Don Adams’s “other” series
Don Adams is best known for his portrayal of Maxwell Smart, the bumbling secret agent in the classic TV comedy series Get Smart, made from 1965 to 1970. Less well remembered is The Partners which he created and starred in in 1971.
The partners of the title were a pair of bumbling police detectives. In a 2004 interview he described his creation as “Lethal Weapon before they ever thought of Lethal Weapon“. Adams wanted to use the show and its premise of a black cop and a white cop working together as a vehicle for exploring contemporary social issues. The studio and network opted for a less controversial approach. Arguably, this decision ultimately condemned it to being regarded as little more than an imitation of Get Smart but initial reaction was positive with The Partners testing highest of all NBC shows to that time.
Adams played Det. Lennie Crooke. Rupert Crosse, a recent Oscar nominee for The Reivers, co-starred as Det. George Robinson, winning the part after apparent friction with Adams resulted in the exit of original choice Godfrey Cambridge. Also appearing were familiar Get Smart faces John Doucette (Col. Von Klaus) as their volatile boss Captain Andrews, and Don’s cousin Robert Karvelas (Larabee) in the recurring role of compulsive confessor Freddie Butler. A pre-Eight Is Enough Dick Van Patten rounded out the cast as the captain’s punctilious assistant, and Lennie’s nemesis, Sgt. Higgenbottom.
Former Get Smart executive producer Arne Sultan took on this task again, joined by Earl Barret and Lee Wolfberg as producers and Bruce Howard as script consultant. (For the first episode only, Sultan was producer with Don Adams himself as executive producer.) The music score was by Richard Hazard; the theme by Lalo Schifrin, already well known for his Mission: Impossible theme and later to lend his talents to The Nude Bomb.
The Partners premiered in the US on NBC at 8pm on Saturday, September 18, 1971 (in Get Smart‘s last NBC timeslot and six years to the day after it was first broadcast) but was cancelled after only 20 episodes had been produced. It had been soundly beaten in the ratings by CBS’s issues-heavy All In The Family, counter-programmed at the last minute from the Tuesday night slot where it had debuted the previous January and on its way to becoming an institution, suggesting that it was Adams’s vision that had been the correct one.
The Partners was made by Universal Studios in association with ‘don/lee productions’.
A TV movie, Confessions of a Top Crime Buster, was compiled from episodes of the series.
Sadly, the show has never been released on either videocassette or DVD.
The Partners 