The show was created by producer Roy Huggins and writer Stephen J. Cannell. Huggins originally sketched the premise of a private eye who took on only closed cases (a conceit quickly abandoned in the series), at one point intending to introduce the character in an episode of the cop show Toma. Huggins assigned the script to Cannell—a professed aficionado of the hard-boiled detective tradition—who decided to have fun with the story by flouting the genre’s clichés and breaking its rules. After the Toma connection crumbled, James Garner signed on to the project, NBC agreed to finance the pilot, and The Rockford Files was born.

Cannell was largely responsible for the character and the concept that finally emerged in the pilot script and the series. Jim Rockford did indeed break the mold set by television’s earlier two-fisted chivalric P.I.s. His headquarters was a mobile home parked at the beach rather than a shabby office off Sunset Boulevard; in lieu of a gorgeous secretary, an answering machine took his messages; he preferred to talk, rather than slug, his way out of a tight spot; and he rarely carried a gun. (When one surprised client asked why, Rockford replied, “Because I don’t want to shoot anybody.”) No troubled loner, Jim Rockford spent much of his free time fishing or watching TV with his father, Joe Rockford (Noah Beery, Jr.), a retired trucker with a vocal antipathy to “Jimmy’s” chosen profession. Inspired by an episode of Mannix in which that tough-guy P.I. took on a child’s case for some loose change and a lollipop, Cannell decided to make his creation “the Jack Benny of private eyes.” Rockford always announced his rates up front: $200 a day, plus expenses (which he itemized with abandon). He was tenacious on the job, but business was business—and he had payments on the trailer.

For all of its ostensible rule-breaking, however, The Rockford Files hewed closely to the hard-boiled tradition in style and theme. The series’ depiction of Los Angeles’s sun-baked streets and seamy underbelly rivals the novels of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald. Chandler, in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” could have been writing about Jim Rockford when he describes the hard-boiled detective as a poor man, a common man, a man of honor, who talks with the rude wit of his age. Rockford’s propensity for wisecracks, his fractious relationship with the police, and his network of shady underworld connections, lead straight back to Dashiell Hammett by way of Chandler and Rex Stout. As for his aversion to fisticuffs, Rockford was not a coward, but a pragmatist, different only by degree (if at all) from Philip Marlowe; when violence was inevitable, Rockford was as tough as nails. Most tellingly of all, he shared the same code as his Los Angeles predecessors Marlowe and Lew Archer: an unwavering sense of morality, and an almost obsessive thirst for the truth. Thus, despite his ostensible concern for the bottom line, in practice Rockford ended up doing at least as much charity work as any fictional gumshoe (as in “The Reincarnation of Angie,” when the soft-hearted sleuth agrees to take on a distressed damsel’s case for his “special sucker rate” of $23.74).

Ultimately—perhaps inevitably—all of Cannell’s generic revisionism served to make his hero more human, and the stories that much more realistic. Jim Rockford could be the Jack Benny of private eyes precisely because he was the first TV private eye—perhaps the first literary one—to be created as a fully credible human being, rather than simply a dogged, alienated purveyor of justice. The Rockford Files was as much about character and relationships as it was about crime and detection. The presence of Rockford’s father was more than a revisionist or comic gimmick. Although “Rocky” and Jim’s wrangling was the source of much humor, that humor was credible and endearing; their relationship was the emotional core of the show, underlining Jim’s essential humanity—and subtly, implicitly, sketching in a history for the detective. By the same token, a tapestry of supporting and recurring characters gave Rockford a life beyond the case at hand: Los Angeles Police Department Sergeant Dennis Becker (Joe Santos), Jim’s buddy on the force, served a stock genre function as a source of favors and threats, but their friendship, which played out apart from the precinct and the crime scene, added another dimension of character. Likewise, Jim’s attorney and sometimes girlfriend Beth Davenport (Gretchen Corbett) further fleshed out the details of his personal life, and served as an able foil for Becker and his more ill-tempered superiors (in the process imparting a dash of 1970s feminism to the show). Angel Martin (Stuart Margolin), Rockford’s San Quentin cellmate, the smallest of small-time grifters, the weasel’s weasel, at once hilarious and pathetic, evoked Rockford’s prison past, evinced his familiarity with Los Angeles’s seamier side and balanced Rocky’s hominess with an odious measure of sleaze. These regular members of the Rockford family, and a host of distinctive recurring characters—cops, clients, crooks, con men, ex-cons— helped create, over time, a web of relationships that grounded Rockford, investing it with a more intense and continuing appeal than would a strict episodic focus on crime and detection.

As the preceding might suggest, The Rockford Files was underlined with a warmth not usually associated with the private eye genre. Much of the show’s distinctiveness was its emphasis on humor, exploiting Garner’s comic gifts (and his patented persona of “reluctant hero”) and the humor of the protagonist’s often prickly relationships with his dad, Becker, Angel, and his clients. In later seasons the series occasionally veered into parody—especially in the episodes featuring dashing, wealthy, virtuous detective Lance White (Tom Selleck), and bumbling, pulp-fiction-addled, would-be private eye Freddie Beamer (James Whitmore, Jr.)—and even flirted with self-parody, as the show’s signature car chases became more and more elaborate and (sometimes) comical (as when Rockford is forced to give chase in a Volkswagen beetle with an enormous pizza adorning the top). Even so, the series was faithful to its hard-boiled heritage. Yet the series also brought a contemporary sensibility to the hard-boiled tradition’s anti-authority impulses, assailing political intrigue, official corruption, and bureaucratic absurdity with a distinctly post-Watergate cynicism.

Rockford’s most profound homage to the detective tradition was first-rate writing and a body of superbly realized mysteries. Cannell and Juanita Bartlett wrote the bulk, and most of the best, of the series’ scripts, with writer-producer David Chase (I’ll Fly Away, Northern Exposure, The Sopranos), also a frequent contributor of top-notch work. Mystery author Donald Westlake, quoted in The Best of Crime and Detective TV, captures the series’ central strengths in noting that “the complexity of the plots and the relationships between the characters were novelistic.” John D. MacDonald, critiquing video whodunits for TV Guide, proposed that in terms of “believability, dialogue, plausibility of character, plot coherence, The Rockford Files comes as close to meeting the standards of the written mystery as anything I found.” During its run, the series was nominated for the Writers Guild Award and the Mystery Writer’s of America “Edgar” Award, in addition to winning the Emmy for outstanding drama series in 1978.

The Rockford Files ran for five full seasons, coming to a premature end in the middle of the sixth, when Garner left the show due to a variety of physical ailments brought on by the strenuous demands of the production. Yet Rockford never really left the air; not only has the series remained steadily popular in syndication and on cable, eight made-for-television movies reuniting the original cast aired on CBS between 1994 and 1999. In addition, a loyal cult following continues to celebrate the series on various Rockford File websites. The show’s rather rapid canonization as a touchstone of the private eye genre is evinced by subsequent series, including Magnum, P.I., Detective in the House, and Charlie Grace, consciously imitating or directly quoting it.

The Rockford Files marked a significant step in the evolution of the television detective, honoring the traditional private eye tale with well-crafted mysteries, and enriching the form with what television does best: fully developed characters and richly drawn relationships. In musing on the hard-boiled detective whose tradition he helped shape, Raymond Chandler wrote, “I do not care much about his private life.” In Rockford, Cannell and company embraced and exploited their detective’s private life. Television encourages, even demands this intimacy. For all the gritty realism of Spade and Marlowe’s mean streets, they were, in their solitary asceticism, figures of romantic fantasy. Jim Rockford was no less honorable, no less resolute in his quests; he was, however, by virtue of his trailer, his dad, his gun in the cookie jar, just that much more real.