YMMV / The Rockford Files

• Fair for Its Day: In "The Return of the Black Shadow", Jim, Cooper, and his sister are attacked by a violent motorcycle gang, who also rape Coop's sister. While she is portrayed as a rather matronly School Marm type, and the rest of the episode focuses instead on Jim and Cooper's revenge on the gang, she is never blamed or shamed for what happened to her, and the crime is treated with the seriousness it deserves.
• Replacement Scrappy: John "Coop" Cooper, Beth's replacement in Season 5. He ended up appearing only in three episodes total (plus one episode where he left Jim a message on the answering machine, but didn't appear in the episode). After "The Return of the Black Shadow", he was never seen or referred to again.
• Retroactive Recognition: Robert Hays has a brief appearance as a fashion designer's assistant in "The Deep Blue Sleep", about five years before Airplane!.
• Values Dissonance: In "The Hammer of C Block", it's revealed at the end that Gandy's girlfriend Lila, whose death Gandy had been framed for, actually had committed suicide, after having been beaten regularly by Gandy, then fleeing and returning to him several times. After this is revealed, Jim tries to comfort Gandy, saying that he somehow wasn't to blame for what he did because she kept "[coming] back". Yikes.
• Values Resonance:
  • In "Three Day Affair with a Thirty Day Escrow", the married daughter of an Arab sheik is condemned to death by her father, for having an affair with a gigolo who was part of a real estate scheme (but who had fallen in love with her anyway). Things get worse when her husband turns up murdered and the gigolo is a suspect. Surrounded by all the people involved (including the woman's sympathetic brother), Rockford makes a point of the obvious Double Standard enforced by the father and his men (as the husband had been partying and carrying on affairs himself without punishment), and figures out the murderer (the gigolo's boss and head of the scheme), before causing an explosion on the landed plane they're all on and saving the woman from her fate. This aired in 1978. And only a few years after the Values Dissonance example above. The relevance of the issues discussed has only increased since then.
  • Also in "The House on Willis Avenue", in 1978, Rockford and Richie Brockelman uncover a secret corporate data center being built. At the end of the episode, a public service message appears:
  Secret information centers, building dossiers on individuals, exist today. You have no legal right to know about them, prevent them, or sue for damages. Our liberty may well be the price we pay for permitting this to continue unchecked. Member, U.S. Privacy Protection Commission.
  • Now compare it to, for example, Google's constant tracking, and the 2013 NSA scandal.
  • "The Trees, the Bees, and T.T. Flowers" is Harsher in Hindsight and relevant to a modern audience. Mr. Flowers is In Harmony with Nature expressing it poetically, but rooted in his extensive knowledge of bees, animals, plants and the environment. He objects to pesticides, a factor in worldwide pollinator die-off, now illegal in the U.S. Declaring people legally incompetent and placing them under legal conservatorship to get control of their assets is better understood today given Britney Spears. The SWAT team standoff looks familiar. Mr. Flowers might have ended up portrayed in the media as a Right-Wing Militia Fanatic (he had a gun!) and Shell-Shocked Veteran practicing self-sufficiency on his mini-farm (called "Freedom", which could cause misunderstandings today) and holed up in a dilapidated shack (after the developer and his goons hacked his cute little house to pieces) after escaping from a nice retirement home where he'd been incarcerated for his own good.

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