Glen A. Larson, creator of The Six Million Dollar Man, Magnum P.I., and many other hit television shows in the pre-internet era, has died at the age of 77. Larson’s rich and deep catalogue has something for everybody, even members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, to whom Larson reportedly embedded allegorical meaning in his pricey original Battlestar Galactica.
In a Hollywood Reporter obituary of Larson, Mike Barnes notes that “Quincy, Magnum, Knight Rider and Fall Guy accounted for 513 hours of television and 21 combined seasons from 1976-88.” Barnes also delves into the controversies that Larson’s massive output inevitably provoked, bringing in such diverse unfriendly witnesses as science fiction giant Harlan Ellison and Analytical Guide to Television’s Battlestar Galactica author John Kenneth Muir.
Full-throated defenses of Larson are so hard to come by that even this Mormon analysis of BSG quotes the writer Orson Scott Card denouncing the original series as “an uninspired, untalented, badly written television show” whose LDS themes were caused by the devil himself “in an effort to embarrass the Church.” This reporter always found the show as hard to follow as a Cylon’s moving eye and was even more baffled by the hip 21st century remake.
Quincy, M.E., Larson’s underappreciated masterpiece, drew on the life and writings of former Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi, re-envisioned by Jack Klugman, with Robert Ito bringing the laid-back Noguchian vibe as a chipper assistant to the intense Quincy.
