Shark Bytes

The first poster says "Archer" only lasted one episode. The series actually lasted six episodes. We vicarious private detectives need to get our facts right! If the series lasted a second season, Brian Keith was going to move production to Hawaii. Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer leave southern California for Hawaii?? It might have been an improvement. Maybe they could have gotten Lew a broken down sports car, a house on the beach, and a sexy next door neighbor while they were at it. And he could have taken up jogging. The difficulty of making a TV hero out of Archer was that there had already been many private eye shows about attractive, intelligent, decent men in their 30's or early 40's who worked out of Los Angeles. What made Archer and the novels distinctive was the quality of Ross Macdonald's writing. Other than the quality of the writing, Archer could have been Mannix. I do think "Archer" producer David Karp was capable of first class work but maybe he was too respectful of Ross Macdonald. Maybe he needed to be a little bit more wild and disrespectful of the author's fine novels.

Peter Graves played Lew Archer in the pilot movie written by Douglas Heyes. Brian Keith replaced him for the series. Keith could be extraordinary with the right role, but he seemed very ordinary (and kind of bored) here. Lew Archer in the novels seemed to me to be the college professor as private detective. He was a combination historian-sociologist-anthropologist. I think the balding Pernell Roberts would have been a good choice. Roberts had a little of the pompousness of a college professor but he also had the orneriness and passion needed to uncover ugly truths hidden by years of lies. Roberts was a guy who had to tell the truth (that "Bonanza" wasn't very good) no matter what the consequences. Roberts also showed some courage in publicly supporting minority civil rights. And Roberts was by all accounts a loner. A cantankerous, morally serious, truth-telling outsider. Sounds like Lew Archer to me.

Here is another example of a show who's creator is seen as a revolutionary and I ask why? I thought real creativity was in creating not bringing others ideas(Till Death us Do Part) and in most cases making little change to the original ideas. Another show who's impact was short and is now overstated and is never understated.

I never thought anything on TV would truly offend me, but this show does. I work with adults with disabilities, and because they don't have huge tits they must rely on SSI and whatever minimum -wage jobs we can find for them. To exploit this person, who obviously has some degree of mental retardation, for advertising dollars is simply sick. The money wasted to produce one episode of this crap could probably fund my organization for a year, and could provide services to improve the lives of hundreds of adults with disabilities.

At the time of this show, I was corresponding pretty regularly with Ken Millar, who wrote the Archer novels under the pseudonym of "Ross Macdonald." Ken told me he liked Brian Keith as Lew Archer...but I didn't. Keith played Archer as shambling, mumbling, and disheveled; I thought that Paul Newman, who played him as "Lew Harper" in the movies "Harper" and "The Drowning Pool" had more of a feel for the character, though Newman gave him an oddball sense of humor that isn't in the original. But Keith...man, he was like a trained bear trying to pretend to be human.

Did this show really only run one episode? I remember watching an episode in slack-jawed stupefaction. It was like a tour of one's own living room, at gunpoint, for hours. Keith appeared to be totally indifferent to the fact that the camera was on him; he just sort of muttered his lines, seeming annoyed that he couldn't literally phone his performance in. The plot revolved around how he had bugged the bad guys car so he could follow it. At the exciting conclusion, the villain objected that he had tried to scan the car for bugs, and Keith told him he had used a different kind of bug that he wouldn't know to scan for. Then the bad guy said "oh". It was pretty gripping.