"Getting Hit On The Head Lessons"

     I replaced the Amazon Fire Stick streaming device on my bedroom TV last month.  The old one was struggling to keep up.  The slightly different menu structure of the new one led me to discover Prime Video offered Mannix in their free programs.

     The series takes heat for the number of times the lead character gets hit over the head.  I didn't remember much about it, but I thought it might be instructive to watch, since I'm writing a little PI fiction these days.

     It's instructive, all right.  While Mike Conners as "Joe Mannix" does get hit on the head enough in the first few episodes to lead to a lifetime of career-ending traumatic brain injury trouble (and takes bad beatings all over, too), that's not the only lesson to learn.  The first season writing is remarkably lazy.  It's not incompetent; story continuity's good, the characters aren't especially thin for 1960s - 70s TV.  And the actors are okay; Conners can carry off the role well even in hokey scenes, sets that wouldn't have been out of place in the campy TV Batman and contrived fight sequences (why do groups of bad guys always attack one at a time?).  But major plot points turn on coincidence and blind luck; normal police procedure is waved off when the hero and his associates even bother to wait around for law enforcement after leaving dead bodies on the scene; somehow, Mannix knows every mid-level mobster and small-time crook in LA, in depth and detail.  There's a little support for the last item, given that the first season has him working for "Intertect," a highly-computerized PI firm...in a time long before centralized, interconnected databases and high-tech piracy made the kind of snooping and probing the company apparently does even possible.  Later seasons have him striking out on his own, which is likely given the amount of grief he causes his tolerant boss at Intertect and the way his methods clash with theirs.

     The series is pulpy stuff, even by the standards of the time, and Season 1 was shot on a budget that leads to repeated use of the same interior sets, redressed (all LA apartments appear to have the same layout), but the plot holes big enough to back his various custom cars through are the real problem.  Action  and acting skills can only go so far in covering for them, and it's a real lesson in how not to keep the audience engaged when you tell a story.  Serendipity happens -- but nobody can make a living relying on it and any detective worthy of the title views it with extreme skepticism.  Just ask Philip Marlow or Sam Spade, who were working that coast long before Joe Mannix first got bopped behind the ear with a length of pipe.  Or Harry "Get off your ass and go knock on doors" Bosch, who is a lot more careful about who he lets sneak up behind him.

     Still, the jazzy theme music and fast-moving plots do have their appeal; but it's junk food, filling but not nourishing.