This was truly a great show to watch. Catching up on MeTV has been great UNTIL: Season 6. When this was handed over to Jack Webb and William Conrad, it was ruined. Cannon never was all that good, and if this is what Conrad's contribution to a show is indicative of, it's no wonder. Seasons 1-5: GREAT Season 6: SUCKS

On Friday evenings, I was glued to 77. Thanks to Warner Bros., the movie studios were joining TV programming, so that by 1958, they knew they couldn't lick the little living room box. For TV, that meant better production values, more glamor, and hour-long formats. 77 hit the little screen with a bang, the first detective show to combine studio glamor, Hollywood chic, and urban cool. Zimbalist and Smith were perfect for their sleek roles. But it was really Edd Byrnes' jive-talking Kookie who caught public fancy, especially teens like me. There'd been nothing like him during the more laid-back Eisenhower years. As I recall, the stories were nothing special, though the studio had plenty of stock footage to draw upon. The staging was conventional for its time-- high-key lighting, straightforward direction, unobtrusive camera angles. (Stylistic changes in the detective genre would come a year later with the innovative Peter Gunn.) Nonetheless, the plots were just an excuse to combine colorful characters with a new glamor babe of the week. But naturally no series lasts forever and when the format wore down in '63, Jack Webb was brought in to revitalize. It was a tough job, at best. Right away I was turned off. Putting a suit on Kookie and moderating the jive talk was a big mistake, and unsurprisingly the series soon folded. But in its early years, the show was a definite trend- setter, as other reviewers detail. Even now, Kookie, Stu, and Jeff live on fondly in my little book of nostalgia. However, it's only logical that the material has lost its cutting-edge, especially for those uninterested in the evolution of TV. Still, for its time, it was a real gas, man!

I was about 8 years old when this went off the air and adult TV series were just starting to come up on my little radar screen. I have no recollection of ever watching this private detective show until I caught it on the American Life channel (before it turned into the Combat! Channel and this along with many other fine shows disappeared). I knew nothing about the show but somehow knew about Edd Byrnes/"Kookie".This show rocks! It is early American television at its best. Now I've only seen about 3 episodes but they are just so damn good. One, starring a very talented Bert Convey, spent almost the entire show on the guest actors, in fact Efrem didn't appear until about two-thirds of the way through and was seen sparingly after that. In another episode Efrem dramatically freed Americans in East Berlin and Smith was barely seen. Wouldn't ever see that sort of flexibility in story-telling on a series today. Some of the plot elements are overdone, cheesy and/or unbelievable, but that just adds to the camp factor.The two leads are great and play well off each other in super cool fashion, while Byrnes earns his rep as their sometimes assistant. Great stuff, wish it still appeared somewhere on the digital dial.

It didn't take long for me to realize the episode, "One False Step" was an adaption of "Strangers on a Train" by Patricia Highsmith, with eventual series' regular Richard Long guest-starring as a very convincingly smooth sociopath. I particularly loved the POV shot of Long's character seeing himself reflected in his victims' eyeglasses: VERY Hitchcockian, and as far as a technical shot goes, above and beyond the call of '50's Television.I also happened to notice Raymond Chandler got a co-writers' credit for this episode based on the Highsmith novel, & that led me to finding out he worked on the '51 screenplay for Hitchcock.