#Banacek season 3 episode 1 full
The pilot episode “Detour to Nowhere” for example starts with an armoured van that disappears after literally driving off a cliff edge in the middle of the desert, while in “Let’s Hear It for a Living Legend” a star NFL player disappears from the middle of the football pitch in front of thousands of spectators and full TV coverage. The core premise of the show is that Banacek only takes on the cases that have baffled others, invariably involving some sort of ‘perfect’ or impossible crime.
Without Peppard there was no show, otherwise it would likely have continued and maybe even come to be remembered shoulder-to-shoulder with Columbo rather than becoming a strange curio sought out merely by the likes of me who remember seeing the original films as a young kid when they were shown in the UK.
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The series did well enough to last two seasons (16 episodes plus a pilot) but ended in 1974 after Peppard quit the show because of an unrelated row with his ex-wife over their divorce settlement.
He’s joined in his cases by his chauffeur Jay (Ralph Manza) and friend Felix Mulholland (Murray Matheson), a bookseller who acts as his chief researcher. Banacek himself adopts a smug, patronising tone when dealing with his insufferably antagonistic rival insurance agents, but fortunately he’s notably much more man-of-the-people when dealing with working stiffs which means that he avoids appearing unlikeable to the audience. The character is something of a wish-fulfilment of the American dream, being as he is the second-generation of a family of Polish immigrants who by his own talents has become a self-made success in his field now able to afford a large mansion, fine art, stylish clothes, vintage wines and classic automobiles which – get this! – are fitted with mobile phones decades before the technology became mainstream. Somewhere in the middle was Banacek, which starred George Peppard as a freelance insurance investigator working out of Boston.
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which like Columbo found life outside of the mystery movie slot, in this case as its own long-running hour-long drama series. A still-later addition to the line-up was Jack Klugman’s cranky coroner Quincy, M.E. Personally I was actually quite partial to The Snoop Sisters myself, but it lasted only one run of eight cases. Later efforts at expanding the line-up proved to be much less successful and short-lived, such as Hec Ramsey with Richard Boone as a Wild West forensics pioneer Cool Million with James Farentino as a former CIA agent turned PI Madigan with Richard Widmark reprising a film role from 1968 McCoy starring Tony Curtis as a thief turned good Tenafly was an obvious TV rip-off of Shaft with James McEachin in the title role and The Snoop Sisters comprised of Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick as a two-up American version of Miss Marple.
The most famous of the strands was Columbo starring Peter Falk, which of course took on a life of its own: the original line-up also included Dennis Weaver in McCloud and Rock Hudson in the distinctly The Thin Man-inspired McMillan and Wife. We’ll start with Banacek, which was was one of a number of early 1970s made-for-television crime dramas starring big movie stars that were produced by Universal Studios for the US network NBC, which grouped the various 70-minute made-for-TV films under the umbrella title The NBC Mystery Movie on various days of the week. Something a little different this time, with a themed look at two crime/mystery shows separated by an ocean and by 25 years, but both of which happen to start from the point of view of how a crime is committed rather than who the perpetrator was: a howdunnit rather than a whodunnit, if you will. Posted on OctoUpdated on November 14, 2015
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