"Shots that evoke Stephen Shore or William Eggleston color photos... Sopranos creator David Chase was a writer/show runner; You can clearly see his Mafia obsession/Sopranos foreshadowing in some episodes. "
An unexpected visual treat via Netflix streaming: The Rockford Files in (4:3) HD.
We kind of liked the show; in the days before the quality-TV revolution, it was a bit different.
In HD (but in standard, "square" 4:3 TV format) it is an old school visual feast: Shots evoke Stephen Shore or William Eggleston color photos.
(If it wasn't in HD, we'd likely not be too interested. This old-school TV show, shot mostly on location and seen in crisp HD, is quite nice eye candy.)
LA in the mid-seventies, a real time capsule; cars the size of yachts (except for Rockford).
His dirty old trailer, muddied up gloriously by the art department, back in a time when one could imagine a PI living in an old, eyesore trailer hard by the beautiful Malibu beachfront, when it wouldn't have taken all day to drive from Malibu to Hollywood.
And not just that:
in Pt. 1 of the pilot, Rockford ducks into the Mayfair Theater (now shuttered but still standing in Santa Monica).
It'd been gloriously restored and was, in real life, a... wait for it...
...English Music Hall, for about eight years.
We see the beautiful interior and the acrobatic and animal acts performing, and it's like we walked off of Santa Monica Blvd. and right into Hitchcock's The 39 Steps.
The show is pretty decent; best when absurdly funny.
And Sopranos creator David Chase was a young writer/show runner. You can clearly see his Mafia obsession/Sopranos foreshadowing in some of these episodes.
(The Rockford Files; 118 episodes, 1974-1980, Netflix streaming)
