Interview: Kent McCord discusses CHIEF, the show he wanted to do before UNSUB, and how far ahead of the curve it would've been

In the world of entertainment, there is a well-known phenomenon known as parallel evolution, where two series come into existence at approximately the same time with approximately the same concept and yet neither creative team has had any connection to the other. It’s nothing but the purest of coincidences, and yet it leaves you shaking your head, wondering about what might’ve been. It’s fair to say that, although he’s continued to find plenty of success since this happened to Kent McCord, he hasn’t forgotten when it happened, and when you read his story, you won’t be at all surprised that he hasn’t forgotten.

If you’ve seen or read about the short-lived 1989 NBC series Unsub, then you know that it was ahead of its time, a procedural that—as I mentioned to McCord—feels like the missing link between Michael Mann’s Manhunter and Criminal Minds. And if you don’t have any idea what series I’m talking about, well, I can help you change that situation, since some kind soul has uploaded all eight episodes of the series onto YouTube. I’ll only post the first episode, but it’s plenty enough to show you that the opening sentence of this paragraph contains precious little hyperbole.

Over the next little while, I’m going to be posting a few pieces about Unsub, because I really do find it to be a fascinating bit of TV history that isn’t discussed nearly enough, but I’m kicking things off with my conversation with Kent McCord. You might know him from his role on the classic cop show Adam-12, or if you’re a sci-fi fan, then maybe you know him from Galactica 1980 or for playing John Crichton’s dad on Farscape. Between those last two, however, he played a member of the investigative team on Unsub, but when he went into the series, he did so only after having tried to get a series of his own into production, and when you read about it, I think you’ll agree that it’s a little startling just how far ahead of the curve the series would’ve been if it had ever come to pass.

I had first watched Unsub when Mill Creek released that Stephen Cannell box set (Prime Time Crime: The Stephen J. Cannell Collection), but then I revisited it recently, and I'd forgotten just how much of a missing link it is between Michael Mann's Manhunter and Criminal Minds.

Kent McCord: Yeah, it was an interesting journey. You know, Steve Cannell essentially started with us on Adam-12. Steve - my dear friend, I loved him - he was such a wonderful human being. I had created a show that Universal called Chief, and it was a one-hour television series concept, and it was about a guy... Basically, it was based on a guy named Pierce Brooks, an actual man who had coined the phrase "serial criminal." He was a Los Angeles police officer, and Jack Webb had depended on Pierce a lot for stuff. He had been a blimp pilot for Howard Hughes, he had done all this stuff, but he was a detective with the Los Angeles police department. And Pierce went down to Quantico, Virginia and helped create VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. If you watch Silence of the Lambs, what Jodie Foster is holding on the clipboard in the beginning of the movie is a VICAP document. So Pierce had been called on to investigate the Atlanta Child Killings, he had investigated Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, here in Los Angeles, and all these things. But what he had done as a police officer... 

Pierce Brooks [Photo courtesy of Occidental College, Brooks’ alma mater]

He would find a certain kind of crime, and the thing that was unique about it, as he described it to me - and it may be in a book somewhere, but I knew Pierce quite well, and when we were developing Chief, we had signed him to the project - he would describe a crime like this. A guy gets shot, he's lying on the ground in a bar, and you go over and he's dead. You wake him up, and you say, "Who shot you?" And he says, "Will did! He didn't mean to, but we were drinking, we got drunk, and we started hitting on the barmaid, and he got pissed off, and he had a gun, and he shot me. God, I don't know why he did that." [Laughs.] That's one type of crime. And the other one was, you find a guy, he's been stabbed a hundred times, his dick has been cut off and shoved down his throat, his ears are missing, and you wake him up and you say, "Who killed you?" And he says, "You know, I don't know. I was drinking, they called last call, and a guy said, 'I got a bottle in my car, come on out,' and the next thing I know, he's stabbing me! But I never got his name." 

Pierce said there was a difference between those kinds of killings. So he would come on a crime, and it would be the second type of crime, so he'd go to the San Diego papers, the San Bernadino papers, San Francisco, Salt Lake, Phoenix, and he would see if there were any similar type crimes that had been committed. "A guy stabbed a hundred times, dick shoved down his throat, ears missing..." And if he saw a similarity in one, he went, "Whoops, we've got a serial killer on our hands!" 

So there was an International Association of Chiefs of Police convention happening when these Atlanta Child Killings were going on, and the chiefs were meeting, and one of the chiefs - from Hartford, I think it was, but I haven't looked this stuff up in a long time! [Laughs.] But the chief said, "You know, we have some similar killings of children here, and maybe we should form a task force!" And the other chief from Atlanta said, "That's a good idea! I'd like to do that! But I want Pierce Brooks as the chief of the task force." So they assembled the groups of people. And I created this show in '87 or '88 - and I'll tell you right now, I just looked this up! - and I don't know if you know who Frank Lupo was, but this was a letter to Frank in 2014, when I revived this. "It was great spending time with you today, let's do it more often..." Okay, here's the concept, and remember I did this back in '87 or '88.

It talks about Chief and what I wanted to do. Pierce had retired from the Los Angeles Police Department and became the chief of Lakeland, Colorado, and then he became the chief of Eugene, Oregon. So I wanted to make my guy a retired police officer who becomes chief of a small place in southern California. As a matter of fact, the town of Laguna Beach was where I wanted to make him the chief. And then what happens throughout the series is that he gets called on to investigate and solve these serial types of crimes. So as I said in this...

"There are four basic formats the show could use: the traditional episodic, the multi-episodic arc, the two-hour movie as part of an alternating wheel, or as a standalone movie in the Perry Mason mode to be shown four or five times a year. These formats all offer the ability to take advantage of the expanding foreign video-cassette markets. There are several types of serial criminals that we will be trying to apprehend: there's murderers, arsonists, rapists, bombers, extortionists, kidnappers, bank robbers, as well as cases dealing with violent assaults, missing persons reports, and unidentified bodies. Modern technology will be used to help solve our mysteries. Psychological profiling is used to narrow the list. DNA, genetic fingerprinting, lasers, forensic analysis, forensic animation, graphic displays, voiceprints, electron microscopes, computer systems, databases, mobile digital terminals, the National Crime and Information Center, and the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. So the source materials for the stories are infinite."

So I had that in development at Universal, and we had [William] Link and [Richard] Levinson on it to begin with. That's who Universal put me with, and they had done Columbo and all these other series, so they were very famous. And then it kind of fell out there, and I had Bernie Kowalski—who I later hired to direct a movie of the week that I produced that was meant to be a series called Nashville Beat—and a man named David Chisolm, and we worked on it.

Now, I neglected to mention that I had taken it to Steve Cannell to begin with, before any of that, and Steve said, "You know what I would do? I would get somebody like I did with Brian Keith and Danny Kelly. I'd get maybe Jim Garner, and then you play Jim's partner." And at that point in my life, I didn't want to hear that. I'd developed this show for Kent McCord! So that's when I went over to Universal, where I'd been under contract for 15 years, up until... I think my last deal was in '81. I went under contract in '65 and stayed there under one deal or another for the next 15 or 16 years. So I took it over there, and we go through this thing, and I keep being put off. "Well, they're not buying any cop shows," blah blah blah, and "the timing's wrong," and all this. And I just went, "Fuck it. Give it back to me." And they sent me a release on it. 

So I called Steve from my house and I said, "I just got Chief back." And he said, "Tell me about that." And I said, "Well, it's the thing that I based on Pierce Brooks about unsolved crimes and Pierce going in and operating with a team to seek out and detect and apprehend serial criminals." And he goes, "Oh, shit. Kent, you've got to believe me: I forgot that you ever pitched me that. But let me tell you what we're doing here. I've got David Burke and Steve Kronish..." And he goes through a whole bunch about this thing. And I said [In a tone of resignment.] "Well, okay."

Anyhow, I wound up on Unsub. And the project with Chief just sat dormant...and still sits dormant. However, in the meantime, how many shows have been done on this very concept?"

So. Many. Shows.

Yeah. [Laughs.] And the idea that I had all of this, and I had Pierce Brooks, the guy who was the leading authority on these kinds of criminals, say, "There are estimates that there are 300 cases of serial murder a year in this country. That's a gross understatement. I'd say there are 8,000-12,000 a year, just serial murders. And there are those who think that estimate is too low."

I'd also written that "the stories that might make good fodder for the series are the one-man bombing spree in Salt Lake City, the case of the Want-Ad Killer, Harvey Glatman, and the Green River Killer." I went into this, and I said, "One of the cases that Jack..." That was my character's name: Jack Pendleton. "...could be asked to investigate might be the string of unsolved murders that's taken place in Florence, Italy, The first murder occurred on August 21, 1968, and the victims were an adulterous wife and her lover."

And it goes on to describe that thing that went on for over a decade. "In addition to real killers, a number of stories can be fashioned around elements of true crimes in the same manner as Manhunter and Silence of the Lambs to create plots and killers out of whole cloth." So I had this thing pretty well put together and did a lot of work and a lot of research on it.

"The typical team that Jack might assemble could consist of a team leader with experience in investigation management, including complex case supervision, to manage and coordinate and investigate the consultant team mission and to act as liaison with other persons involved in the investigation. An investigator with experience and expertise in investigating major cases involving violence. We'd have a member of the team with experience in operations resource management, including the utilization of crime analysis system. One team member highly skilled in the analytical process of managing and coordinating the crime analysis function."

And it goes on and on. Anything sound familiar? [Laughs.] 

Just a little bit.

Yeah, so what I wound up doing was...not the role on Unsub that I would've wanted to do, which would've been what David Soul did. Also, I knew a lot about the subject matter and what I would've done with it, so I kind of had that. But like I said, I loved Steve, and he was a great friend who had a group of people around him who he was loyal to and who were loyal to him, and the fact that he offered me a role in this... I'll always be grateful for that.

There’s more to my interview with Mr. McCord that’ll be forthcoming, but this was so very on-topic as far as the lead-up to doing the show that it seemed like a perfect way to kick off the series of Unsub pieces. Stay tuned for more, including a chat with cast members Joe Maruzzo and—if we’re lucky—Richard Kind. (And if we’re not lucky, then I’ll just recycle the stories he told me during my Random Roles interview with him, which are pretty damned good in their own right. But he says he’s up for hopping on the phone to talk specifically about the show, so fingers crossed!)