A Relentless Pursuit of an Innocent Man

The most genius idea ever for a TV show, and how it paved the way for modern cable drama

The Fugitive, "The Garden House"
OB: January 14, 1964, 10 p.m. EST, ABC
I was born the day this episode was originally broadcast.

"The name? Richard Kimble.  Occupation: doctor of medicine.  Destination: death row, state prison.  The irony?  Richard Kimble is innocent."

Every episode during season one of The Fugitive re-enacted the beginning of Richard Kimble's run from the wrongly applied law: the train wreck, which separates him from Lt. Gerard.

"Proved guilty, what Richard Kimble could not prove was that moments before discovering his murdered wife's body, he saw a one-armed man running from the vicinity of his home."

Why Gerard is escorting Kimble to state prison and not a uniformed state trooper or deputy is unclear (so is why they're not being transported on a more modern-looking train car), but it does put the antagonist in the opening, handcuffed to Kimble just as fate has done symbolically.

"Richard Kimble ponders his fate as he looks at the world for the last time, and sees only darkness.  But in that darkness, fate moves its huge hand."

...and then the trainwreck, followed by the splash in a nearby creek as newly-freed Kimble washes his face.

And so began Richard Kimble's (and David Janssen's) four year, legendary run from the law, from certain injustice and death, from the obsessed Lt. Philip Gerard (Barry Morse),  toward black hair dye and a new temporary identity and new life in every town big and small, and toward a scary, uncertain future and an odds-against search for the one-armed man.  That meant exactly one regular character, a couple of semi-regulars or two, settings that changed every episode, a shipload of guest stars, and one of the most liberated storylines in television history, rivaling the one from Route 66. Really, almost anything could happen--the show's entire genre could even change from one episode to the next, and it often did.  It's what makes The Fugitive to this day, one of the greatest hour long dramas of all time.

Kimble worked odd jobs, faced trouble makers from the very first episode (a jealous, woman-beating jerk played by Brian Keith), looked over his shoulder in every town.  He reacted with the rest of us, getting that sick, dreadful feeling in our stomachs every time he saw a uniformed officer or a police car.  (Newspaper photographers and radio microphones weren't the most welcome sights in the world, either.)  Kimble made friends tentatively and trusted surprisingly often, found himself uncomfortably close to murders and dead bodies a surprising amount of time, and often performed heroic efforts that attracted the attention of the media...and tips off Gerard to his whereabouts.  By the middle of the first season he'd already rescued a bunch of school children from a burning school bus, helped deliver a baby in the middle of a raging forest fire and rescued Gerard himself from drowning.

In true 1960s male fantasyland, Kimble became a jack of all trades who could do all manner of man's work. And there was almost always a woman.  Ladies were drawn to him like flies.  A troubled but innocent man was golden.  And the built-in premise allowed him to love 'em and leave 'em without any of the normal male guilt, because his very survival depended on her not seeing him again, and hers depended on not coming with him.  He spent the night with many of these women, and it was heavily implied he did more than crash on their couch, even in those pre-censorship times.  In one episode a single mom even seems to be figuring out what to do about her children so she can have a man over.  And those women were played by some beautiful 1960s era guest stars, like Susan Oliver, Suzanne Pleshette, Lois Nettleton and Angie Dickinson.

So how did his feelings for Helen Kimble figure into all of this?  Well, that's the rather dark elephant in the room.  We don't actually see Richard pine for her all that much, or stop to shed a tear or look at a picture of her in his billfold (yes, I know he had to travel light).  It turns out there's a reason for that.

When we finally meet Helen Kimble in flashbacks, we don't see a very pleasant side of her.  We first meet her in the hospital just minutes after the Kimbles' son dies in childbirth, and she's confronted with the wrenching news that she'll never have children.  Much later, she's grown bitter, hateful and alcoholic, and is swilling martinis left and right.  The night of her death, they're arguing about adoption, and when Richard takes a glass away from her and throws it into the floor, she simply stares at him and coldly says they still have more glasses.

Richard takes a drive in his Mercury to cool off, along the way seeing a boy in a rowboat (in Franklin Canyon Reservoir no less, I've written about that place already, a couple of times in fact).  It's a bittersweet moment as well as a key part of his later murder trial.

When he returns home, he has to slam on his brakes to keep his Mercury from running over a one-armed man, who stares at him for a moment with his mouth open.  Then arrives home and finds his wife, lying in the floor dead.

We've never heard much about whether Kimble had a chance to properly mourn Helen Kimble's death, or if he even did, considering the rocky state of their marriage.  And as I've seen it mentioned elsewhere, that wasn't his only rocky relationship; his hometown of Stafford, Indiana apparently didn't love him very much either.  After all, it was a jury of his Stafford peers who found him guilty (after a trial of questionable evidence),  and Lt. Gerard was considered a pillar of that community.  And when Kimble returns home briefly (in an episode the week before I was born, "Home is for the Hunted") we find his brother Ray not only has doubts about Richard's innocence, but despite those doubts, he's been treated badly by the community for being Richard's brother, complete with abuse and difficulty finding employment.  (To his credit, Ray still doesn't want Gerard to catch him and hides Richard from him.)

The show almost didn't get made due to its portrayal of law enforcement.  Sometimes, especially in episodes set in smaller towns, the police department or sheriff's office is portrayed as teeming with corruption or just plain laughably incompetent.  (In one episode we even see a deputy swilling moonshine while driving.)  In many other episodes they're seen as highly competent, and just as quick to get fed up with Gerard as everyone else.

In an early episode, Phillip Gerard has to break the news to his son that a planned fishing trip for the weekend may be cancelled due to another Kimble sighting in another part of the country.  A few episodes later in "Nightmare at North Oak" (the one in which Richard injures himself rescuing children from a burning bus, which Janssen actually injured himself filming that very scene), we see Kimble in a jail cell and a cocky Gerard talking mano a mano.  (Their local sheriff's office has taken an instant dislike to Lt. Gerard.) Gerard makes it clear, he thinks Kimble's time on the run has made his "fantasy" about being innocent more of a reality to Kimble. When Gerard appears defensive, having said he's done everything he could to find the one-armed man himself, Kimble says, "It's a curse, isn't it Gerard?  You know, I think you have nightmares too.  Your nightmare is, when I'm dead, you'll find him."

This is a tense, memorable scene that once and for all, makes it abundantly clear Gerard himself considers the "It's just my professional duty to carry out the law, that's all" line to be a huge, steaming crock.  Gerard is immovably convinced he's looking for a killer, and it's obsessive and personal.  And this episode's appearance after the one involving his son implies it grows even more personal over time.  And I honestly think Kimble's line about Gerard finding the one-armed man haunts Gerard.  Barry Morse always played Lt.Gerard of the Indiana State Police with exactly the right amount of cold, calculating obsessiveness, with a tiny amount of decency somewhere inside fighting to take control of him.  Making him a villain at this point in time was a daring choice.  Some fans felt he was downright scary, and one of those grew up to be horror writer Stephen King.

Put all of this together, along with Richard Kimble's odd jobs (he couldn't work for someone who demanded a social security number or too much more information) and how that often put him among some rough characters...and of course, the fact that the show's first three seasons were shot in black and white...and you basically have a recipe for film noir.  It's not that Kimble was an anti-hero, but during the later black and white episodes he comes off as especially desperate, willing to do almost anything to find that one-armed man; sometimes appearing less willing to clear himself under the eyes of the law than just make a point.  He even seems to get used to this lifestyle, having jettisoned a rather empty, unsatisfying life in higher middle classic suburbia, the very type described on Mad Men and in the works of John Cheever.

Put all of this together, and I could make the argument that the first three seasons of The Fugitive may very well be the last true, and truly great, film noir ever produced in this country.

Another thing to consider: the case against Richard Kimble.  Having covered numerous real-life capital murder trials over the years (in which the evidence was often more of a slam dunk since we now have DNA testing and the like; plus loose-lipped suspects who confess in front of surveillance cameras), I was very curious about whatever evidence in Kimble's murder trial made everyone, especially Gerard, so hand-on-stack-of-Bibles-swear-to-everloving-God certain and positive no one else in the universe could've possibly killed Helen Kimble.  We always heard the evidence was circumstantial; forensics science wasn't what it is now, and DNA testing was non-existent; the boy in the rowboat testified he never saw Kimble, but since Kimble saw him and placed him there, and the boy admitted being there, that should've solidified his alibi. It's later brought out that the defense never mentioned Helen Kimble's heavy drinking or how strong someone could be when they're missing one limb and have learned to compensate for it.

So, Dr. Richard Kimble basically had an inept attorney, and everyone's certitude about his guilt isn't based on a mountain of evidence and an arsenal of smoking guns as much as maniacally blind faith in a system that's clearly failed.  Perhaps that's a holdover from the smoking ruins of the McCarthy era and a foreshadowing of disillusion with "the system" that would come in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The show's creator, Roy Huggins, always swore his one and only inspiration for this show was the western genre, basically the "loner" western character who often popped up so much.  (Sure enough, Brian Keith's pilot episode bad guy is wearing a cowboy hat.)  But there are glaringly obvious similarities to the real life murder case of Dr. Sam Shephard, and to the Victor Hugo classic novel "Les Miserables," in the latter case especially with Gerard's character patterned so closely after Javert.

Reinforcing the noirish style to the show was the work of the actor, not announcer, they choose for the show's narrator. William Conrad, radio's Matt Dillon, would actually have his own Quinn Martin-produced show ten years later (Cannon), but brought a surprising amount of depth to his role here as the sympathetic voice of doom.  He was clearly chosen for his acting skills, not just his deep voice.  (For an idea of Conrad's range as a gifted narrator, check out his other great TV narration work: The Bullwinkle Show.  Those two assignments overlapped for one season, 1963-64.)  During season one, Quinn Martin's usual announcer, Dick Wesson, read off the titles and guest cast.  (I didn't realize until I sat down to write this, that Wesson was also the announcer on The Wonderful World of Disney and many of the Disney movie trailers of the 1960s and 1970s.)  The opening is underlined by the Pete Rugulo theme song, the opening notes representing loneliness, the rest of the quick-tempo strings representing a man on the run.


This whole show may have very well failed had they picked the wrong actor...but fortunately they didn't. David Janssen takes on the role as if it were made just for him, with at least one fan saying he looked in the very first episode ("Fear in a Desert City") as if he'd already been doing the show for years.  I'm taken by how much acting Janssen did just with his eyes.  He may very well be one of the most underrated actors in television history, and it's a shame his health--smoking constantly on camera, drinking constantly off camera--cut short his life at age 48 and possibly interfered with his getting better roles in his lifetime.  It hurts that we didn't get to see more work from him, that a 60-something Janssen couldn't make a cameo in a Quentin Tarantino movie...and I know he would have, I just know it.  (Incidentally, the on-camera smoking may have been out of deference to one of the show's advertisers being a tobacco company.  There are even scenes where someone offers him a cigarette and he says no thanks, he has his own.)

Janssen always wanted a big break as a leading man in movies; the best he could get was four television series, two of which had him as private eyes.  His first, a 1950s TV version of radio's Richard Diamond, Private Detective, was a Peter Gunn-type TV noir that had him taking assignments from a woman whose sexy voice and sexy legs was all we ever heard/saw.  (The first woman in that role happened to be Mary Tyler Moore.)  On The Fugitive, his clean-cut persona, tobacco-stained voice, and the drinking that made him appear older than he was, all worked in his favor as he played a college man who stood out in the odd jobs he held, like truck driver and lifeguard.

The very day I was born, the show took a turn into Hitchcockian territory...maybe not Rear Window or Vertigo so much as Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  "The Garden House" was written by Sheldon Stark.  The woman who directed this episode--veteran Hollywood actress Ida Lupino--had also directed a couple of Hitchcock episodes.  At a time when it was exceedingly rare for a woman to sit in a director's chair, she directed episodes of Have Gun Will Travel, The Twilight Zone and The Virginian, and even sitcoms like The Donna Reed Show, Bewitched and Gilligan's Island.  She was known for her special ability to work with TV actors in particular and get them out of their weekly comfort zones.

The show opens with "Act I"--Quinn Martin's TV shows often put their titles after each commercial break with an "Act" number, very unusual then as well as now--as Ann Guthrie (played by Peggy McCay, better known for her long running role on Days of Our Lives) is struggling to stay on a horse.  Her husband Harland (Robert Webber) and sister, Carol Willard (Pippa Scott) are watching, as Carol takes pictures for a "Sunday spread."  As Kimble, who goes by the name "Sanford" in this episode (he has a different alias in almost every episode) walks up with another horse, we hear the narrator set the scene: "Connecticut.  Green trees framing the homes of the wealthy and the near-wealthy.  Gracious living with roots deep in the past. And without roots, interstate fugitive Richard Kimble."
Carol snaps a quick picture of couple, horse and "Sanford," but Kimble quickly averts his head.  As Carol asks if he's camera shy, Kimble finds one of the girth buckles still undone, indicating a loose saddle and therefore, the problems with the horse.

As Harlan--editor of the Westborne Clarion--and Carol, a reporter and photographer for the paper, walk off to the side, we realize they mean to kill Ann.

"I really fumbled that one, didn't I?" Harlan asks.
"My love, with a capital F," Ann responds, speculating that latest attempt on her life could've resulted in nothing more than broken bones, "...or a wheelchair case.  How would you like that?  Pushing her around the rest of our lives in a wheelchair."  The writers really want us to hate these two.  We come to realize Ann actually owns the house, estate, newspaper and has all the money, but Ann's husband really wants her sister Carol.  Carol, however, is expressing attraction toward Kimble.

A little later, an optimistic Ann has gotten back onto what turns out to be a runaway horse, and Kimble chases after her in a Jeep.  He finds the horse stopped on the trail and some blood on a nearby root, then he sees the title location, the estate's garden house.  He finds Ann inside, listening to a music box with a twirling ballerina and looking at some childhood artwork depicting her and Carol.  "Anytime I put my foot in it, I come here," she tells Kimble as he fixes a small cut on her arm.  She says "Sanford" reminds her of a doctor; Kimble says his ability is from earning an old Boy Scout merit badge.

Later, the two sisters chat at an art studio where Ann is painting; Carol, wearing a bathing suit, asks "Sanford" to adjust one of her straps, apparently both flirting and showing off to Ann her seeming freedom of a single life.  This is apparently where Carol hatches the idea of cooking up a phony affair between "Sanford" and Ann.

Back at the newspaper, we see her holding an old back issue about Kimble's escape from the train wreck, complete with photos.  She shows it to Harlan, who at first starts to call the police.  But she stops him, first pointing out that no one else knows yet so it's an "exclusive," then pointing out that he's now a convenient alibi for a murder, and they no longer need convoluted plans to make it look like an accident.  "He's killed one woman already," she points out.

Back at the house, we see Harlan pulling a gun out of a drawer.  (The graphics say we're in "Act II," in case you're keeping score for "Chekov's Gun" purposes.)   He asks Ann to touch it, so she won't be so afraid of it.  As Kimble walks in, Harlan asks "Sanford" to spend some time with Ann to show her firearms and horses.  This is especially low behavior...

...for when the two get into the car and Harlan lights up, they hatch their real plan.  It's to imply the two spent a lot of time together because they were having an affair, then got into a quarrel and Kimble, the lady-killer,strikes again.  "Make sure you don't miss, my love," Carol says.  "Don't worry about me, make sure you cry at the funeral!" Harlan shoots back.

Carol hides in the bushes and snaps away as Kimble takes Ann horseback riding.  When they get back to the house, Carol greets them and reminds Sanford Ann's a married woman, and that she, Carol, is single.  "Is there anything you can teach me?" Carol asks.  The conversation gives us some more background: apparently Ann inherited everything because she stayed home in Westborne while Carol traveled the country in search of herself.  Interesting enough, Ann's not that good on horses and with guns and Carol is, which is a family trait and perhaps another source of some of the resentment.  "Let that be a lesson to you, Sanford...a rolling stone gathers no loot!"  Carol says to Kimble.

At a party at the estate that night, Ann is wearing Carol's dress, and Harlan goes off to dance with her for appearances' sake.  Carol reminds him he'll be dancing with her Dior dress.  "How many drinks have you had?"  he asks the martini-swilling Carol.  "Not nearly enough!"  she shoots back.

Carol finds Kimble alone in the stable, and starts peppering him with questions about his past, his work history, and his love life.  "I'm working on it, Miss Willard," Kimble says about his love life.  She tells "Sanford" that he's "much too formal" and promptly sticks her tongue down his throat.  He pushes her away and tells her they'll be asking questions if she's gone too long from the party.  (Interesting little argument there, implying Richard may very well be attracted to her himself.)  Harlan finds her in the stable and takes her back to the party.

As she leaves, Kimble finds a hotel key that's fallen out of her purse.  It mentions the name of a specific hotel and room number.  He keeps it.  As he walks out of the barn, he finds Harlan and Carol making out big time, and specifically overhears Harlan say,   "Until Ann is gone, we've got to be very careful, you know that!"

The next day, after unsuccessfully trying to teach Ann how to shoot skeet and after Carol showed off her own abilities ("When you aim at something, sweetie, you must want to try to kill it"), Kimble gets Ann alone and tells her about the affair and that, based on what he overheard, she may not be safe.  She gets upset and orders him gone, then tells Harlan what Kimble just said.  Kimble says he's sorry if he misunderstood what was going on and he'll be on the next bus out of town that night.  Harlan agrees to pay him before he leaves town.  Ann has gone back to her special place, the garden house, where she's listening to her music box and saying "Kimble's lying" over and over.

Back at the newspaper, Harlan tells Carol, "It'll have to be in the next couple of hours if we're going to blame him."  Cut to commercial.

The Fugitive, "Act IV," has Kimble confronting Carol at the Clarion offices, with the motel key, and what he learned from the clerk.  He says the clerk provided a very convincing description of Harlan and Carol, and a handwriting expert can figure out the handwriting from the aliases on the register.  He mentions the idea of dropping it in a mailbox with a note to the D.A. and suggests Carol go back to traveling.

A panicked Carol calls Ann, but doesn't say anything and hangs up.  She hops into her Thunderbird and drives away.  Back at the house, Harlan and Ann have a very ugly confrontation in which he admits the affair and that he doesn't love her.  "You don't know, do you?  You really are stupid, aren't you?  It's Carol and I. You think I married you for love?"  He says he only married her for the house, the newspaper and the money, and shows her the old newspaper with Kimble's picture.  He beats Ann over the head with the whole idea that she's alone and no one cares about her, obviously being an over-the-top anus to get her upset enough to head back to the garden house.

Kimble comes back, finds the newspaper lying in the floor and the open, empty drawer that once held the gun.  The maid tells him Mrs. Guthrie went back to the garden house, so he heads there.  Harlan arrives first, and loads his gun with bullets.  Then, while hiding, he sees two high-heeled feet come in the door.  Kimble, off in the distance, hears the gunshot and rushes to the garden house.  He finds Harlan inside, holding the gun and crouched over the body of a woman, and the two get into a fistfight.  (Quinn Martin's shows had a specific rhythm to them, calling for so much action per act and strategically placed action scenes like this one.)   With Harlan lying on the floor, Ann walks in, and finds Carol shot and wounded.  During her dying moments she still shows she can be mean, saying, "Harlan thought I was you.  That's a blow to my ego, mistaking me for you...Good little Annie, the good one, that's why you always had everything."  But then she sees the childhood sisters picture on the wall, apparently noticing it for the first time, and strokes Ann on the cheek, saying "Annie, Annie," before she expires.

Harlan comes to and asks Ann to give him the gun, so they can blame it on Kimble ("He's a convicted murderer, what does it matter?"), but Ann--confident with the gun because Harlan already said he wanted her to be--holds it steady. Harlan tells her he was out of his head, and if he dies or goes away, she'll be alone.  Kimble tells her there are worse things than being along. When Harlan lunges for the gun, Kimble slugs him one last night, knocking him out cold "for awhile," as Dr. Kimble puts it.  He tells Ann to call the police.

The Fugitive, "Epilog," finds Kimble walking her back to the main house where the phone is located.  "I wish you could stay or that I could go," she assures Kimble, thus assuring him both main women in this episode were very much attracted to him.  She says she has no idea what she'll do next, and that she doesn't know how to run a newspaper, but Kimble assures her she'll be all right.
Every episode ends with a shot of Kimble returning to live on the run...either walking off into the distance, catching a bus, hitchhiking, what have you.  In this one, we see him walk, then break into a jog (remember, the police are coming) as William Conrad leaves us with an afterthought:  "Tomorrow the Westborne Clarion will have a new editor.  One of the paper's first editorials will be a plea for innocent men pursued by the furies, men such as Richard Kimble, the Fugitive."

There was never any sign of Gerard in this episode, just the opening scene re-enacting the train wreck; in fact, he only appears in some 35-40 episodes, 12 of them in season one alone.  But his presence is always felt and he's basically the reason Kimble is on the run.

In the show's final season, 1966-67, it suddenly wasn't the same show anymore.  Like the rest of ABC's prime time lineup, it was now in full color, robbing it of many of its noirish qualities, even though so many of the other noir tropes were still in place.  In part one of the series' two part finale there's even a scene in a bail bondsman's office with neon light streaming in through Venetian blinds.  One thing the new lighting and bright colors did do is make us subconsciously think for some reason, it might actually be easier now for Kimble to get caught.  It also paved the way for later, grittier color shows like Hill Street Blues.

By then, Janssen needed a break; he was showing up on time to put in long hours on the set, but then partied around the clock afterwards.  This took its toll on him, and made it harder to do the show, so he decided to bow out, despite an almost certain renewal.  Here's where the show came up with its best known innovation: the idea that it owed the fans some closure, a wrap-up.

So the cast and crew shot a two-part episode, "The Judgment," that was held back until the end of summer reruns, airing August 22 and 29, 1967.  It's a convoluted plot that's actually not a fan favorite, as it also manages to pay tribute to the series' long run while managing to shred the canon at the same time.  (For one thing the writers actually managed to change Helen Kimble's cause of death from strangulation to blunt force trauma;  they also pulled an eyewitness out of their butts, a coward who watched Helen Kimble get murdered and could've intervened but didn't, then was too cowardly to come forward.)  Gerard finally got his man, allowing Kimble to spend a last weekend with his family (an unusual twice likely borrowed from "Les Miserables") and one last effort to find the one-armed man.  Sure enough, Kimble and the man, Fred Johnson, end up atop an amusement park tower that was part of a water-based ride of some sort, and Johnson confesses to everything.  The two fight, Johnson ends up pointing a gun at Kimble...and Gerard spectacularly saves his life, shooting the one armed man who then falls off the tower.  By then Gerard has made an eleventh hour conversion, finally convinced of Kimble's innocence, and gets coward guy to finally tell everything in court.  It robbed fans who wanted Gerard to get his comeuppance, or at least walk away looking deflated.

If the finale failed in story construction, it succeeded wildly in emotional drama, especially the pitch-perfect epilog.  We see Kimble (arm in arm with one final woman, the one he was able to stay with this time) leaving the courthouse a free man talking very confidently to a gaggle of reporters he once would've feared with good reason, then sees Gerard, who shakes his hand and watches Kimble go his separate way.  The real kicker is when we see that once-feared police car drive up, and two officers matter-of-factly get out and walk off.  Kimble suddenly realizes the sight of the police no longer means what it did for four years and will never again mean what it did when Helen Kimble was alive.  "Tuesday, August Fifth...the day the running stopped," is what the narrator leaves us with.  It was the highest rated TV broadcast in history, a record that is now held by the February 1983 M*A*S*H episode that saw the Korean War end.  Today we now expect series TV to wrap up with finales, giving us closure with the characters, all because The Fugitive forever convinced network executives that we will always consider that a big deal.

The show's "wrong is right" mentality can best be summed up in a season one episode, "Smoke Screen," in which a group of migrant workers take an instant dislike to Kimble when he goes to work with them.  We later find out it's because, again, of his college-educated demeanor, making him stand out and making them fear he's working undercover for customs and immigration.  When Kimble tells one of them he's actually on the run from the law, they reward him with fierce loyalty.  And that, I believe, was the day the inverted logic of heroes was born.

The Fugitive obviously inspired a lot of shows in its format, shows that couldn't be less like one another--The Incredible Hulk, Touched By an Angel, The X-Files, Mad Men, all owe a lot to The Fugitive. But so does The Shield, The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and a number of other shows, where we see what happens when flawed people are left in charge of a system, or a main character is liberated from having to be a "good guy" necessarily.

The Fugitive was remade as another series on CBS in 2000 (for just one season), with Tim Daly channeling Janssen.  I didn't watch so I don't know much about this one, and how Kimble stayed on the run in the era of the internet (I know they dealt with that), DNA, fingerprint databases and the earliest cell phones with cameras, but I do know he did think of his late wife a lot and apparently missed her.  Before that, there was a highly acclaimed 1993 movie version, in which Harrison Ford once again faithfully re-created Janssen's persona.  But Tommy Lee Jones won an Oscar for re-inventing Gerard (now a U.S. Marshal) as a more professional lawman who isn't quite as cold, and went from not caring whether Kimble was innocent to figuring out on his own that he was--and did so a lot quicker than the TV Gerard.

When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed that movie on their TV show (they loved it), Siskel spoke about how faithful it was to the TV show, and made a remark that could very well be a pop culture seismic shift: he pointed out that, just like the TV show (and others from the 1960s), the action swells up to a climax in 15 minute increments, like a TV show leaving us hanging through a commercial break.  That's one of the earliest recognitions I've ever heard that what was once a TV director's nightmare, working around commercial breaks, might actually result in an art form by itself.  Quinn Martin pioneered that idea, and The Fugitive ran with it.  You can still follow those steps even now on any hour long TV drama that has any amount of suspense.

Availability: the entire series is on DVD and many episodes are on Youtube.

Next time on this channel: The Ed Sullivan Show.