Obituary: Herman Groves (1927-2010) (from Stephen Bowie's Blog)
Matthew Kruk
December 23, 2010
Television writer Herman Groves died on December 5 at the age of 83.
According to the death notice in the Los Angeles Times, Groves was born
September 21, 1927, in Baltimore.
Groves was one of those rank-and-file episodic TV writers who could
maneuver through the conventions of a given genre with dexterity,
recombining the pieces into new plots without ever departing from the
basic formula. He specialized first in westerns and then in crime
shows, as the popularity of one gave way to the other. His last credit,
on Airwolf in 1984, came around the time that American dramatic
television shifted toward more complex, character-driven narratives.
Groves wrote for The Restless Gun, Bonanza, Riverboat, Tate, The
Rifleman, and Have Gun - Will Travel, for which he turned Richard
Connell's oft-filmed The Most Dangerous Game into an adventure for
Paladin. Then came SurfSide 6, The Detectives, The F.B.I., Hawaii
Five-O (a couple of worthy first-season episodes, then back as a story
editor in the mid-seventies), Harry O (including the one with Maureen
McCormick as a junkie), The Bionic Woman, Vega$, and The Dukes of
Hazzard.
I'm tempted to joke that Groves wrote for every bad television show made
between the fifties and the eighties, but in fact he also landed
assignments on a few good ones: Mr. Novak, The Untouchables, The Name of
the Game. He wrote four Bewitched episodes and a number of shows for
Disney in the seventies. Groves was also a story editor on several
other series, from Daniel Boone to Fantasy Island, and co-created the
short-lived The Contender with Robert Dozier.
I wish I could do more than summarize Groves's credits, but there's
hardly any literature about him, and I never met the man. Although I
did come close. The only time I've ever been to the Motion Picture
Country Home in Woodland Hills was in 2004, when I was invited out to
meet another writer who lived there, in the Fran & Ray Stark Villa. The
Stark Villa is an assisted living facility, not a hospital, and most of
its residents are in reasonably good health. And all of them, I found
out once I got there, had little nameplates next to their doors:
undoubtedly a way to help the staff get the right pills into the right
mouths, but also an unintended boon to nosy historians. So when my
interview concluded, I couldn't resist the temptation to "browse." I
walked the whole floor, and recognized a number of the names. One of
them was Herman Groves. I almost knocked, but I didn't have his credits
in front of me and wasn't prepared with my usual detailed questions. So
I let it slide, and scurried off before I could be collared by a
suspicious orderly. I shoulda knocked.