McMillan & Wife

This show was one of the rotation of the NBC Mystery Movie which also featured Columbo, McCloud, Night Gallery, etc. It's two main stars made the show go.

Rock Hudson played Comissioner McMillan very well. Susan Saint James as his slightly goofy, sexpot wife Sally, added a spark that flew between her, Hudson, & the audience. Susan was the type of woman that teenage boys fell in love with. Good thing she didn't realize when this show was on or she'd have been in jail. All us teenage boys when this show ran wanted her (at least most of us).

Even when the scripts mystery was a little lacking, Susan & Rock would make it seem fresh. John Schuck & Nancy Walker both provided excellent cast support as well. Really enjoyed these years ago & now the DVD's are coming out. We never realized when we were young the privilege we had of watching this good a series.

I never took my eyes off Susan. This show always pleased its fans.

The NBC Mystery Movie was a perfect fit for a film star like Rock Hudson who wanted to get into the grind of a regular television series and its 30 or so episodes that were expected back in 1971. Alternating with McCloud, Columbo, and others Hudson did about 8 McMillan&Wife shows a year and still did a film or two.

Reportedly the co-stars Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James did not get along all that well, but you'd never know it from this 70s version of Nick and Nora Charles. In real life even in San Francisco the police commissioner is an administrator of a large agency. But in San Francisco Stuart McMillan took a hand in an occasional murder that came in some roundabout way to his attention.

Like Myrna Loy, Sally McMillan tried to help as did their maid Mildred played by Nancy Walker. Many times they helped the way Lucy and Ethel helped Ricky. But Mac was always around to save Sally from whatever harm she got in the way of.

The stories were always witty and literate. The one weakness of the show was that whoever the big name guest star was you could pretty much guess that that individual would be the murderer. Maybe one or two times it didn't work out that way, but that was a tease.

It was an enjoyable show and Sundays were always something to look forward to on NBC with McMillan&Wife, McCloud, and Columbo. You could never go wrong.

As other reviews note, logic isn't a major part of many of this series' scripts, and some of them didn't age well. But keep in mind this was close to a half-century ago, and TV audiences were used to these kinds of plots and writing. (Some of the cars are very cool to see, but the clothing styles are straight out of Barnum and Bailey-guys in every pastel color under the sun, and women wearing huge stiff wigs and dressed in what looked to be upholstery.) St. James went on to a solid tv career, and Hudson was a better actor than some may remember. Despite the plot and dialogue implausibility they sometimes had to deal with, their characters played well off each other, and that's largely what kept us coming back for several seasons. For many of us teen guys, Susan had enough drawing power to do that by herself--cute, spunky, funny, and just the right amount of kooky. However, I could never figure out why the city brass didn't make Mac--who, after all, was the Police Commissioner--work out of his office instead of running around getting into gunfights. The series isn't the top of the TV-detective heap, but it represents the era....a comfortable and friendly revisit to a more innocent time.

Used to watch this series a long long time ago.Loved it so much that I promised myself I will visit beautiful San Francisco(I did and loved it). Although the series bore no resemblance to "real" people: how many of us know of a police Cornish and his wife solving murders personally? Still it was an hour spent each week being entertained by Mrs McMillan,her funny and slightly "boozed"housemaid and the most overworked,underpaid and undernourished Sergeant.Watching the show let me escape in a world of thrills and spills,and all the beautiful people that only a TV show can present.Mrs McMillan never had to make the bed or run the vacuum or do the ironing,no no all she involved herself was crooks and more crooks some nastier than others.Pure simple escapism for my family and myself. So now comes the sixty four dollars questions: when are we going to see more releases on DVD of this TV show and others like McCloud. Millie

Ahh, memories of watching this series aged about 11 and having a crush on Susan St James, her pushing Judy Carne to one side in the process. Of course the early 70's was a great time for classic US 'tec series, Kojak, Columbo (to quote Harry Nilsson) and many others, but this show doesn't appear to have gone into the permanent re-run rotation like so many of its contemporaries. There could be any number of reasons for this, some clear (it has dated quite a lot) and some perhaps not so clear, although its template has been reused since, most notably in "Hart To Hart".

Naturally it's not as good as the child in me remembers, the story, at least of this early episode being somewhat formulaic and the direction very flat and reactionary.

That said, I liked Hudson in the part and he doesn't appear to be coasting as much as his history might have entitled him to, while St James still has that quirky charm going for her, even if she does scream a lot. There's a nice frisson between them, loved-up as we say here in the UK, whch added some spice to proceedings. Nancy Walker, later Rhoda's mum, is watchable as ever as their feisty house-maid and moon-faced John Schuck is Hudson's runabout foot-soldier.

The Frisco locations are fine, the humour is gentle and while I guess there's not a lot of dramatic tension on show, it still reminds me fondly of Sunday afternoons as a kid in from the rain, with nothing better to do.