Run for Your Life

I loved this series and I am very disappointed that since it got cancelled on NBC in 1968 I have not been able to find this show anywhere. Today is August 4th, 2019, and I still have not found this show on any TV network or on any streaming service or even online. If you ever do find this show available for viewing in any form and anyplace please share this info here. I would love very much to watch all these episodes again. This show ran from 1965 till 1968, and there were 85 episodes in total. Thank you in advance.

This was a very clever concept. A lawyer, Paul Bryan, has been diagnosed with an incurable disease and has been told he has just two to three years to live. The idea put this lead character in the position of living life to the fullest and the most responsible. There is a message in that for all of us somewhere, isn't there?

While somewhat morbid straight off the top, the concept made for interesting viewing from my perspective. Ben Gazzara played the main character and each week he would resolve other people's problems, but at the end of the show he would still be facing the anguish of a limited time on this earth. One of an unnamed genre of shows like "The Fugitive" and "The Incredible Hulk", "Run for Your Life" was set in locales all over the world, but probably filmed on studio back-lots, renovated to look like the French Riviera, Hawaii and Rio. The idea was that Bryan was seeing the world with what little time and resources he had left. Each episode he would engage in new relationships, involving himself in new circumstances, resulting in high action and adventure.

This wasn't a great show, but was certainly a product of its time. Always reminded us of our own mortality, which all of us need occasional reminders of in life.

Grace Lee Whitney appeared briefly in the 1965 TV series "Run for Your Life," the story of the terminally ill Paul Bryan (Ben Gazarra). The fourth episode of the series is titled "Never Pick Up a Stranger" and begins in a small town on a Sunday morning. Whitney plays the character Millie, a fast-talking diner waitress, who serves a cup of coffee. The story revolves around Bryan's encounter with a runaway Kathy (Brenda Scott) and his decisions after returning her to that small town. Barry Sullivan portrays the hardass local sheriff, who is aggressive in his attempts to get Bryan back on the road. Grace makes another appearance in the middle of when the sheriff arrives to present Bryan with a warrant for his arrest. There are several twists until we find out why the Sheriff is after our innocent hero. Grace was on the cusp of joining the cast of "Star Trek" and would film several of the first few episodes but be written off the show before the first installment aired. This part is a perfect example of her underutilization as an actor despite a decade of dues being paid in good performances on a range of shows.

...that of not just the adventures of a dying man with only a year or two to live, but also make him rich and playboy handsome, and even though he's doomed by illness, bless him with otherwise relative good health so as to be symptom-free until the very end, and with that, set him free upon the world to basically go wherever he wants and do there whatever he wants. Okay. I'll bite.

I watched this show without fail during its first season, each and every episode-- 30 in all. It had everything a teenage boy of that era might like, hot women, hot cars and exotic places; every week the dying hero falls in love with a beautiful babe, while living life to the fullest possible extent. That it's all being enjoyed by a dying man, Paul, played by Ben Gazzara, at first only subtly and slightly puts a damper on all the fun. Hey, there's a lot to experience! But, to me, eventually, i.e., by the second season, the maudlin aspect of it all began to seriously undermine the enjoyability of the show. Who wants to be constantly reminded of the unrelenting imminence of death? By season 2 something had changed, maybe it was me, but for some reason I no longer liked the show.

Thinking back on it, in a way, the show is a lot like another 60s show, Route 66. If you take out the Corvette and the buddy, and inject the dying man conceit.

8 Stars for the inspired idea and for the 60s nostalgia

At one time, TV shows occasionally had an interesting premise. This one's a variant on the question of what you'd do if you had the means and perhaps the time. Time, though, this character doesn't have, and the threat of death is probably what gives the series its focus and urgency. "To cram thirty years of living into one or two" is the voiced-over premise at the start of an episode; we would all do well to remember it at the start of a day, and live as though it's the last one, not recklessly but deliberately.