“The Fugitive” was reaching the end of the line by 1967 as Dr. Richard Kimble (David Janssen) hopped one Greyhound after another, more to slip the tightening dragnet around him than to find the one-armed man who murdered his wife. Volume 2 of “The Fugitive’s” fourth and final season is out on DVD.
The show’s premise was pure Hitchcock: an innocent man convicted of killing his wife, Kimble is fleeing the law while trying to bring the real murderer to justice. Extended as the series was over several years of weekly episodes, the story became an incognito odyssey across a rather dark America of suspicious minds and nosy neighbors, powerful and corrupt local oligarchs and police with a proclivity for shooting at suspects or questioning them in rooms lit by single overhead bulbs. But times were changing. By 1967 a sheriff cautioned his deputies when Kimble was picked up on an unrelated charge: “Don’t push him too hardremember the new court decisions.” Miranda was in the air.
Through it all, Janssen played his part with wary decency, slightly stoop-shouldered from apprehension. The wanted poster sent out on the wire followed him everywhere as justice grew more elusive. One imagines that his luck was running out.
