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This '80s cop show would've reunited Kent McCord and Martin Milner from Adam-12
The show was set in Nashville and featured the pair as old partners.
Oh, what could've been...
According to a November 1988 edition of the entertainment news journal Broadcasting Magazine, we nearly got to see the Adam-12 officers back in a new series. The duo's natural chemistry made their original pairing a hit in the '60s and '70s, and Adam-12 has been on TV consistently in re-runs ever since. NAC and Buck Productions were looking to recapture that same magic with Nashville Beat.
Early in the show's development, the production company negotiated with two basic cable networks to sell the broadcasting rights to the new series. Nashville Beat would've featured Kent McCord as a "hip" undercover LA cop who gets recruited by Martin Milner's "old-fashioned" chief detective.
The show would've used the vibrant music nightlife of Nashville as its backdrop. McCord and Milner were in talks for 26 half-hour episodes.
The official Kent McCord archives feature an interview in the first edition of Nashville Beat Magazine in which McCord explains why the show felt important to him:
"My motive was twofold: I wanted to work with Marty Milner again and I wanted to do a detective show that had a strong moral to it.
"I've taken a subject matter that's interesting to me," said McCord. "That happens to be cop stuff... the cop genre. You deal with life and death situations all the time. I think the genre is very clear-cut as far as morals and morality are concerned. There is good and there is evil. There are good guys and there are bad guys."
Unfortunately, Nashville Beat the series was never picked up. Instead, we did get the proposed two-hour made-for-TV movie which would've served as the show's pilot, introducing the audience to these new characters and their city.
"The movie that I wanted to make," said McCord, "was based on a simple story in which the good guys find out who the bad guys are and put them in jail. The moral of the story is, basically, crime doesn't pay."
The resulting TV movie had Martin and Milner playing cops who were former partners, a fitting role for these Adam-12 alums. The story had McCord as LAPD widower Mike Delaney following a dangerous gang leader to Nashville. There, he teams up again with Martin Milner's Captain Brian O'Neil and the Nashville PD to put an end to the growing gang problem.
20 Comments
Would they have driven around in a green patrol car?
They also appeared in the dreadful New Adam-12, McCord as LIEUTENANT Reed and Milner as CAPTAIN Malloy, but I'm not sure whether they appeared in the same episode or not.
