Dennis Weaver rides into Manhattan as Deputy Marshal Sam McCloud, a Stetson-wearing lawman from Taos who corrals killers between Times Square peep shows and the half-built Twin Towers. The fish-out-of-water premise, lifted wholesale from the 1968 Clint Eastwood film Coogan's Bluff, became NBC’s Sunday-night anchor after the network bundled it with Columbo and McMillan & Wife into the rotating Mystery Movie wheel. Each month viewers tuned in to watch McCloud rope crooks on horseback down Lexington Avenue, slap leather with a 4¾-inch Colt .45 and deflect the apoplectic ire of J.D. Cannon’s Chief Clifford with a drawled “There ya go!”
The series ran seven seasons, ballooning from sixty to a hundred and twenty minutes as ratings climbed, and ended only when the final episode pitted the marshal against Count Dracula on Third Street Bridge. Terry Carter’s world-weary Sgt. Broadhurst supplied dead-pan foil while Diana Muldaur’s journalist Chris Coughlin supplied intermittent romance, but the real chemistry was between Weaver’s affable frontier optimism and a graffiti-scarred New York sliding toward bankruptcy. Glen A. Larson’s producing hand kept plots playful—train robberies on the Long Island Rail Road, 1930s gangster pastiches, even a Hawaiian vacation—yet the sight of McCloud trotting past yellow cabs in sheepskin and spurs fixed the show in pop-culture asphalt.
Production Details
NBC / 7 Seasons / 46 Episodes / 1970
Created by: Herman Miller
Showrunner(s): Glen A. Larson
Writer(s): Glen A. Larson, Peter Allan Fields, Michael Gleason
Producer(s): Peter Allan Fields, Winrich Kolbe
Main Cast
Dennis Weaver as Sam McCloud
J.D. Cannon as Peter Clifford
Terry Carter as Joe Broadhurst
Diana Muldaur as Chris Coughlin
Vic Tayback as
Booth Colman as
Arthur Malet as
Teri Garr as Sgt. Phyllis Norton
Bob Harks as Detective (uncredited)
Ray Danton as
