Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.
January is Cannell-ary. Every Original TV Score Selection of the Week this month will be a Mike Post instrumental from a Stephen J. Cannell production. They’re my five favorite themes Post, the producer and arranger of the 1968 Mason Williams instrumental “Classical Gas,” wrote or co-wrote for the late Cannell, an interior designer’s son who overcame dyslexia to become a prolific writer for hour-long dramas and a TV mogul, and they’ll be spotlighted in chronological order.
I always felt that Post wrote most of his best themes for Cannell. Something about the sense of humor in Cannell’s writing—it was different from the Joss Whedon style of quipping Gita Jackson perfectly slammed in their 2022 Vice article “When Joss Whedon Was Our Master”—brought out the best in Post. A cold-blooded assassin calls everybody “Buckwheat” for no reason. A tough guy in a mohawk and gold chains is the dude you want by your side when you’re taking down bullies, but take him along with you to a plane, and he suddenly turns into Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. An aging private eye hurts his hand whenever he punches out somebody. This was the offbeat world of Cannell, and Post reveled in it.
Everybody in a Whedon script or an Aaron Sorkin teleplay has the same style of speaking. The difference between Cannell and Whedon or Sorkin is that Cannell knew how to write characters so that nobody sounded quirky except for one or two people. On The Greatest American Hero, Agent Bill Maxwell was the lone quirky character. On The A-Team, that was either Murdock or Hannibal. On Wiseguy, Jonathan Banks got all the funny lines as Special Agent Frank McPike (but whenever William Russ showed up as Roger Lococco—the assassin who calls everyone “Buckwheat”—he was the dominant funny one).
When you put a writer who was able to keep all his characters from sounding the same together with a TV theme composer who has a similar knack for character building, magic often happens.
“One reason why Mike Post was such a good writer of TV theme songs in the ’70s and ’80s (his work in the last ten years or so hasn’t been as good) is that he understood that successful TV shows are about characters, not situations, and that therefore a good theme song should introduce you to the characters,” wrote TV critic Jaime Weinman on his blog in 2004. “Post and [Pete] Carpenter’s theme for [The Rockford Files] is basically a character portrait: the quirky melodies and orchestration signal that this is a show about a different, less conventionally heroic kind of hero.”
Check out those unconventional melodies in the first Original TV Score Selection of the Week in Cannell-ary: Post’s 1974 MGM Records single version of the Rockford Files main title theme, which features the late Tommy Morgan, the harmonicist from Quincy Jones’s Sanford and Son theme, on harmonica and a smokin’ electric guitar solo by Dan Ferguson.
The single version was so popular on radio that in The Rockford Files’s second season on NBC, it was edited (terribly) into the opening titles. In the first season, title designer Jack Cole, the same man behind the legendary Six Million Dollar Man opening titles, cleverly edited a bunch of photos of James Garner in action all over Malibu and L.A.—and in indecisive mode at the supermarket—to match the rhythm of Post and Carpenter’s theme.
Because the original version of the theme was replaced by the single, the opening titles were no longer in sync with the music. At some point in the second season, someone in the Rockford Files crew must have said, “This edit of Mike’s hit single sucks,” so the following season, Post and Carpenter re-recorded the theme so that it matched Cole’s visuals again.
I sometimes get frustrated by how often The Rockford Files—the creation of both Cannell and Maverick creator Roy Huggins, who was banned from writing for The Rockford Files by Garner after the middle of the first season because Garner disagreed with Huggins’s sneaky ways of rewriting scripts—leaves streaming services and never stays in one place for long, which is why I’m glad I have The Rockford Files’s fifth season on DVD. I’d love to have the show’s other seasons, as well as the series of ’90s CBS reunion movies I haven’t watched yet. (All those ’90s Rockford Files movies-of-the-week were archived in their entirety on Internet Archive last year, but they suddenly vanished.) The Rockford Files and The Venture Bros. were my favorite shows to rent from Netflix’s now-defunct DVD rental service.
So many literate or scholarly pieces have been written about why Jim Rockford, a Malibu private eye who did a five-year bid for an armed robbery he didn’t commit, was the perfect hero for the post-Watergate era or why Jim’s occasionally meta sense of humor was a breath of fresh air in the ’70s crime show landscape. His sense of humor was crafted by a murderer’s row of skilled writers that consisted of Cannell, future Sopranos creator David Chase, and Juanita Bartlett, a former secretary to both Garner and Rockford Files executive producer Meta Rosenberg. One of Bartlett’s strengths as a writer was bringing depth to The Rockford Files’s female characters.
But no one has nailed down why I often rewatch The Rockford Files—or why Matt Fraction, another Rockford Files fan, felt the urge to reimagine Kate Bishop as a female Rockford in his Hawkeye comic—better than alt-rocker Juliana Hatfield did.
“I love that he lives in a run-down trailer in the parking lot of a restaurant by the ocean in Malibu. (How is it even possible that a person can live in a trailer in a parking lot in Malibu? Today, with real estate the way it is, that would not be believable. Today, the likes of Jim Rockford—anyone who is anything other than super-rich—would not be able to afford to live anywhere near Malibu, dilapidated trailer or not.),” wrote Hatfield in a 2010 issue of Magnet magazine. “I love the chummy, sweet relationship Rockford has with his dad, whom he calls ‘Rocky,’ as everyone else does. I love that he keeps his gun in the cookie jar and wears polyester wash-and-wear slacks that do not flatter his chubby bum. (This was before people worked out, before TV stars had to be all fit and muscly and healthy and botoxed and facelifted and perfect and inaccessible and unrealistic and cookie-cutter boring.) Rockford smokes and eats dollar tacos and drives without a seatbelt. He’s a straight shooter, taking everything as it comes. He’s always getting jumped by bad guys, but he never gets really angry; mostly he sighs a lot, grumbles a bit and gets on with it. I like him.”
The Rockford Files was the only show Cannell and Chase worked on together. It’s the one place where you can watch their different senses of humor develop, as well as watch which types of themes became their favorite to write about for the show and subsequent projects.
A more misanthropic writer than Cannell, Chase was interested in the Mafia, the music industry (the subject of Chase’s 2012 coming-of-age movie Not Fade Away), and people who jump from faddish religion to faddish religion. My favorite Chase-penned Rockford Files episode is 1977’s “Sticks and Stones May Break Your Bones, But Waterbury Will Bury You.” Rockford Files episode titles were known for sometimes being even longer than ’60s Star Trek episode titles like “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.”
Chase riffed on Watergate. The “Waterbury” of the title is a posh private investigation agency that eliminates the competition—independent private eyes like Billy Merrihew, portrayed by Blazing Saddles star Cleavon Little, and whiny and racist Vern St. Cloud, played in the first of three appearances on the show by Simon Oakland, whom Chase knew from writing dialogue for him on Kolchak: The Night Stalker—by causing the detectives to lose their private investigator’s licenses. The playful references to political scandal in “Waterbury” are a Chase thing that also existed on The Sopranos, most memorably during its final season, when Uncle Junior, institutionalized after he shot Tony, wrote a letter to Dick Cheney (“Like yourself, I was involved in an unfortunate incident when a gun I was handling misfired”).
Meanwhile, Cannell developed a fondness for fast cars and frazzled heroes who would rather be fishing or napping (McPike’s frustrations over his inability to get a good night’s rest on Wiseguy were very Rockford-esque), but sticking up for their clients or busting organized crime are the only things that give their lives meaning. He liked to parody other crime dramas or deglamorize their depictions of detective work. Cannell wanted Jim to do or say things he never saw Mike Connors do or say as Joe Mannix over on Mannix, another detective show about a SoCal private eye who frequently got his ass kicked.
“Mannix and those guys never talked about money,” said Cannell to Los Angeles Times interviewer Bruce Newman in 1997. “So I wanted Rockford to be a guy who cared enough about getting paid to run credit checks on his clients and keep track of his gas mileage.”
An early precursor to Cannell’s future hour-long buddy comedies about mismatched duos or trios was “Just Another Polish Wedding,” the 1977 episode Cannell wrote as a backdoor pilot for a spinoff starring Louis Gossett Jr. and Isaac Hayes as, respectively, Marcus “Gabby” Hayes and Gandy Fitch, their characters from The Rockford Files. The greatest scene in “Just Another Polish Wedding” is a bar fight scene G.I. Robot from Creature Commandos would admire, but he’d probably say that it wasn’t homicidal enough: Gabby, Jim’s former parole officer, and Gandy, Jim’s former cellmate, kick the shit out of a bunch of Nazis. (Both Black Dynamite and Blood and Bone made me realize that Michael Jai White would be perfect as a modern-day Gandy.)
Unfortunately, the Gossett/Hayes spinoff never happened. Cannell’s dream of an hour-long network TV action comedy starring two Black actors never came to fruition until NBC added to its fall 2010 schedule Undercovers, a J.J. Abrams production that attempted to combine the hyperkinetic action of Abrams’s Alias with Hart to Hart-style antics between Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Boris Kodjoe as married spies, but viewers weren’t intrigued, so NBC yanked it from the air after 11 episodes. Then from 2018 to 2021, Bulletproof attempted to break ground on British TV with its Bad Boys-esque pairing of Noel Clarke with Ashley Walters, but that cop show’s run was cut short by Clarke’s sexual misconduct and bullying scandals, which made the squabbles between George Peppard and Mr. T on the set of The A-Team look like thumb wrestling.
Speaking of post-Rockford Files Cannell, my least favorite thing about Cannell’s ’80s action dramas—other than so much pro-cop material—is the master of disguise who puts on brownface or yellowface to pose as people of color. The A-Team and Stingray went to this well a few times. On The Rockford Files, Jim sometimes pretended to be bespectacled bureaucrats or a fake Oklahoma oilman known as Jimmy Joe Meeker to gather evidence, barge into offices he would have been kicked out of if he showed up as himself, or run a con on crooks who were scamming his clients, but he never wore other races as costumes. Garner was too classy for that shit.
Once in a while, the internet asks, “Who would you want to play Jim in a Rockford Files reboot?” Why the fuck would you want to reboot The Rockford Files? Be original, man. Be more like Terriers or Shane Black’s The Nice Guys (which modeled Jackson Healy and Holland March’s phone book ad after Jim’s phone book ad). Those are a couple of great examples of writers who channeled the irreverent spirit of The Rockford Files without ripping off or trying to reboot Cannell’s old show.
NBC’s 2010 rejection of House creator David Shore’s unreleased Rockford Files reboot pilot, which starred Dermot Mulroney as Jim and Beau Bridges as Rocky, was proof that nobody wants a Rockford Files reboot. The Rockford Files isn’t worth doing without Garner (or the late Stuart Margolin as weaselly ex-con Angel Martin, who was to Cannell’s show what Quark later was to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine).
Only one man could play Jim as Juliana Hatfield vividly described him, and that was the charismatic Garner.
The first place I saw the late Garner was neither Maverick nor The Great Escape. And it definitely wasn’t The Rockford Files, where the Oklahoma native built a reputation as one of the nicest and most gentlemanly stars to ever lead a TV series off-camera (“My father wasn’t crazy about the autographs, premieres and parties, but he really loved the process [of creating a show]. He loved the people he worked with, and they loved him,” recalled Gigi Garner, his daughter, to Closer last year), and every Rockford Files guest actor who’s still alive has a story or two about Garner’s cordiality and professionalism. (Garner was also an uncredited executive producer on The Rockford Files. The “Cherokee Productions” name at the end of the closing credits of each episode belonged to Garner’s production company. Its name referred to the half-Cherokee heritage of Garner’s mom.) I was too young to understand the dialogue on The Rockford Files during its first eight years in syndication. I never watched it until 2007—when it was on both DVD and Sleuth, an NBCUniversal cable channel that focused on reruns of procedurals.
I come from the generation that first knew Garner as a Polaroid pitchman in a series of ads where, instead of playing himself, he played a Polaroid devotee who good-naturedly bickers with Mariette Hartley, who played his wife. Garner and Hartley’s chemistry in the Polaroid ads was so great that many viewers thought they were actually married to each other, which spurred one of Hartley’s friends to make for her a shirt that said, “I am not Mrs. James Garner.” My favorite Rockford Files episode from the final season, “Paradise Cove,” even capitalized on the popularity of Garner’s Polaroid ads with Hartley by casting her as a foil to Jim, as well as his love interest of the week.
I can’t think of any present-day actor who can do what Polaroid’s most popular pitchman did on The Rockford Files. I don’t know how to describe it.
The best I can do is this: Garner winningly played Jim as if Jack Benny were a P.I. who can take a punch and throw a few, but he needs Rochester or Mary to run over to the trailer and hand him a bag of frozen peas because that last punch he threw hurt like hell.
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2024 was the year I began leading the Couch Avocados thread. Because of my knowledge of and fondness for film scores—I may not advance to the final round on Name That Tune, but I would definitely win Name That 007 Gunbarrel Opening Music—I added to the headers a weekly feature I call the Original TV Score Selection of the Week.
I love the sounds of Nujabes and the other Japanese hip-hop artists who worked on Samurai Champloo. I also like bits and pieces of Henry Mancini’s easy-listening output, especially when Mancini transported CBS viewers to a screwy small town in Vermont each week. That’s how I roll.
The following is merely a recap of all the Original TV Score Selections of the Week I picked in 2024, with a link to each instrumental and bonus track. I don’t want to compile the following into a playlist on Spotify or YouTube because I stopped using Spotify a long time ago—it fucks over musicians, small labels, and lesser-known stand-up comics—and I don’t like YouTube’s playlist feature. Nobody makes mix CDs anymore. The following would have been a fire mix CD.
August 1: Henry Mancini’s theme from Newhart
August 8: Patrick Williams’s fifth-season version of “Home to Emily” from The Bob Newhart Show (bonus tracks: Wayne Bergeron’s 2020 cover of “Home to Emily” and the Reverend Jim Ignatowski version of “Home to Emily” from the Taxi episode “Love Un-American Style”)
August 15: Nujabes’s “Kujaku” from the Samurai Champloo episodes “Hellhounds for Hire (Part 1)” and “The Disorder Diaries”
August 22: Frederik Wiedmann’s “Main Title Theme” from Batman: Caped Crusader
August 29: Siddhartha Khosla’s “Son of Sam (The Tell)” from the Only Murders in the Building episode “The Tell”
September 5: Nami Melumad’s “The Aquathawn” from the Star Trek: Prodigy episode “Asylum”
September 12: Jerry Goldsmith’s theme from the first three seasons of Room 222
September 19: Shirley Walker’s “Batman Confrontation with Clayface/Clayface Dies” from the Batman: The Animated Series episode “Feat of Clay: Part II”
September 26: Howard Shore’s 1976-79 Saturday Night Live main title theme
October 3: Angelo Badalamenti’s “Night Life in Twin Peaks” from Twin Peaks
October 10: Vic Mizzy’s “Gomez” from The Addams Family (1964)
October 17: Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein’s extended version of the Stranger Things main title theme
October 24: Mark Snow’s “Eaten by Light” from the X-Files episode “Soft Light”
October 31: Vince Guaraldi’s “Graveyard Theme (Trick or Treat) (2nd Reprise)” from It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
November 7: John Morris’s Fresno main title theme
November 14: Quincy Jones’s “The Streetbeater” from Sanford and Son (bonus track: Ella Fitzgerald, the Count Basie Orchestra, and the Tommy Flanagan Trio’s 1972 cover of “The Streetbeater”)
November 21: Mike Post and Pete Carpenter’s The White Shadow main title theme (bonus track: a medley of Post/Carpenter cues from the first half of The White Shadow’s first season)
November 28: Robbie Robertson & the Red Road Ensemble’s “The Vanishing Breed” from The Native Americans
December 5: Chris Westlake’s “The Cerritos” from the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode “Crisis Point”
December 12: Alan Silvestri’s “I’ll Ride with You” from the CHiPs episode “Roller Disco: Part 2” (bonus track: Silvestri’s second-season version of John Parker’s theme from CHiPs)
December 19: Shirley Walker, Lolita Ritmanis, and Michael McCuistion’s “Pukey Christmas Music/Christmas with the Joker/Game Show Music” from the Batman: The Animated Series episode “Christmas with the Joker”
December 26: Nick Lee and Hunter Rogerson’s “Previously On” from Interior Chinatown (bonus tracks: the studio and concert versions of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s “Behind the Mask”)
