For six seasons on NBC, every episode of The Rockford Files began the same way, with a ringing phone, a click and James Garner’s dry, easy voice asking the caller to leave a message. This week NBC put that phone back on the hook. Fans who dial (760) JIM-ROCK now hear a greeting from David Boreanaz, the Bones star taking over as Jim Rockford, and can leave a voicemail of their own, NBC confirmed on November 5.
According to TheWrap, the new Rockford Files debuts Saturday, January 2, 2027, at 8 p.m. ET right after NBC’s football game, then moves to Thursdays at 8 starting January 7. It will be the first weekly Rockford series since the original signed off in January 1980, and the blessing Boreanaz wanted most before taking the job did not come from anyone at the network.
Why Did Every Episode Start With a Ringing Phone?
Roy Huggins and Stephen J. Cannell, who created the show, parked their detective in a Malibu mobile home instead of an office, and he had no secretary to take his calls. A Dictaphone Ansafone did that job, sitting beside a phone numbered 555-2368.
The greeting itself never changed: “This is Jim Rockford. At the tone, leave your name and message. I’ll get back to you.” What came after the beep was new every week. The show recorded 122 messages, and they usually had nothing to do with the episode about to start, Open Culture noted when it collected them in 2015. Norma at the market rang to say his check had bounced, and wanted to know whether she should “tear it up, send it back, or put it with the others?” The company that supplied the machine phoned to remind him, “I see you’re using our unit.” One week a woman from the plant shop tried to break it to him gently before admitting, “Your fern died.”
A fresh joke every week was harder than it sounds. The writers, future Sopranos creator David Chase among them, ran short of ideas after a few dozen and started asking the crew for suggestions, Cheat Sheet reported in 2021. That ritual only ever worked because of the man whose voice was on the tape.
Why Did James Garner Walk Away From Rockford?
Huggins had produced Maverick, the Western that made Garner a star in 1957, and he shaped Rockford for the same actor in a modern setting. Garner never pretended otherwise. “If you look at Maverick and Rockford, they’re pretty much the same guy,” he wrote in his 2011 memoir, The Garner Files, as the Boston Globe recalled in his obituary. “One is a gambler and the other a detective, but their attitudes are identical.”
The role won him the 1977 Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, but it wore him down. Garner did many of his own stunts, and by 1979 his knees and back were badly damaged and a bleeding ulcer had put him in the hospital. When his doctors ordered rest, NBC canceled the show midway through its sixth season. Garner later sued Universal over the show’s profits, and that fight ended in a 1989 settlement.
Between 1994 and 1999 he made eight Rockford Files TV movies for CBS with most of the original cast. He died of natural causes at his Los Angeles home on July 19, 2014, at 86. Most of the people beside him in that trailer are gone too, though not all.
Who From the Original Cast Is Still With Us?
Noah Beery Jr., the nephew of Oscar winner Wallace Beery, played Jim’s father, Joseph “Rocky” Rockford. He died on November 1, 1994, at 81, and the first CBS reunion movie was dedicated to him. Joe Santos earned a 1979 Emmy nomination as Sgt. Dennis Becker, the cop friend Rockford was forever asking for favors, and he died on March 18, 2016, at 84, after a heart attack, CBS News reported.
Stuart Margolin won back-to-back Emmys in 1979 and 1980 as Angel Martin, Rockford’s slippery former San Quentin cellmate, and he directed episodes of the series too. Margolin died on December 12, 2022, in Staunton, Virginia, at 82.
Two familiar faces from the regular cast are still with us, as far as anyone has reported. Gretchen Corbett, now 81, played Beth Davenport, Jim’s lawyer and sometime girlfriend, in 33 episodes before leaving after the fourth season in 1978 over a contract dispute between the producers and Universal. She has worked largely in regional theater since, and last month she played Deborah Ann Woll’s estranged mother in the Shudder horror film The Cycle. Tom Atkins, 90, played Lt. Alex Diehl, the boss who bristled at Rockford’s methods, before becoming a horror favorite in Halloween III and Night of the Creeps. The guest list also included a young Tom Selleck, who played private eye Lance White in two episodes.
What Did Garner’s Daughter Say About the New Jim Rockford?
Before Boreanaz said yes to NBC, he made a phone call of his own. In February, Gigi Garner, James Garner’s daughter, wrote on X that the actor had called to tell her he had been offered the series and was thinking about it. “If anybody can do it, HE CAN!” she wrote, as Entertainment Weekly reported.
In the new show, written by Mike Daniels, Rockford is freshly paroled for a crime he didn’t commit and back on the job as a Los Angeles private eye. Boreanaz told Variety in June that “this feels like the right time to do it,” while making clear he wants his own take on the character rather than an impression.
In May, Boreanaz invited Gigi Garner to a private screening of the pilot. Afterward she posted photos of the two Rockfords side by side. “He told me he just wanted to ‘make my dad proud,'” she wrote. She admitted she cried. Then she gave the kind of review only a daughter could give: “My dad would be tickled!”
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