The Fugitive and Route 66

I grew up in the 60’s and have a preference for the TV shows of that era. Two of my favorites were Route 66, (1960-64) and The Fugitive (1963-67). The first is the all-time favorite program of one of my best friends and the second is mine. We often discuss them. I’ve gotten DVD boxed sets of the entirety of both series and have started watching both in chronological order. I decided to review each episode as I went along.

Both shows featured wandering heroes, as did several shows of the 60’s, (Run for Your Life, The Invaders, Cornet Blue, The Immortal, etc.) Those shows, in turn were the progeny of the western shows of the 1950’s and 60’s, (Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, The Restless Gun, Bat Masterson, many others) with rootless protagonists. Most shows have the heroes in the same location and the stories come from the people who enter their sphere. Or they are based on their profession and are limited by its boundaries. These “road” shows have the heroes travel and find themselves in the middle of other people’s stories. The fact that they have no permanent professions means that they could be in any type of situation and any type of story could be told. Route 66 was totally open-ended while the Fugitive had the suspenseful “double-chase” scenario where Lt. Gerard is after Richard Kimble and Dr. Kimble is after the one-armed man. Neither show could rely on the routine plots and situations that dominated conventional series.

Both shows had the problem of inserting their heroes into the situation of the plot since their professions did not do it for them, as they would in a cop, lawyer or doctor show. Sometimes the devices used were kind of awkward on Route 66. They seemed much more ingenious on The Fugitive, where the fixes the writers put Kimble in are often amazing and delightful. Route 66 was able to have light-hearted episodes or an element of comedy relief in the serious ones. Richard Kimble’s situations were inevitably rather tense. But they were also incredibly poignant. The Fugitive used a lot of the music from the Twilight Zone and it is essentially a four year journey into Kimball’s own Twilight Zone. The protagonists on that show were both fearful and searching for something that would get them out of their nightmare. That’s exactly where Kimble is. Think of how many shows you’ve seen and what emotions they brought out in you. How many of them produced feelings of poignancy and alienation? Route 66 produces a sense of freedom, with the boys always wanting to see what’s around the next bend before they have to settle down.

David Janssen’s performance as Richard Kimble is the best I’ve ever seen on television. Kimble doesn’t want to be recognized so he keeps his head down and says as little as possible, as quietly as possible. This deprives Janssen of an actor’s basic tools. He has to simply use his face, especially his eyes, to tell us what Kimble is thinking and feeling. And the fact that Kimble is a doctor makes a wonderful “hook”. He’s not the type of doctor who went into the profession to get rich: he cares about people and can’t walk away from their problems just to save his neck. It creates many great dramatic situations.

With all the traveling the heroes do, it’s a pity that the shows weren’t filmed in color, (as the Fugitive finally was in its last season). Actually, The Fugitive with its downbeat theme, is probably more appropriate for black and white. Route 66 which was actually filmed all over the country, (The Fugitive was filmed in California), definitely should be in color, as were contemporary series like Bonanza and I Spy. Musically, The Fugitive had the wonderful theme composed by Pete Rugolo, which could be played allegro for excitement and suspense or lento for drama and poignancy. But Route 66 has my favorite TV theme of all time, by Nelson Riddle who was told to “write something that sounded like a car driving down a road”. He sure did. It’s the greatest traveling music of all time.

Neither show has an origin episode, although The Fugitive did some flashbacks in “The Girl From Little Egypt”. The Route 66 backstory is that Tod’s father was rich, owning a fleet of barges that worked the Hudson River where Tod works for a time and met his Buddy, Buz Murdock, form New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. When Tod’s father died suddenly Tod found that his family wasn’t rich after all- at least not any more. When all the debts were paid, all he had was his corvette. He and his buddy decided to use it to see the world, or at least America. Richard Kimble was a successful doctor whose wife could not have a child and didn’t want to adopt. They argued about it. He left in a huff. When he came back, he nearly ran over a one-armed man, then went into the house to find his wife dead. Lt. Gerard could never find this one armed man and Kimble was convicted. Gerard accepted this verdict and accompanied Kimble on a train ride to the death house. But a derailment freed him, sending Gerard on his obsessive search for Kimble and Kimble on his even more obsessive search for the one-armed man.

Neither showed premiered with an episode depicting these events. Route 66 starts with a sort of “Bad Day at Black Rock” episode that takes place in Mississippi, (but was filmed in Kentucky). There are some brief references to who they are and how they got there. The rest of the backstory above was put together from fragments mentioned in other episodes. The Fugitive has a significant opening segment explaining Kimble’s situation along with a narrator describing it and his feelings at the beginning and end of each episode. But the first episode takes place in Arizona and is about Kimble trying to help a woman and her son get away from a politically powerful and abusive husband/ father. He thinks about going off with them but realizes that’s impossible and is on his way. The fans demanded to see the backstory and the writers gave them a delirious Kimble in, “The Girl From Little Egypt”, producing the flashbacks they wanted. My theory is that the premiere of a show is usually the pilot and the networks wanted the pilot of a show to be a typical episode, not an origin story, which wouldn’t really tell them what a show will be like.

Both shows inaugurated the concept of a finale, an episode that ended the series by terminating its premise. Route 66 made a rather meek gesture toward this with a goofy two-parter called “Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way” that no one seems to like about a family of con men and women, one of whom is Barbara Eden who marries Tod, who also inherits some money and is rich again. Far more satisfactory, to say the least, was “The Judgement”, when Gerard finally catches up to Kimble who finally catches up to the one armed man, which was the highest rated show in the history of American television until the “Who Shot JR” show of “Dallas” 13 years later. It ends with Kimble free and having a pretty new girlfriend, (Diane Baker). I’d rather that Kimble have left the courthouse and found Vera Miles and her son from Fear in a Desert City so they could finally go off together as they almost did in the premiere. Not only will Kimble be free but he’ll have a wife and the child he always wanted. (A comical alternative to this would be to have Kimble exit the courthouse and be faced with a vast throng of all the women who fell in love with him on his travels. He panics and runs, the women chasing him with open arms. William Conrad: ”For Richard Kimble, the running never stops!”)

You would think Tod and Buz might have met up with Richard Kimble at some point in their mutual travels. They sort of did in “One Tiger to a Hll”, the premiere episode of the third season of Route 66, in which David Jansen guest stars as a troubled war veteran named Karno, who has become a near psychopathic bully. That’s not Richard Kimble, but he sure looks like him.







The past is a series of presents. The present is living history we are privileged to witness