When revolution sweeps through a banana republic and democracy is established at last, an American private eye is found in jail, having spent 28 years there without trial. He returns home to an America which seems very different to him...
American TV's famed ability to jump on cinematic bandwagons is much in evidence here. This short-lived series is based on the notion handled far more imaginatively in Robert Altman's film "The Long Goodbye", released the same year - an old-fashioned detective is a fish out of water in the harsh, glitzy world of modern Los Angeles. But where the film had a sleuth who is a contemporary figure who's just, by his own choice, out of the step with his environment, the TV series makes everything literal by having its hero a 1940s shamus who's been cut off from the world ever since 1945 and, on returning to California, expects it to be just the same as it was when he was young. This idea had some mileage - our hero is constantly bemused by things like television and women's liberation, and keeps getting modern slang wrong - but it ran out of steam pretty fast. And Dan Dailey is amazingly chipper for a guy who's done half his life in jail!
