The Outsider is an American detective drama created by Roy Huggins and starring Darren McGavin. A two-hour pilot movie aired on November 21, 1967; about a year later, a regular series of 26 episodes aired on NBC for one season from September 18, 1968, until April 16, 1969.
40-ish Los AngelesâÂÂbased private eye David Ross (Darren McGavin) is a group-home raised orphan with no family, originally from Puyallup, Washington. (Notably, both series creator Roy Huggins and star Darren McGavin were also originally from Washington state, Huggins from Littell and McGavin from Spokane.) As a teen, Ross became a high-school dropout and a runaway from the group home. At the age of 19, while riding the rails, Ross got into an altercation with a railroad policeman and inadvertently ended up killing him while trying to defend himself. Convicted of murder, he spent six years in prison before receiving a governor's pardon.
Now working as a licensed private investigator, Ross is constantly harassed by police partly for his past crime, and partly due to his activities investigating cases. Ross lives alone in a small, shabby, sparsely furnished apartment in L.A., and is essentially an "outsider" in society.
Most episodes of The Outsider begin near the story's climax, with Ross in some sort of imminent, life-threatening danger. After briefly setting up the situation via narration, Ross will then (also via narration) say some variation of "I suppose you're wondering how I got here..." The story is then presented in flashback, leading back to the climax, which is then resolved.
When investigating cases, Ross only resorts to violence when forced to, and his carry pistol is a tiny .25-caliber semi-automatic. Many of Ross' cases involve eccentric Hollywood or Southern California types, with whom he copes in a bemused fashion. Ross himself has some peculiarities and eccentricities; for instance, he routinely keeps his phone in his fridge.
There were no other regulars on the show aside from McGavin, although Ossie Davis played Ross' antagonistic police contact Lt. Wagner in the pilot, and James Edwards played the same character in two episodes of the series. Bill Quinn is seen in two late-running episodes as another (slightly friendlier) police contact, Lt. Kanter.
Two feature-length television movies were created after the shows cancellation by combining multiple episodes together along with added narration from Darren McGavin. The first of these published in 1969 was Anatomy of a Crime, created by combining episodes "There Was a Little Girl" and "Tell it like it was... and You're Dead". The second aired in November 1970 with the two episodes "The Flip Side" and "Service for One" being edited together and shown under the title The 48-hour Mile. A paperback spinoff novel, The Outsider, was written by prolific American genre writer Lou Cameron.