The Name of the Game

I had just visited Universal Studies, Hollywood in 1968, when I was 15 and saw sets where they filmed The Name of The Game. Growing up with Bat Masterson and The Untouchables, I was a big fan of two of the stars, Gene Barry and Robert Stack. Susan St. James was just a young lady as Peggy Maxwell at 22 years of age. Tony Franciosa was fine too though I think he got into some type of dispute with the studio and disappeared from the show.

The 90 minute show ran on Friday nights and I remember enjoying it quite a bit. I have not seen it in some time and really hope it will be available on DVD sometime soon. It was shot in color and I think ran for about three years. Though the show is now almost 40 years old, I know I would still have fun watching it. My kids would laugh at the rotary dial telephones and lack of computers but to me it would still be a blast. They would recognize Robert Stack from Airplane though! Tony Franciosa was good but my favorites were Barry and Stack. The action, cars, outfits and setting were all classy. Please bring it back on DVD!

I used to love this show. I have not seen it recently, and I do not know how it would play today. However, my younger self remembers this as one of the best tv dramas ever. I remember one episode when Tony Franciosa returns to New York City to visit his mother and astranged older brother played by Martin Balsem. Franciosa throughout is trip is reading Thomas Wolf's "You can Never Go Home Again." He reunites with is brother, but later find that his grocery store owner brother is also a local drug dealer. It ends with Franciosa turning his brother into the police. His mother forgiving him, but she leaves to live in her home country of Italy. Susan Saint James played one of the magazine's researchers, and stared in one episode opposite Joseph Cotton. This was a 90 minute show that had three rotating stars. Tony Franciosa played the star reporter for a fictional magazine called "People," his millionare publisher was Glenn Howard played by Gene Barry, and Robert Stack played Dan Farrell, a former FBI agent turned crime reporter.

When this debuted in 1968, I thought it was the best TV show I'd ever seen. It had a "wheel" format of the kind pioneered by Warner Bros. a decade before, which allowed more time to film each episode and allowed the show to attain higher quality than the average TV show. You could also do any kind of story on it. Glen Howard, (Gene Barry) could get involved with boardroom battles, political scandals in Washington, could travel to anywhere in the world. He was involved in everything from a campus protest to a murder investigation in and English country house to the "Prague Spring" to a flashback episode that took place in the old west to a Phil Wylie vision of a post-apocalyptic world. Dan Farrell, (Robert Stack), was Elliot Ness with a typewriter, going wherever crimes were committed to battle the bad guys with the truth and comfort the afflicted. Jeff Dillon, (Anthony Franciosa), was more interested in afflicting the comfortable as a reporter for People Magazine, (Time/Life's version didn't exist yet), His was perhaps the most open-ended job of all. He could be doing a personality piece on a show business icon, going undercover at a paramilitary training ground, investigating a phony doctor, covering the coverage of a search for someone lost in the woods, (an updated version of "Ace in the Hole"). Susan Saint James was the real star of the show as she was assigned as the assistant to each in time for their latest adventure, (a strange practice, it seems to me, but she was always welcome).

The whole thing was packaged in a glittery covering of jazzy music and artsy-craftsy direction, (including by a young Stephen Spielberg), that made it all seem "hip" and exciting. Looking back at it now, that's one of the problems. It's so aggressively contemporary that it's now very dated, both in style and attitudes. The "Man From Uncle" doesn't date because it was never realistic to begin with. "Adam 12" doesn't date because it was never about issues. The things those cops dealt with is the same thing they'd deal with today. "Lou Grant " doesn't date as much because it was presented in a straight forward manner. "Name of the Game" seems stuck in it's own time.

Another problem is that it got more and more wordy as the show went on. it started out as that rare dinosaur, the 90 minute drama. Coming up with movie length stories on a weekly basis was tough and there was a lot of "fill" in many of the episodes. NBC, experimenting with the notion that longer shows might be cheaper because they meant less shows, eventually expanded it to a series of "special" two hour shows, which not only bloated it more but took it past many bedtimes. What finally killed it was the expense. It was the most expensive show in TV history to that time, (and probably would still be with inflation factored out). it had to be a huge ratings hit to "make it" for a long run. It wasn't and it didn't. But, for a while there, it was something special.

This series to me was in a class by itself. The stories were first-rate and the stars were very charming and sophisticated. I always did admire Gene Barry as an actor and his work in this series made me a lifelong fan. I loved the clothes that he wore on the show and hence have tried to emulate his sophisticated style ever since. I feel that there were very few actors at that time other than Craig Stevens and Robert Wagner that had the same aura and screen presence. I also greatly enjoyed the episodes that Tony Franciosa and Robert Stack headlined. This series had the feel of a theatrical motion picture and one could tell that big bucks were being spent to produce it. I have some episodes on tape and still think that they hold up very well as compared to dramatic television today. Like the old saying goes; "They don't make 'em like that anymore".

After more than 35 years, I still remember The Name of the Game as one of my all-time favorites. The format was original and the overall vibe cool and classy. The stories were well-written with interesting plot twists. Back then, I had no idea who the writers were but now, of course, Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues) is a TV icon and I'm not surprised to learn his superb career had its genesis here. The actors were on a par above other shows of the day -- movie stars doing a TV turn. not the norm at that time. Susan Saint James made her career on this show. Her character was vivid and sexy and it was obvious she was destined for bigger parts.