"Aspen" was a trashy but very absorbing and fun pilot for a legal/mystery series that would have starred Sam Elliott.
The executive producer was the great Roy Huggins who gave us "Cheyenne", "Maverick", "Colt 45", "77 Sunset Strip", "Run For Your Life", "The Outsider", and "The Rockford Files", as well as creating but not producing "The Fugitive".
Roy Huggins gave us two of the best westerns and three of the best private detective series in the history of TV. If this series had sold, Roy Huggins might have given us one of the great legal dramas. (His "Lawyers" section of "The Bold Ones" was very entertaining but the three lead characters could have been sharper.)
You could be sure a lawyer hero in a Roy Huggins' series would have behaved more like a tough private eye than a lawyer, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Huggins always come up with absorbing, puzzling, Gothic stories for his series.
Sam Elliott should have been one of the great, legendary series leads like other Roy Huggins' heroes Clint Walker, James Garner, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Ben Gazzara, Darren McGavin, and David Janssen.
This unsold pilot was a real missed opportunity for Sam Elliott and Roy Huggins, a tantalizing might have been.
