Route 66 is an American adventure crime drama television series that premiered on CBS on October 7, 1960, and ran until March 20, 1964, for a total of 116 episodes. The series was created by Herbert B. Leonard and Stirling Silliphant, who were also responsible for the ABC drama Naked City, from which Route 66 was an indirect spin-off. Both series employed a format with elements of both traditional drama and anthology drama, but the difference was where the shows were set: Naked City was set in New York City, while Route 66 had its setting change from week to week, with each episode being shot on location.
Route 66 follows two young men traversing the United States in a Chevrolet Corvette convertible, and the events and consequences surrounding their journeys. Martin Milner stars as Tod Stiles, a recent college graduate with no future prospects because of circumstances beyond his control. He is originally joined on his travels by Buz Murdock (played by George Maharis), a friend and former employee of his father's, with the character leaving midway through the third season after contracting echovirus. Near the end of the third season, Tod meets a recently discharged Vietnam veteran named Lincoln Case, played by Glenn Corbett, who decides to follow Tod on his travels and stays with him until the final episode.
Format and characters
Route 66 is a hybrid between episodic television drama, which has continuing characters and situations, and the anthology format, in which each week's show has a completely different cast and story. In this narrative format, dubbed "semianthology" by the trade magazine Variety, the drama usually centers on the guest stars rather than the regular cast. Series creator Stirling Silliphant's concurrently running drama, Naked City (1958–1963), also followed this semianthology format.
Original concept and trial pilot In the original concept under discussion between Silliphant and producer Leonard, the two series leads were to be ex-army men who had left the service and were looking to re-establish themselves in American life. George Maharis was signed to a contract by Leonard before the Route 66 concept had been fully developed, and was set to be a cast member from the beginning. Actor Robert Morris was set to be the other lead.
Morris was cast beside Maharis in a 1959 episode of Naked City that was written by Silliphant as a backdoor pilot to a potential spin-off series featuring two young travelers who were looking to find themselves. At that point, the Route 66 title was not yet decided upon, and the potential spin-off was tentatively entitled The Searchers. The Naked City episode that served as the Searchers pilot was called "Four Sweet Corners", and in it, Maharis played Johnny Gary, while Morris was Link Ridgeway. Both were ex-servicemen. After spending most of the episode rescuing Johnny's kid sister from a shoplifting ring, the two friends decides they are too restless to stay in New York City, and they want to see the world. They end the episode by leaving Johnny's family's apartment building, setting out for parts unknown.
The half-hour pilot and the chemistry between the leads was judged to be good by the producers, although Leonard could not interest a network or a sponsor in the spin-off show; Morris was replaced with Martin Milner for the reworked version that occurred before the death of Morris in May 1960 at age 25.
The concept was subsequently reworked. The title of the series became Route 66, the leads became Tod and Buz, and neither had ties to the army. Maharis was given the role of Buz, while Martin Milner beat several actors (including Robert Redford) for the role of Tod. Leonard personally financed the shooting of a new hour-long pilot episode ("Black November", written by Silliphant) and CBS picked up the series in 1960.
Character profiles
Tod and Buz (and later, Linc) symbolize restless youth searching for meaning in the early 1960s. The two men take odd jobs along their journey, like toiling in a California vineyard or manning a Maine lobster boat, bringing them in contact with dysfunctional families or troubled individuals in need of help. The lead characters are not always the focus of any given episode; in fact, many, many episodes focus primarily on the guest characters in that particular episode, with Tod and Buz (or Linc) being secondary players who act as a catalyst for the episode's events. Consequently, the backstories of the three main travelers are revealed only in occasional references across widely spaced episodes.
Tod Stiles, portrayed by clean-cut Milner, is the epitome of the decent, honest, all-American type. Tod comes from a background of wealth and privilege; his father owned a shipping company, and Tod's early years were spent in New York and Connecticut. He attended Yale, but after the death of his father, Tod discovered that his father's business had essentially gone bankrupt. The only legacy left to Tod is a new Corvette.
Buz Murdock, meanwhile, is an orphan who had worked with Tod's father as a laborer on one of his barges in New York City. After the death of the senior Mr. Stiles, and the subsequent collapse of his business, Tod and Buz decide to drive across America in search of work, adventure, and themselves. The working-class Buz (George Maharis) is looser, hipper, and more Beat Generation in attitude than Tod, though the two characters share a mutual respect. Subtle indications were given that the Buz character was intended to loosely embody Jack Kerouac in appearance and attitude. Kerouac, in fact, contemplated a lawsuit against Leonard, Silliphant, and Chevrolet for misappropriating the characters and theme from his iconic novel On the Road.
Toward the end of the second season, Maharis was absent for several episodes, due to a bout of infectious hepatitis. He returned for the start of the third season, but was again absent for a number of episodes before leaving the show entirely midway through season three. Consequently, in numerous episodes in late season two and early season three, Tod travels solo, while Buz is said to be in the hospital with "echovirus". Tod is often seen writing to Buz in these episodes or having a one-sided phone conversation with him. Tod appears solo in 13 episodes.
Buz made his final appearance in a January 1963 episode, and was then out of the show without a definitive explanation; the character simply stopped appearing, and was never referenced again. After five consecutive solo Tod stories, Tod gains a new traveling companion named Lincoln "Linc" Case (Glenn Corbett) in March 1963. Case is a United States Army veteran of the Vietnam conflict, haunted by his past. Tod meets Linc in "Fifty Miles From Home", in which Linc fights with an aspiring basketball player outside a Houston bus station. Linc severely injures the young man, whom Tod was coaching and training, and the incensed Tod follows Linc to his hometown, where he challenges him to a fistfight. After the fight, the two come to an understanding of where Linc has been in life, and Linc becomes Tod's new traveling companion. Linc is more introspective than the often extroverted Buz, but he has (like Buz) a sometimes explosive temper. Linc is nonetheless a reliable companion as the duo continued their travels.
The series concludes in Tampa, Florida, with the two-part episode "Where There's a Will, There's a Way", in which Tod Stiles marries a Houston commodities trader (played by guest-star Barbara Eden), and Linc announces his intention to return home to his family in Texas after a long period of estrangement from his father. Tod and his new wife head back to Houston and offer to take Linc, who has to remind Tod how small the car is. The scene ends with Linc walking up a hill after loading the couple's luggage into the Corvette. This episode made the series one of the earlier primetime television dramas to have a planned series finale resolving the fate of its main characters. The show was filmed and presented in black and white throughout its run.
Locations Route 66 shot each episode on location around the country. Writer-producer Stirling Silliphant traveled with location manager Sam Manners to a wide range of locales, and wrote scripts to match the settings. The actors and film crew would arrive some time later. Locations included a logging camp, shrimp boats, an offshore oil rig, Riverside Raceway, and Glen Canyon Dam, the latter while still under construction.
The show had little connection with the U.S. Highway providing its name. Most of the locations were far from "The Mother Road", which passed through only eight states, while the series was filmed in 25 American states (and even had an episode in Toronto, Canada). Another episode features a brief coda set in Mexico, but was filmed in California. U.S. Route 66, the highway, was briefly referred to in just three early episodes of the series ("Black November", "Play It Glissando", and "An Absence of Tears"). The actual highway is even more rarely shown, as in the early first-season episode, "The Strengthening Angels".
Route 66 is one of few television series to be filmed entirely on the road. People, their accents, livelihoods, ethnic backgrounds, and attitudes varied widely from one location to the next.
Cars The Chevrolet Corvette seen in the first episode ("Black November", October 7, 1960) is a 1960 model; for the rest of that season the show used a 1961 model. Chevrolet provided vehicles throughout the show's run, upgrading to new models with each season. Although a few publicity photos show a black or red model, for actual filming the entire black-and-white series used Corvettes in light colors such as Horizon Blue, Cascade Green, and Fawn Beige. The 1963 Corvette Sting Ray convertible (in Saddle Tan) finished the show out through 1964."Route 66 TV series could return to the small screen" by Daniel Strohl. Hemmings Motor News, Hemmings Daily, Dec 15th, 2014. During the show's final, 1963–64 season, a 1963 model Corvette was used initially, but was replaced by an updated 1964 model part way into the season.
Guest stars
The roster of guest stars on Route 66 includes numerous actors who later went on to fame, as well as major stars on the downside of their careers. One of the most historically significant episodes of the series in this respect was "Lizard's Leg and Owlet's Wing" featuring Peter Lorre, Lon Chaney Jr., and Boris Karloff as themselves, with the latter donning his famous Frankenstein monster make-up for the first time in decades and Chaney Jr. made up to resemble his 1941 role as the Wolf Man. Joe E. Brown and Buster Keaton also appeared together as the leads in an episode mixing comedy and drama titled "Journey to Ninevah".
An episode featuring Ethel Waters also guest-starred Juano Hernandez, as well as the fictional five-piece Memphis Naturals band, made up of actors Bill Gunn and Frederick O'Neal and real-life musicians Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, and Jo Jones.