THE GAME OF THE NAME - LINKING 'HAWKINS' & 'COLUMBO'

JOSEPH HARRELSON

'HAWKINS'
'DEATH AND THE MAIDEN'
[MARCH 1973]

From the IMDb:
Hawkins defends an heiress charged with a triple murder.  

Although he was based in Beauville, WVa, Billy Jim Hawkins traveled all over the country to defend high-paying clients.  (He must have taken a hell of a lot of bar exams!)

In the pilot, he was hired to defend Edith Dayton-Thomas who was accused of butchering her father, her stepmother, and her stepsister.  Although the location wasn’t cited in the dialogue, we know from the newspapers that open each episode where the case takes place.  With the pilot, we saw the breaking news headlines from the San Francisco Dispatch (part of the newspaper empire owned by Arthur Kennicutt as seen in the ‘Columbo’ episode “Death Lends A Hand”.)  So the trial took place in the San Francisco Bay area.

The case was prosecuted by Joseph Harrelson.  He was a decent enough litigator, but he was keen on beating Billy Jim with a guilty verdict for Miss Dayton-Thomas.  However, Billy Jim and his cousin Sheriff RJ Hawkins were able to discover who the true killer was.

Over the next twenty years, Harrelson decided he wanted more in his career and in order to accomplish that, he moved south to Los Angeles when he was offered the chance to run for the District Attorney of the City of Angels.  There he proved time and again his prowess in the court room as he got a lot of headline-grabbing convictions. 

Finally he turned his attention on the mayor’s office in Los Angeles.  In the mid-1980s, he ran for the mayorship and won, becoming entrenched in the position by the time he was caught up in another high-profile murder investigation.
  
'COLUMBO'
"COLUMBO CRIES WOLF"
JANUARY 1990

From the IMDb:
When Dian Hunter, the publisher of the men's magazine "Bachelor's World", wants to sell her stock to a media tycoon, her adulterous partner Sean Brantley objects. Soon afterwards, Miss Hunter apparently disappears on a London-bound flight.

The uproar over this celebrity-driven mystery had the press demanding answers from the upper echelons at the LAPD and at City Hall.  Mayor Harrelson conferred with his police commissioner and even got the chance to grill the chief investigating detective on the case, Lt. Frank Columbo.  And even though the pressure was on him to wrap the case up quickly, Mayor Harrelson finally agreed to let the Lieutenant continue in his own way. 

That proved to be the right call, even with the revelation that Ms. Hunter was still alive which left Columbo holding the bag for the waste of man-hours and the cost of the investigation.  But in the end, Columbo was able to turn the tables on Sean Brantley.

Further investigation into other TV series set in TV-LA would have to conducted in order to determine how much longer Mayor Harrelson remained in office.  (TV shows like ‘Diagnosis: Murder’, ‘The Closer’, ‘Shark’, and the second ‘City of Angels’ have more than likely shown different mayors of the televersion of Los Angeles.) 

Even out of office, Harrelson remained a power behind the scenes in his party and served as a super-delegate for the California delegations at political conventions.

Joseph Harrelson, the former Mayor of Los Angeles, passed away two years ago.

O’Bservation – David Huddleston portrayed Joseph Harrelson in the ‘Hawkins’ pilot and the Mayor in the ‘Columbo’ reboot.  I conflated the two. (And used a couple of other pictures from other projects.)

BCnU!