The debut episode of Howard Rodman’s offbeat detective show establishes the character of Harry Orwell more flavorfully than either of the made-for-TV movies that preceded it. Pensioned off after being shot in the back, Harry is an ex-cop and reluctant private eye who lives on the beach, building a boat that looks like it’s never going to sail anywhere. He’s television’s ultimate drop-out hero, with David Janssen supplying just enough respectability to keep him from seeming shabby. The phone rings and Harry decides he’ll answer only if it goes eighteen times (“You must really want to talk to someone at this number”). So commences the plot, and it’s a shaggy-dog number about a missing sailor that turns into something even less consequential – a search for a lost shoe. Rodman doesn’t care about the mechanics of a mystery, but he’s not out to implode the architecture of film noir like Robert Altman in The Long Goodbye. Instead he pitches down the middle, mocking the genre’s pretensions by giving us the most modest sleuth imaginable. Harry eludes a man following him by taking the bus, and interrogates a suspect by asking the man to distract him from his back pain. Everyone in Rodman’s world talks in riddles, including the daffy ingenue of the title (Julie Sommars), but the aphoristic narration and intricate dialogue fit Janssen’s gravelly voice like a shot of whiskey down the gullet.
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