In the first post that I wrote about The Fugitive, I mentioned that I saw parallels between it and westerns such as The Lone Ranger, where the hero used to roam around the country helping out those he came in contact with. 

What I didn’t realize at the time was that was actually the genesis of the concept for the show in Roy Huggins’s mind. Not the Lone Ranger in particular but he was thinking of someone like Shane or Cheyenne, and he wanted to find a modern day reason for someone to be roaming the countryside.

I wanted to create a contemporary series that would contain the elements that make westerns so appealing. The shows I had been working on from the time I came into television were westerns, starting with Cheyenne and moving onto Maverick. Although I was tired of producing westerns, I loved the freedom of the western hero. I wanted to transfer that total freedom of the western protagonist who could wander from place to place, and do anything he wanted, and have a relationship with a woman, and move on—onto a character in a contemporary setting.

At first I thought it couldn’t be done. If you put a man like that in a contemporary environment, he’ll look like a bum. The audience wouldn’t accept him: they’d hate him. But then the answer hit me: he has to be a fugitive from injustice. He must have been accused of a crime, and it must be a capital crime, and he must have exhausted all of his appeals so that he is truly a fugitive. And if they catch him, he dies! That is the only way I could have put the classic western hero in a modern setting— the man cannot stay in one place because he is a fugitive, and so he must move on, and so forth.

The concept had been brewing in his mind for some time, and when he finally hit on the idea of a fugitive from justice, he sat down at his typewriter and in two hours he wrote up the concept. The date was September 19, 1960.

He explained all this to Ed Robertson who included it in his 1993 book The Fugitive Recaptured, which is now sadly out of print, although used copies can be found here and there.

I’ve uploaded Roy Huggins’s original concept for the series, and you’ll notice several things. The opening that was used for the first season is very close to the one that Huggins outlined in his concept paper.

The initial idea for the real killer of Richard Kimble’s wife was a gaunt, red-haired man that Kimble saw leaving the scene. Even in his original concept, Huggins believed the series should be brought to a final conclusion:

This will be a series which will be brought to a planned conclusion, that conclusion being of course Richard Kimble’s release from his predicament and the ultimate salvation of justice.

Thus, The Fugitive may have been the first series that was planned from the beginning to be brought to a conclusion, though of course there was no obligation for the ultimate producer and the network to do so.

As for the “red-haired man”, when ABC picked up the series several years later and a pilot episode was written, it was submitted to Kellan DeForest of the network’s Errors and Omissions Division for review for any potentially liable material. By this time it was 1963 and thanks to lawyer F. Lee Bailey taking over his case and filing an appeal, the Dr. Sam Sheppard case had been getting national headlines, and that case involved Sheppard claiming to have seen a “bushy-haired” man fleeing the scene. DeForest felt red hair was too close to bushy hair and asked that it be changed.

Truth be told, I suspect that once filming began someone would have realized that red hair doesn’t show up very well on black and white film and if you want to have a readily identifiable villain, perhaps you need to give him a physical characteristic that will work in black and white. In any case, the physical trait was changed and the infamous one-armed man was born. That opened up lots of cinematic possibilities where the audience sees the back of a man only to have him turn or have the camera pull back to reveal the absence of an appendage. Can’t do that with red hair.

By the way, Quinn Martin, who ended up producing the show, was at one time married to Madelyn Pugh, one of the writers for the I Love Lucy show. Everything seems to come back to I Love Lucy, doesn’t it?

As I continue watching the episodes (I’m into the third season now), I cringe a little bit every time I see David Janssen smoking a cigarette, as I know he died of a heart attack at the much too young age of 50.