The Eddie Capra Mysteries

"You're a lawyer, not a detective!"

Those words were constantly mentioned by J. J. Devlin, senior partner at the law firm that employed Eddie Capra, a young lawyer who doesn't act like the typical attorney...in other words, he doesn't dress in a suit and tie, he doesn't carry a briefcase and go to court. In fact, his cases DON'T go to court, simply because he works to clear the client of murder charges. As the opening statement says, he behaves more like a detective than an attorney, and his clients should be damned glad of that fact.

Vincent Baggetta starred as Eddie, who was basically Ellery Queen with a New Jersey twist. He wasn't quite as polite and tactful as Jim Hutton's Ellery, but had a pesky streak in him more along the lines of Columbo. Eddie wasn't afraid to ask the tough, personal questions and offend people he considered to be suspects.

He also conducted experiments, used diagrams...any means at his disposal to solve the crime, and this meant the assistance of several other folks at his office: his fetching secretary/girlfriend Lacey (Wendy Phillips), leg man Harvey (Michael Horton) and high-strung boss Devlin (Ken Swofford, an expert at playing such roles, and also a vet from Ellery Queen, where he played blowhard Frank Flanagan).

Like Ellery Queen before, and Murder, She Wrote after, The Eddie Capra Mysteries boasted all-star casts and puzzling murders, overseen by Columbo vet Peter S. Fischer. It helps that the cast has great chemistry and likable actors and that the story moves along. Why the show failed, who knows? All I know is that if you enjoyed Jim Hutton as Ellery Queen and Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, you just might enjoy Vincent Baggetta as Eddie Capra.

The Eddie Capra Mysteries concerned an attorney working in a white shoe law firm who apparently was not interested in trial fees. Vincent Baggetta would much rather solve the murder than win an acquittal in court. He must have cost his firm millions of dollars, but for a brief while gave viewers an enjoyable show.

Young assistant Michael Horton and secretary Wendy Phillips aided and abetted Baggetta in his pursuit of justice. Phillips and Baggetta were an unspoken item, something in fact being pushed by Phillips's daughter Seven Anne McDonald. Ken Swofford was one of the partners who had a mixed attitude about Baggetta's sleuthing on company time.

I remember the show because my mother was a devoted fan of TV mystery shows going back to the original Perry Mason series. She watched them all, Ironside, Cannon, Barnaby Jones, Murder She Wrote, Matlock and you'll note all of these had some pretty long runs. This was the only one of these type of shows she liked that flopped.

Why it flopped who knows because the episodes were every bit as good as the ones on the above named hits. Vincent Baggetta is a very good actor who specializes in playing a lot of urban types on both sides of the law. This series was his big chance at TV stardom though and he never got another.

If the episodes of The Eddie Capra Mysteries are ever shown and hopefully were saved somewhere, you'll see what I mean.

I enjoyed this show too. I was a little kid who watched a lot of TV but this show really stood out. It was funny and well written with quality work from Swofford et al. Baggetta was a real find too playing a real street smart, smart aleck type... an urban Poirot! Seven Ann was the cute kid... Phillips was, if memory serves, delectable as the female lead. Really too bad this one didn't go the distance... ahead of its time perhaps .. years before Goodfellas or the Sopranos would lead to actors like Joe Pesci or movies like Analyze This would allow actors with a distinctly urban Italian attitude and speech to find their services in high demand. Too bad a good guy of this type didn't fly... though if you're a fan of Hill Street Blues.. Baggetta's role as a corrupt cop is one of the most chilling portrayals this side of Ray Sharkey or Dennis Franz!

Even though Capra didn't spend much time in the courtroom, he made being a lawyer look very fun - he was much more of a private eye in his methods and daily routines, however.

This was one of the best, and unfortunately short-lived, series on the NBC roster in the Fall of 1978. The only other one that I recall was David Cassidy: Man Undercover (following the excellent Police Story episode the previous Spring). But Cassidy wanted that show to end as he hated being back in a TV series.

The rest of the slate - all of them - were cancelled by Fred Silverman when he was hired to revamp NBC's Prime Time programming, so instead we got Supertrain and Hello, Larry in the Spring of 1979 and Capra only ran just 13 episodes through to early January. There were some very good episodes, featuring the usual roster of current character actors appearing in many shows produced by Universal Studios, as well as a smattering of semi-retired or washed up has beens getting one more paycheck to bolster their retirement expenses.

Some have criticized the casting of Baggetta as the lead, but I always thought he was a compelling actor, having guest starred all over the place in the 70s, and with a later very memorable role on Hill Street Blues as a vicious detective.

Anyway, Eddie Capra got cancelled, and I became a cop, not a lawyer, after a stint as a private eye myself. But real life is much different than television. Yet, the Capra series was a brief flight on what could have been a long-running mystery/detective show in much the same vein as Columbo, except that we were tasked with figuring out the murderer(s) along with Eddie. A shame it disappeared so quickly.

Vincent Bagetta, more accustomed to playing scum, often "connected," is the good guy this time around, a lawyer taking cases his boss (Ken Swofford) doesn't want, or doesn't want done that way. It's like a police show where the policeman bucks his superiors (or Kolchak without the panache or the ghoul-of-the -week or the incredibly talented Darrin McGavin).

They gave Bagetta's Capra all the usual baggage: a secretary like Perry Mason's Della Street, a kid assistant who'd been fired from the firm yet still did Capra's leg work, etc. . . . But somehow, the show didn't gel.

Capra was more detective than lawyer, determined to find his clients innocent before trial to avoid public confessions as in "Perry Mason."

Eddie Capra was so up to date to the late 1970s it looks like an antique today. As opposed to another short-lived show, "Ellery Queen," which had a period late-1940s setting (though with 1970s sensibilities and stars) and so doesn't look these days like a relic of its time.

Frankly, I came of age in the 1970s. I was a Junior in high school when this show aired and had other things on my mind than sitting home watching TV. I didn't like the 1970s then and I have no nostalgia for it. But these days I try to catch up on things I missed and Eddie Capra fell into my lap accidentally after 45 years of never hearing about it. It's worth watching once, but despite a lot of promise I thought the show was ultimately special. Sorry.