The Lieutenant

The Lieutenant
Cover of Part 1 of the Complete Series DVD
Created by	Gene Roddenberry
Starring	Gary Lockwood Robert Vaughn John Milford Henry Beckman Richard Anderson Carmen Phillips Steve Franken
Composers	Jeff Alexander (1.12, 1.14)
Country of origin	United States
Original language	English
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	29
Production
Running time	60 minutes
Production company	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Television
Distributor	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Television
Release
Original network	NBC
Original release	September 14, 1963 (1963-09-14) – April 18, 1964 (1964-04-18)

The Lieutenant is an American television series, the first created by Gene Roddenberry. It aired on NBC on Saturday evenings in the 1963–1964 television schedule. It was produced by Arena Productions, one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's most successful in-house production companies of the 1960s. Situated at Camp Pendleton, the West Coast base of the U.S. Marine Corps, The Lieutenant focuses on the men of the Corps in peacetime with a Cold War backdrop. The title character is Second Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice, a rifle platoon leader and one of the training instructors at Camp Pendleton. An hour-long drama, The Lieutenant explores the lives of enlisted Marines and officers alike.

The series was released on DVD in two half-season sets by the Warner Archive Collection on August 14, 2012.^[1]

Synopsis[]

Gary Lockwood starred as USMC Second Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice, a recent graduate of the United States Naval Academy who is assigned his first command, that of a rifle platoon. Rice is a young, educated idealist who still has much to learn from an older mentor. Robert Vaughn played Captain Raymond Rambridge, Rice's company commander, an up-from-the-ranks officer. Richard Anderson, remembered for playing Oscar Goldman in The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, had a recurring role as battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Steve Hiland, and Linda Evans, later known for her roles on The Big Valley and as Krystle Carrington in Dynasty, appeared in several early episodes as Colonel Hiland's daughter Nan, who flirted with Rice.

Production and broadcast[]

After its original broadcast, The Lieutenant was sparsely rerun in syndication, as its run had not been long enough for episodes to be stripped in daily broadcasts. In 2016, digital subchannel network GetTV aired The Lieutenant on Wednesday evenings at 8 p.m. Eastern Time in a block of four episodes, not following the original airdate order.

Unbroadcast episode[]

The installment "To Set It Right", which was written by Lee Erwin, was about racial prejudice, and featured Nichelle Nichols as the fiancée of a black Marine, portrayed by Don Marshall, with Dennis Hopper as the antagonist to that Marine. It was never broadcast.^[2] The subject of race was considered taboo in entertainment television in 1964, and because the network refused to broadcast "To Set It Right" or even pay for it, MGM had to shoulder the entire cost of production.^{[citation needed]} The Paley Center for Media in New York City possesses a videotape of the episode.^[3] This episode was eventually broadcast on the cable channel TNT in the early 1990s.

After The Lieutenant[]

The Lieutenant performed well in the ratings, but was nevertheless canceled after only one season because, according to Roddenberry, the Vietnam War had made present-day military dramas toxic for television. In the final episode of the series, "To Kill A Man," Rice is sent to a fictitious Asian country based on Vietnam as an advisor, his assignment as such mirroring the real-life situation for which the series had been canceled.

Roddenberry recruited Lockwood one more time, in "Where No Man Has Gone Before," the second pilot installment for Star Trek, as Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell.

The title character in The Lieutenant was Second Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice; on the original series of Star Trek, the title character was James T. Kirk. It was not until the animated series that writer David Gerrold expanded the "T," giving us Captain James Tiberius Kirk; however, that he chose "Tiberius" was purely coincidental. According to Gerrold, he had been influenced by I, Claudius, and had approached Roddenberry with his choice of middle name, but it was not until 2014 that Gerrold learned of the earlier use.^[4]

Several actors who appeared on The Lieutenant—among them Ricardo Montalbán, Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, and Majel Barrett—would later join Roddenberry in Star Trek.^[2]

The DVD release of The Lieutenant - The Complete Series, Part 2 includes a feature film version of the episode "To Kill a Man" that was released in international markets.

Cast members[]

Regulars[]

• Gary Lockwood – Second Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice
• Robert Vaughn – Captain Raymond Rambridge
• John Milford – Sergeant Kagey
• Henry Beckman – Major Al Barker
• Richard Anderson – Lieutenant Colonel Steve Hiland
• – Lieutenant Harris
• Chuck Haren – Corporal Sandow
• Carmen Phillips – Lily
• Steve Franken – Lieutenant Samwell 'Sanpan' Panosian
• Chris Noel – the regular female cast member, who never had a regular "character;" Gene Roddenberry had her acting out different characters each week

Robert Vaughn[]

Vaughn received the same compensation as Lockwood, even though he was usually in only one scene per episode.^{[citation needed]} Vaughn asked both MGM Television and Norman Felton (under whose Arena Productions banner The Lieutenant was being produced) for his own series during the run of The Lieutenant. The result was The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which began the next season and proved to be highly successful.

Guest stars[]

Guest stars included Eddie Albert, Jack Albertson, Edward Asner, Barbara Babcock, Barbara Bain, Ina Balin, and Majel Barrett, who later became Roddenberry's wife.

Episodes[]

References[]

External links[]

• The Lieutenant at IMDb