Banacek

George Peppard plays the title role in this series of Thomas Banacek, a street smart detective who works on retainer for insurance companies. He's the furthest thing from Jim Rockford who scrounges for work. No, Banacek is well paid for his cases.

He also has an old time petty crook played by Ralph Manza as a chauffeur and the tweedy and very British Murray Matheson to do his research. I'm sure they're well compensated also.

Peppard's character was interesting and intelligent and favored Agatha Christie like gathering of the suspects when all will be revealed when he solves a case. The show was more of a how it was done rather than a whodunit. With Banacek it was always the 'how'.

Ironically this limited series as it shared the NBC Mystery Movie time slot with three others only had a two season run and 17 episodes. I found it better than the A Team. But that show is what most remember George Peppard for.

Ironic, isn't it.

A great look back at TV show history and the times. Classic list of actors in every episode.

George Peppard WAS the show. Short hair when long hair was cool, wealthy and Bostonian, a ladies man with no equal, and the ability to solve impossible thefts for the insurance reward money. He was the man to see when all else failed. I still watch the re-runs when I get the chance. Sadly, too few shows were made. It was one of the four rotating Mystery Movies on NBC for a time. Supposedly, George Peppard walked away from a successful series because of the grind of the show. He was in nearly every scene and had to do voice overs too. Or else, one problem with the show that may have led to the decision to end the series was that, although entertaining and having great characters, the crimes were starting to get derivative and easier for the viewer to know the general solution to the problem in hand.

The inspiration for this show, for me, was the movie, THE THOMAS CROWNE AFFAIR. Take the important bits of the movie, a brilliant crime, Boston, wealth, the upper-crust life style, an insurance detective, and change the star from the thief to the recovery expert and you have the TV series, BANACEK. Of course, the added "hook" was making him Polish. This brand of Polish was the antithesis of every joke you've ever heard.

It would have been nice had George Peppard made some BANACEK REVISITED shows before he died. Like the NEW PERRY MASON, they would have been welcomed by his many fans. Peppard owned the role. Someone may play a similar role again, but they will not re-create the BANACEK mystique. George Peppard put his mark on that character for all time.......

After years of playing what he described to TV Guide as "tight-jawed men of action" in routine theatrical films, George Peppard made his small-screen bow as the star of "Banacek," one of three series ("Madigan" and "Cool Million" were the others) that rotated under the umbrella of The NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie when it premiered in September 1972 (following in the successful footsteps of the original Mystery Movie trio of "Columbo," "McCloud," and "McMillan and Wife" which moved to Sundays for their second season).

Almost every TV cop had a gimmick in that era, be it a wheelchair ("Ironside"), a Stetson ("McCloud"), or a walking stick ("Longstreet"). Thomas Banacek's appeal had much to do with his being Polish, and the sleuth (actually an insurance investigator) had enough confidence and sex appeal to counter any ethnic joke that came his way. When he wasn't seducing the leading ladies, he was correcting those who mispronounce his name ("It's Bana-CHECK"), more often than not with a smart-a** response.

Like "Columbo," this show's mysteries weren't who-done-its so much as they were how'd-they-do-it? Each episode opened with a mysterious disappearance (a football player vanishes after being tackled in one show, a priceless artifact or an airplane disappears in another) that Banacek would spend the bulk of each 90-minute episode attempting to solve. Smoking fine cigars, and displaying an expertise on the more elegant things in life that would make James Bond envious, Banacek could be insufferably arrogant, and Peppard inhabited the character to perfection.

"Banacek" was introduced in a two-hour World Premiere movie which aired on NBC in the 1971-72 season, then went on to headline 16 episodes from 1972-74. Despite healthy ratings, Peppard, whose contract with Universal and NBC originally called for a weekly series, and was therefore easily broken, bowed out in the hope of producing and directing a film about Long John Silver. When that project failed to materialize, he returned to series TV in the lesser "Doctors Hospital" in 1975 but enjoyed his greatest success as the leader of "The A Team" in the 80s. But "Banacek" remains his finest work in the television medium.

"Banacek" has also been aired in polish TV during seventies. Polish people were partly proud, partly disappointed watching these series. People were laughing watching it and started to make jokes about this TV series. Main reason of jokes were "typical polish" proverbs often cited by investigator.

I can assure you - none of his proverbs really exist in Polish. All of them were invented by script writers. Many years later, when someone tried to "invent old tradition" saying something which sounded archaic but in fact was invented by him people used to say "Do not be such Banaczek".

Btw. proper polish spelling of his name is "Banaczek" and should be pronounced as "Bana-check"