Aaron Spelling's First and Best All-Star Cast Show

Before "Fantasy Island," before "The Love Boat," a young producer named Aaron Spelling helped mount a fun and atmospheric early 60's mystery show called Burke's Law, which, like those later shows, depended on a weekly group of star cameos to keep it fun.

"Burke's Law" had several great gimmicks. One was the premise: Gene Barry's Amos Burke was a Beverly Hills millionaire who just happened to be a Captain on the LAPD. Each week's show would open with the discovery of a body, then a cut to Burke at his mansion, romancing some gorgeous woman -- whom he would leave behind to drive to the crime scene in his Rolls-Royce!

The second gimmick: "Burke's Law" was a whodunnit, with a weekly "guest cast" of stars from which Burke would have to find the killer. The suspect mix was of old-time movie actors(Steve Cochran, Stephen McNally, Gloria Grahame) and newly minted TV people (Paul Lynde, Barbara Eden, the Smothers Brothers.) Ronald Reagan was a suspect once -- a TV used-car salesman like Cal Worthington. Each episode was called "Who Killed ---?"

The third gimmick: Captain Burke would often toss out a pronouncement to his assistants, and finish the line with "Burke's Law." Like: "You can take a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Burke's Law." Well, not a line like THAT, but you get the picture.

The fourth gimmick: if the killer turned out to be a man, Burke and that guy would usually engage in a big fistfight. The killer could be a tough guy (Steve Cochran or Stephen McNally as examples) or the killer could be a very wispy or older man (Billy de Wolfe, Reginald Gardiner as examples), but they would just put a stunt man in there and suddenly even the most foppish fellow would be punching out Gene Barry's stunt man with vicious abandon. Of course, Barry always won the fight.

And if a woman was the killer at the end, Burke would usually have a fist-fight with a subsidiary male character earlier in the show, just for the scene.

Ah, those were the days: nothing like a good furniture-wrecking fist-fight to bring an episode to a satisfying end. They were legion; practically no killer gave up without a fight, sometimes to the death. Stunt men were fully employed. (A few killers required only a chase scene to be immobilized.)

"Burke's Law" came with the early 60's feeling of the Rat Pack and Hugh Hefner. It was a surprisingly adult TV show for those censored years, with sex, extramarital infidelity, alcoholism, and drug use sometimes addressed on the show. Captain Burke romanced gorgeous women both in "show bookends" and among his female suspects. Playboy bunnies and bikini beach babes were in big-haired abundance.

And the mystery plots could be pretty good. People like Harlan Ellison and Levinson/Link("Columbo") wrote them.

Paul Lynde (who guested three times, and played the killer all three times) had a good episode about a magician buried underwater in a watertight coffin who is pulled out of the pool and found shot to death inside the coffin. Whodunnit? Paul Lynde, the physician who first checked the magician's heart while he lay in the coffin ("This man's dead.") Lynde had a silenced pistol in his doctor's bag. Cool.

As the 60's progressed, somebody (Barry? Spelling? ABC) had the not-so-bright idea to jettison all the guest stars and convert the show into "Amos Burke, Secret Agent" to compete with "The Man From UNCLE" and the like. It didn't work. The show tanked in that version.

But two seasons of "Burke's Law" remain, a snapshot of a more innocent and yet saucy time in American culture, with a landscape of 40's movie stars and 60's TV stars upon which to gaze.