On the Run With TV’s Marathon Man : Producer Dean Hargrove specializes in solving mysteries--zillions of ‘em

Dean Hargrove doesn’t seem to sweat. His sleeves are buttoned and his tie is invariably knotted neatly in place. His desk is serenely clear of clutter, his office accented with red poinsettia and French lithographs.

He is soft-spoken, reticent, the picture of equanimity.

But Dean Hargrove’s profession is murder and mystery. Four times a week. Rain or shine.

He is executive producer of “Matlock” on NBC, “Jake and the Fatman” on CBS, “Father Dowling Mysteries” on ABC and “Max Monroe: Loose Cannon” on CBS.

The A.C. Nielsen Co. counting staff figures that Hargrove’s shows had a combined viewing audience last week of between 120 million and 130 million people.

And that doesn’t include the 38 million who watched his fifth series last Sunday, the recurring “Perry Mason” adventures on NBC.

What with people around like Aaron Spelling, Norman Lear, Stephen Cannell and others who are renowned for sheer television bulk, it’s uncertain if Hargrove can claim a Guinness World Record as a creative writer-producer. But in observing him over several weeks in casting sessions, story conferences and assorted meetings trying to solve unsolvables, he seems to stretch human endurance.

Life in television is life on the cutting edge of deadlines.

One of the gags around his office--like gallows humor--is that if something is demanded four days or more from this moment, that’s “an eternity.”

As of this week, Hargrove and his merry band had produced 51 episodes this season, had five more in production and had 17 scripts in various stages of writing, rewriting and pre-production.

A status report on each series:

“Perry Mason” is in its fifth season of three or four movies a year, with Raymond Burr in the not-unfamiliar role. A first cut of an episode shot in Paris before Christmas, to play in May, was just turned in. Another installment begins shooting Monday in Denver. And NBC just ordered six more movies.

“Matlock,” starring Andy Griffith in his fourth season as a country-folks lawyer, is shooting its 18th and 19th episodes (a two-parter) for the year.

“Jake and the Fatman,” with William Conrad and Joe Penny in their third season, is doing its 18th episode this week.

“Father Dowling,” which shoots in Denver, premiered Jan. 4 on ABC (matriculating from a short run on NBC), with Tom Bosley as the high-collared investigator and Tracy Nelson as Sister Steve. Episode 10 started Thursday.

“Loose Cannon” opened on CBS Jan. 5, starring Shadoe Stevens as an L.A. cop who has perfected a style of reckless abandon. Episode 6 is being completed. But the series--pummeled by the critics and disdained by viewers--was pulled after Friday’s episode and, Hargrove shrugged, “they (CBS) will bring us back in March in a different time period and we’ll see.”

Hargrove takes a simple approach to pressure: “It’s turning out scripts,” he said. “I mean, I think producing a TV series is essentially producing scripts. Every eight days somebody’s got their hand out for another script.”

He works on a series “until it finds its speed or own internal rhythms.” Then the day-by-day duties are handled by the staff.

But: “Well, there’s always going to be problems--most of which you can never anticipate. You deal with them and move on. I’ve had to make a couple of trips to Hawaii (where “Jake and the Fatman” is filmed) where I fly over, get off the plane, have meetings and get on the plane and fly back.

“The only time I ever really feel the pressure is like starting these two new shows from a standing start. I have to put together a staff and I’ve got to put enough scripts together and I’m looking at those dates (deadlines).”

His partners are Fred Silverman, who does the dealing for the team, and Viacom Inc., the entertainment conglomerate. It puts up the money.

Silverman is a legend of the business with stints as programmer at all three major networks. His image has been Couch Potato Supreme--one of the rare few TV executives who will “admit” that they watch TV and love it.

He talked show details with Hargrove most every day until felled by a coronary in November. “Now I do a couple hours of work every other day,” Silverman said from his Malibu beach house. “I hope very shortly to be back to a fairly normal schedule.”

He acknowledges that he and Hargrove are “an unlikely odd couple--Dean is lower-key, kind of WASPish. I’m more volatile. He’s from Kansas; I’m from New York. . . .”

One of their producers said that they’re most anxious to get a sitcom on the air because of all their murder shows. “We call them,” he said, “the Beasts of Brentwood.”

Assessing “dailies” (each day’s shooting) or episodes in varying stages of editing can be an exercise in anguish, since it essentially is a matter of assembling bits and pieces of the story so that it results in a reasonable logic.

Hargrove sits behind his desk, visitors on the sofa. They all eyeball the TV set as the cassettes run.

He told the producer and editors one day that the music was too thin in one “Loose Cannon” scene and too big in another.

He froze the tape when NBC called. The network has this idea about opening “Matlock” next season with an episode in Japan, for the promotional value. NBC wanted his opinion.

Back to the tape. Producer David Solomon spotted graffiti on an alley wall that Max drives by: “Is that the Crips (the L.A. gang)?” Hargrove laughed: “ ‘Fraid they’re gonna sue?”

Hargrove looked at cryptic notes: This sequence he didn’t believe. One action needed to be “punctuated more”; “this scene just lays there for me.”

In one “Loose Cannon” episode, Max is trying to trap a hit man and gets himself up in blackface as a cook with some sort of twisted dialect. Might have been an attempt at Pakistani.

Solomon reported that “Shadoe wants more of that scene. How he got a cut of the show, I don’t know.”

Hargrove: “He got a cut of this show?”

Director Chris Hibler: “That shouldn’t ever happen.”

Solomon: “It should never happen. But he did and called about changes in that scene.”

Hargrove: “We should find out how it he got it (the tape). I don’t want to persecute him. Just make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Solomon: “I said, ‘Where did you get it?’ He said, ‘I’m not talking.’ ”

Hargrove shares a suite on the Universal Studios campus with Joel Steiger and Joyce Burditt, his key “Matlock” producers. On one of the walls in his office there’s a monster photograph and autograph of Boris Karloff and a quaint picture of half of Alfred Hitchcock looking around a corner outside Studio 18. Through the window to the lot, you can see the caricature of Hitchcock’s round cheeks against the screening theater bearing his name.

With a shag of hair, with the smallest flecks of gray, Hargrove, 52, is laid-back, Midwestern proper. He looks trim. He noticed a paunch last August and now brings in an exercise pro three early-morning half-hours a week. Hargrove has lost 29 pounds, bought some new ensembles, and is holding.

He doesn’t strike you as a funny guy but “I still see myself as a comedy writer basically” and “if there is a common trend in the shows, I would hope it would be a sense of humor.”

He started off straight enough--born in Iola, Kan., went to Wichita State (political science), UCLA film school, then jokes on the original “Bob Newhart Show.”

Other employments: “Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” “Girl From U.N.C.L.E.,” “It Takes a Thief,” “Name of the Game” (Gene Barry’s segments), “Columbo,” “McCloud,” “Madigan,” “McCoy,” “Holvak,” “Me and Mom” and “Return to Mayberry.”

But it’s hard to see the writer--which is how Hargrove sees himself. He leaves few clues around.

There’s a typewriter covered in the corner, next to a computer, new and unused. “I never learned it,” he said. (Secretary Ann Farina figures that he’s afraid of the technology.)

There are no shreds of old notes and misdirected scenes scattered around, sure signs that a writer has been there.

Hargrove is all calm and composure.

Andy Griffith calls him “the quiet man.”

His wife, the former actress Brenda Scott, who runs Fables, an antique store in Studio City, asserted that “it’s taken me forever just to get him to do the minimum talking.”

In a craft given to frustrations and tantrums, where’s the temper?

One of his “bosses,” Henry Schlieff, chairman and CEO, Viacom Broadcasting and Entertainment Groups, New York, marvels that Hargrove is “almost unique in that (Hollywood) environment,” referring gingerly to “the diversity of personalities out there.”

The NBC executive on “Matlock,” Charisse McGhee, director of drama programs, said that the extent of Hargrove’s temper in disagreements with her are something like “Are you ever going to leave me alone on this?”

Billy Campbell, director of current series at ABC and the contact on “Dowling,” only recalled a single time when Hargrove raised his voice: “When he and I played basketball at his club one Sunday morning, because I didn’t pass him the ball.”

Hargrove knew Gerry Conway as a writer with Marvel Comics and worked with him on a long-ago project. Conway came in to talk with Hargrove and was assigned to rewrite a script. He was sent “Loose Cannon” scripts. Then he came in to see the boss.

“What we’d like to do is run it through your typewriter,” Hargrove said. “And we should make it a little more urban, a little more contemporary. . . .”

The script came from Brian Clemens, a writer-producer of some special regard since he co-created “The Avengers,” a most celebrated English series. He now works as executive story consultant via phones and faxes from his home in London.

The plot is tricky--the episode is called “Tricks”--about a silent movie star whose nephew is immersed in the arms racket. Plus other complications. (Director Dan Attias instructed an actress during the audition for another key role, “She’s an undercover FBI agent who’s chasing a terrorist--but she’s got amnesia. So you don’t really need to know that anyway. . . .”)

Hargrove said the basic structure of the scripts works well: “I don’t think you have to do much in terms of plotting. At this point, we just wanted to get you to get a pass at it.”

Conway: “How about the humor?”

Hargrove: “The humor in it should be a little more like the humor you read in the other scripts.”

Conway: “Seemed a little more distant.”

Hargrove: “Exactly. Brian is British and, you know, there’s a slight idiomatic difference. I mean, he’s terrific and he has some very nice things. As I say, this is not to make work. If you find parts of it in terms of dialogue you like, don’t feel that you’re obliged to do anything to it. But I’d like to get basically your fingerprint on it.”

As it turned out, Conway’s eventual rewrite was adjudged on the button and Hargrove promptly gave Conway a “Dowling” assignment.

What makes for good television? “I don’t know how to answer,” Hargrove said. “That’s always a matter of opinion. There are successful programs and there are good programs and sometimes they’re the same programs. How often, that’s the question.”

His shows are obviously popular but, if not critically attacked, “they’re usually critically ignored. I’d say ‘Matlock’ has never been acclaimed, but I don’t think it’s ever been badly reviewed. ‘Loose Cannon’ got some bad reviews.”

The appeal is traditional-form, old-fashioned mainstream mystery.

The stories are outlined in enormous detail before scripting: “Once we have the premise, the next thing that we want to know is the finish,” he said. “Then you know how to get there. Say that we’re constructing a ‘Matlock’ story. We work out the murder. We work out who the suspects are. And then we jump to the end and say, ‘Well, what’s the finish? What’s the finish clue?’ ”

The “Perry Masons” are especially by-the-book mysteries: “They have to be. It’s a tradition. You now only have a society of people who pay a lot of attention to ‘Perry Mason’ but the Erle Stanley Gardner estate is very specific about maintaining those traditional elements. We send them copies of the scripts and the shows.”

The approach is taking a personality and designing the show for him, “because if we feel we can get the right character married to the right star then we have a chance of doing something that’s going to be popular.”

Adjustments are made. “Jake and the Fatman,” for example.

“It’s changed radically,” he said. “It started out telling what we call open mysteries, where you saw the killers in advance. We tried to play it slightly film noirish . We used old standards for all the song titles, integrated them into the musical underscore for each episode. Then, when the show was renewed, part of the condition was that we take it to Hawaii. Then the show changed and became a much more straight-forward cop show.”

After a zillion shows, how does he keep from going back to the same old well for ideas?

“Well, I guess that’s a question you can ask almost anybody who does a series. When you hit the 90th episode or beyond, you have to try not to get stale. What we try to do on ‘Matlock’ is to vary the format of the show, or bend it a little bit, do variations on the central them, so that we’re not to hidebound that it becomes overly familiar to the audience.

“It’s a good question. It’s one that we ask ourselves quite a bit and I guess what happens is we get attracted to ideas that are off form simply because we want to avoid repeating ourselves.”

In fact, Hargrove and his troops have had to throw out virtually completed episodes because they just couldn’t make the twisted mystery work to any reasonable degree of logic.

But despite his achievements in murder and mystery, he wants to do a comedy series: “At the moment, we’re dealing with everything we’ve got. But at that point where we sit down to start doing some new development, which would probably be next year, that’s certainly going to be part of it.”

Whatever eventuates, in the world of TV programming, you never get too distant from humble.

He had one lesson one day during an audition. One young man said it was good to see Hargrove again; Hargrove had hired him for his first TV acting job five years ago on a TV movie, “Goldie and the Bears.”

Hargrove paled, as if someone had kicked him in the gut: “Oh my god,” he said, “that goes back.”

They exchanged niceties. The actor did well enough on his reading (but not well enough to get cast). When he left everybody wanted to know about “Goldie and the Bears.”

“I blocked it all out,” Hargrove said. “Something you don’t want to be reminded of. . . . It was Warner Bros. I got assigned to it.”

The plot: Three former Chicago Bears players and the detective daughter of their dead coach take on a hot case of spies and murderers. Starring Stephanie Faracy, Ben Davidson, Terry Hogan, Julius J. Carry III and Thomas Rhiner.

Solomon wanted to see a cassette.

Hargrove wanted to change the subject: “Nothing’s available on that one.”