Harry Orwell (David Janssen) wasn't like most private eyes.  He owned a car, but rode the bus because his car was often “sick.”  He couldn't run well because of a bullet lodged in his back from his days on the San Diego police force.  He really didn't have to work: while his disability pension didn't make him rich, it afforded him a life of simple pleasures.  Though he didn't work for free, he didn't always work for money: he once let a client pay off his fee by working on his boat, The Answer.  He could also afford to work "on the house" occasionally, if he truly believed in a client, or if he somehow felt he had let the client down.  Jim Rockford would never do that.  

Harry O was born out of the fertile mind of Howard Rodman (Naked City, Route 66), the award-winning writer/producer of over 1,000 teleplays, screenplays and radio shows.  Sometime in 1972, Warner Bros. commissioned Rodman to script a pilot based on the box office smash Dirty Harry.  The studio soon learned, however, that the prolific scribe had ideas of his own.  As Rodman explained in Murder on the Air (Mysterious Press, 1989), rather than re-create Clint Eastwood, he found his initial inspiration in the pages of Nathanael West’s classic novel, The Day of the Locust.

There is a page or two describing this guy walking up Sweetzer -- that slope between Santa Monica and Sunset Boulevard -- on a very hot day.  He’s a door-to-door salesman going through bungalow courts and he’s got his jacket off, his thumb through the hanger loop holding it over his back, and his shirt is all wet...  That is the image I used to create Harry O.  I mean that literally.  That’s where I started.

Rodman's Orwell owned a gun, but rarely used it; he didn’t own a car at first, relying instead on the buses for transportation.  He lived near the ocean – alone, but not lonely (he goes to bed with a lot of different women).  Though he wasn’t particularly friendly, he was a good friend to those who knew him.  He was different (for television, at least), yet he was also rooted in the tradition of the literary gumshoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.  In fact, Rodman’s title for the script, Such Dust as Dreams Are Made On, was itself an homage to the classic line from the film version of Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, “This is the stuff that dreams are made on” (which screenwriter John Huston in turn cribbed from Shakespeare's The Tempest).


Telly Savalas and David Janssen were among the possible leads Rodman discussed with executive producer Jerry Thorpe (The Untouchables, Kung Fu).  Savalas soon became unavailable once he landed The Marcus-Nelson Murders, the TV-movie which eventually begat Kojak.   Though Warner Bros. was high on Janssen, Thorpe and Rodman initially had their reservations.  “I thought David was too elegant,” confesses Thorpe.  “He had a kind of ‘movie star’ quality, like a Clark Gable, which I didn’t think would work for this particular character.”

Thorpe's instincts can be understood.  Harry Orwell, as originally conceived, was much grouchier, more hard-boiled, kind of chauvinistic, and far more of a "man's man" than the character that would eventually embody much of Janssen's own personality.  Janssen, however, won Rodman over by making the role his own.  “Little by little, I began to understand who Harry Orwell would be if David played him," wrote Rodman in 1980.  "[Soon] I was never able to separate Orwell from Janssen – the actor from the role he played.  Harry O came out of my mind to begin with, but when David took over, there was never any question about who knew Orwell better.  David did.  So when he said, ‘What I want to do is…’ it was never a star insisting on having his own way, it was a statement of the way Harry Orwell saw it. 

“If I hadn’t been there from the beginning, I wouldn’t have understood that the life of Harry O came out of David.  It was David’s vitality, David’s soul, that showed on the screen each week.”

Interestingly enough, the pilot was filmed as a 90-minute movie, even though ABC had only set aside a 60-minute time slot for the show.  “As I recall, Howard came in long,” explains Thorpe.  “The television hierarchy at Warners decided, rather than cutting out a lot of material, that we’d add another five or so pages and make it a 90.

 “One major reason Warners wanted David Janssen was that his TV-Q was so very strong at the time.  They felt that [given Janssen’s prior success with ABC and The Fugitive] they could probably talk the network into picking up the tab for the extra 30 minutes and airing the pilot as a Movie of the Week.  More importantly, they were convinced that, even if ABC didn’t pick up the tab, they could still recoup the additional costs by selling Harry O as a 90-minute movie, in foreign markets and in syndication, on David’s name alone.  It was a numbers decision, pure and simple."  While ABC didn’t buy the extra half-hour, Warners more than recovered their costs.  The 90-minute Harry O: Such Dust as Dreams Are Made On has played constantly in TV markets worldwide for over 20 years.  

A look at the final shooting script for Such Dust indicates that apparently two endings were filmed – one presumably for the hour-long broadcast version, the second for the 90-minute overseas version.  In the first ending, Harry shoots down the mysterious Broker (Sal Mineo) during the showdown at the paint factory, then surprises his client (Martin Sheen, playing the man whose bullet originally disabled Harry) by arresting him.  “You gave me [$1,400] to find somebody named Marilyn Bedestrum, and [gesturing to the girl] there she is,” explains Harry.  “[But four years ago], you and your friend broke into a drug store and robbed it.  You killed one cop and you shot another.  And there’s no statute of limitation on murder.”

 A separate section of the script (clearly marked “Part Two”) lays out the second ending.  After slapping the cuffs on Harlan (Sheen), Harry engages in a shoot-out with the Broker.  This time, the Broker gets away, while Harlan is killed in the crossfire.  After taking junkie Marilyn (Kathleen Gackle) to the hospital to dry out, Harry chases down the Broker, both by foot and via motorcycle, in an excitingly-filmed finale.  All of the above, plus a few additional scenes featuring Kidder (as Helen, the woman whom Harry picks up at a bar) and Mariana Hill (as Mildred, Harry’s neighbor and occasional lover), is included in the 90-minute version of the pilot. 

Such Dust aired on March 11, 1973, to lukewarm reviews.  “The pilot’s intent seemed to be an approximation of the mood and motivation of the Dashiell Hammett-Raymond Chandler school of private eyes, but one assumes it read better than it played,” commented Daily Variety.  “Janssen’s semi-sullen interpretation of the lead did not look too much like a character viewers could grow fond of.”  The trade also cited a number of script gaps that were “[apparently] the result of the hour-long running time.”  

In fairness, Such Dust is much more cohesive when viewed in its entirety.  Still, even in its abbreviated form, the pilot wasn’t bad – it just didn’t stand out.  “It was just a little too close to the conventional private eye genre,” adds Thorpe.

The failure of a pilot to sell usually spells the end of the project.  But there have been some exceptions to this basic rule of television.  Harry O is one of them, because while the Harry Orwell character may have come across as sullen, David Janssen himself tested well before the ASI audience that previewed the pilot.  “The ASI audience really liked David,” recalls Thorpe.  “That was the impetus for why we made the second pilot.”  Indeed, according to TV Guide, the test audience wanted to see Janssen “firm and capable, with a good amount of toughness, but, underneath, sensitive, understanding and a ‘bleeder’ for the problems of others -- qualities that make him vulnerable on several levels.”  These, of course, were many of the same qualities that endeared Janssen to television viewers worldwide during his four seasons as the Fugitive.

Getting ABC to finance another pilot, however, was another matter.  Asked to provide the network with a memo outlining the merits of the project, Howard Rodman responded with a 30-page document discussing the philosophy of Harry O (the series and the character) in detail.  As he explained in Murder on the Air, Harry O “had to be a guy who was totally honest, the sort of guy who would listen to you, and then say calmly, ‘That’s bullshit, because...’ -- whatever  the reality of ‘Because...’ happened to be.  I liked that.  I liked it because it was reassuring.  One of the qualities of the world I live in is that nothing is fixed and steadfast anymore.  Everything changes so fast from day to day, that I have to learn new rules.  Even ‘changing against change’ is change.  What verities remain then?  Well, certain ways we like people to behave -- like a man who says, ‘Bullshit is bullshit.’”

Rodman felt that Harry’s experience as a policeman was both a boon and a potential source of concern.  “A cop has a drawback for a series which requires audience empathy," he continued.  "Because almost as much as an audience wants stability and effectiveness, it rejects too much stability and effectiveness because that makes the audience feel the guy is arrogant, or too perfect.  ‘Too perfect’ is a serious charge against a hero in fiction, since individuals in an audience, including thee and me, aren’t perfect at all.  ‘Too perfect’ is somebody you can’t identify with.”  

While the Harry Orwell in Such Dust wasn’t necessarily “too perfect,” he was certainly aloof, a man who kept behind a shell that prevented the other characters (as well as, of course, the viewers) from coming inside.  Rodman would later remedy this by introducing the voice-over narrations that would become one of the series’ endearing characteristics. 

“Harry O is a man who has to have compassion,” continued Rodman. “He has to have feeling.  Again, it’s a matter of balance.  For on the one hand, he must seem to be cool, self-contained, and invulnerable.  [Yet what also must] open up to the audience, what the audience must be able to discover for itself, is a secret that none of the bad guys will ever uncover – that Harry is vulnerable and caring and has pity and compassion.”

Jerry Thorpe underscores this point.  “I learned a lot about Harry O, and about David Janssen, in that first pilot,” he says.  “When we were planning the second pilot, I remember pitching the importance of tapping into the David that I knew by that time, to make the character more interesting and more vulnerable – which we did, I think, in Smile Jenny.”  

 In Smile Jenny, You’re Dead, the second pilot, Harry falls for his client, a beautiful young model named Jennifer (singer/actress Andrea Marcovicci) who is being stalked by the mentally imbalanced young photographer (Zalman King) who has murdered both her estranged husband and current lover.  Harry rescues Jennifer, but loses her nonetheless when the emotionally fragile woman walks away at the end of the story.  It’s a crushing moment for Harry, who realizes the chances for true love increasingly diminish as he continues to grow older.  Though he maintains a stoic expression, Harry lets the audience know just how badly he aches through his final voice-over: 

Days happen to you... and sometimes I wish I could go back to when I was 17 again.  When I was 17, I once said, “A woman is like a bus -- let her go.  There’ll be another one along in five minutes.”  But that was a long time ago...

Goodbye, Jennifer.

David Janssen was always marvelous at performing these voice-overs, his inflections never failing to capture the wit, whimsy and weariness that were essential to Harry’s character. 

Rodman, Thorpe, and others close to the show often described Harry Orwell as “a part-time investigator and a full-time human being.”  Meaning, like all full-time human beings, Harry had hopes and dreams that sustained him throughout the disappointments that sometimes came his way.  As Rodman explained to the network, those dreams were personified by what would become one of the show’s more memorable characters: Harry’s boat, The Answer. 

Harry, like everyone else, has an unfulfilled, inchoate hunger.  A boat like that takes you away (my homage to Clifford Odets, whose irrelevant third acts always took his protagonists to that far place).  Even though, no matter how long the series would continue, the boat would never be finished.  Because, like everyone else, Harry has answers which never come to reality, has dreams which remain dreams.  The boat is simply a statement of what he’s after – both in the specific of a detective’s work, and in general, as a human being trying to find out what kind of world he’s living in.  And that answer is never finished because it’s always in the making.  It’s always under construction. 

“You don’t see too many allegories on network television,” adds Jerry Thorpe.  “But that was the particular beauty, and the genius, of Howard Rodman.” 

Though ABC liked the basic concept of Harry O, it did have its reservations.  “They thought no dramatic series could survive without ‘hard action,’” Rodman said in Murder on the Air.  “They would rather have seen Harry drive a car, carry a gun, and not be hampered by the bullet in his back.”  In other words, ABC wanted the show to be “different,” but with the same trappings as other private-eye shows.  Known in the television business as “the jello wall,” this particular mindset would ultimately prevail over the course of the show’s first season. 

Nevertheless, ABC not only ordered the second pilot, it commissioned seven scripts for possible episodes and paid Janssen a handsome holding fee to ensure his availability.  Smile Jenny, You’re Dead aired as a two-hour Sunday Night Movie on February 3, 1974.  Clu Gulager co-starred as Lt. Milt Bosworth, Harry’s police contact, who somehow always felt threatened by Harry’s unassuming presence.  Harry always tried to get Bosworth to relax.  “[Riding the bus] gives you a chance to think,” he tells him in the second pilot.  “You ought to try it sometime, Milt.” 

“The Harry O character is an interesting human being,” noted Variety in its review.  “Janssen gave the role a well-shaded, often effectively underplayed interpretation.”  The trade paper also commended Rodman’s script for “focus[ing] on character development of the feature’s leads, rather than the hardcore detective action of most such series.”  Producer/director Thorpe’s trademark “painstaking attention to detail” was also noted.  

Harry also has a car in the second pilot, although we never actually see it (it’s in the body shop). However, by the time the series began, the car became more visible, probably as a concession to the network (ABC didn’t want to lose out on having the General Motors Corporation as a sponsor).  The ancient Austin-Healey MG rarely fared better than it did in Smile Jenny – it frequently didn’t start, and even broke down once in the middle of the street while Harry was on a case [in Coinage of the Realm].  Visiting his mechanic became as much a part of Harry’s life as riding the bus.  Harry would have three mechanics over the course of the series: Roy Bardello, played by Mel Stewart (Scarecrow and Mrs. King), who had played Arvin Granger, Harry’s police contact in the first pilot; Clarence, played by Hal Williams (Sanford and Son, 227), who also starred as Sgt. Earl Danning in the San Diego episodes; and Spencer “Spence” Johnson (Bill Henderson).

Originally, Clu Gulager was going to continue as Milt Bosworth.  But when Gulager opted not to do the series, Rodman reshaped the character in the image of Henry Darrow (Manolito on The High Chaparral).  "I had just lost out to Earl Holliman [for the role opposite Angie Dickinson] on Police Woman," recalls Darrow.  "I remember David telling me he was at the screening with Angie, or at least they discussed it, and that they looked at films of mine, and films of Earl, and she chose Earl.  That was probably in the back of David's mind, because next thing I know, I get a call.

"That was one of the best-written shows ever done, especially whenever Howard Rodman was involved.  Howard gave him a lot of little quirks, which David turned into wonderful moments of television.  Like those shots of him sitting in his little car, waiting for it to start... and waiting... and waiting...   And, of course, he always had his tie loose around his neck, with the blue shirt unbuttoned, and the gray jacket open.  That was his thing.

"Once, we were down at Coronado Island, and Harry and Manny are talking by the steps in front of his house on the beach.  As I recall, one of the assistant directors said to me, 'Hank, keep the energy going, so you can keep David going.'  Because, let’s face it: we were working long hours, 14-hour days, six-day shoots for each episode.  David would have be on the set all day, from the first shot to the last, whereas I was in and out.  At most, I had maybe a four-or-five-day week per show.  

“So, David’s dressed like Harry, with his tie loose, and everything.  And so I sort of unloosened my tie, and opened my shirt, and stepped back and became a little like Manolito, the character I played on High Chaparral.  And it was like CUT!

“Jerry Thorpe was directing.  He was also exec producer (he’d hired me), and I guess he and David may have been partners on the show.  He says, 'Henry, can I talk to you?'

  “'Sure, Jerry.'

“'This is Harry O.  And David does that.  You’re Manny.  Manny is an uptight kind of guy.  And we can’t have two guys doing the same thing here…'

“And I thought, “Oh, okay…”  I still don’t remember whether they used that take with my shirt buttoned, and the tie up, or whether they left the one with the tie open.”

Unlike Milt Bosworth, Manny Quinlan actually liked Harry (though his friendship with the P.I. sometimes got him in trouble with the brass).  Manny trusted Harry and usually cooperated with him, because he knew Harry would always return the favor by bringing him in on the kill.  Manny was a good cop in his own right, but his arrest record probably wouldn’t have been as impressive without Harry’s help.    

Harry O premiered with Gertrude,  a delightful combination of mystery and whimsy written by Howard Rodman that was later nominated by the Mystery Writers of America as one of the Best Television Episodes of the season.  Despite the promising start, however, Warner Bros. and ABC each had their concerns: the studio worried about skyrocketing production costs (the show was filmed entirely on location in San Diego), while the network believed the ratings, while respectable, weren't high enough to justify the expense.  ABC was particularly concerned that the leisurely pace of the storylines wasn't hooking enough viewers.

Shortly after the series premiered, Thorpe met with Warners executive Tom Kuhn and ABC entertainment head Marty Starger.  “The studio felt, and I quickly realized, that if we didn’t change the tone of the show somewhat, ABC would remain disenchanted,” recalls the exec producer.  “So I sat down with Marty, and we basically made a tradeoff.  I said, ‘Look, I see a lot of wonderful qualities in David Janssen.  He’s very vulnerable, he has a lovely sense of humor, self-deprecatory, he’s humble.  He has a lot of qualities that we aren’t really tapping.  He’s always been a fairly internal performer – until you tapped into his sense of humor, and then he just lights up.’  I then brought up Gertrude, which had just aired, as an example of where I wanted the show to go.  David and Julie Sommars were terrific together.  So that was the goal.  

“I said to Marty, ‘We’ll make the show more melodramatic [which is what the network wanted] – but you’ll have to promise me that you’ll let me bring more humor to the show, and panache, so that we could at least hold onto some of the character elements that we had in the first 13 episodes.’  That was the deal we made.”

By the time it resumed production, Harry O had evolved from an unconventional drama [about a man who happened to be a private investigator] to a show with more traditional private-eye trappings.  The episodes now began with Harry already on the case, instead of going through the motions of being hired.  Harry’s voice-overs were pared down and revamped (the introspective musings replaced by straightforward, keep-the-plot-moving narrations).  Except for a brief scene in Sound of Trumpets, Harry no longer rode the buses, which meant there were more car chases and squealing brakes and tires than before.  As another concession to the network’s demand for “hard action,” the bullet in Harry’s back miraculously disappeared, enabling our hero to become more dynamic or acrobatic when necessary.  Harry also carried a gun more often, though he still preferred using non-violent means to work his way out of trouble.  The show’s reflective theme music was also jazzed up with hot guitar licks and a driving percussion.  All of these changes, ABC believed, would give the storylines the kind of “running start” that could better take advantage of the enormous Streets of San Francisco lead-in.

Harry O, both the the show and the character, also moved to Los Angeles, with the switch in locale explained over the course of two episodes.  Harry's client in For the Love of Money  brings him to L.A., where he rents an apartment and befriends his neighbor, an airline stewardess named Betsy (Kathrine Baumann).  When Harry learns [in Sound of Trumpets] that his home in San Diego is being torn down, he moves to Santa Monica--right next door to Betsy's new place.  Betsy and her roommates Linzy (Loni Anderson) and Tina (Barbara Leigh, a.k.a. Mildred in the second pilot) , who often wore nothing but bikinis, frequently pop in for a visit, which Harry never seems to mind.  

Eventually, Betsy disappears, and fellow stewardess Sue Ingham (Farrah Fawcett-Majors, one year away from Charlie’s Angels) takes over as Harry’s neighbor in the episode Double Jeopardy.  Though Fawcett was still far from an accomplished actress at the time, she played off of Janssen very well.  Both actors liked each other, and that warmth definitely comes across in their scenes.  “That was another of David’s essential qualities that we wanted to tap into,” adds Jerry Thorpe.  “He was very genteel toward women, very gallant, and kind.  That was something I recognized right away, and so the relationship between Harry and Sue was kind of based on that.”  

Though it wouldn’t have been impossible to imagine, reassigning Manny Quinlan to Los Angeles at the same time Harry moved north probably would’ve looked contrived, so as a matter of logic, a new character had to be brought aboard.  More to the point, however, is this basic fact of life in television: when a series struggles in the ratings, sometimes cast changes are made if the producer thinks that doing so might make the formula work.  

Thorpe believed in order to more fully exploit Janssen's unique abilities as a performer, the show needed both a character who was the antithesis of Harry Orwell, and an actor who could provide a counterpunch to Janssen's low-key style.  "First of all, I think Henry is a marvelous actor, and indeed, that’s the very reason I hired him,” he explains.  “He’s also an internal performer.  David Janssen was an internal performer.  They were both very good, but the two characters weren’t working off of each other, in my opinion--meaning, there wasn’t enough of a contrast between the characters that could generate the kind of spark needed to grab the audience.  That’s why we made the change.”

"I know David fought for me," adds Henry Darrow.  "He finished shooting at around 10 in the morning the day I found out.  I wasn't supposed to finish until around four or five, but he waited for me--which he didn't have to do--in order to tell me himself.  We got drunk at one of the local pubs.  He apologized, and he said, 'Hank, I fought for you.  I wanted you to go up there with me.'  But they told him, 'You don't understand.  You go solo, or you don't go.'  It wasn't meant to be.  They paid me off for the second half of the season, and then they brought Anthony Zerbe onto the show."

The versatile Zerbe brought his unique theatricality to the role of Harry’s new foil, Lieutenant K.C. Trench:  “I hadn’t seen the show yet by the time the offer came in to my agent, so I asked to take a look at the pilot, and maybe one or two shows, so that I could get a feel for what they were doing.  They did just that, and I soon became very interested.  It looked like a neat show to become involved with.  I liked the writing, and I saw what a master David Janssen was at playing this laid-back, nonchalant guy.  And I thought, the only line that occurs to me would be, ‘Take out the pauses, Harry, we’re in the big city’ – which I would say to him as the window’s going up.  Meaning, ‘I don’t have time for you.  I’ve got an entire office to run.’

“I remember when I first met David.  I’d read over my dialogue for the scene we were going to do.  I’d made changes to some of my lines, to make them more elaborate, in a way that I felt would work for the character, that I felt I could accomplish.  The writers were trying to write to that, but at that point, since this was my first show, I felt I had the inside track on that, since I was actually doing it. 

“A lot of times, actors will change things, but very rarely will their changes affect the other actor’s lines.  However, in this case, in order to facilitate this particular aspect that I was felt important for my character, the change I made was going to completely alter David’s line in that scene.

 “Richard Lang was directing, and he said, ‘Let’s run through it.’  And so, I met David.  He was very nice, and he said, ‘I’m sure glad you’re doing this, and this is great,’ and he was very warm.  And we started to do the scene, and I knew my lines, because I was prepared to do it.  And David’s reading it off the script, so I’m thinking, ‘Well, what do I do, go back to the way it was written before?’  And I thought, ‘No, let’s just hang with it.’  So we get to the line that I say, the one that makes the line that he’s reading on the page, his response, absolutely impossible.  And I say that line.  There’s just the slightest beat, then he improvises the next line, and goes right on.  

“So, I thought, ‘All I can say is, I love this guy.’  I mean, he didn’t say, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s going on here?’ or ‘Why are you so off the script?’  He didn’t even bat an eye.  It was like, ‘Okay, I see what you’re doing.  You wanna do that, okay.’  It was all instantaneous.

“David did that all the time.  He would give you the space to do something like that, and he would absolutely ask the same of you in return.  But the fact that he did it that way, that day, in that initial moment of our first contact, was so extraordinary.  I think that was the key to why our relationship on the show just took off.”

While Trench respects Harry’s honesty and appreciates his experience as a former cop, the lieutenant admittedly has mixed feelings about their relationship.  He’s constantly frustrated by Harry’s casual manner and independence (“A really good detective is an organization man, yet you never share your information”).  He chides Harry for relying more on intuition than hard evidence (“I don’t trust hunches”), even though he knows that, more often than not, Harry’s hunches about a case are right on the mark.  “That,” confesses Trench to Harry, “is why I have mixed feelings about you.” 

“Trench had his way of doing things, and he was very successful at it,” adds Zerbe.  “Then suddenly he looks over his shoulder, and he sees this guy Orwell is gaining on him, and that’s the fun of it.  Trench really loves Harry, but he knows Harry’s way is not his way.  And he knows that Harry needs a Trench, and that Trench definitely needs a Harry.  It’s a kind of symbiotic relationship.  Harry bemuses Trench, and even exasperates him, but ultimately Trench loves him.”

Trench’s protégé was Sergeant Roberts (Paul Tulley), a still-wet-behind-the-ears young cop who never talked much -- but then again, he was smart enough to know he didn’t have to. Roberts picked up a world of experience simply by watching Harry and Trench in action.

The shift to Los Angeles introduced another character whom Jerry Thorpe believed would enhance the show.  Remembering how well Les Lannom played opposite Janssen in Gertrude, (he was Harold, the slow-witted brother, in that episode), Thorpe decided to add the actor to the cast as another means of tapping into Janssen’s humor. Lannom began appearing as Lester Hodges, a silver-spooned would-be criminologist whose well-meaning stupidity usually got Harry in Dutch with Lieutenant Trench.  A typical Lester misadventure was Mister Five and Dime [from the second season], in which Harry’s investigation into the kidnapping of an elderly counterfeiter leads to embarrassing ramifications involving Trench, the F.B.I., the Treasury Department, and the Mexican Secret Service. 

The series also continued to tap into Harry’s vulnerability in more demonstrative ways.  Whereas Harry’s humanity had been conveyed subtly early on (usually via the voice-overs, and through Janssen’s own tortured expressions), it was now being dramatized in stories like Elegy for a Cop, in which Harry avenges the murder of Manny Quinlan.  “I don’t have many friends,” he grieves in that episode.  “You take away one of my friends, you take away a piece of me.”  

“'Elegy for a Cop' is also my favorite episode," adds Darrow.  "Through the years, a number of policemen who have seen that show have told me that's how they remembered being shot themselves, or seeing their friends shot.  They'd think, 'Wow,' after I looked down to see where I'd been shot in the stomach, because they're thinking, 'Ah man, I just bought it . . . it's over for me.  And then, of course, at the end of the show, there's that wonderful scene where David goes into a bar, picks up that bottle of tequila, and says, 'In case any of your friends come in, let 'em have a drink on Manny Quinlan . . .'"

Harry O fans also know Elegy as “the show with a lot of scenes from the first pilot.”  Indeed, approximately 30 minutes of the episode consists of footage from Such Dust as Dream Are Made On – most of which was culled from the “Part Two” sequences filmed originally for the 90-minute overseas version (as explained earlier), although some important expository scenes (such as the meeting between Harry and the Broker at the coffee shop) were also lifted from the 1973 hour-long broadcast.  

The reason for recycling this footage from the pilot, explains Jerry Thorpe, had a lot to do with economics.  “As you know, we were terribly over budget at the time, because of the deficit we ran in San Diego, and I was trying hard to hold costs down, while at the same time maintain the quality of the production we’d established in the first half.  So I suggested at one point that we do a show that incorporated that ‘second part’ of the pilot story into a new storyline.  It seemed like a way to recoup some of that deficit (because we would not need an entire six-day shoot to film the new scenes) without compromising on the episodes we were making currently.  And Howard Rodman did a really incredible job of weaving that stuff into a new story.”  Indeed, the seamlessness of the entire production, coupled with the poignant nature of the story itself, is what makes Elegy a truly remarkable episode, far and away the best of the series. 

While Harry O may have lost much of its original identity with all the changes in format, at the same time it gained a wonderfully new kind of quirkiness to which the viewers responded.  Ratings for the second half of the season increased ten percent, good enough  to merit renewal. 

The second season featured several stand-out episodes.  Harry clears Trench of a trumped-up murder charge in Anatomy of a Frame, while the lieutenant returns the favor in A.P.B. Harry Orwell (in which Janssen once again finds himself playing a fugitive when Harry busts out of jail in Act IV).  Harry’s vulnerability is further explored in Reflections (an unlikely reunion with his ex-wife touches off bittersweet memories of their marriage), Exercise in Fatality (Harry becomes so consumed with avenging the murder of an old flame that he nearly commits a tragic error), and Death Certificate (Spence dies in a car explosion intended for Harry).  Lester Hodges returns to plague Harry and Trench in Lester Two and The Mysterious Case of Lester and Dr. Fong, the latter episode a pilot for a Les Lannom spinoff series (co-starring Keye Luke, Master Po on Kung Fu) that never materialized.   

A.P.B. Harry Orwell is also known as “the peanut butter episode,” as Anthony Zerbe explains, because of a delightful sequence he and Janssen improvised at the top of the show.  “We were both in his kitchen to do this scene which was mostly exposition, when I noticed this jar of peanut butter on the set.  So I said, ‘Hey, David, let’s start eating peanut butter, and we’ll get completely incomprehensible – except to each other, because for some reason, we’ll both understand each other.’  And he started doing it!  It was hilarious.”  Although the producers considered overdubbing this sequence, Janssen and Zerbe prevailed upon them to leave the scene the way it was because they didn’t want to lose that “authentic peanut butter feel.”   A.P.B. Harry Orwell is also the episode that won Zerbe the Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the 1975-1976 season.  

Though the audience numbers for the second season remained respectable, Harry O was nonetheless canceled at the end of the year.  New network chief Fred Silverman, determined to catapult ABC to the top (as he had done earlier with CBS), looked at the numbers and decided Harry O was, at best, a “good little show,” as opposed to a show with breakaway hit potential.  

“As I recall, it took them a long time to make up their mind,” adds Jerry Thorpe.  “They went back and forth for about a month before they finally decided to drop the show.”  Silverman did in fact have ABC in first place by the end of the 1976-1977 season.  

Harry O has enjoyed a remarkably lengthy afterlife in reruns, both on national late night television and in local markets and superstations – despite the fact that only 44 episodes were made, nowhere near the “magic number” (100 episodes) that usually guarantees eternal success in syndication.  After a two-year run on The CBS Late Movie (1979-81), the show went into syndication in 1982, and continues to be distributed internationally to this day.  Both Such Dust and Smile Jenny still play frequently in TV movie slots, both locally and on such national cable networks as TBS and Lifetime.  The two pilots have also been released on home video.

In a sense, though, it’s fitting that the series ended when it did.  There probably could not have been a more appropriate way to send off the show than the “tag” segment of what turned out to be the final episode [Victim].  Harry finally buys Trench a new bag of coffee (the department had been out of coffee since Harry finished off the last batch a few days before).  Though the lieutenant appreciates the gesture, he still has a lot of work to do, so it’s business as usual: “Goodbye, Orwell.”  

“Goodbye, Trench,” says Harry, as he strolls past Sergeant Roberts.

“Goodbye, Harry,” says Roberts.  Freeze-frame.  

David Janssen died of a heart attack on February 13, 1980.  Howard Rodman died on December 4, 1985.  But their mutual creation still lives on.  Somewhere right now, Harry Orwell is walking along the beach – his jacket off, his thumb through the loop as it hangs over his shoulder, an answer never finished because it’s ever under construction.

Text (c) 1997 by Ed Robertson.  All rights reserved.

Photos courtesy of Television Chronicles, TV Party and epguides.com.