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One of Hollyweird's great creative talents is gone.
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Glen A. Larson, Creator of TV's Quincy M.E., Magnum, P.I. and Battlestar Galactica, Dies at 77
Glen A. Larson, the wildly successful television writer-producer whose enviable track record includes Quincy M.E., Magnum, P.I., Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider and The Fall Guy, has died. He was 77.
Larson, a singer in the 1950s clean-cut pop group The Four Preps who went on to compose many of the theme songs for his TV shows, died Friday night of esophageal cancer at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, his son, James, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Larson also wrote and produced for such noteworthy series as ABC's It Takes a Thief, starring his fellow Hollywood High School alum Robert Wagner as a burglar now stealing for the U.S. government, and NBC's McCloud, with Dennis Weaver as a sheriff from Taos, N.M., who moves to Manhattan to help the big-city cops there.
After ABC spurned the original pilot for The Six Million Dollar Man (based on the 1972 novel Cyborg), Larson rewrote it, then penned a pair of 90-minute telefilms that convinced then-network executive Barry Diller to greenlight the action series, which starred Lee Majors as a former astronaut supercharged with bionic implants.
Other shows Larson created included Alias Smith & Jones, B.J. and The Bear, Switch (another series with Wagner), Manimal and The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo. He spent his early career at Universal Studios, inventing new shows and reworking others, before moving to 20th Century Fox in 1980 with a multiseries, multimillion-dollar deal.
With Lou Shaw, Larson conceived Quincy M.E., which starred Jack Klugman - coming off his stint on The Odd Couple - as a murder-solving Los Angeles medical examiner. A forerunner to such "forensic" dramas as CSI, the series ran for 148 episodes over eight seasons on NBC from 1976-83.
CBS' Magnum, P.I., toplined by Tom Selleck as a charismatic Ferrari-driving private instigator based in Oahu, Hawaii, also aired eight seasons' running from 1980-88 with 162 installments. Larson created the ratings hit with Donald Bellisario, with whom he had worked on Quincy and Battlestar.
NBC's Knight Rider, starring David Hasselhoff as a crime fighter aided by a Pontiac Trans-Am with artificial intelligence (K.I.T.T., drolly voiced by William Daniels), lasted four seasons and 90 episodes from 1982-86. And ABC's Fall Guy, with Majors as a stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter, prevailed for five seasons and 113 episodes spanning 1981-86.
If you're counting, Quincy, Magnum, Knight Rider and Fall Guy accounted for 513 hours of television and 21 combined seasons from 1976-88.
During a 2009 interview with the Archive of American Television, Larson was asked how he could possibly keep up with such a workload.
"I tried to stay with things until I thought they were on their feet and they learned to walk and talk," he said.
"If you believe if something, you must will it through, because everything gets in the way. Everyone tries to steer the ship off course."
Battlestar Galactica lasted just one season on ABC from 1978-79, yet the show had an astronomical impact. Starring Lorne Greene and Richard Hatch as leaders of a homeless fleet wandering through space, featuring special effects supervised by Star Wars' John Dykstra and influenced by Larson's Mormon beliefs, Battlestar premiered as a top 10 show and finished the year in the top 25. But it was axed after 24 episodes because, Larson said, each episode cost "well over" $1 million.
"I was vested emotionally in Battlestar, I really loved the thematic things. I don't feel it really got its shot, and I can't blame anyone else, I was at the center of that," said Larson, who years early had written a sci-fi script, Adam's Ark, with a theme similar to Battlestar's and had been mentored by Star Trek's Gene Coon. "But circumstances weren't in our favor to be able to make it cheaper or to insist we make two of three two-hour movies [instead of a weekly one-hour series] to get our sea legs."
Much like Star Trek before it, Battlestar became much more beloved after it was canceled. Universal packaged episodes into two-hour telefilms and added a "Battle of Galactica" attraction to its studio tour that proved hugely popular. A new version debuted in 2004 on the Sci-Fi Channel, followed by a spinoff, Caprica.
Yet for all his success, Larson had his share of critics.
Writer Harlan Ellison, in a 1996 book about his Star Trek teleplay for the famous episode "City on the Edge of Forever," infamously called him "Glen Larceny," accusing him of using movie concepts for his TV shows.
It often has been noted that Battlestar premiered soon after Star Wars, that Alias Smith & Jones arrived shortly after Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and that the setups for McCloud and B.J. and The Bear bore similarities to the Clint Eastwood films Coogan's Bluff and Every Which Way But Loose, respectively.
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