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How The Rockford Files really ended

Two-thirds of the way through the last season of The Rockford Files, James Garner's doctors told him he had to quit. The studio's answer was a lawsuit. more

Garner played Jim Rockford, a funny, down-to-earth private eye, on a show that first aired on NBC in the mid-1970s. Fans loved the character and the writing. Behind the scenes, Garner and the studio fought more than once.

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Fans saw the show's easy warmth, not the fight with the studio going on behind it.

By that last season he was so sick, he says, that he was bleeding from about everywhere. He asked how long he'd need. Nobody knew, and the doctors planned to check again in a month. He called the studio. "Of course they immediately sued me," he says, for breach of contract, even with doctor after doctor telling him to stop.

It wasn't the first time. He'd had knee surgery in the break after the first season, and on the first day of the second he fell down some stairs and tore the knee up again. He worked all morning anyway, until it swelled up like a balloon. Then his doctor sent him home to stay off it.

When he called the studio, they threatened to sue. He was in the middle of asking for another writer, a raise for himself and a raise for a colleague, and the studio decided the knee was a ploy. "I asked for three things hoping to get two," Garner says. "What I really wanted was a writer."

The studio called the show off and began moving people to other series that same day. Garner went to work the next day anyway, hobbling. He was working in Beverly Hills, about three blocks from his doctor, who told him again to get off the leg, ice it and give it two or three days. When Garner passed that on, the studio sued and let everybody go.

"This is stupid," he said, and he finished the episode on that knee. In his words, he "just absolutely ruined it." He did it so nobody would get fired and the series wouldn't go down the tubes. The way he saw it, the studio was "literally trying to destroy it" rather than give him a writer.

A middle-aged adult male wearing a textured knit sweater with 'Molly Odd' printed on it, outdoors amidst greenery in what appears to be late afternoon natural daylight. The headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
Two-thirds of the way through the last season of The Rockford Files, James Garner's doctors told him he had to quit.

Years later, in that last season, there was no saving it. When he told the studio he could come back, but only in a month or two, they canceled the series and let everybody go. Garner countersued, and that was the end of Rockford.