Barnaby Jones – The First Season (1973/CBS DVD)

 

Picture: B-     Sound: C+     Extras: C     Episodes: B

 

 

In 1973, Buddy Ebsen was one of television’s biggest stars.  The Beverly Hillbillies was actually cancelled by new CBS head of programming Fred Silverman despite still being one of the biggest hits in TV history and still in the Top Ten, so it continued to be a huge hit in syndication and Ebsen was showing up on TV episodes and in TV movies all over the place.  Pumping him up further were special broadcasts of The Wizard of Oz (1939) where the trivia that he almost played The Tin Man became surprise trivia.  In all that, it is no shock that someone wanted to get him into another TV show.

 

Enter CBS and Quinn Martin Productions, whose hits includes The Fugitive and then-current juggernaut Cannon (reviewed elsewhere on this site), so it was decided to launch a new detective show with Ebsen and even get William Conrad to show up as Cannon in the first show.  A 1973 mid-season replacement, Barnaby Jones first aired in January and with Lee Meriwether as niece Betty, the show was an instant smash that ran for eight seasons.  The First Season finally comes to DVD after a long wait, but the wait was well worth it.

 

Betty’s father is a detective friend of Cannon’s who is killed.  Barnaby arrives, intervenes and gets involved in finding the killer.  By the end of the show, he decides to juggle his farming business and solving murders.  Meriwether was long overdue to be in a long-running hit after smaller stints on many shows, as Dr. Ann MacGregor in the underrated The Time Tunnel and as Tracey in the fourth season of the original Mission: Impossible.

 

You gotta love the titles for the initial shows here, including:

 

1)     Requiem For A Son

2)     To Catch A Dead Man

3)     Sunday: Doomsday

4)     The Murdering Class

5)     Perchance To Kill

6)     The Loose Connection

7)     Murder In A Doll’s House

8)     Sing A Song Of Murder

9)     See Some Evil, Do Some Evil

10)  Murder-Go-Round

11)  To Denise, With Love & Murder

12)  A Little Glory, A Little Death

13)  Twenty Million Alibis

 

 

This is another one of those great, strong TV seasons where you are likely to recognize more of the actors than you can name.  The guest cast for this season includes William Conrad as Cannon in the pilot, Bradford Dillman, William Shatner, Charles Cyphers, Janice Rule, Stuart Nisbet, Gary Lockwood, Corrine Camacho, Jon Cedar, Jeff Donnell, Lynn Hamilton, Geraldine Brooks, Andrew Parks, Hank Brandt, Booth Colman, James Daughton, Jerry Houser, Chad States, Eric Braeden, Sharon Acker, Richard Bull, Richard Hatch, Jamie Smith-Jackson, Mark Roberts, Barbara Stuart, Christine Belford, Lloyd Bochner, Michael Blodgett, Ted Gehring, Richard X. Slattery, Whit Bissell, Cathy Lee Crosby, Anne Francis (both with Meriwether in the same show!), Richard Derr, Jack Cassidy, Estelle Winwood, Andy Kim (the “Rock Me Gently”/“Sugar, Sugar” guy in his only acting role), Jackie Coogan, Paul Lambert, Judy Strangis, Paul Sorensen, Dan Tobin, Roddy McDowall, Reni Santoni, Beverly Powers, Patricia Donahue, Claude Akins, Lou Frizzell, Geoffrey Lewis, Neva Patterson, Bill Bixby, Claudia Jennings, San White, Jill Jaress, Brendan Dillon, Meg Foster, Barry Sullivan, Mark Thomas, Sandra de Bruin, Bill Erwin, Byron Morrow, Bert Freed, Chuck Isen, Michael Laurence, Ben Wright. Peter Haskell and Gary Owens.

 

The writing is top notch and holds up very well today.  The big joke became Barnaby drinking many glasses of milk in a time when each detective had some calling card, but Ebsen leaves Jed Clampett far behind and the chemistry between he and Meriwether is totally believable.  I liked the show then and was impressed by how well it still played.  With technologized versions all over TV today, some items may seem dated by today’s standards, but the writing is smarter, richer and stronger than most of the equivalent of what we are getting now.  If you like detective TV, Barnaby Jones - The First Season is required viewing.

 

The 1.33 X 1 image could have been rough like what we have been getting from the Cannon sets, but CBS has gone back to the original film elements and created new transfers of all the episodes over the four DVDs here.  The result is stunning color and decent detail that is easily the best this show has ever looked.  Fleshtones are good, detail can be impressive (though we get slight softness more than I would have liked) and depth will surprise viewers.  Nice job overall in what might be High Definition masters.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is clean and clear for its age, but can be compressed or flawed at times and limited, but work was done to fix the tracks up to CBS’ credit.  The only extras are minute-long promos for each episode.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo