Simon & Simon is a series of detective stories of 1980’s starring James Parker and Gerald McRaney. It was originally called Pirates Key in Florida in the year 1978, but later this was taken over by CBS and was moved to San Diego with no changes being made to the base storyline. The show was telecasted for over eight years making a hit on the television.
Gist of the series
The show is based on two brothers, who are very different from each other starting from the way they think to their style of living. Rick and A. J Simon are brothers, Rick was a United States Marine and AJ was studying in college. AJ keeps quite busy with his books, while Rick has more of intelligence in him.
AJ takes care of his finance and uses it to live a decent life spending money on good cars and fashionable clothes, whereas Rick is not so fashionable. This is the reason that AJ always calls Rick as a low-class living lover. Rick always does things as he feels like doing, but AJ tries to follow the manual and procedure so as to do things correctly.
One fine day both the brothers decide to do a business together and the conclusion comes out to run a private detective agency. The best part of the entire series is the way both of them decide to pursue the case.
Rick does things in a free-spirit, but keeps following books which actually become the main highlight of the show. This gives more stories every week as their contrasting ways of taking investigation cases and then increase in conflicts were exerting a pull on the viewers. Although they both had the same job, they took a very different approach and were still able to solve the case well each time.
AJ always keeps a 357 Magnum and Rick holds a 44 Magnum revolver while dealing with the crime and criminals. Some guest actors in the show included Tom Simcox, Anne Lockhart, Kathy Garver, Eddie Albert, Kevin Hagen, and Richard Anderson.
Events that Unfolded in the Eight Years of Telecast
As any other series, this one also lost its rating and was running on very low rating for a brief period of time and it was almost decided to cancel the broadcast of the series in the year 1982. However CBS continued to air the show deciding to give it another go and in the same interest it also changed the timing of the series and moved it to 9 PM Thursday. As the days progressed Simon & Simon became more popular which directly improved the rating and this continued for several seasons.
Later the series telecast time was changed from Thursday 9 PM to Late night Saturday. This was done when the show again started to decline in its rating and the broadcast of this series was finally stopped in the year 1988 with many episodes unaired. Overall, the series was quite exciting and portrayed the unusual way of two brothers dealing with the cases.