January 3: Happy Birthday Glen A. Larson

[TMC]

https://lebeauleblog.com/2023/01/03/...glen-a-larson/

Glen A. Larson (1937-2014) was born in Southern California. He was attending Hollywood High School in the 1950s, when he and three friends started a band. They were soon discovered by Capitol Records and began recording as the Four Preps. Larson co-wrote several songs for the band, including their hit singles “26 Miles (Santa Catalina)” and “Big Man.”

Larson is most likely to be remembered as a television producer and writer. During much of the 1970s and 1980s, there was at least one show created or co-created by Larson airing in prime time. His most durable series, co-created with Donald Bellisario, began airing in 1980 on CBS.



Larson began working in television in the mid-sixties. After doing some writing for The Fugitive, he worked as a writer and producer on series like It Takes a Thief and The Virginian. In 1971, he created his first series, the Western series Alias Smith and Jones.

Larson then created a private eye series, Switch, before moving on to one of his best-known and most durable creations. Quincy, M.E., starring Jack Klugman as the titular LA County medical examiner, ran for seven seasons on NBC, beginning in 1976.

In the late 1970s, Larson created or co-created several series. The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries were very loosely adapted from the juvenile mystery novels about those characters. Battlestar Galactica was a sci-fi/space opera series, while B.J. and the Bear and its spinoff series, The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo, were action comedies. What they all had in common, though, was being short lived. By the summer of 1981, they were all gone from the airwaves.

By that time, though, Larson was involved in some new, more durable projects. Magnum, P.I. began airing on CBS in 1980, and lasted eight seasons. A year later, The Fall Guy debuted on ABC, and in 1982, Larson achieved a trifecta when NBC began airing his Knight Rider. For the next four years, Larson had series running on all three networks.

Larson’s career largely fizzled out after Magnum’s run ended in 1988. He developed a couple of new series in the 1990s, both short-lived, and was an executive producer on Team Knight Rider in the late 1990s. He was not involved in the Sci-Fi Channel revival of Battlestar Galactica in the 2000s, although he was credited as a “consulting producer.”

Larson attracted a share of controversy during his career. His work was often criticized as highly derivative of other creations. At one point, the Writer’s Guild fined Larson for, more or less, plagiarizing a script for Switch from an episode of The Rockford Files. More generally, it was easy to see B.J. and the Bear and Sheriff Lobo as knock-offs of Smokey and the Bandit, or Battlestar Galactica as an attempt to cash in on the success of Star Wars.