Jake and the Fatman
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Jake and the Fatman

Jake and the Fatman is an American crime drama legal drama television series starring William Conrad as prosecutor J. L. (Jason Lochinvar) "Fatman" McCabe and Joe Penny as investigator Jake Styles. Created by Dean Hargrove and Joel Steiger, the series ran on CBS for five seasons from September 26, 1987, to May 6, 1992.

Diagnosis: Murder, which aired from 1993 to 2001, was a medical-oriented spin-off of Jake and the Fatman that came to be a popular series of its own.

J. L. "Fatman" McCabe is a Hawaii-born, tough former Honolulu Police Department officer turned Los Angeles district attorney. He is teamed with a handsome, happy-go-lucky special investigator named Jake Styles. They often clash due to their different styles and personalities. "Fatman" travels hardly anywhere without Max, his pet bulldog. The show was set in Los Angeles during the first season. After the end of Magnum, P.I., the show was moved to Hawaii. The second and third seasons and half of the fourth season were filmed in Honolulu and some of the production sets from Magnum, P.I. were used. The show then returned to Los Angeles for the remainder of its run.

Guest stars on the series included Alex Cord, Robert Culp, Scott Marlowe, Ed Nelson, Robert Reed, Mitch Ryan, Ray Sharkey, and David Soul.

Conrad guest starred as an aging prosecutor in a two-part episode of Matlock during its first season on NBC. Executive producers Fred Silverman and Dean Hargrove decided to use this character as a model for one of the main characters in a new show they were creating for CBS. Penny also guest starred in these episodes, but his character was not on the same side as Conrad's character in the storyline's legal case.

Following the departure of Hargrove, executive producers David Moessinger and Jeri Taylor were brought on to run the series with Silverman. They also hired J. Michael Straczynski as an executive story consultant. Taylor and Moessinger ran the show for two years before finally leaving in a dispute over control over the show.

Straczynski has written that he was hired after pitching a story that let Conrad sit down for almost every scene, noting his own faux slogan for the show "Jake and the Fatman: He can't act, he can't walk, together they fight crime".

Joe Penny lost a large amount of weight after the show moved to Hawaii, which led to many rumors about his health, including the possibility that he had AIDS. In actuality, he had suffered from a gastrointestinal virus and was having difficulty regaining the weight he lost. When the show moved back to Los Angeles, it was suspected that it was on Penny's urging, which Penny denied.

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