First watched : Uncertain
As the least violent and lightest in tone of the US detective series The Rockford Files moved around the early evening schedules a fair bit and I'm not sure when I first caught it.
The Rockford Files started in 1974. One of its creators Roy Huggins had worked with James Garner on the successful Maverick ( 1957-62 ) and wanted to place him in a more contemporary setting. Jim Rockford was an ex-con ( wrongly accused of course ) making a precarious living as a private eye in Malibu, California. The contrast between the opulent setting and Jim's down-at-heel lifestyle in a trailer on a parking lot - slightly undermined by his driving a Pontiac Firebird - was one of the hallmarks of the series. The other main characters were his dad Rocky ( Noah Beery ) always involved in the case one way or another and his lugubrious friend in the police force Dennis ( Joe Santos ) who often had to go out on a limb for him. The series was also blessed with a memorable opening sequence - after a usually completely irrelevant answering machine message for Jim the screen would explode with a photo- montage of Jim in action set to Mike Post's dynamic theme played on (now ) vintage synthesiser.
Garner was always an actor of great charm and it was likable enough but I found it frustratingly lightweight compared to Kojak or Cannon.
It finished in 1979 when Garner took medical advice to quit because of the toll it was taking on his knees. He and Universal then spent the next decade suing each other. It was resolved enough to allow a string of TV movies to be made in the nineties although Beery died after filming the first one in 1994. Garner died last year.
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