givbatam3 2008-10-28
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
"Mannix" has an impressive pedigree, having been created by Bruce Geller (Mission: Impossible) and Richard Levinson and William Link (Columbo) who were among the most original minds in television. The series was one of the most popular detective series of all times, appearing for seven seasons and Mike Connors earned a repuation as a fine actor. Thus I was surprised to find that this first season left a lot to be desired, in terms of quality. All sucessful series have to work out a lot of kinks in their first episodes, but this first season of "Mannix" had quite a few poor episodes. I think this was due to the unsuccessful tie-in with the "INTERTECT" angle, a high-tech crime-solving corporation headed by an egg-head, played by Joe Campanella. Over and over we see his character peeking into Mannix's office using a closed-circuit television system (I think that may be illegal, how many workers would want their bosses spying on them?). Campanella always has a bemused, exasperated look as if thinking to himself "what am I going to do with this guy...he is so unorthodox, yet I can't get by without him!". After the first several dozen times we see this, it gets tiresome. Also, part of the charm of private detective stories is the sleuthing the PI's do in order to come up with clues. Here it seems INTERTECT and its army of egg-head intellectuals and their computers seem to be able to spew out mountains of information about every person in the United States, if not the world, making Mannix's job too easy.
In the early shows we see poor acting on the part of numerous supporting characters and an episode where Mannix's foot is injured, yet manages to gimp aroudn for miles and miles around a rural town without a car. He is even chased by tractors and manages to survive.
A couple of interesting things we see in these early episodes is a cameo appearance by producer Bruce Geller playing a movie director, who might have been very talented as a creative person, but certainly was no actor. We also have a scene where Mannix gets to speak Armenian.
I must admit that as the season wore on the quality did improve and part of the reason was that we saw less of INTERTECT and Joe Campanella stopped showing up miraculously when Mannix was in deep trouble. The dialogue also improved and became more Raymond Chanlerish with interesting quips commenting on life, the world and human nature.
Maybe it would be worthwhile for someone who is not sure whether they want to see this series to start with the second season, where he becomes a more convention PI with his own office and secretary.
