Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 76

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Popular Culture Review

for him. I never really liked him that much.”
Muzzy: “It ain’t that I really care that much about Larry Kirkoff.
No. I think the kid’s a creep for killing his mom and dad. But
that’s not the reason why I want you to quit fooling around
with this.”
Rockford: “You’re right— 1 understand.”
Muzzy: “No, you don’t understand.”
Rockford: “No, 1 don’t.”
NBC executives were not the only ones who failed to see the humor. Both
the San Francisco Chronicle and Weekly Variety cited the above scene as a “violence-for-violence’s sake beating that contributed nothing to the story.”3 Yet as
James Gamer delivers the lines they are still funny. And it goes without saying that
makes him a funny coward. So in the second year of the series NBC said, “Take
out the comedy.” Hawaii Five-O was beating The Rockford Files in the ratings, so
nervous executives naturally assumed that people liked the dour Jack Lord and
pineapples better than a funny James Gamer and Malibu. Universal Studio spoke
to both Stephan Cannell and producer Meta Rosenberg. “They’d talk to me and
Meta separately,” Cannell relates. “Neither of us could sleep well. Both o f us had
chest pains. We both thought we were having a heart attack. Then Jim called the
head of Universal and said he’d had it. 'Get the network offSteve and Meta or I’m
leaving.’” Shortly thereafter, Hawaii Five-O began to fade, vindicating the origi
nal concept for the show. Cleveland Amory said it best when he reviewed The
Rockford Files for TV Guide in December 1974: “A lot of what Mr. Gamer does in
this show is funny. It is not fast funny, mind you—everything Mr. Gamer does,
including think,is done slowly. But the fact remains that he is— in a kind o f in
stant-replay, double-take way— slow funny. In other words it grows on you.” Vari
ety called Gam er’s style “sardonic, and sometimes a little whimsical” and viewed
it as one of the show’s strong points.4 A year before the premier of The Rockford
Files in 1974, Robert Altman, just coming off the deconstruction of war movies
( M*A*S*H) and Westerns (McCabe and Mrs. Miller), directed Raymond Chandler’s
classic The Long Goodbye. When the film first appeared critics said it betrayed the
book, displaying “jokiness” and “contempt for the genre.”5 With deconstructivist
brio Altman mocks the conventions of Hollywood and hard-boiled American de
tective fiction. And while The Rockford Files can easily be superficially dismissed
as nothing more than James Gamer doing his Maverick gag as a P.I. living in a
trailer in Malibu (and indeed that was exactly what Roy Huggins had in mind
when he first proposed the project to NBC), the sophisticated humor of the series
as provided primarily by the writing of Stephen J. Cannell and James Gamer’s
own real life battle with the Hollywod system makes the series at least as signifi