As I may have mentioned, we recently got a Roku stick, which gives us access to a seeming infinity of channels, provided you either (a) pay for them, or (b) suffer innumerable commercials. Well, when you're tired of an evening and you're content to let your brain rot, the second option is perfectly acceptable. There are also two different models: one is the old-fashioned "you have to watch what happens to be on," only with the wrinkle that there are a million channels, and each one shows one type of thing. For example, Jami discovered (to my delight) a classic Doctor Who channel, that rotates through a selection of stories from the 1964 Hartnell era to the 1989 Sylvester McCoy days. If you miss an episode or two, wait a week and the same series will be back on again. (My only complaint is that it doesn't have all of them.) But the other model allows you to choose any episode of a classic show and watch it when you're ready. After dabbling with Starsky & Hutch (when I was a kid, everyone wanted to be Hutch, but Starsky is obviously the cool one, especially in that big chunky cardigan), in particular that one vampire one that I remember scaring the pants off me (John "Enter the Dragon" Saxon is the vampire!), we settled on The Rockford Files, and are hooked. Currently we're on the third season, and have just seen one of the episodes widely regarded as the best ever, where Jim gets strong-armed into serving on a grand jury and gets thrown in jail on contempt charges. There's certainly a formula: a client (nine times out of ten, a young, attractive woman - and certain actresses crop up more than once, playing different characters - including a young Cagney (Sharon Gless))
hires Jim to find someone, in the process of which two separate groups start hassling him (typically in pairs of large, surprisingly older men, in loud leisure suits and with bad (mostly missing) hair) and there is always at least one car chase, where Jim gets to show off his beloved Gold Pontiac Firebird and carry out a maneuver that became named for the character - the Rockford. James Garner actually did the driving, because he'd been trained for a racing film and had a real talent for it, and in fact regarded the car chases as his privilege. (Sadly, he can't do much of the running, because, as is painfully clear, particularly in season 2, at least one of his knees is completely shot. If you see Jim running, it's only ever from behind.) Oh, and of course Rockford gets beaten up at least once by the goons. What separates The Rockford Files from the innumerable cop/detective shows of the seventies is not just the quality of the writing (uniformly high - in fact, the creator of the Sopranos, David Chase, started out as a writer on this show) and acting, but also several quirks of the character. Like Columbo, Jim does not like to carry or use a gun (although this seems to be relaxing a bit more in the third season), keeping an unregistered one in a cookie jar in his trailer. He also has no compunction about saying he's scared, or about refusing a job (although the women always get him back in eventually), or on sticking to his (surprisingly high) fee of "$200 a day - plus expenses," and he's quite prepared to fight dirty, if needs be. (In the pilot, he realizes a goon is watching him in a bar, so he goes into the bathroom and covers the floor with liquid soap. Then, when muscles slips and falls, he smacks him unconscious with a hand containing a roll of quarters. (After which, in true Jackie Chan fashion, he shakes his hand out as if in great pain.) The politics of the show become pretty clear very quickly: Jim is not an ex-cop, as so many PIs are, but an ex-convict, albeit pardoned after being wrongly convicted. He thus has a healthy distrust of the law, tempered by the fact that his good buddy (who nonetheless has to arrest him at least every other episode) Dennis Becker works in the Police Department.
His other, less good, but very popular with the fans, buddy, Angel Martin (for whom the adjective "weaselly" was invented), decidedly does not. He was also in San Quentin, and you can be sure he fully deserved to be there. He nominally has a job working in the records department of a newspaper (owned by his brother-in-law, who is no Angel fan) but mostly seems to have constant schemes on the boil. By season three he is in more and more episodes, perpetually letting Jim down when he most needs him.
Completing the troika of men in Rockford's life, and most important of all, is his father, Rocky. I'd forgotten what an unusual relationship they have. Although Jim calls him "Rocky" as often as he calls him "Dad," he also spends practically all his spare time with him (mostly fishing), and they have an affection that you don't usually see on screen between a man in his (late) 40s and his presumably 70+ year old father.
Rocky also reveals Jim's decidedly blue-collar background: he's a proud, lifelong trucker, who keeps pestering Jim to get (back) into trucking and leave this dangerous PI business behind. I also find the fact that Jim lives and works in a (decidedly beaten up) mobile home, somehow dumped down in a parking lot (albeit by the sea! In Malibu!!), and wears the worst clothes (so much nylon! Such high-wasted pants and wide belts, over which his middle-aged spread bulges gently! Such loud "sports coats"!) It's such a seventies attitude that would be completely obliterated by the Dallas/Dynasty Reagan-era 80's TV. What's more, Jim never gets paid. Oh, it may look like he's struck it rich - he finds someone or something for which there is a big reward - in one instance, Rocky bought a patch of land in some scheme, and oil is discovered, and they work out that it could be worth thousands a day... but you know he's not going to be able to keep it. Something always goes wrong. In fact, it's a miracle he has the money to get his trusty Firebird repaired after all the accidents that befall it. What else? Oh yes, how could I forget: besides the female-client-of-the-week, the one permanent woman in his life is his lawyer, Beth Davenport, with whom (it is made clear) he previously had a fling (despite the actress Gretchen Corbett looking at least 20 years younger than Garner), who is always there to bail him out.
It is often remarked that he has a female lawyer, and in general the series as a whole is much more enlightened than most 80's shows, perhaps because the producer, Meta Rosenberg, was a woman. It also gives guest starring roles to some black actors: Isaac Hayes has a recurring role (and was going to have a spin-off show, it was once mooted), along with Lou Gossett Jr, who gets to play neither a victim nor heroic Sydney Poitier-type, but instead something of an anti-hero, as a rival PI who was once Jim's parole officer. (The guest stars on this show are great - you will recognize so many familiar faces. I think James Garner used his personal connections in quite a few cases, and it helped that Rockford was basically his 50's cowboy show Maverick translated to LA, with the same people involved.) There is an awful lot to like about Rockford, and actually also about James Garner himself. Like Rockford, he served in Korea, and in fact had a string of medals. He has an easy charm but isn't afraid of making himself look like a fool, and obviously was committed to his hero's blue-collar, down-at-heel background. He gets plenty of opportunity for comedy, as Rockford constantly adopts different personas (all with personalized business cards, printed on a specially-made gizmo that he keeps in his car), albeit all with the first name "Jim") to con his way into places he's not supposed to be, but he's also very firm about his rights and, while he's no fan of the police (and several episodes feature dirty cops, sometimes murderously so), he's also not stupid, and will usually advise his clients to go to the police (and never takes a case if it's "open" with the cops), and there are occasional very downbeat endings. But then they're followed by that theme tune, which is an all-timer (and is a reason I never take the option to "skip intro" - that and of course the gimmick of the unique answering machine message for each show (the answering machine being a new-fangled gizmo at the time)), although, as becomes obvious when you watch every episode in order, they kept tinkering with it throughout the length of the series - they add a guitar break halfway through season one that is obviously spliced in, and sounds muffled, but they fix that by season two. Delicious televisual comfort food!
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