And Andy Griffith was a Moravian.

Aaron Ruben talked about rejecting a scene where Barney fainted, because he thought it was over the top; they were very careful about keeping the character real in certain ways. If you look at Knotts's reactions, he's always exasperated or infuriated whenever Andy or someone else scores a point off him, but he…

Yes - it's great. Written by the very talented Richard Alan Simmons, who produced some of the later COLUMBO episodes.

A valid point. I meant it was too Nehru jackets/pop colors/Bob Hope special '70s to feel like neo-noir; but of course you're right, that strand of grubby Nixonian naturalism also made a rewarding pass through the crime genre at the same time.
More alarmingly, though, David, you sound as if you're not ready to send in…

The error about Joe Mannix's backstory has been corrected above. Thanks for pointing it out.

Boy, are there a lot of ways to interpret THAT quote….

Well, you're right — I guess you CAN (and did) explain the original format in 25 words or less. But what I was getting at was that there were several elements — Wickersham, his computer, and Mannix's gripes with each — that weren't characteristic of the genre and had to be re-explained every week. It was a fairly…

We knew about those couples, of course, but Gilliland would be excluded from this because he met Jean Smart on the set. I'd assumed the same was true for McRaney & Delta Burke, since they became a couple during the run of Designing Women, but now that I'm looking it up it appears they would qualify — they met…

The "n" word was not uncommon on TV in the 70s and 80s. You can hear it in SANFORD AND SON a lot, and it was generally permissible for white characters who were identified as bigots to say it.

Boone actually moved his family to Oahu in 1964 because he was pissed off about the demise of The Richard Boone Show. He issued a typical "I'll never do TV again!" flounce to the press. Moved back to Los Angeles in 1972 for Hec Ramsey, I think.

No, I didn't. He's basically been incoherent in all the interviews I've seen since the trial. I felt that there would be a credibility problem there.

And frustrating in terms of researching this piece — two out of eleven, one of whom won't talk to me and the other is, well, Robert Blake. The production manager, Howard Alston, whom I had interviewed before, died a month before I got started on this. Even the "second tier" of workshop actors who turned up in bit…

And it was a good way to go out, even if (in some senses) TV was a comedown for Odets. The two scripts he wrote are very strong (especially "Big Mitch"), and apparently the other writers and actors were really energized by working with him.

Incidentally, Harding — the only surviving cast member apart from Robert Blake — is now an artist living in Maine. (She has a website.) I asked for an interview in 2010 and again for this piece, but she declined the first time and didn't respond the second. A shame. And she's very good (and offbeat) in the show.

Also, UCLA and the Paley Center each have a few episodes, for anyone who's in New York or Los Angeles.

Not apart from whatever you might find on Youtube or elsewhere on the 'net. (All the episodes do circulate among collectors; they ran on some obscure channel, I think in Canada, in the 80s.) As far as I can tell it's now owned by Fremantle Media, which bought Goodson-Todman … unfortunately not one of the companies…

But Wagon Train does belong on a list of distaff Westerns. Lots of episodes about female pioneers (just look at the list of titles), and some scripts that were effectively debates about the role of women on the frontier. There's even an episode that's a rewrite of Lysistrata! Plus the series had two prominent women…

If you HAVE ten of those, send 'em my way!

I would argue, though, that WKRP is BETTER (and more likely to appeal to a modern audience) than at least half of those ten, and that should be as much a factor as historical significance. I wouldn't wish HAPPY DAYS or late ALL IN THE FAMILY on any poor AVC writer, myself included.

Wasn't it on TBS or WGN for a while in the 80s? I definitely had several years of easy WKRP access as a teenager.