Quincy, M.E.

Quincy, M.E. is an American television series from Universal Studios that aired from October 3, 1976, to September 5, 1983, on NBC. It stars Jack Klugman in the title role, a Los Angeles County medical examiner.

Inspired by the book Where Death Delights by Marshall Houts, a former FBI agent, the show also resembled the earlier Canadian television series Wojeck, broadcast by CBC Television. John Vernon, who played the Wojeck title role, later guest starred in the third-season episode “Requiem For The Living”. Quincy’s character is loosely modelled on Los Angeles’ “Coroner to the Stars” Thomas Noguchi.

The first half of the first season of Quincy was broadcast as 90-minute telefilms as part of the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie rotation in the fall of 1976 alongside Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan. The series proved popular enough that midway through the 1976–1977 season, Quincy was spun off into its own weekly one-hour series. The Mystery Movie format was discontinued in the spring of 1977.

In 1978, writers Tony Lawrence and Lou Shaw received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the second-season episode “…The Thighbone’s Connected to the Knee Bone…”. Many of the episodes used the same actors for different roles in various episodes. For example, an actor who plays a crooked Navy captain also plays a ballistics expert in several of the later episodes. Using a small “pool” of actors was a common production trait of many Glen A. Larson TV programs. Before becoming a regular cast member as Quincy’s girlfriend-wife Dr. Emily Hanover in the 1982-1983 season, Anita Gillette had portrayed Quincy’s deceased first wife Helen Quincy in a flashback in a 1979 episode “Promises to Keep”.