Brass

In between his successes with All In The Family and In The Heat Of The Night, Carroll O'Connor did this pilot film for another series Brass. In this he plays the NYPD's Chief of Detectives or in police jargon the Chief of Ds.

There are two parallel stories in this pilot, one concerns the killing of several people in a parking lot, similar to the CBS killings. The one ultimately responsible thinks he's too big to touch and he's got a lot of juice.

The second one is more interesting. Some senior citizens are being shot with a low calibre 22 pistol, the best not to give out too much noise allowing for the perpetrator to escape. The detectives assigned fell down on the job and my favorite scene in the film was O'Connor dismissing them. He takes over personal investigation of the case, a lot like the way Rock Hudson did in McMillan&Wife.

Brass had a lot of promise, but I've seen other promising pilots get rejected also. It really is a crapshoot as to what gets picked up and what doesn't I've felt for years.

But on the other hand if this had been successful we might never have seen Carroll O'Connor defending law and order in Sparta, Mississippi.