Excellent example, Vicky. The particularly great thing about The Rockford Files is that the promise of these titles - the spectacle of Los Angeles as an urban terrain - is actually played out in every episode. Not only in the sense of copious location shooting alone, but in movement: Jim Rockford as a social agent who moved among many different places, many of them (e.g., his trailer in a Malibu beach parking lot) specifically named and indicated. On top of that, he was a social chameleon, adapting personae to facilitate entry to these spaces, in the best hard-boiled private eye tradition (though he's closer to soft-boiled, of course, which is not an epithet!). 1970s television (including its theorization, as you point out) is a seemingly endless source of material that challenges any easy attempts to define the era. There were several other shows of the time that were similarly "emplaced," (The Bob Newhart Show, Rhoda, Phyliss, The New Dick Van Dyke Show, Petrocelli, Columbo, The Rookies, etc.) particularly in their title sequences. This is in contrast to the earlier standard of "spaces" (e.g., Hooterville, Bewitched's vaguely NY suburb) and the later standard of upper middle-class ubiquity (e.g., the New York of both The Cosby Show and Friends, David E. Kelley's Boston, etc.). I think you're also right to wonder about TV time travel to specific places. How might we theorize this historical televisual geography? How do we contextualize representations and realities? And why so much of this in the 1970s?

Interesting snippet, Vicky; first time I've seen even a snippet of "Rockford" as far as I can recall. I'm struck in part by the answering machine at the opening, emphasizing both Rockford's absence from the personalized office space depicted and his belonging to the tech-savvy cohort that strikes me as characteristic of LA culture. That said, the remainder of the segment also seems oddly to downplay much of what I think of as stereotypical LA: if not for the signs indicating Hollywood and Bel Air, I'd have guessed that the series was set in the midwest, or perhaps the mid-Atlantic coast. (Contrast this with opening credits of the geography and people of the Miami depicted in "Miami Vice" or "Burn Notice," or the Boston of "Cheers," for instance; the former emphasize distinctive outdoor spaces, bikini- and pastel-jacket clad bodies, and sunny climes with both alternately long shots and tight close-ups, while the latter emphasizes the sort of nostalgia that almost suffuses Boston.) I wonder to what extent that was a choice shaped by industrial pressures at the time, both to capitalize on the cachet of Hollywood and to de-emphasize the more distinctive aspects of the city and the culture to appeal to different viewers as well. I wonder if that ability to navigate the "multiple geographic personae" you mention is underscored by the more subtle, rather than more overt, manner in which LA is depicted. The urban terrain Derek mentions seems to me indistinct, more "not-LA" than "LA," except for those explicit geographical markers.

Hi, Vicky: Nice "placement" of issues by which to frame this clip, so familiar to many who watched TV at the time. As I played the clip, I was immediately struck by the opening sound of that analog phone, which appears before the image track. It generated a series of frames of reference, eerily both Pavlovian and Proustian, bringing back the 70s and the flavor of televisual aesthetics of the period. (How many shows had that identical sound effect whenever a telephone rang?) So I kept noticing the phones throughout the sequence, and how they might condition the sense of movement and place you are asking about. Perhaps especially from the perspective of our mobile phone era, I find a heightened attention to what we might call class experience. I always felt that Rockford Files was gesturing to not only a variety of locales within LA, but also to levels/varieties of lifestyle and street-smarts. The phone booth, the pay phone in a congested waiting area, etc. might evoke as much about the character's "social" mobility as do his car and mobile home. Or is this essentally a 21st century reading?