I’m currently re-watching The Fugitive, one of the high points of 20th-century television drama. Like many of the shows I enjoy, I was too young to remember the show in its initial run (1963-67), but when our local PBS station, WYES, picked it up in syndication in the mid-’80s, I watched it every Sunday night and enjoyed it thoroughly; though most of the shows I watched then, as now, were science fiction or fantasy, “the characters who interested me most were always outsiders, weirdos, and outlaws such as vigilantes, monster-hunters, and fugitives“. For those unfamiliar with the premise, Dr. Richard Kimble is wrongly convicted for the murder of his wife, but on his way to death row by train, “Fate moves its huge hand” and a derailment allows him to escape. For four years, Dr. Kimble, engagingly portrayed by David Janssen, moved around the country, trying to hide from the relentless Lt. Gerard (Barry Morse), the Inspector Javert-like cop obsessed with his recapture, while himself hunting the real murderer, a one-armed man he saw fleeing his house just before discovering his wife’s body. The show was the first one on US television to pay close attention to continuity, and the first to feature a concluding episode: that episode, in which Kimble finally catches the one-armed man and proves his innocence, was the highest-rated television episode of all time for decades.
One of the things I enjoy about watching classic TV shows is playing “Spot the Actor“; in this show I’m also recognizing musical cues in every episode, because the show drew on the CBS music library and featured many of the pieces Bernard Herrmann and others wrote for The Twilight Zone. But one of the most striking things for me is seeing just how much attitudes have changed in the past 60 years. Overall, there’s the fact that for four years, one of the highest-rated series in a country now in love with cop glorification shows was one in which the cops were the bad guys in every single episode, and the hero regularly assaulted them and escaped from their clutches, often with the help of people he’d met who saw his innate goodness and nobility (especially because that nobility often got him into trouble when he felt compelled to stick his neck out to help people instead of just not getting involved).
An episode I saw last week, however, was even more striking. In “Smoke Screen“, Kimble is working as a field hand in California (because obviously he can’t do any job requiring papers or references) and his work crew is asked to volunteer to help fight a wildfire. One of the laborers he has befriended is undocumented, and he and his pregnant wife are terrified of being caught and deported before the birth of their baby, whom they want born as a US citizen. The woman goes into labor, and though there is a problem requiring an emergency C-section, they can’t get her to a hospital because of the fires. So Kimble, ever the humanitarian, is forced to reveal to the camp nurse that he is a doctor and can save mother and child; when the cops come snooping, the nurse, the father and another laborer who was a veterinarian in Mexico make up a story to cover for him. And all of this is portrayed as positive. Compare this with the current toxic zeitgeist: a fugitive from the law helps undocumented migrants to deliver what nativist authoritarians now disgustingly dehumanize as an “anchor baby”, and everyone goes away satisfied. Look, I fully recognize that there were just as many racists, xenophobes, and badge-lickers in the Sixties as there are now. But it’s nice to recognize that in extremely popular entertainment of that time, those were typically being portrayed as the villains they are instead of lionized and given positive attention, money, and political power. 
