by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The night before last
Charles and I watched a rather intriguing TV show downloaded from archive.org:
the first of nine episodes from a 1960 summer replacement series called Diagnosis:
Unknown which I suspect was the
first TV series in history to dramatize the workings of forensic science. Yes,
before Quincy (which this show resembles
not only in the lead character but also in his having an Asian sidekick, though
here he’s Indian instead of Japanese) and the CSI and NCIS franchises, here we got Dr. Daniel Coffee (Patrick O’Neal), smoking
like a chimney (the fact that doctors are shown smoking and everyone smokes in enclosed rooms, even inside a hospital,
dates these old TV shows big-time) and outfitted with a thin moustache and
beard that usually belonged to the iconography of villains rather than hero.
He’s outfitted with three assistants, Indian doctor Motital Mookerji (Cal
Bellini), nurse Olivia Brenn (Millette Alexander) — whom Dr. Coffee treats as a
bimbo even though she isn’t (indeed, she’s a good deal less annoying than the
Pauley Perrette character on NCIS), and Link (Martin Huston), a teenager who’s going through various
musical obsessions (in this episode he wants to reinvent himself as Lionel
Hampton — I kid you not!) when he’s not being comically obnoxious and
disruptive.
This quartet of forensic medicos are up against the murder of the
mistress of multimillionaire Lester Farnum (Murray Matheson), and the suspects
are Mrs. Farnum (played with just the right world-weariness by Patricia Barry),
junkyard worker Don Harding (a slimmer, more muscular and decidedly hotter
version of Larry Hagman than the one we’re used to) and wine merchant Freddie
Ziegler (Tom Bosley, somewhat slimmer and less baggy-faced than the version who
played Ron Howard’s father on Happy Days but easily recognizable: one can readily see why he was picked to play Mayor
Fiorello La Guardia in the 1960 musical Fiorello! after the originally intended star, Lou Costello,
died suddenly in 1959). The episode title, “A Case of Radiant Wine,” was a
reference to a 1948 French wine that was radioactive due to contamination of
the soil in which the grapes were grown with carbon-14; though it wasn’t enough
to kill her, the victim had drunk some of the radioactive wine (which was
supposed to have been recalled) and the killer had handled the bottle and left
traces of its radioactivity on the curtains where he hid out just before he
knocked off the victim, whom he killed for the all too common (in fiction and in life) motive that he had the hots for her but
she had no interest in him “that way” whatsoever. It was a neat program and I’m
sorry we can’t see more of the episodes — and the appearances of Hagman and
Bosley in roles other (and far younger!) than the ones we know them for was a
welcome bonus.
