Thursday, July 25, 2019

What Might've Been: The Blue Knight (1976)

Jack Webb popularized procedural crime dramas in the 50's, 60's, & 70's with Dragnet and Adam-12. In 1971, real life Los Angeles detective Joseph Wambaugh took the baton, and ran with it to the best-seller list.

Wambaugh's 1st novel, 1971's New Centurions, became a feature film a year later with George C. Scott. In 1973, Wambaugh's The Blue Knight became an Emmy award winning TV-movie with William Holden as William "Bumper" Morgan, who was about to retire.

Three years later, Morgan, now played by George Kennedy, was back on the beat as Lorimar & CBS decided to reboot Blue Knight as a weekly series, airing on the back end of the network's Wednesday lineup. This was despite the fact that Wambaugh had another series, Police Story, and two spin-offs from that series, Police Woman & Joe Forrester, airing on NBC. How the Peacock Network passed on Blue Knight in the first place, I'll never know, since the movie aired the same year Police Story debuted.

In fact, Police Story was in the midst of its 3rd season when Blue Knight premiered on CBS in January 1976. Knight was slotted against Aaron Spelling's Starsky & Hutch on ABC during the first season. After Knight was renewed for a 2nd season, ABC countered with another Spelling crime drama, Charlie's Angels. Ballgame over.

For what it's worth, after Knight was cancelled, ABC flip-flopped Angels & Barreta while CBS switched to movies to fill the Wednesday block.

Here's the intro:



Today, Blue Knight sits in the WB vault, and it shouldn't.

Rating: A.

4 comments:

Mike Doran said...

Little-known fact:

When Joe Wambaugh sold The Blue Knight to Lorimar, he specified that he wanted George Kennedy to play Bumper Morgan.
When Lorimar made the NBC deal, the network wanted a bigger name, preferably one who hadn't done much TV; William Holden was a long-term TV holdout, so when he signed, the deal was done.
When Lorimar came back for a weekly series, Holden wasn't interested, which in turn ended NBC's interest.
Wambaugh was brought back into the fold, and he insisted that Kennedy get the nod; this in its turn brought CBS on board.
The rest, you know; the '70s cop glut and all.
Much of this could have been avoided had Lorimar simply used Kennedy from the start, as Wambaugh had wanted in the first place.

hobbyfan said...

What surprises me is that Blue Knight ended up at Lorimar when Wambaugh already had a deal with Screen Gems (Police Story).

Mike Doran said...

Wambaugh's Lorimar deal was for his published novels; this predated the Screen Gems deal with David Gerber, which was about original material for TV, with no connection to any published work.
Different agents for Wambaugh were involved with each deal; this is quite common in the business.

hobbyfan said...

Thanks for clarifying.