Remington Steele

Remington Steele was an American television series first broadcast on the NBC network from 1982 to 1987. The show took an offbeat approach to the standard TV detective genre, with ironic plotting and elements of romantic comedy.

Stephanie Zimbalist plays Laura Holt, a private detective who finds that her potential customers are unwilling to hire a woman. Business picks up when she invents a fictitious male superior named Remington Steele. In the first episode, she encounters a Humphrey Bogart-loving thief, played by Pierce Brosnan, who overhears someone calling for "Remington Steele" and, in order to escape a pair of murderous thugs, impulsively assumes the Steele persona. By the end of the episode, he chooses to make the alias permanent.

The real name of Brosnan's character was never revealed; in later episodes, it was revealed that Steele did not know his birth name, and his attempts to discover it became a running theme. In the show's pilot episode (which was actually the second episode broadcast), Laura reveals that she took the name "Remington" from a brand of typewriter and "Steele" from the Pittsburgh Steelers.

One running joke throughout the series was "Steele's" penchant for quoting lines from famous movies as ersatz bits of philosophy, and occasionally using techniques from cinematic mysteries to attempt to solve crimes, with variable degrees of success. A number of plotlines were openly inspired by famous film noir thrillers, such as the first-season episode "Steele Flying High" that takes its lead from the Bogart classic The Maltese Falcon.

The first season included two recurring characters, James Read who played Zimbalist's real partner, Murphy Michaels, and Janet DeMay, their secretary and periodic rescuer, Bernice Fox (whom Steele often misnamed "Wolf"). Early episodes tended to be "simple", focusing on the story without too much flash. The series tended to focus on the sexual tension between the leads as much as the plots of the episodes themselves. NBC decided that the show was worthy of considerably more attention and re-tooled the format for the second season.

Read was removed in order to allow the romance between Holt and Steele to develop; his character pined for Holt and the producers felt this was a hindrance, so in the second-season opener Steele and Holt explain to an IRS agent that Murphy had opened his own detective agency in Denver, and that Bernice had resigned to marry a musician. Later in the episode, the nosy IRS agent, Mildred Krebs (Doris Roberts), joined the firm as Bernice's replacement. Mildred proved to be a capable investigator in her own right, and grew to be an amalgam of Bernice, Murphy, and Laura's mother as the series progressed. The "new" Remington Steele was a bigger-budget production with more flash and a more lively opening credits sequence that emphasized the action and adventure of the series. (The third season saw another opening credits sequence introduced that incorporated Doris Roberts.)

After the success of the season 2 premiere, which was filmed on location in Mexico, NBC gave producers a bigger travel allowance for the third season, resulting in several episodes being filmed in European locations such as Ireland, Malta and France.

The new format lasted for three more years before the series was cancelled at the end of the 1985–86 television season. After several seasons of "teasing" and nothing happening between Holt and Steele the show was deemed to have run its course, and the show was cancelled. Brosnan was then named the newest actor to play James Bond for the film, The Living Daylights. NBC received a barrage of letters urging them to renew the show. The network, which still had Brosnan under contract, chose to renew Remington Steele for another year in order to capitalize on Brosnan becoming the new James Bond; this backfired, and Brosnan subsequently lost the role to Timothy Dalton as Bond film producer Cubby Broccoli stated he did not want Bond to be identified with a current TV series and the producers of Remington Steele refused to release Brosnan from his contract in the light of increased popularity generated by the Bond rumours. Brosnan would finally become 007 in 1995. Another side-effect of the surprise renewal was that Zimbalist was forced to pull out of the production of RoboCop, in which she was originally cast to play Officer Lewis.

The final abbreviated season consisted of several made-for-TV films broadcast over the course of a few months, including installments filmed on location in places like Ireland. Jack Scalia joined the cast as a Romancing the Stone-inspired rival for Laura's affections. This new format was not very popular with audiences, and low ratings coupled with reports of on-the-set tension (due in part to Brosnan's resentment at losing the Bond role) resulted in the series being cancelled for good in the spring of 1987 (ironically long before the release of Living Daylights). The final scene of the series showed Steele and Laura apparently about to finally consummate their relationship.