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In 1959, he played a truck driver in with cargo hijackers in an episode of Highway Patrol. Ihnat moved to the United States in 1956 to pursue a career in acting and attended the Pasadena Playhouse. Acting is the best way to do it.' Film and television career I was raised on a farm and I decided I wanted to be everything in life. He said, 'I knew this was the only thing I wanted to do with my life.' He also said, 'I think wanting to act started when I was about 14 as an escape valve to my environment. Ihnat became hooked on acting when he played a child role in an amateur theatre near Lynden. Ihnat, his mother, father, younger sister, and two young boys from other families left Czechoslovakia three days before Prague was occupied by invading German forces in March of that year. His family settled there after fleeing his native Czechoslovakia in 1939, when he was five years old. I'm on the road right now, but when I get home, a little binge watching is going to be called for.Ihnat was born in Slovakia and was raised on a farm in Lynden, Ontario. I have the entire eight seasons of 'Mannix' on DVD, and for me they are like comfort food. (And Hugh Beaumont, of 'Leave It To Beaver' fame, even has a supporting role.) (Season Four, Episode Five.) Joe is given a slow-acting poison, and he has to figure out who is trying to kill him and why. Plus, he seems like a real match for Mannix. another vengeful Korean War buddy comes back to hunt down Joe, but this time he's played by Darren McGavin, who is crazy good in the role.

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Mannix is blinded by an assassin, and then has to figure out how to defend himself when the bad guy comes back to finish the job. the mystery plot is secondary in this episode, as Mannix goes back to his hometown to confront his estranged father, played by the great Victor Jory. Steve Ihnat is great as the bad guy, and the episode is tautly written and shot. in which Mannix has to enter a booby-trapped abandoned apartment building to rescue a policeman friend, and deal with the ravings of a guy who served with him in the Korean War, but who betrayed his unit to the enemy. A good, sold plot, with the added attraction of Mannix being chased by a helicopter. the very first episode, which introduces the character, and sends him to Palm Springs to track down the kidnapped daughter (Barbara Anderson) of a mob boss (Lloyd Nolan). Here, just because I know them, are the six best episodes of 'Mannix'. You can't make 194 one-hour episodes of anything without repeating yourself. (And some of them got dumb, and repetitive. I loved the convertibles Mannix drove, the fights he won and lost, the crazy sports jackets he wore, the apartment that he lived in over his office, and even some of the dumber plots.

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The fact is, I loved 'Mannix.' It was my favorite TV show, hands down. I tell you all this not just because I know a lot of trivia. It also, by the way, had one of the best-ever opening title sequences and musical themes on TV, composed as a waltz by Lalo Schifrin (who also did the 'Mission: Impossible' and Bullitt themes). (The Hollywood Reporter notes in its obit that 'by one count, Mannix was shot 17 times and knocked unconscious 55 times on the show.') While the show was criticized at the time for its violence, these days it looks tame. (He lived and worked at 17 Paseo Verde in Los Angeles, and had a great secretary named Peggy Fair, played by the luminous Gail Fisher.)Īnd then, for seven seasons, 'Mannix' got terrific ratings, and Connors became one of the best-paid stars on television. which produced not just her show, but also a couple of other shows you may have heard of called 'Star Trek' and 'Mission: Impossible.' Lucy liked 'Mannix'and thought that Connors had the makings of a major TV star, and so it was decided that 'Mannix' would be renewed and reformatted, with Joe now off working on his own.

That person was Lucille Ball, and the studio was Desilu.

The ratings during that first season were mediocre, and CBS was about to cancel the show when the person who ran the studio that produced it intervened. KC's View: 'Mannix' started out with a premise that was revolutionary, even prescient for the mid-sixties - Joe worked for a big corporate detective firm called Intertect, where most of the detecting was done by enormous mainframe computers Joe, however, was a two-fisted private eye in the classic tradition, which brought him into constant conflict with his boss, Lew Wickersham.

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