Jake and the Fatman

Plot

J. L. "Fatman" McCabe, a tough former Honolulu police officer, works as a Los Angeles district attorney. He partners with Jake Styles, a handsome and easygoing special investigator whose personality often clashes with McCabe's. McCabe rarely goes anywhere without his bulldog, Max.

The series began in Los Angeles for its first season. After Magnum, P.I. ended, the show relocated to Hawaii, where seasons two and three plus half of season four were filmed, reusing some of that show's sets. It then moved back to Los Angeles for the rest of its run.

Production

The character that would become "Jake" first appeared when William Conrad played an aging prosecutor in a two-part Matlock episode. Fred Silverman and Dean Hargrove, the executive producers, decided to base a main character for a new CBS show on that role. Joe Penny also appeared in those Matlock episodes, but his character was on the opposing side of the legal case. After Hargrove left, David Moessinger and Jeri Taylor took over as executive producers alongside Silverman, and they brought in J. Michael Straczynski as an executive story consultant.

Taylor and Moessinger ran the series for two years before leaving due to a dispute over control. Straczynski has said he was hired after pitching a story that allowed Conrad to sit for nearly every scene, and he coined the fake slogan "Jake and the Fatman: He can't act, he can't walk, together they fight crime." After the show moved to Hawaii, Joe Penny lost a significant amount of weight, sparking rumors about his health, including speculation that he had AIDS.

The actual cause was a gastrointestinal virus that made it hard for him to regain the weight. When production returned to Los Angeles, some suspected Penny had pushed for the move, but he denied that.

Did You Know?

• CBS DVD released the first two seasons on DVD in Region 1 between 2008 and 2009; these releases were discontinued and out of print as of June 2015.
• Visual Entertainment released Jake and the Fatman - The Complete Collection on June 23, 2017.
• The nineteenth episode of the fourth season, "It Never Entered My Mind", featured Dick Van Dyke as Dr. Mark Sloan and led to the spin-off Diagnosis: Murder.