which even its creators ultimately got cold feet about. At the end of ’79/beginning of ’80 the Beeb began to show SHOESTRING, which ushered in a quirkier, less violent type of crime show, but this would have been rather late for DEAR DETECTIVE.
These things seem to by cyclical. At the moment a lot of the planned cop shows from British TV follow the grim,serious tone that has been in the ascendant for some years, but the most popular ones at the moment are things like NEW TRICKS or the determinedly old fashioned and unrealistic DEATH IN PARADISE, which suggest that viewers are getting tired of gloomy ‘realism’ again.
June 2nd, 2012 at 8:39 am
#21. BRADSTREET, great point about timing. I was thinking more in terms of American hardboiled versus British traditional, but you are right. In 1979, on both sides of the Atlantic, traditional mysteries on television were not in style.
June 24th, 2013 at 6:43 pm
I watched all the episodes of DEAR DETECTIVE, back when they were originally broadcast. That was a long time ago, obviously, and I have not seen them since, so all I can offer is a fuzzy memory. With that qualification noted, I offer my own theory as to why the series did not last: it was awful. The pilot, a remake of a French film, was good, but the show’s makers were at a complete loss when they had to come up with their own stories. The mysteries were inane, the characterizations were silly, and no one seemed to have any idea where to go with the romance between the detective and the professor.
Mind, there were only three episodes, perhaps too early to expect everything to be right. The premise of the series was perfectly sound, and the cast was strong, so maybe the thing could have been salvaged. However, I cannot blame CBS for giving up on it.