HUGGINS’ TV FILE: IT’S GETTING THICKER

Television, which seduces even its detractors into occasional viewing, can exert an irresistible pull on those working on the other side of the screen.

Just ask Roy Huggins.

After 25 years as a writer-producer, Huggins quit in 1980 to write the definitive work on what he considered Phase Two of television, the era unchallengingly dominated by three networks airing filmed series from the major studios.

Five years later, the unfinished manuscript sits on a shelf and Huggins, at age 67, is the co-executive producer of NBC’s “Hunter.” That series is from the production company begun by Stephen J. Cannell, the man Huggins sought a decade ago to collaborate on the pilot for a little series idea he had dreamed up called “The Rockford Files.”

If Huggins’ name isn’t a household one, his TV efforts are. He created “Maverick,” “77 Sunset Strip” (based on his 1947 novel of the same name), “The Fugitive,” “Run for Your Life” and two short-lived but critically acclaimed series, “The Outsider” and “City of Angels.” In addition to co-creating the “Rockford Files,” he served as executive producer of “Baretta,” “The Virginian,” “Kraft Suspense Theater” and the miniseries “Captains and Kings” and “The Last Convertible,” among others.

His first TV job was as producer of “Cheyenne” in 1955, which happened to coincide with what Huggins considers the start of TV’s second phase. Not counting Disney’s three-part presentation of “Davy Crockett,” “Cheyenne” was the first filmed hour series and the first series produced by one of the movie studios, in this case Warner Bros.

“Up until then, TV was radio with pictures,” Huggins said the other day, looking a good decade younger than the age his driver’s license indicates. “Advertising agencies ran it as they ran radio. There were half-hour live shows and a few one-hour live shows.”

Then Leonard Goldenson arrived in town as president of American Broadcasting-Paramount Theaters, the precursor of ABC Inc. The company had resulted from the merger between the fledgling network and the cash-rich theater chain the government forced to split from the movie studio of the same name.

“Goldenson came out here and persuaded Jack Warner to go into the television business,” Huggins said, reciting the fact with the same sense of profundity a history teacher might attach to the start of World War II. “Before that, you couldn’t talk to the studios about television.”

Huggins allows that much of the lore about Warner and his contemporaries is apocryphal, but he swears he was in the room when Warner said that “he would not even allow a television set to be shown in one of his movies. The word televisio n was never to be mentioned.”

But television turned out to be very good to Warner and his fellow moguls--and to Huggins. When the onetime movie director (“I really wasn’t very good at it . . . “) tried to leave the television business in 1961 to complete his UCLA doctoral work in political science, Universal lured him back with the promise of big bucks and a three-hour workday.

“For 18 years I never reported to work before 4 o’clock,” Huggins said with a grin. “Once in a while, I’d get in at 3. . . . “

The doctoral degree is a dream of the past; the book, tentatively titled “Twenty-Five Years Down the Tube,” is on hold. But Huggins still has a thing or two to say about how to make prime-time TV shows.

“I am a believer--and I am almost alone in this--in the primary importance of a good story,” Huggins said the other day in his Hollywood office at Stephen J. Cannell Productions. “I believe audiences want to see a show that hooks their interest and maintains that interest and surprises them and resolves that story.”

It seems almost too obvious a premise, and Huggins is not the only writer around who would espouse it. Yet, he contends that networks have played down the promise of solid storytelling because “they can’t quantify it--they can’t do to storytelling what they can do to a refrigerator. So they have gone just the other way.”

By that, he means that an undue emphasis has been placed on such quantifiable elements as personalities, action, sexual content and the like.

Huggins seems happy to be back with a series--a position that came about when Cannell needed a strong hand at “Hunter” so he could turn his attention to a new series he is developing, “The Last Precinct.”

But he also acknowledges that he no longer has “what I had for 25 years in television, which was absolute and total control. When I left in 1980, it was beginning to be chipped away.”

And so began Phase Three, marked by a decline in network viewership due to cable and videocassettes and the rise of the independent producer. Someday, when Huggins leaves television for good, that watershed could become the final words in the definitive book he still hopes to write.