It started as summer filler. After three episodes, ABC decided that Detective School was doing well enough to warrant being placed on the fall schedule, only to close the school after a grand total of 13 weeks. The first three episodes constitute one season. Don't ask.
James Gregory moved over from a recurring gig on Barney Miller to headline his first series in more than a decade, playing Nick Hannigan, the instructor. The students included La Wanda Page, fresh from Sanford & Son/The Sanford Arms, Randolph Mantooth (ex-Emergency!, Operation Petticoat), and Melinda Naud (ex-Operation Petticoat).
Co-star Pat Proft might be better known for his work on the creative side of things. For example, he was heard as one of the background voices behind Dan Aykroyd & Tom Hanks on their 1987 novelty hit, "City of Crime". After the series ended, Gregory returned to Barney Miller, Page returned in another ABC dud, Aaron Spelling's B.A.D. Cats, and has that on her resume, as does Jimmie Walker. If memory serves correctly, Randolph Mantooth later resurfaced on an ABC daytime soap. I want to say it might've been All My Children, but I can't be sure.
Here's the intro:
No rating. Never saw the show. It was on during baseball season, you know.
2 comments:
The only thing I remember about this show, aside from La Wanda Page being in it, was that one of the characters was named Robert Redford, which elicited the predictable string of jokes.
Here & There (if not everywhere):
- In the first "short-flight" run, the femme lead was Jo Ann Harris, who proved unavailable for the return; Melinda Naud, who had highly-placed friends at ABC, got the nod.
- 'Robert Redford' was Douglas V. Fowley, whose career went back to 20th-Fox B-movies in the '30s.
Fowley did loads of Westerns and cop shows in the '50s and '60s; tough guys and con men at first, later comedy codgers (with the beard) in his later years.
Many of the shows Fowley appeared on have been written up here - you have to look for him, but he's there (and not bit parts either; using modern TV terms, he'd have been called a guest star - as he was a couple of times on Quinn Martin shows, like Streets of San Francisco).
- By the way, Douglas Fowley was the father of Kim Fowley, the rock entrepreneur who discovered Joan Jett and the Runaways (but that's another story …).
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