Cool Million

After a TV movie pilot, "Cool Million" joined the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie in the 1972-73 season and rapidly established itself as a dud, barely worthy of notice beside the interesting "Banacek" with George Peppard and the excellent "Madigan" with Richard Widmark. Pretentious and dull, James Farentino's Jefferson Keyes was a private eye whose services cost a million bucks, thereby giving the character an exotic quality more at home on James Bond than Columbo (the most successful of the NBC Mystery Movie segments). If his services were worth such a fat payday, why were the mysteries he solved so dull? James Farentino did what he could with the part, but this show was barely worthy of its four episode run.