Seems some executives at Universal found some unused scripts that were intended for Ellery Queen in 1975, but shelved when that series was cancelled.
Fast forward three years, and a completely original concept, The Eddie Capra Mysteries, inherited those unused scripts, reworked to fit the new hero.
Capra (Vincent Baggetta) was a practicing lawyer who opted for detective work simply because he didn't like wearing neckties in court. The series was your classic whodunit formatted detective drama, but because it was on ratings-challenged NBC, it was largely ignored by viewers. CBS had taken over Friday nights, and Capra was slotted opposite Dallas. Ballgame over.
"Murder, Murder" features guest stars Tricia O'Neil, Eric Braeden (The Young & The Restless), and Normann Burton (Wonder Woman).
3 comments:
Scanning the imbedded episode, I note that the original story is credited to "Ted Leighton".
That's a registered pseudonym, which the Writer's Guild allows its members so they can remove their real names from a script that got mucked up during production, while protecting their future royalty payments.
"Ted Leighton" was actually William (Theodore) Link and Richard (Leighton) Levinson, who had occasion to use this disguise several times in the past (such as on the Peter Lawford/Ellery Queen pilot of some years before).
In the past, I've given limited credence to the "second-hand EQ scripts" story, but this might be an example of that, so there too.
Anyway, there is a documented example of a Murder, She Wrote episode that seemed to clearly derive from a potential EQ segment ("The Grand Old Lady", from Season 6, written by EQ bossman Peter S. Fischer), so there too - also.
Did I ever tell you about Me And MURDER, SHE WROTE, Peter Fischer's memoir, from which I cribbed much of the foregoing?
Worth checking out, if you can ...
If I can find it, I'll get it. With my luck, it's probably out of print.
As for Leighton being Link & Levinson, I was not aware of this little nugget.
"What might have been" is right!
Even though Capra didn't spend much time in the courtroom, he made being a lawyer look very fun - he was much more of a private eye in his methods and daily routines, however. This show made me want to become a lawyer!
This was one of the best, and unfortunately short-lived, series on the NBC roster in the Fall of 1978. The only other one that I recall was David Cassidy: Man Undercover (following the excellent Police Story episode the previous Spring). But Cassidy wanted that show to end as he hated being back in a TV series.
The rest of the slate - all of them - were cancelled by Fred Silverman when he was hired to revamp NBC's Prime Time programming, so instead we got Supertrain and Hello, Larry in the Spring of 1979 and Capra only ran just 13 episodes through to early January. There were some very good episodes, featuring the usual roster of current character actors appearing in many shows produced by Universal Studios, as well as a smattering of semi-retired or washed up has beens getting one more paycheck to bolster their retirement expenses.
Some have criticized the casting of Baggetta as the lead, but I always thought he was a compelling actor, having guest starred all over the place in the 70s, and with a later very memorable role on Hill Street Blues as a vicious detective.
Anyway, Eddie Capra got cancelled, and I became a cop, not a lawyer, after a stint as a private eye myself. But real life is much different than television. Yet, the Capra series was a brief flight on what could have been a long-running mystery/detective show in much the same vein as Columbo, except that we were tasked with figuring out the murderer(s) along with Eddie. A shame it disappeared so quickly.
Vincent Baggetta died in 2017 at the age of 79, predeceased 5 years earlier by his only child, daughter Trinka (he had been married to her mother, Sylvia, from 1973-1983).
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