Nichols

The first time I remember seeing James Garner was in this series. It was set in the late 1800s and he played a sort of smart-alec who inherited the name of the founder of the town but basically nothing else. The people of the town kind of looked down on him. He rode around town on a motorcycle, which in those days was like a moped in that it had pedals like a bicycle (in fact that's how you started it).

It was hilarious and I was very disappointed when it was canceled. When I saw Rockford, I thought "wow, that's the same guy that was in Nichols, I wonder if this show will be any good."

Margot Kidder was in this too. I hope someday I get to see reruns to see if it's as good as I remember.

Garner played Garner as only Garner can. For this short lived series, he was a disreputable sheriff in one horse western town in the early 20th century. The great Margot Kidder played the saloon keeper, a sorta equivalent of Kitty on Gunsmoke. It was clear, however, that her saloon offered more than a drink and a song. Above all, Nichols was really funny.

I guess I'm one of the few who remembers this very funny show. The turn of the century Old West, with technology about to change the frontier forever, made for a very interesting setting, and the cast did a good job of getting into the period, pulling it off without being camp. Garner was great, Margot Kidder was delightful, and John Beck made a terrific villain. The show was of such high quality it's no wonder it lasted such a short time.

This show was a really good one in many ways, although certainly an atypical Western with the hero (?) riding around on a motorcycle rather than a horse, due to the 1914 setting, very "late" for a Western, which tend usually to be set between 1866 and 1890. I remember some controversy about its cancellation at the time but didn't really watch it during its time on NBC. When I came to see it and love it was a decade later when I was in the Army stationed in Germany and it was shown every week from the beginning on Armed Forces Television. By then, Margot Kidder was famous as Lois Lane but I'll also always think of her as Nichols' girlfriend. In a lot of ways, Nichols was a lot like Maverick; both were much more attracted to getting rich with little effort than they were fighting. It was in the little TV magazine that they distributed at the PX (not really an authorized edition of "TV Guide" but made to resemble it as closely as possible without getting into copyright trouble) that I first learned the real story behind the cancellation. I really wonder what the next season with the more violent twin would have been like if they had really made it as planned. Of course, by the time this show was made the "Western era" of TV had been in decline for around a decade; someday I hope to be able to write that the "reality era" has been in decline for that long! While "Gunsmoke" and "Bonanza" were still running, they were both nearing their ends and it had been years since a new Western had really caught on; I think that this trend did a lot to hold "Nichols" back, and was the main reason that NBC executives doubted that it would ever find a large audience But to me, a good Western, unlike a show set in contemporary times, is somewhat timeless, as are other "period" shows; changing fashions and the like do nothing to make them look any more "dated" than they were supposed to be, and I think that watching this show, 10 years after it was produced, is really what brought this point home to me. Also, this show is an early pairing of Garner and Stuart Margolin, who is really one of the all-time great sidekicks, and not just in Westerns.

James Garner starred in two of the most celebrated, popular, and delightful Television Shows ever, Maverick and The Rockford Files. However, they were not his only contributions to our TV heritage. One can think of the wonderful, but rapidly canceled God, The Devil, and Bob, in which he was utterly convincing Deity. However, his most shamefully overlooked TV show was this startling comedy western, which my family loved. Set in the dying old West of 1914, and starring , in addition to Garner, Henry Darrow, Margot Kidder and Stuart Margolin, this show poked fun at most of the conventions of the western genre. It was wonderfully written, directed and acted. Perhaps not surprisingly,it was canceled, in an act of network stupidity ranking right up there with the cancellations of East Side / West Side, Slattery's People, Star Trek, My World And Welcome To it, and The Rogues.