We're still waiting either for some credible news source to say that Judy Carne has passed away or that she hasn't. In the meantime, I thought I'd note the passing of another actor who was in one TV series after another, Martin Milner. Mr. Milner had an interesting film career in which he set some sort of record for being decent (if not pretty decent) in movies that were otherwise pretty awful. He was good in good films like The Sweet Smell of Success or Compulsion and you can see him briefly in Mister Roberts. But it was in pictures like 13 Ghosts or The Private Lives of Adam and Eve or Valley of the Dolls where he proved how skilled he was.
He worked constantly in films and TV but no one really knew who he was until Route 66, which aired from 1960 to 1964. Good series. Then he was back behind the wheel from 1968 to 1975 as the veteran cop who drove Adam-12. I got hooked watching the latter on MeTV not long ago and I really enjoyed most of them, in large part because of Milner. The show raced from cop story to cop story and rarely had time to tell us much about who those two officers were. It didn't have to because Milner and his co-star Kent McCord had such great rapport and personality.
I really don't have that much else to say about him. I never met the man. If I had, I would have told him how much I liked watching him when he had a good script and how I even liked him when he took a weak one and made it work. The premise of Adam-12 was that veteran cop Pete Malloy (Milner) was teaching the ropes to new cop Jim Reed (McCoy). But when you watch then, you get the sense that veteran actor Milner was tutoring new actor McCord. But maybe that wasn't so. Maybe it just felt that way because they were both such good actors.