Chefe Burke

I well remember the first incarnation of Burke's Law with Gene Barry as the rich old money cop who came to crime scenes in his Rolls-Royce and after an hour of time visiting the guest star lineup inevitably solved the crime. It was a great show for two seasons and then someone had the bright idea to make Amos Burke a secret agent. Show never made it after that.

Thirty years later Amos Burke is with the LAPD again and is now a senior consultant as befitting a senior citizen. He got married and widowed in the interim and had a son. The son grew up to be Peter Barton and he's now a homicide cop with the LAPD.

Now they both go to crime scenes in style. At least Gene Barry does. Barton preferred more understated modes of transportation.

It was a nice show, but I guess it was too late to get this souffle to rise again.

Amazingly,producer Aaron Spelling brought back his most famous show which produced 27 episodes and ran for one season on CBS from 1994-1995. The title again became "Burke's Law",and Gene Barry was back in his most famous role as Chief of Detectives,Amos Burke,who was still head of operations for the Los Angeles Police Department. This time around,Burke is assisted by his son,Peter Burke(Peter Barton). The revival,even more than the original program,was widely regarded as camp,but it was still a good murder mystery with a cast of "whodunits" leading up to Burke and his son to solve the crime and catch the killer. Also,Gene Barry's character was back chasing crooks in his fabulous Rolls-Royce only this time the producers along with some of the writers including Richard Levinson and William Link along with Harlan Ellison,Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts along with Ernest Kinmoy dusted off the original scripts for this new incarnation. Only on occasion did we see the old spark of creatively that made the original show from the early 1960's so great. Some of these episodes did have a touch of a 90's retrospective,such as a victim freezing to death on the hottest day of the year;an ambulance chasing lawyer getting run over by an ambulance. Who would have thought of bringing back guest stars such as Efrem Zimbalist,Jr. as a greedy tycoon accused of murder while practicing his golf swing from the roof of a building and doesn't care who it falls on?

And other stars such as Brian Keith,as an ex-marine turned novelist accused of first degree murder,who puts on a dress just to get into the mood to write? And other stars as suspects such as Hugh O'Brian, Richard Crenna,Stella Stevens,and Carolyn Jones to name a few. This show also featured guest appearances by many of Gene Barry's peers from the 1960's spy-fi genre including Patrick Macnee(The Avengers), Robert Culp(I Spy),David McCallum(The Man From UNCLE),Peter Lupus and Barbara Bain(Mission:Impossible),and Anne Francis(Honey West). It also have some well-known detectives including Mike Connors(Mannix)and Karl Malden(The Streets of San Francisco). After one season on the air,CBS cancelled it and replaced it with the Dick Van Dyke mystery series "Diagnosis Murder",which was the greatest travesty of its kind and to say CBS kept it on the air for seven years killing one of the greatest mystery shows of all time.

I love detective stories. I saw them all: Murder She Wrote, Diagnosis Murder, even the short-lived Blacke's magic. The revived Burke's Law would have been a welcome addition, if not for the derivative style. It's the same plot device over and over again, a murder, one suspect leading Burke and Son to another suspect, then finally calling all suspects in one room and Burke eliminating the non-murderers before naming the real one. Even Agatha Christie knew how to manipulate the storyline so it wouldn't be the same story as the last one. Sadly, the new Burke's Law was just trying to be the next Murder She Wrote without the variety. It feels like it's trapped in the 1930's, like those cozy murders in an English cottage.

The only positive thing: it's in color!

Burke's Law was a 60s police detective series when it started out. First two seasons were anyway. The third season was a bizarre attempt to turn it into a Man From UNCLE type show. This reboot is a throwback to how the original show began. Burke is a swave and wealthy police captain who excels as a detective. That was the original series. Here, much of the work is not done by Amos Burke who by this time is a police chief.

The newer shows make me think ofn he Columbo reboot episodes more than the newer Perry Mason episodes. The format was always good. The writing is not quite up to the level of the original series but it is still pretty good. Recommend searching this one out. I didn't have the easiest time managing that.

I liked the show and wished it could of lasted longer than it did, although I suppose it is a miracle that such a high styled campy escapist detective show like this would even have been revived in the mid-Nineties and went for 27 episodes! In the Fifties to the Seventies this sort of entertainment designed for the small screen went over reasonably well, but now I suspect that there are more humorless TV viewers than ever who possess little patience and even less appreciation of anything with a sense of old school style and flair that BURKE'S LAW had in abundance. Such folks enjoy formulamatic fare like the nightly news, Fox News and CSI and a million copycat shows, they don't and won't try to get something like BURKE'S LAW, which is too bad...

Such easy to understand and digest TV shows around at the same time like MURDER SHE WROTE and MATLOCK were designed to appeal to similar tastes, but with BURKE'S LAW you had to have a more fine tuned appreciation of wit, well timed sarcasm and style plus a tongue in cheek sense of humor to fully appreciate the gifts and sheer force of personality and presence that Gene Barry brought to the screen in his role and to enjoy the campy proceedings at hand. Despite being at the helm of other successful series and in many films, Gene Barry IS Amos Burke, he owns that role!

If you are reading this, then chances are you already know about the original BURKE'S LAW and what it is about, and as others have already written about how the storyline was updated for the 1990's. On this 1990's version, Burke was still as sharp as ever, big name guest stars abounded just like in the Sixties, and for a little while CBS looked like it had showcased a nice revival of a classy Sixties favorite to its lineup. Too bad they didn't order another season