Following in her fedora

The binge began after an unforeseen -- and unavoidable -- confluence of recent events. The satellite TV was disconnected while the roof was replaced. My girlfriend went out of town for three weeks. And “Remington Steele -- Season One” was released on DVD.

I have binged this way before. Six episodes of “The Sopranos” at a sitting. Twelve episodes of “The L Word” over a single weekend.

And now, 22. On those discs were 22 mysteries solved by exceptionally capable detective Laura Holt and her fiction-made-flesh boss, “Remington Steele.” The Mancini score was swinging. The dialogue crackled. Sparks flew.

As a 12-year-old, I latched on to “Remington Steele” like a duckling imprinting on its mother. Much adolescent obsessive behavior followed. Fan letters. A framed photo of Stephanie Zimbalist and Pierce Brosnan hung above my desk. A scrapbook.

OK, scrapbooks.

I pitched the scrapbooks during college when I became aware that stalker-like behavior is decidedly unattractive. But I never lost my affection for the show or the characters. In fact, one of the ways I knew my partner, Amy, and I were well suited from the get-go was that she hated cantaloupe just as I do, and she understood that no one was cooler than private detective Laura Holt.

When the DVDs first arrived, Amy and I gathered friends with similar admiration for the finer moments of early ‘80s television, and we all watched the pilot episode over Thai takeout.

“Remington Steele” never looked this good. Shot on film and directed by adults unmolested by MTV, it is elegant. On DVD, on my LCD flat-screen TV, it was one of the few experiences of my youth that was genuinely superior when experienced again as an adult.

Then Amy left town. I exhausted my TiVo list. I fell back into my old habits and started watching alone.

It was different this time. The workplace romance, which seemed so breezy, has different implications now that I actually work in an office. I’m also now 8 years older than Laura Holt, the bold and quick-witted detective who was my idol. I remember wanting to be her, to wear those fedoras, to drive that convertible VW Rabbit.

The most profound shift, however, is in my relationship to Los Angeles.

Growing up in Ohio, “Remington Steele” was this window out of the basement rec room that opened right onto Southern California. Through it I saw blindingly sunny Westside boulevards and winding roads through the Hollywood Hills. I saw elegant Beverly Hills estates and seedy downtown corners. TV worked its spell on me and lured me west.

When I arrived in Los Angeles as a USC freshman, my new campus was already familiar as the stand-in for a Berkeley-ish university terrorized by a vengeful homecoming queen (played by Sharon Stone). Some weeks later I spotted the twin office towers in Century City, supposed home of Remington Steele Investigations, while zipping past on the Santa Monica Freeway. Miraculously I’d gone away to college and come home to my favorite TV show.

BACK then I matched landmarks to the episodes -- “Remington Steele” defined Los Angeles for me, however inaccurately. I thought Laura Holt’s yellow ranch house was somewhere in Studio City because I sent my handwritten fan letters to an address on Radford Avenue. That is the address of the CBS Studio Center.

Today the plots of those episodes dance across my personal map of Southern California.

Consider: a sushi chef hires the agency to find his brother, who flew in from Japan but went missing at the airport. The detectives interview him at his restaurant. But it’s not any restaurant. It’s Oomasa. In Little Tokyo. My favorite sushi restaurant. A place where I eat almost weekly.

At that point in my 22-hour viewing marathon, “Remington Steele’s” Los Angeles integrated fully with my own.

A murderer tosses a bottle of poison off the cliffs of Malibu. Remington steals kisses from Laura in the Marina. He plays high-stakes polo against a client at Will Rogers State Park. He’s called to a seedy hotel in Eagle Rock -- though it looks more like the Westlake district to me. I know all these places.

Sure it was an ugly TV binge. But it was a chance to look at my city before I lived here, like a home movie taken before I was born.

In the weeks since too, it’s rekindled some of my fascination with Los Angeles. I look more closely at the industrial buildings in the Artist District. Was that Laura’s loft -- the one she moves into at the start of the second season (out on DVD Nov. 8)? I slow down as I drive up Rossmore Avenue. Is that the apartment building where Remington Steele lived?

The night my partner returned from her three-week trip, we stopped at Oomasa on our way home from the airport. It wasn’t crowded, and we had our choice of tables. I beelined for a booth toward the back. Amy followed and slid in across from me.

Oomasa’s California rolls and miso soup are comfort food to us, something we’ve indulged in a dozens of times. But this dinner, coming after my bender, tasted better, felt somehow cooler because of its newfound association.

I spent years of my adolescence trying to become Laura Holt. I didn’t manage to become a detective. I still look ridiculous in a fedora. But Laura Holt sat right there, in that booth, in Los Angeles. And now, so have I.

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Robin Rauzi is an assistant Travel editor. She can be reached at robin.rauzi@latimes.com.