Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine Detective series - the best, the worst?

I love a good whodunnit...I loved the old Ellery Queen series with Jim Hutton in the title role, as well as Jessica Fletcher/Angela Lansbury in "Murder She Wrote"...

Has anybody seen or would like to see their favourite TV mystery detectives back on the screen?

Ummm, hmmm,

Columbo

Monk was good but he got annoying pretty quickly and that's a federal crime.

Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett is always worth another viewing. Brilliant perfomances all round.

No one beats John Thaw as Inspector Morse. "Lewis!" Sadly, Americans can't do mysteries because they can't help revealing the criminal at the beginning. Maybe that is the difference between a criminal procedural and a mystery?

"Veronica Mars" is a great detective series that manages to balance self-contained mysteries, a large mystery that takes the entire season to unfold and great characterization.

"Spenser: For Hire" was also really cool. Hawk is da man!

I tend to think the 3 "classiest" detective series I've ever seen on TV were...

SHERLOCK HOLMES with Jeremy Brett -- I've seen a multitude of Holmes / Watsons in movies & tv series, and have enjoyed quite a lot of them. But this was the finest. Sadly, the quality slacked off after the 2nd season, one season was ruined by the foolish decision to do nothing but 2-hour stories (despite none of them being based on the novels), and the final season, while generally a nice recovery, was done while Brett was almost too sick to work. It's also a damn shame that his version of "Hound Of The Baskervilles" was so SERIOUSLY flawwed... it gets worse every time I see it, and from THIS series, that's criminal. See the Tom Baker version for comparison!

POIROT with David Suchet -- This has astonished me over the years for continuing to be virtually "PERFECT" from beginning to present. It's only been in the last year that I've seen some genuinely BAD episodes, and it was all in the directing, not the script or acting. (I forget the name of the story, but it involved hand-held cameras used during flashback scenes-- 1st-week film-student amateurishness!!! A brief blot on an otherwise incredible series.)

NERO WOLFE with Timothy Hutton & Maury Chaykin -- they were so right to make sidekick Archie Goodwin the focus, you need someone LIKEABLE in the lead role! NW mysteries are the DENSEST, most impenetrable I've ever run across... this series overcame that with an abundance of STYLE and pizzazz practically unknown in America. Most stories, I didn't even CARE if I found it impossible to follow the plots... because just watching was so entertaining in the extreme.

Jeremy Brett's Holmes

Columbo

Poirot

i'll throw one out there how about Hart to Hart?
and Quincy? although he was a medical examiner he still solved mysteries way before CSI ever came apon the scene.

Quincy was cool. I wasn't thrilled with H2H; I'd sooner add Magnum (which I won't).

Only say it once, but there was an Aussie show called Halifax f.p. (or some similar combo of initials) that was good.

As for worst, while I loved Stacey Keach as Mike Hammer, the show was damned predictable - the one person who didn't fit was the one he was hunting for.

I loved watching MIKE HAMMER, but I could NEVER follow ANY of the plots! The 2nd season it also got silly, and even my Dad-- who loved watching all the gorgeous women on the show-- actually "complained" that there were TOO MANY of 'em! (The 3rd season things calmed down, and the writing & directing improved again.)

It may sound silly... but for 3 seasons, I could never seem to remember the name of the actress who played Velda-- Lindsay Bloom! I finally was able to remember when I thought of connecting her name with her chest size ("bloom"-- I know, that's really bad... heehee). One night I was watching a tape of a STRIKE FORCE episode and saw this blonde who looked familiar, but couldn't place her... until I saw her name in the credits. it was Bloom-- BEFORE she dyed her hair and lost some weight. (She really, REALLY wanted the job as Velda!) Yet, nice as she was, the whole time the show was on, I kept wishing it had been Tanya Roberts instead (who had been in the pilot).


I've seen just about EVERY version of Mike Hammer ever made since then... EXCEPT for the earlier TV series, which starred Darren McGavin! I sure wish SOMEBODY would put that into syndication!!!

McMillan and Wife was good....but the Sledge Hammer series was super-bad...

If you only watch Sledge Hammer once or twice, it was fun... but it definitely didn't have the stamina for a series; it became the same joke over and over again.

I only saw Mac&W once or twice; it didn't strike my fancy... one episode was the typical "Yank inherits a Scottish castle from a distant cousin" story, complete with the local Scots trying to scam the poor Yanks... but it was so obviously Southern Cali that it was pitiful.

Really? I didn't know that, dude

Until fairly recently, American TV shows did very little location shooting outside SoCal (unless the series themselves were being shot elsewhere). I remember an episode of Quantum Leap (I show i loved), supposedly set in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, about a half-hour from where I live, but it was so obviously not, I cringed.

Long before Austin Powers II, it was my own tagline to say, "Isn't it amazing how much Luxembourg (or wherever) looks like Southern California?"

McMILLAN AND WIFE was a lot of fun when it started. Over the course of 5 seasons, however, it got more and more low-key... essentially, BORING. I hate when shows I really like drop in quality like that.

After the 5th season, Susan St. James decided to QUIT... this coincided with Nancy Walker (who was already a regular on RHODA) getting her own tv series... AND, John Schuck getting HIS own tv series (incredible as that seems). I don't know for a fact if the show was cancelled when they did this. But SOMEBODY, in a fit of insanity, decided (perhaps at a very late moment) to do a 6th season of the show, anyway. They called it McMILLAN-- and when it started, they abruptly revealed that Sally AND her new baby had been KILLED between seasons in a plane crash! AUGH!!! Those BASATRDS!!! How could they DO a thing like that???

Now here's the really strange thing... Richard Gilliland (later of DESIGNING WOMEN) replaced Schuck... and Martha Raye replaced Walker (and was a HUGE improvement!!) Schuck eventually returned for the 2nd half of the season, as his show got canned pretty fast. And incredibly, the writing was better than it had been since the 1st season. If you could just ignore the horrible thing the producers had done to get it on the air at all.....

In fact, my favorite episode of the series was in the last season-- "Philip's Game", which guest-starred Tony Roberts (PLAY IT AGAIN SAM) as a unusually charming hit-man, and Shirley Jones as one of Mac's "old girlfriends". (It's one of the ONLY episodes of the series I have on tape.)

"Until fairly recently, American TV shows did very little location shooting outside SoCal"

Back in 1972, Richard Widmark insisted that every foot of film of his series, MADIGAN, be shot on location. Of the 6 episodes that were part of the NBC WEDNESDAY MYSTERY MOVIE (rotating with BANACEK and COOL MILLION), 3 were shot in NYC, and 1 each in London, Lisbon & Naples.

I always remember what he said when interviewed n TV GUIDE that year. "All I know is, whenever I like a series it gets cancelled after one season!"

I was aware of Banacek (great show!), which was shot in Boston, and a handful of shows out of NYC, but compared to the hundreds of series filmed in and around LA, it's only a handful that weren't. I admit I don't recall Madigan.

Even for New England-stlye coastal vilalges (a la Murder She Wrote), it's a Cali village that's often used to sub for New England.

Those would be my top three choices, followed by Moonlighting and Remmington Steele. I like the various Law & Order series as well, if those count. Oddly enough, I've been re-reading the Spenser novels again...halfway through the series at the moment...

McCLOUD had exteriors shot in NYC and wherever the stories took them, but they also used a lot of back-lots for New York streets, so it could be a real mixed lot.

I loved most of the NBC MYSTERY MOVIES, as they had the beenfits of doing fewer stories per year (cutting down on the bad scripts) and longer stories per episode (allowing for more character bits & humor that your average detective show, like, say, HAWAII FIVE-O).


The last remaining series from that is COLUMBO, as Peter Falk continues to make a new one whenever he feels like it (once a year or so). The initial COLUMBOs were very clever... but it quickly fell into "formula". I caught one with Eddie Albert last week, and it was so SLOW-moving and low-key!!! And this was one of the 90-min. episodes! It got worse when some idiot at NBC decided to make EVERY episode 2 hours (instead of just those "special" stories that called for an extra half-hour). When COLUMBO was revived by ABC after a 9-year break, the first new season was worse than the previous one. But the 2nd season on ABC, Peter Falk stepped in as Executive Producer, and began to "play" with the format... DAMN!!! He succeeded in making the show fresh, dynamic and FUN to watch all over again, and it's stayed that way ever since! Several (if not most) of my favorite episodes have been part of the revival, rather than the original series! (In fact, my #1 fave COLUMBO was from that 2nd ABC season-- it was Patrick McGoohan's 3rd time at bat as a murderer! He said he enjoyed it so much he wanted to do another one "soon"... He did eventually appear in a 4th one, but it took about 9 years to happen!)

Anybody heard of a show called "Matt Houston"? It was like Magnum-as-a-whodunnit (the star Lee Horsley was rather nice-looking) and co-starred the chick who played Princess Ardala on "Buck Rogers". It had a brief run from 1982 to 1985...

Ah yes, Lee Horseley was also the star of THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, a flick rushed into production and into theatres a couple weeks before CONAN THE BARBARIAN, and was a LOT more fun to watch!

Pamela Hensley was Princess Ardala. On pulling out my BUCK ROGERS tapes some time ago, I was stunned to discover the show had aged even worse than I thought... and that Hensley gave the ONLY really decent acting job in the pilot!!!