Best of Route 66 (1 Viewer)

[Stephen Bowie]

Interesting story about Wincelberg, Wayne. He died just before, or maybe even after, I'd contacted him to request an interview.
Lars Passgard was one of the stars of Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly, so he would've been snatched up by Route 66 just at the moment that film arrived in the US. Somebody in the casting department must've had one foot in Europe, or else firmly planted in the art house cinema, because they also brought over the French actress Macha Meril for her only American TV role in "Mon Petit Chou." Another way in which Route 66 was the hippest thing on TV at the time.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Season 3 two cents con'd.
"suppose i said i was the queen of spain" Suppose I said this was one of my five favorite episodes. It's got everything (except Buz): A great role and performance for the late Lois Nettleton (who never looked better or more appealing); A side role for Robert Duvall; And Harvey Korman as a snippy credit card agent. It's also got a heart-breaking and nicely underplayed performance by Martin Milner as Tod. Are those tears in the final scene? I totally believe him. And isn't that Eli Wallach's Music City record store in Hollywood in the opening scene? A classic location for music enthusiasts. Tasty, indeed.
Lois Nettleton plays a woman, or rather several variations of a woman, f-ing with Tod's mind, heart and credit card. Who is she? What is she really after? This episode is probably the greatest defnition of your basic aspiring Hollywood actress I've ever seen put to film: Bonkers. Self-involved drama queens totally out of touch with any reality, and not letting anything or anyone get in the way of their self-perpetuated fantasy existence or agenda. I feel your pain, Tod. You didn't have a clue; you never stood a chance. Where was your buddy Buz when you really needed him? It takes a drama queen to recognize one.
I think Silliphant (working from a story by Jerome Brown) found his Buz-less stride with this episode. No stupid phone calls. No pretending the beat poet heart was still lingering. Just great characters, emotions, and hang on to your sanity for a wild ride. As untameable free spirits go, this is the haunted and haunting counterpoint to Vicki. Run for your life.

 

[Stephen Bowie]

Yeah, that's one of my favorite episodes, too. Some amazing location footage on Hollywood Boulevard.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Season 3 two cents con'd. "The saving grace of a dilemma is that you can only get tossed on two horns."
"sometimes it gets to be tomorrow" A second heartbreaker in a row for Tod. Things are getting tougher without Buz. But, in a way, this episode has a Buz. Joby is the 13-year-old foster home runaway who's sizing up Tod as a replacement father for the one he really loved and who was killed with his mother in a fishing accident. Martin Balsam plays the thankless child welfare worker trying to reconcile the boy and his sister with a home. We know how the orphaned Buz would have come down on the decision whether to help put Joby back in the foster home, or let him go his way, but Tod, without Buz's streetwise counsel, is stuck on the horns of that dilemma. And gored by them when he finally makes a decision.
I really appreciate how this Silliphant-scripted episode never sells out to syrup or an unrealistic resolution. The foster parents are willing and loving, but they don't know how to be the parents the child expects. The kid (nicely played by Roger Mobley) is very complex, with all parts toughened and tender gasping for dominance. The title sadly summarizes the only attitude you can live with when confronting an issue like Joby: the hurt, anger and damage will never go away, but somehow it does get to be tomorrow. He WILL grow up.
One of the things I find so remarkable about this series because it is shot on location with constantly changing characters dealing with the very human condition is that ... almost every episode has touchstones for any numbers of viewers out there. Points of relation, whether a character, or a location, or a story. This episode was shot in Corpus Christi, Texas, the city my late father was born in, but which I have never visited. The boy running around the city is the same age as my son. So part of the touchstone of this episode for me was seeing the sights of my father's birthplace through the sneaker footprints of a boy my son's age. I felt closer to my dad, and grateful I am still here for my son. How often does television do that?

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Season 3 two cents con'd.
"...and he shall forfeit his dog and ten shillings to the king" Oh, yeah, and also his wife. Hey, after two straight episodes of violence of the heart (Tod's), we finally get some good old-fashioned normal violence: people shooting other people. An Arizona motel owner and a bystander are murdered during a robbery and a posse is formed to track them down. That's right; a horse-riding posse.
Only don't expect your normal posse in a Silliphant script; this is basically your existential posse. That doesn't mean you won't get your expected faire of a good story, action sequences and sagebrush justice, but you will also get Tod's angst at what the pursuit of another human being to shoot them down is all about. "Why do you need to go?" A woman piano player, who might be the female embodiment of Tod's conscience, asks him. By the end of the episode, and after witnessing the usual TV episode quota of senseless violence, betrayal, murder and greed, Tod is asking himself the same question. And yelling into the wind, for all the good it does.
This episode could have been called, "The History of Violence," but David Cronenberg won't come up with that title for another 45 years. But for all the revisionist views of what the classic Western use of violence is all about and where it gets you (see also "The Unforgiven"), Silliphant got there first with this story.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Season 3 two cents con'd.
21 "on the closing of a trunk" Yegads, am I watching a ponderous episode of the hour-long Alfred Hitchcock Hour? (And don't tell me the hour long episodes weren't sluggishly paced). A woman returns to Los Lobos Island, Texas after 27 years in prison for killing her abusive father and the locals, and her uncle and son (now 27), are none too happy. Tod is the big heart who lets the women mistake him for her son briefly, and all he gets for that is attacked with a huge fish gaffe and stuffed in a trunk. Ruth Roman, playing the woman, is good as always, and nobody does grit-your-teeth-bitter better than Ed Begley, Sr. as the uncle. But this episode, like the ex-father, is somehow DOA.
Also missing in action; George Maharis' name from the credits for the first time. I guess the negotiations or thoughts of his returning finally ended with this episode. There's a very unusual and long scene of Tod and the Ed Begley character having a conversation while fishing waist-deep in the Gulf of Mexico while getting battered by waves in between their dialogue. That must have been a bitch to film for the cast and crew.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Season 3 two cents con'd.

22 "the cage around maria" Aah, so many troubled women in the world, and only so much of Tod's empathy to go around. How do you solve a problem like Maria? Who starts the episode standing barefoot in the middle of the bear cage at the Houston zoo. Well, the moment you recognize it's Elizabety Ashley, you already know she's batshit crazy, so you should RUN FOR YOUR LIFE. But, of course, that's a different program.

This episode is flatter than Kate Hudson in a corsett. I think the writer (Jesse Sandler) was trying to pull off the Silliphant formula of our freckled white knight stumbling into the damaged psyche (read: kook) of the local hottie, but the mare just doesn't kick here. When you spend the 48-odd minutes staring at the big mole on Elizabeth Ashley's cheek (which she obviously later had removed), you know something is wrong. Compare this episode to how magnificently the same formula worked in the Lois Nettleton episode ("suppose i said i was the queen of spain") and it may be impossible to articulate the difference, but there's no denying that one works and one doesn't.

Tod's weary, troubled look is wearing thin. When he just walks away at the end, you get the feeling he's turning his back on carrying this whole show on his own shoulders, as well. Relief is needed. Who you gonna call?
Postscript: A technical question. I'm noticing in many of the bright scenes in this set of disks, particularly when a large patch of sunny sky is featured, there is a lattice-like pattern faint on the image across the whole frame (like a faint chain-link fence pattern). Is this some polaroid or filter effect from the camera lens at the time of filming, or is it a defect in the prints or transfer? I've been noticing it throughout this set, but it's only apparent on bright, outdoor shots.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Season 3 two cents con'd.
23 "fifty miles from home" Who you gonna call? Glen Corbett. The original 'McDreamy' blue eyes (at least my mom thought so). And I'll see your crystal blue eyes and raise you a pair of Susan Oliver cobalt blue orbs. Course, they're all in black & white so you'll just have to use your memory from shows they appeared on later (like their appearances on Star Trek TOS).
The newer, less-improved Buz is a Lincoln Case, a Vietnam veteran returning home to Landon, Texas, withdrawn and emotionally damaged and looking for meaning beyond the violence he has witnessed. Considering this is 1963 and America's ... adventure in Vietnam was just gaining speed and hadn't had it's Walter Cronkite 'this is a lost cause' moment, this episode is suprising prescient of the pschic damage that war would inflict on its returning heroes. But how psychic did Silliphant or any empathic writer have to be to understand that war is hell, and emotionally, there are no intact survivors. See "The Best Years of Our Lives" for the WWII version.
But you have to question the producer's choice of a character that even Susan Oliver's Vietnam vet groupie (?) describes as 'always quiet, and I wish I knew what he was thinking." So do we. Television is a dialogue-based medium. If we want to see someone brood quietly, we can always go to a museum and stare at a statue.
Tod and Linc meet and bond cute, of course. And by 'cute,' that means they beat the shit out of each other. Tod thinks Linc unfairly used his trained killer karate skills on a group of harassing college basketball players that Tod was coaching, putting one of them in the hospital. And Linc, well, remember he doesn't talk much, so his fists have to make up for his lack of dialogue. Buz, as you remember, could talk a blue streak and still have the wind left for a good rumble.
This is a good episode as a portrait of brooding and emotionally wounded returning warrior, but is that who we really want to wander across America with in the passenger seat of Tod's 'vette?

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Season 3 two cents con'd.
24 "narcissus on an old red fire engine" Boredeom from an old B&W television show. By now, anyone familiar with the Route 66 canon knows that it serves very effectively as a primer on every type of woman NOT TO DATE, or even become remotely involved with. But that never stops our impressionable hero/victims; in this case Linc going all gaga-eyed over Ann Helm hanging out in a Greek Galveston sailor's bar and playing a variation of her 'Sweet Thing' character from Season 1.

File this WNTD (woman not to date) under pure narcissist: a spoiled empty poser who could make Paris Hilton look less vapid. But she's so damn ... cute. And isn't there a degree of narcissism on the part of Linc, who falls for her before she ever opens her mouth, like she's just the perfect complement to him looking in a mirror, or appearing in tandem atop a wedding cake? It's a hoot when the Skipper (Alan Hale, Jr.) shows up as her doting and overprotective father, though.
And you're never going to get out of a Greek sailor's bar without a brawl, of course. It was a missed opportunity (at least for me) when this series aired repeats on Nick at Nite in the 80's to not turn it into a drinking game where you had to do shots every time a fistfight broke out. But then I would have ended up with alcohol poisoning well before the end of the first Season.
Episode scribe Joel Carpenter gives the formula his best shot (and a quirky Silliphant-esque title), but strikes out far worse than Linc here.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Season 3 two cents con'd.
25 "the cruelest sea of all" Episode writer Silliphant finally got so tired of writing kooky women for Tod to fall in love with that he said "oh, screw it," went off the deep end and sent in a mermaid. Seriously. Or should I say, whimsically? Or perhaps, mysteriously? Because the overreaching and ultimately unanswered question for this episode is, "Is she or isn't she?" Do you believe, or don't you? And the cruelest sea of all? That would be our surface world, where we can't always accept things on faith, even unconditional love.
Tod and Linc finally make it to my neck of the woods (or should I say swamp), with staff gigs at the Weeki Wachi Springs mermaid spectacular tourist attraction in Florida. Thirty air-hose-sucking, slightly chunky (by today's standards), reasonably attractive human women in one-piece suits ... and one ringer, who shows up unannounced and not breathing underwater for seven straight minutes. One of the problems with this episode is that you spend a lot of time watching those seven minutes and more of women dancing underwater with no dialogue to cover the action. This has all the dramatic effect you would get staring at your aquarium. Which would be entertaining only if you were smoking what Silliphant must have been when he wrote this episode.
But Diane Baker as the sea nymph from the Sargasso Sea is awfully cute (and not chunky), and the Tod squirm factor goes past 11, as he mugs and looks increasingly confused trying to figure out just where this soggy chick is coming from. She told you, Tod, the Sargasso Sea. Can't you take a mermaid at her word? Oh. Guess not. Too bad. There she goes.
Now Buz, the poet, would have believed. And wouldn't that have been more fun? But he also would have drowned swimming after her. So maybe Silliphant's ultimate message here is to take things on faith ... unless it requires breathing underwater.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Season 3 two cents con'd. "handball with cannons"
26 "peace, pity, pardon" and Pul-eaasee tell me what the hell is going on in this episode? You've got a rooming house in Tampa full of Jai-Alai players, including Alejandro Rey, mooning about the struggle and the war. Which war? The Spanish Civil War? The Vietnam War (nope, that's Linc's), the anti-Castro revolutionary war? Okay. We're getting warmer. There's a guy in a very fake Castro beard and Cuban army hat with a machine gun on a boat at one point. And he's muy malo. So, I guess we're fighting Castro here. But it's hard to tell for the first three quarters of the episode, and without the context of what was going on historically OUTSIDE of the television the year before this aired (Bay of Pigs, anyone?).
There's some fantastic acting by the man who plays Rey's brother, Ramos (Victor Junquera). There's a nice little action sequence at the end. There's the usual pained Tod bookend voiceover, "How did this all happen?" sequence. And there's some out-of-focus Jai Alai action. The only touchstone for me on this episode was the fact that our own local Jai-Alai fronton just closed this very week after 48 years. No more "handball with cannons" here. No more obviously dropped pelotas. The last time I saw anything unscripted at a Jai-Alai fronton it was Jethro Tull teetering on one leg improvising his flute solo in the middle of "A Passion Play." Let me moon over that one for a moment.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Season 3 two cents con'd.
27 "what a shining young man is our gallant lieutenant" Dick York plays a man stuck with an eight year-old mentality ... which means he's a slightly more mature than Darrin Stephens. I keed, I keed. But seriously, he does a nice acting job playing a war buddy commander of Linc's who had a brain injury and is now trapped in a child-like state. Not so funny when you consider that with munitions what they are today, your brain can be permanently injured just by the shock wave of a IED blast, or a full speed head on head helmet collision in the NCAA. Still, it's a moving portrait of one of the more unheralded casualties of war.
There's not much more here than that sketch portrait and some nice supporting actors (hey, there's James Olson). There's some fake suspense that Linc will somehow regress from his own PTSD and be lost in a child-like state with his former lieutanant. There's the car which York is polishing to give to his mom so they can ride to the 'big city' together. But, of course, the car has no wheels, and is little more than an obvious and somewhat cliched metaphor. (Howard Rodman is credited with this script).
York isn't the only casualty of battle fatique here. This series, which has often reached emotional heights few dramas of the era can match, in the second half of its third season is beginning to resemble that wheel-less car with the spinning rotors going nowhere.

 

[Stephen Bowie]

Agreed that "Peace, Pity, Pardon" is a clunker, but I feel strongly that "Fifty Miles From Home" and "Shining Lieutenant" are two of the best episodes of the series, a powerful, early anti-Vietnam diptych unlike anything else on American TV at that time. Just those two episodes are enough to redeem the introduction of the Linc Case character, even for Glenn Corbett-haters.
I've always assumed that Silliphant lifted "The Cruelest Sea of All" from Curtis Harrington's Night Tide (1961), which has an almost identical is-she-or-is-she-not-a-mermaid premise (and a similar ambiguity of resolution). But the Harrington film had such a patchy theatrical release that you'd have to do some legwork to verify that Silliphant might've plausibly seen it.

 

[Bert Greene]

The "Lieutenant" episode has long been a favorite of mine, although I agree the metaphor of the stationary car becomes a hair too unsubtle by the end. The process of Linc's unconscious descent towards his friend's regressed mentality is deeply unsettling subject matter, and not something unfamiliar to those of us who've had to care for elderly relatives as they sink into senility and witness their worldviews collapse inwardly. It's very easy to be drawn into (and ulitmately dragged down by) their little worlds, all while under the altruistic motive of providing care. This episode really captured that.

Anyway, I'm enjoying the reviews very much. I have yet to crack open my season-3 set, but I do know the episodes pretty well, courtesy my ragged old Nick-at-Night tapes, which I revisited repeatedly over the past two decades. Hope we hear word of season-4 before too long.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

I liked the episode and, in the context of the time, it must have been a pretty shocking indictment of war, and the denial of its impact on the individual (everyone around the veteran just pretends things are okay). I just wish a better actor had tackled Linc's conflict, and really made us really believe he was at risk to slip irretrievably into that same never neverland.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Season 3 two cents con'd. "That's the difference between men and women ... 40 miles per hour."*
28 "but what do you do in march?" Here's a fun episode. Janice Rule and Susan Kohner play extremely wealthy women jet-setters who spend March in St. Petersburgh, Florida, trying to beat each other with the fastest speedboat (toy) and the cutest driver boy (toy). Guess who the boy toys are in this episode?
Did anyone write more powerful or forward-thinking women roles in the early 60's than Silliphant? I doubt it. When you consider this is the same era of Mad Men and witness a version of the limited roles of women in the workplace, let alone on television, the scripts for women on this series have been revolutionary. Consider Vicki. Then, consider Sydney Brookes here (Janice Rule), who flies her own plane, has a Blackberry multi-task mind ever spinning, and the joke is she took her father's paltrey $15 million company and ... ran it into a $150 million company.
Sydney hires Linc to drive her boat, and be her latest boy-thing, and he, of course, falls in love with her and tells Tod he's going off with her after the race. This is the third time in three episodes Linc has threatened or stated he was dropping out on Tod. If I were Tod, I would cut my losses on this shakey cruise partner and head to Brooklyn to find another Buz ... fast.
The boat race scenes are pretty well done. I've seen a few of these Gulf races that run at about 200 mph, and all it takes is an errant wind under the hull on a moderate chop to send one of these boats flipping through the air in a fatal fashion. I like the fact that the winner of the race here is also the loser. Figure that out if you watch the episode.
Guy Lombardo shows up with his orchestra, a brother named Carmen, and an awesome tan. Realize that huge developers had bought up chunks of Florida and were using every angle possible to lure retirees into their canal-dredged and sand lot communities on the Gulf coast in the early sixties. So Guy Lombardo was essentially the Pepto Bismo Pied Piper of St. Petersburg. Today, it's Andy Williams, the Osmonds and everyone else over 70 in Branson, Missouri. It's too late for me ... I already live in Florida, indirectly a victim of that same migration that Lombardo and others contributed to luring my parent's generation down to this drained swamp.
*There are so many great quotes in this episode that would stand alone. And what other television series in this or any other era quotes Tolstoy ... and in the right context (material gratification leading nowhere)? Writer's who wrote television in the sixties still read books and went to plays. Today, the source material for everything is either a comic book, a previous movie, or television show. The medium may be the message as McLuhan noted, but the message has now been mostly diluted into illiteracy and inanity.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Season 3 two cents con'd.
29 "who will cheer my bonnie bride?" Linc is comandeered to drive for a couple of motel robbers trying to escape the law and get to a wedding in time to stop the bride from marrying someone else. The robbers (and prospective bride groom thief) are played by Rip Torn and Albert Salmi. A witness is played by Gene Hackman. And Glen Corbett ... he's a minnow swimming with sharks when it comes to acting chompers. And Linc, who is supposedly from Texas, you want to hear a REAL Texas accent? Pay very close attention to Rip Torn.
This episode hits all sorts of touchstones for me. I believe it's the first example of blatant product placement in a television series ... for a land development corporation. Cape Coral was a sandy and swampy peninsula on the Gulf coast of Florida that was purchased by the Gulf Land Development Corporation, razed of any trees by bulldozers dragging chains between them, dredged with canals, and sliced into little lots that were sold to Northerners for about $600 a pop. Mostly after the time this episode aired, when Cape Coral was merely a big welcome sign and the Nautilus Motel (scene of the robbery). Both are featured prominently here, as is the credit thanking the Gulf Land Development Corporation for their "cooperation." By cooperation, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the producers or the network were compensated handsomely. And that Cape Coral sign was featured prominently at least three times.
So, my parents bought one of those $600 Cape Coral lots and lived their happily for the last 23 years of their lives, and are buried there now. My mother was practically the walking chamber of commerce for that community, never hesitating to praise it to her friends back in Maryland. And, amazingly, she did this without any compensation or cooperation from the Gulf Land Development Corporation. I always made fun of the fact the place had no big trees (they were all planted since the early sixties, remember?). But it was a nice place to decompress after many years in Hollywood, and to hang out at the Tikki bar at the Del Prado Inn (formerly the Nautilus Motel).
Another personal touchstone, if you will indulge me one more moment. My mom appeared briefly in a cameo in a film shot in Pennsylvania many years ago as an Amish woman. She just happened to be vacationing with a friend in the area and got tapped for the cameo (and was horrified to have to go without makeup), much as many of the locals you see in Route 66 episodes were cast. The name of the film was Birch Interval and one of the main actors who she met and made friends with ... was Rip Torn.
So it's tough for me to watch this episode shot in the sandy barrens of Cape Coral, and starring Rip Torn and not think of another R.I.P. I love you, Mom. I miss you.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Season 3 two cents con'd.
30 "shadows in the afternoon" Or, as I like to call it ... "To Kill a Dachsund in the Heat of the Garden of Good and Evil with a Crucible" to reflect the Southern crime, bigot sheriff, town secret, false accuser plotline. Linc, rotating shifts with Tod as a housekeeper and pet-sitter in Charlotte County, Florida (just above Cape Coral) is accused of attacking the absent owner's beloved Dachsund with pruning sheers, which, in this blue hair neck of the of woods is probably a hanging offense.
Miriam Hopkins plays the local widow biddy who swears she saw Linc committ the crime. And she's much scarier here playing the trusted eyewitness than she was playing the looney toons abandoned bride in The Outer Limits episode, "Don't Open Til Doomsday" (which is saying a lot). It's a terrific peformance and, if I was ambitious, I'd check to see if she was nominated for an Emmy for this performance. The whimpering Dachsund wasn't too bad, either. The script is by Alvin Sargeant (and Leonard Freeman), who I'm sure has a few Emmys stacked on his mantle. It's not your typical Route 66 episode. It really digs deep into the Southern gothic legal drama like a worthy Grisham short story. And the last shot uniquely features the Miriam Hopkins character having a meltdown in a close up, not our boys.
One big legal quibble: The story makes big hay out of the locals not trusting Linc and Tod because they are 'drifters,' and yet Linc easily makes bail on a felony charge. Isn't he the very definition of a 'flight risk' by their suspicions or criminal profile of him? Perhaps it was just Ralph Meeker's superior charms as the local attorney to sway the judge (or a nice bottle of Jack). And, speaking of charms, there's the beautiful Kathryn Hays ("Empath" episode from Star Trek) as Tod's latest smooch interest. And Richard Mulligan (S.O.B. and Custer in Little Big Man) playing it straight as the prosecutor.
The switch on The Crucible here is that the pre-pubescent girls are the reliable witnesses and it's the respectable old lady who can get you hung just for having memorable baby blue eyes.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Season 3 two cents finished.
31 "soda pop and paper flags" This episode was on the Producer's Picks best of released a few months back, but it's a solid tale (by John McGreevey), so I watched it again. I still don't understand why it's on the 'Best of' disc, except those are randomly chosen around some guest star who became much bigger later on, rather than the full merits of the episode. This one features Alan Alda as a stone-faced doctor and the bipolar opposite of Hawkeye Pierce. Chester Morris plays a hobo who, coinciding with Tod and Linc rolling into this small town, is detained by the police as a possible transmitter of a potentially deadly sleeping sickness that two of the town's beloved kids have contracted. With the H1N1 flu currently hanging over us, and the particular vulnerability of children at stake, this story gains an eeriely timeless quality.

Linc's story plays in lighter counterpoint, as he is off on a rubber sales assignment and drafted by a sleazebag version of Tom Bosley to do pimp duty attracting babes at a local watering hole. Linc, it seems, has very little command over his fate and is always getting drafted or commandeered one way or the other so far in this series.
Small town paranoia of strangers and ignorant fearmongering is on full display here, which is also a timeless reflection of an epidemic that has spread far wider in our culture than those closed-minded little towns featured in so many classic television episodes in the early sixties (See "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" from the The Twilight Zone as a prime example). Frank Overton plays one of the fathers and the voice of reason here, but I'm beginning to get the impression this is the only note he plays as an actor. It's the same tone and gravity he brings to perhaps my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone ... "Walking Distance."
Tod and Linc survive to ride off in the '63 Corvette to Season 4, while the other hobo has to take the train. He needs a better agent.
That's it for my Season Three comments and opinions. I had a most enjoyable time returning to these episodes, which I either haven't seen in 20 years (Nick at Night), or since they originally aired in 1963. I also hope you may have had a little enjoyment reading them.
One last comment; again purely my opinion. The Fugitive, also primarily an anthology 'road' series from the same era, was a very solidly scripted and beautifully rendered (and scored) set of mini film noirs. It stands the test of time. But to me, the appeal of the show was somewhat limited by the consistently pinched emotional performance Janssen had to play as the hunted and haunted character. He just didn't have the palette of tones from grim to comical that Maharis and Milner were allowed to bring to Route 66. It also didn't have the wide open vistas of actually being on the road like Route 66. And, most importantly to me, as a writer and a humble truthseeker, although the scripts were excellent, they weren't reaching for something beyond the story - an effort that Stirling Silliphant brought so consistently and eloquently to his Route 66 tales. He was always searching, exploring, just like these characters were, for the greater truths in life, and usually finding them in the very human connections they made along the way. May we all continue to make those connections.

 

[Ron Lee Green]

Me-TV started airing this show 2 weeks ago, and I was disappointed to see they are showing the old Colex syndicated episodes. Running time is approx. 45 mins. and the picture is dark and fuzzy.
I guess its better than nothing, but it hurts knowing that there are better quality prints out there from the old Nick at Nite airings.