The Rockford Files is generally regarded (along with Harry O) as one of the finest private eye

series of the 1970s, and indeed of all time, consistently ranked at or near the top in polls of

viewers, critics, and mystery writers. The series offered superbly-plotted mysteries, with the

requisite amounts of action, yet it was also something of a revisionist take on the hard-boiled

detective genre, grounded more in character than crime, and infused with humor and realistic

relationships. Driven by brilliant writing, an ensemble of winning characters, and the charm of

its star, James Garner, the series went from prime-time Nielsen hit in the seventies, to a

syndication staple with a loyal cult following in the eighties, spawning a series of made-for-TV

movie sequels beginning in 1994.

The show was created by producer Roy Huggins and writer Stephen J. Cannell. Huggins

originally sketched the premise of a private eye who only took on closed cases (a conceit

quickly abandoned in the series), at one point intending to introduce the character in an

episode of the cop show Toma. Huggins assigned the script to Cannell--a professed aficionado

of the hard-boiled detective tradition--who decided to have fun with the story by flouting the

genre's clichés and breaking its rules. After the Toma connection crumbled, James Garner

signed on to the project, NBC agreed to finance the pilot, and The Rockford Files was born.

Cannell was largely responsible for the character and the concept that finally emerged in the

pilot script and the series. Jim Rockford did indeed break the mold set by television's earlier

two-fisted chivalric P.I.s. His headquarters was a mobile home parked at the beach rather than

a shabby office off Sunset Boulevard; in lieu of a gorgeous secretary, an answering machine took

his messages; he preferred to talk, rather than slug, his way out of a tight spot; and he rarely

carried a gun. (When one surprised client asked why, Rockford replied, "Because I don't want to

shoot anybody.") No troubled loner, Jim Rockford spent much of his free time fishing or watching

TV with his father Joe Rockford (Noah Beery, Jr.), a retired trucker with a vocal antipathy to

"Jimmy's" chosen profession. Inspired by an episode of Mannix in which that tough-guy P.I. took

on a child's case for some loose change and a lollipop, Cannell decided to make his creation

"the Jack Benny of private eyes." Rockford always announced his rates up front: $200 a day,

plus expenses (which he itemized with abandon). He was tenacious on the job, but business was

business--and he had payments on the trailer.

For all of its ostensible rule-breaking, however, The Rockford Files hewed closely to the hard-boiled

tradition in style and theme. The series' depiction of L.A.'s sun-baked streets and seamy underbelly

rivals the novels of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald. Chandler, in his essay "The Simple

Art of Murder," could have been writing about Jim Rockford when he describes the hard-boiled

detective as a poor man, a common man, a man of honor, who talks with the rude wit of his age.

Rockford's propensity for wisecracks, his fractious relationship with the police, and his network of

shady underworld connections, lead straight back to Dashiell Hammett by way of Chandler and Rex

Stout. As for his aversion to fisticuffs, Rockford was not a coward, but a pragmatist, different only by

degree (if at all) from Philip Marlowe; when violence was inevitable, he was as tough as nails. Most

tellingly of all, he shared the same code as his L.A. predecessors Marlowe and Lew Archer: an

unwavering sense of morality, and an almost obsessive thirst for the truth. Thus, despite his ostensible

concern for the bottom line, in practice Rockford ended up doing as much or more charity work as any

fictional gumshoe (as in "The Reincarnation of Angie," when the soft-hearted sleuth agrees to take on a

distressed damsel's case for his "special sucker rate" of $23.74).

Ultimately--perhaps inevitably--all of Cannell's generic revisionism served to make his hero more human,

and the stories that much more realistic. Jim Rockford could be the Jack Benny of private eyes precisely

because he was the first TV private eye--perhaps the first literary one--to be created as a fully credible

human being, rather than simply a dogged, alienated purveyor of justice. The Rockford Files was as much

about character and relationships as it was about crime and detection. The presence of Rockford's father

was more than a revisionist or comic gimmick. Although "Rocky" and Jim's wrangling was the source of

much humor, that humor was credible and endearing; their relationship was the emotional core of the show,

underlining Jim's essential humanity--and subtly, implicitly, sketching in a history for the detective. By the

same token, a tapestry of supporting and recurring characters gave Rockford a life beyond the case at hand: L.A.P.D. Sergeant Dennis Becker (Joe Santos), Jim's buddy on the force, served a stock genre function as

a source of favors and threats, but their friendship, which played out apart from the precinct and the crime

scene, added another dimension of character; likewise, Jim's attorney and sometimes girlfriend Beth

Davenport (Gretchen Corbett) further fleshed out the details of his personal life, and served as an able foil

for Becker and his more ill-tempered superiors (in the process imparting a dash of seventies feminism to

the show); and Angel Martin (Stuart Margolin), Rockford's San Quentin cellmate, the smallest of small-time

grifters, the weasel's weasel, at once hilarious and pathetic, evoked Rockford's prison past, evinced his

familiarity with L.A.'s seamier side, and balanced Rocky's hominess with an odious measure of sleaze.

These regular members of the Rockford family, and a host of distinctive recurring characters--cops, clients,

crooks, con-men, ex-cons--helped create, over time, a web of relationships that grounded Rockford,

investing it with a more intense and continuing appeal than would a strict episodic focus on crime and

detection.

As the preceding might suggest, The Rockford Files was underlined with a warmth not usually associated

with the private eye genre. Much of the show's distinctiveness was its emphasis on humor, exploiting

Garner's comic gifts (and his patented persona of "reluctant hero") and the humor of the protagonist's

often prickly relationships with his dad, Becker, Angel, and his clients. In later seasons the series

occasionally veered into parody--especially in the episodes featuring dashing, wealthy, virtuous detective

Lance White (Tom Selleck), and bumbling, pulp-fiction-addled, would-be private-eye Freddie Beamer

(James Whitmore, Jr.)--and even flirted with self-parody, as the show's signature car chases became

more and more elaborate and (sometimes) comical (as when Rockford is forced to give chase in a

VW bug with an enormous pizza adorning the top). Even so, the series was faithful to its hard-boiled

heritage. Yet the series also brought a contemporary sensibility to the hard-boiled tradition's anti-authority

impulses, assailing political intrigue, official corruption, and bureaucratic absurdity with a distinctly

post-Watergate cynicism.

Rockford's most profound homage to the detective tradition was first-rate writing, and a body of

superbly-realized mysteries. Cannell and Juanita Bartlett wrote the bulk of the series' scripts, and most

of its best, with writer-producer David Chase (I'll Fly Away, Northern Exposure) also a frequent contributor

of top-notch work. Mystery author Donald Westlake, quoted in The Best of Crime and Detective TV,

captures the series' central strengths in noting that "the complexity of the plots and the relationships

between the characters were novelistic." John D. MacDonald, critiquing video whodunits for TV Guide,

proposed that in terms of "believability, dialogue, plausibility of character, plot coherence, The Rockford Files

comes as close to meeting the standards of the written mystery as anything I found." During its run the series

was nominated for the Writer's Guild Award and the Mystery Writer's of America "Edgar" Award, in addition to

winning the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series in 1978.

In 1982, record producer and arranger John Dote' recorded the theme song on Pentouse Records. The album

titled Hooked On Themes contains soundtracks from some of the biggest shows on television. They include

Charlies Angel's, Barnaby Jones, Perry Mason and The Untouchables.

The Rockford Files ran for five full seasons, coming to a premature end in the middle of the sixth, when

Garner left the show due to a variety of physical ailments brought on by the strenuous demands of the

production. Yet Rockford never really left the air; not only has the series remained steadily popular in

syndication and on cable, three of a projected six made-for-television reunion movies aired on CBS

between 1994 and 1996 (the first scoring blockbuster ratings). In addition, a loyal cult following celebrates

the series on the Rockford Files Web site, and Internet discussion groups. The show's rather rapid

canonization as a touchstone of the private eye genre is evinced by its conscious imitation or outright

quotation in subsequent series including Magnum P.I., Detective in the House, and Charlie Grace.

The Rockford Files marked a significant step in the evolution of the television detective, honoring the

traditional private eye tale with well-crafted mysteries, and enriching the form with what television does

best: fully-developed characters and richly-drawn relationships. In musing on the hard-boiled detective

whose tradition he helped shape, Raymond Chandler wrote, "I do not care much about his private life.

" In Rockford, Cannell and company embraced and exploited their detective's private life. Television

encourages, even demands this intimacy. For all the gritty realism of Spade and Marlowe's mean streets,

they were, in their solitary asceticism, figures of romantic fantasy. Jim Rockford was no less honorable,

no less resolute in his quests; he was, however, by virtue of his trailer, his dad, his gun in the cookie jar, just that much more real.