Shark Bytes

Never Jumped! Darren McGavin, playing David Ross, an unarmed private eye who had served six years in prison on a trumped-up charge. Ross is no glamorous Richard Diamond-type P.I. His phone isn’t in his car; it’s in the refrigerator of his seedy apartment/office. Ross is a loner, and something of a loser, a high-school drop-out, an orphan, an outsider. This Roy Huggins creation is almost a dry run for “The Rockford Files”; it ran for a single, warmly remembered NBC season (1968-69). Like most Huggins shows, it featured an adaptation of his 1949 private-eye novel, ‘The Double Take.’ The pilot film (very noir, mod-L.A. sixties) turns up in syndicated movie packages.