Glen Larson obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/nov/17/glen-larson

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As the creator of TV series such as Battlestar Galactica, Quincy, Magnum PI and The Fall Guy, the producer and writer Glen Larson, who has died aged 77, was one of the most astute makers of small-screen American dramas in the 1970s and 80s. He made TV gold from the most unlikely material, whether it be a show premised on a talking car (the 1982-86 drama Knight Rider, starring David Hasselhoff as a crime fighter aided by a Pontiac Trans Am with artificial intelligence), a culture-clash cop show featuring a sheriff from New Mexico transferred with his horse to crime-fighting in Manhattan (the 1970-77 series McCloud, starring Dennis Weaver) or the Mormon beliefs that he mobilised in the creation of the science-fiction series Battlestar Galactica (1978).

Larson also used the musical skills he had developed during the 1950s and 60s with the close-harmony vocal quartet the Four Preps to write many of the theme songs for his TV shows. He composed The Unknown Stuntman for the opening credits to his 1981-86 series The Fall Guy, about a stuntman, played by Lee Majors, moonlighting as a bounty hunter. In 1979, he was nominated for a Grammy for his score for Battlestar Galactica.

“I would like to think we brought a lot of entertainment into the living room,” Larson said. That achievement was scarcely matched by awards. He never won an Emmy, despite three nominations, two for producing McCloud and one for Quincy. His greatest honour was to be awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1985.

For Larson was also one of TV’s most controversial figures, branded by the Star Trek writer Harlan Ellison as “Glen Larceny” for taking film concepts for his TV shows. The first series he created, Alias Smith and Jones (1971-73), a western starring Peter Duel and Ben Murphy as outlaw cousins trying to go straight, was a case in point. Critics noted it had a similar premise to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the 1969 William Goldman-scripted western starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Larson said only that his series was “certainly in the genre of Butch Cassidy, a new wave western”.

Other Larson creations had big-screen, and occasionally TV, precursors. McCloud was said to have borrowed from the Don Siegel film Coogan’s Bluff (1968) starring Clint Eastwood; and the comedy series BJ and the Bear (1979-81), about the adventures on the road of a trucker and his pet chimp, bore similarities to Eastwood’s 1978 film Every Which Way But Loose (Eastwood played a trucker with an orangutan). Larson said that the series was akin, too, to the Burt Reynolds film Smokey and the Bandit (1977).

He conceded that Magnum PI (1980‑88), starring Tom Selleck as a luxuriantly moustachioed private detective in Hawaii, was influenced by his fondness for the 1960s CBS cop show Hawaiian Eye. He reckoned that the prototype for Knight Rider was another TV series, The Lone Ranger, saying: “If you think about him [Michael Knight, the show’s hero] riding across the plains and going from one town to another to help law and order, then KITT [his car] becomes Tonto.”

“Television networks are a lot like automobile manufacturers, or anyone else who’s in commerce,” Larson once explained. “If something out there catches on with the public … I guess you can call it ‘market research’.”

In the early 1970s, Larson visited the set of The Rockford Files, the comedy detective series starring James Garner. Garner, who in The Garner Files (2011) described Larson as a “thief”, accused him of plagiarising storylines from the show and punched him so hard that he “flew across the kerb, into a motor home, and out the other side”. Garner said: “I only hit him with my left hand. If I’d hit with my right, I would have killed him.”

In 1978, Fox studios unsuccessfully sued Universal for infringing Star Wars copyrights in the making of Battlestar Galactica. Even though Battlestar Galactica featured special effects supervised by John Dykstra, who had also worked on Star Wars, Larson preferred to regard his series, about a fleet of spaceships wandering the galaxies, and starring Lorne Greene and Richard Hatch, as influenced by another movie. He described it as “Wagon Train heading toward Earth”. Larson had been working on versions of the drama for a decade: an earlier version was called Adam’s Ark, and in this and Battlestar, Larson applied much Mormon theology to his deep-space drama.

“I was vested emotionally in Battlestar, I really loved the thematic things,” he recalled. Each episode of the drama cost a then-exorbitant $1m and ratings were not high – as a result the series was cancelled after 24 episodes. An inveterate recycler, Larson reused some of the sets, costumes and effects from Battleship Galactica for his 1979 sci-fi series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

Larson’s shows themselves influenced later ones. Without Quincy (1976‑83), which starred Jack Klugman as a Los Angeles-based medical examiner, such forensic dramas as CSI would be unthinkable. Larson was responsible for successfully adapting Martin Caidin’s 1972 novel Cyborg as The Six Million Dollar Man (1973-78), with Lee Majors as a former astronaut supercharged with bionic implants – a conceit that influenced such cyborg franchises as RoboCop and the Terminator. And in 2004 a rebooted version of Battlestar Galactica, with Larson listed merely as “consulting producer”, was made to great critical acclaim.

Larson was born in Long Beach, California. He started in show business in 1956 when he was signed, with three others singers, to Capitol Records. The Four Preps recorded hits such as Twenty Six Miles (Santa Catalina), Big Man, Dreamy Eyes and Down by the Station, many of them co-written by Larson. He decided to pursue a career in television and sold a story idea for a 1966 episode of The Fugitive. By 1968 he had become associate producer on It Takes a Thief, a drama starring his Hollywood high school contemporary Robert Wagner.

In his heyday, Larson had as many as five TV shows running at the same time on American TV networks. But his influence waned during the 1980s thanks to such relative flops as Automan, Manimal and The Highwayman. In 1997, he adapted the Ultraverse comic Nightman, which lasted two series.

Cinema versions of Knight Rider, Manimal and The Six Million Dollar Man have been floated by Hollywood in recent years; and the Hollywood director Bryan Singer is making a film version of Battlestar Galactica, based not on the 2004 critics’ favourite, but on Larson’s original.

Larson is survived by his third wife, Jeannie, and nine children.

• Glen Albert Larson, TV writer and producer, and musician, born 3 January 1937; died 14 November 2014