brilliant actors, brilliant editing

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Bert Convy was a series regular and is omitted from the cast list

The NBC Mystery Movie was a perfect fit for a film star like Rock Hudson who wanted to get into the grind of a regular television series and its 30 or so episodes that were expected back in 1971. Alternating with McCloud, Columbo, and others Hudson did about 8 McMillan&Wife shows a year and still did a film or two. Reportedly the co-stars Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James did not get along all that well, but you'd never know it from this 70s version of Nick and Nora Charles. In real life even in San Francisco the police commissioner is an administrator of a large agency. But in San Francisco Stuart McMillan took a hand in an occasional murder that came in some roundabout way to his attention.Like Myrna Loy, Sally McMillan tried to help as did their maid Mildred played by Nancy Walker. Many times they helped the way Lucy and Ethel helped Ricky. But Mac was always around to save Sally from whatever harm she got in the way of.The stories were always witty and literate. The one weakness of the show was that whoever the big name guest star was you could pretty much guess that that individual would be the murderer. Maybe one or two times it didn't work out that way, but that was a tease.It was an enjoyable show and Sundays were always something to look forward to on NBC with McMillan&Wife, McCloud, and Columbo. You could never go wrong.

Ahh, memories of watching this series aged about 11 and having a crush on Susan St James, her pushing Judy Carne to one side in the process. Of course the early 70's was a great time for classic US 'tec series, Kojak, Columbo (to quote Harry Nilsson) and many others, but this show doesn't appear to have gone into the permanent re-run rotation like so many of its contemporaries. There could be any number of reasons for this, some clear (it has dated quite a lot) and some perhaps not so clear, although its template has been reused since, most notably in "Hart To Hart".Naturally it's not as good as the child in me remembers, the story, at least of this early episode being somewhat formulaic and the direction very flat and reactionary. That said, I liked Hudson in the part and he doesn't appear to be coasting as much as his history might have entitled him to, while St James still has that quirky charm going for her, even if she does scream a lot. There's a nice frisson between them, loved-up as we say here in the UK, whch added some spice to proceedings. Nancy Walker, later Rhoda's mum, is watchable as ever as their feisty house-maid and moon-faced John Schuck is Hudson's runabout foot-soldier.The Frisco locations are fine, the humour is gentle and while I guess there's not a lot of dramatic tension on show, it still reminds me fondly of Sunday afternoons as a kid in from the rain, with nothing better to do.

This, along with "Columbo" and "McCloud" plus several lesser-known and short lived also-rans made up the NBC Mystery Movie franchise during most of the Seventies. Three or four rotating characters took turns headlining a 90-minute telefilm each week. Of the three most famous elements of the series, "McMillan" was the least unusual. "Mac" McMillan was the Police Chief of San Francisco whose wife Sally "helped" him solve various murders. Sally and the McMillan's housekeeper Mildred (Nancy Walker) were responsible for most of the unique elements of the show. The films were well-made and adequately complex to sustain interest over the longer-than-average running time of the series. Like everything Rock Hudson did during his career, this has new layers of interest since the revelations about his sexuality shortly before his death; the relationship between Mac and Sally seems sexless in hindsight, though that may be a product of the differences between the 1970s and today as much as Rock Hudson's homosexuality. One unusual episode in which Mac is called to Naval Reserve duty as defense counsel in a murder trial plays like a 20-years too early pilot for "JAG," but most of this series was solid if unexceptional police procedural with the wife thrown in for color.