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Here's a hint: when Baretta ended, NBC, sniffing a cash cow, was willing to fork out the bucks for not one but several pilots for a hard-boiled private eye series Blake had concocted, and gave him carte blanche. Blake was going to play JOE DANCER, a tough-but-tender Los Angeles private eye "on the edge." According to Blake himself, this was going to be the "best show ever produced for television." And just to make sure, Blake was not just going to star in it, but was also going to executive produce the thing, and generally have a hand in almost every facet of it, to ensure it was a "class act." Most people saw it another way. Ric Meyers in TV Detectives, for example, noted that although Blake was supposed to be "part John Garfield, part Dick Powell and part Humphrey Bogart... as he stood, Dancer was all Robert Blake--and that was just the problem. The Dancer two-hour episode fluctuated between casual brutality, forced humour, and self-concious pathos." Certainly there was no doubt whose show it was. Blake was listed in the credits not just as the star but as the producer and the creator. His wife at the time, Sondra Locke, co-stars as Joe Dancer's physically challenged assistant, Charlie, and there are enough odd cameos in the show (the guy at the taco stand, for instance) to suggest casting was often a matter of friendship, and enough peculiar mannerisms, plot holes and WTF moments to suggest nobody was willing to challenge Blake. I mean, sheesh, the guy has to be an orphan raised by nuns? He has to wear a fedora? He has to drive a clunker that needs a paint job? He has to meet clients on the beach despiute the fact he has an office? His assistant has to be in a wheelchair? The dialogue has to be forty years out of date? The show was further marred by Blake's dis-and-dat voice-over narration, a tin-ear symphony of overworked tough guy talk cribbed from better movies, meaningless philosophizing and constant reminders that Dancer was a man "on the edge." So maybe it's not such a surprise that, despite several pilots, the subsequent series never materializied. And dat's de name of dat tune. Except... So help me, there's something almost embarrassingly entertaining and delightfully cheesy about the whole thing -- all that earnestness and effort and ego put out for all the world to see, with good ideas and intentions derailed at every turn. The problem was, perhaps, that Blake had in fact succeeded in evoking the spirit of 1930s and 40s only too well. But not the great crime films or classic detective novels of that era. Nope, the Joe Dancer movies were the TV equivalent of the pulps. Not the A-list talent stuff either, but those who-the-hell-wrote-this? stories you'd skip over, and only go back to read after you'd read all the good stuff. TELEVISION
UNPRODUCED EPISODES.
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. | Home | Detectives A-L M-Z | Film | Radio | Television | Web Comics | Comics | FAQs | Drop a dime. Your comments, suggestions, corrections and contributions are always welcome.
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