Classic Television - Prime Time

O'Hara, U.S. Treasury

Original channel

CBS

Original run

September 17, 1971 – March 10, 1972

Starring

David Janssen

O'Hara, U.S. Treasury (on-screen title is O'Hara, United States Treasury) is an American television crime drama starring David Janssen and broadcast by CBS during the 1971-72 television season. Jack Webb's Mark VII Limited packaged the program for Universal Television. Webb and longtime colleague James E. Moser created the show; Leonard B. Kaufman was the producer. The series was produced with the full approval and cooperation of the United States Department of the Treasury.

O'Hara, U.S. Treasury starred Janssen (whose company co-produced the show with Mark VII) as the title character, Treasury Agent Jim O'Hara. A county sheriff from Nebraska whose wife and child died in a fire, O'Hara cut all ties with his past life. He put in an application with the United States Department of the Treasury, which accepted him.

As a "T-Man," O'Hara was available to any of the various law enforcement agencies then part of the Department, all of which cooperated in this positive portrayal of their various organizations, much in the manner of the Los Angeles Police Department with Webb's Dragnet and Adam-12. These included the Secret Service, the Intelligence Unit of the Internal Revenue Service, the then-Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Division of IRS, and the then-Customs Bureau.

O'Hara sometimes worked undercover. Janssen was the series' only regular, as he was given a different assignment at the start of each weekly episode.

Guest stars in the series' brief run included: Bruce Bennett, Godfrey Cambridge, William Conrad, Yvonne Craig, Will Geer, Frank Gorshin, Alan Hale, Jr., Martha Hyer, Marilyn Maxwell, Ricardo Montalban, Judy Pace, Leslie Parrish, Brock Peters, Marion Ross, Don Stroud, George Takei, Jessica Tandy, Angel Tompkins, Lindsay Wagner, Betty White, Joseph Wiseman, Lana Wood and Dana Wynter.

O'Hara marked the first Mark VII show to run a full hour in length; all of Webb's previous efforts (excepting the TV-movie pilot for Dragnet 1967) ran in half-hour episodes. It was also one of the few he did not package for NBC. The show failed in the Nielsen ratings against ABC's Partridge Family and Room 222 and ended after a one-season run. Reruns were later shown on the A&E Network in the 1990s and on Retro Television Network in the 2000s.