Route 66 • CBS
CHARACTER: Hob Harrell
EPISODE: "Ever Ride the Waves in Oklahoma?" (#3.4)
AIRDATE: 12 October 1962

SERIES DESCRIPTION: Route 66 was one of the most unique American television dramas of the 1960s, an ostensible adventure series that functioned, in practice, as an anthology of downbeat character studies and psychological dramas. Its 1960 premiere launched two young drifters in a Corvette on an existential odyssey in which they encountered a myriad of loners, dreamers and outcasts in the small towns and big cities along U.S. Highway 66 and beyond. And the settings were real; the gritty social realism of the stories was enhanced by location shooting that moved beyond Hollywood hills and studio backlots to encompass the vast face of the country itself.

Route 66 was the brainchild of producer Herbert B. Leonard and writer Stirling Silliphant, the same creative team responsible for Naked City. The two conceived the show as a vehicle for actor George Maharis, casting him as stormy Lower East Side orphan Buz Murdock, opposite Martin Milner as boyish, Yale-educated Tod Stiles. When Tod's father dies, broke but for a Corvette, the two young men set out on the road looking for "a place to put down roots."