TV Review: Miami Undercover | Richard Diamond, Private Eye

TV Review: Miami Undercover | Richard Diamond, Private Eye

Miami Undercover was a 1961 series shot in Miami Beach, with Lee Bowman as private investigator Jeff Thompson and Rocky Graziano as “Rocky.”  Mr. Thompson was employed by the hotel owners to perform undercover investigations to avoid alarming guests with the presence of an overt hotel detective.  Rocky, a former boxing champ, provided muscle.

In the episode I saw on DVD, “The Thrush,”  a radio disk jockey (a very young Larry King!) refuses to take payola to promote a particular record.  He pays for this with his life.  Since the killers made the mistake of doing this live on the air,  the police have already figured out the Raven recording company is the probable culprit.  But when they approached the singer (“thrush”) on the record she clammed up.

Jeff goes undercover as a New York booking agent.   The crooked music producer is a relatively small-time gangster from the Midwest trying to move up in the world; he also owns a local nightclub where the thrush sings.  Jeff plays the gangster and his hoods against each other in order to free the singer from their clutches.

Jeff is urbane and has an excellent rapport with the police.  Rocky is played as kind of dim and gets ribbed a lot about his appearance, but his boxing fame comes in handy, as do his fists.  The show is very dated, and the Mill Creek transfer is poor.

Richard Diamond, Private Eye was a television version of the early 1950s radio show, the TV series running 1957-60.  Richard Diamond (David Janssen) is a light-hearted private detective (most people call him “Rick”, )   In later seasons, he had a leggy secretary named “Sam” , but the two episodes I watched were from the first season.

“Picture of Fear” has Mr. Diamond’s fishing vacation cut short when the woman he’s been pitching woo to takes a photograph of two men hunting who most assuredly did not want to be photographed.  Rick has to protect her from their repeated attempts to get the film, or failing that, kill her.  Rick is kind of annoyed when it turns out the woman took that picture deliberately; she’s a reporter.

“The Merry-Go-Round Case”  Mr. Diamond is hired by the sister of one of his old friends.  It seems this friend has become increasingly frustrated with hard work that leads nowhere, and became a criminal.  One that allegedly killed a gas station attendant during a robbery.  She wants Rick to track him down and clear the man if he can.  It takes a while for Rick to realize that the merry-go-round of the title is literal, and not the name of a bar or club.

Mr. Janssen is good (he went on to star in The Fugitive), but the writing is only so-so in these episodes.  These are perhaps not the best available examples to judge the series by.