LO-O-O-O-OKING GOOD, LOOKING BACK
The Spectacular Rise and Quick Fall of a Landmark TV Star (And Series)
As the 1974 television season loomed 50 years ago, three newcomers had much of the advance buzz: Rhoda, a spin-off from the Mary Tyler Moore show; The Sonny Comedy Revue, a variety showcase for going-it-alone-without-now-ex-wife-Cher Sonny Bono, and TV favorite James Garner’s The Rockford Files. When the curtain lifted, though, the breakout hit became Chico and the Man.
Premiering 50 years ago tonight, it marked both the beginning and the end for its 20-year-old star, Freddie Prinze.
A rising New York comedian, Prinze had made a headline-making debut on The Tonight Show just nine months earlier with a routine about his (semi-fictionalized) hardscrabble son-of-immigrants youth in New York’s Washington Heights. He became the show’s first first-time stand-up invited over to join Carson’s couch for conversation following his set, a gesture that served as a career benediction from comedy’s kingmaker. Producer James Komack, who’d been developing an idea for a Latino-oriented sitcom, turned to Prinze as his new star.
Chico and the Man showcased born-for-the-camera Prinze as charming job-seeking hustler Chico Rodriguez, who talks his way into the struggling East L.A. garage-shop business — and life — of world-weary racist Ed Brown ( Jack Albertson). A fractious but loving relationship is formed, because, well, TV. And tucked on its Friday-night schedule behind crown jewel Sanford and Son, NBC had a brand-new smash.
Chico Rodriguez was a role that “fed off [Prinze’s] streetwise stage persona and fit him like a glove,” noted Dan Epstein in a 2015 Rolling Stone reflection. With popular go-to-expressions like “Lo-o-o-o-oking good” and “Ees’s no’ my job, man” — delivered, as much of his stand-up was, in an exaggerated accent — he became series TV’s biggest Latino star since Desi Arnaz. But, wrote Epstein, “[h]is cheeky humor and barrio-hipster image were far closer to Cheech & Chong than I Love Lucy.” (Ironically, Komack had been circling Cheech & Chong as his leads during Chico’s early development.)
The timing behind Chico and the Man’s arrival helped fuel its take off: Just as All in the Family’s Archie Bunker fed off a growing blue-collar movement in 1971 and Maude spoke to women’s liberation fever in 1972 and Good Times rode a tide of Black Power when it showed up in earlier 1974, Chico and the Man, set in the barrios of East Los Angeles, tapped into a Brown Pride wave then rolling across the country. (The era’s politics of identity led to pushback against Chico from segments of the Latino population, however, concerned about a reinforcement of what it called Chicano stereotypes.)
By the end of its first season, Chico was TV’s third highest-rated series, behind All in the Family and Sanford and Son, and Prinze was prime-time’s most popular new face. Offers accumulated — stand-up engagements, TV-movies, prime-time guest appearances. In June of 1976, just two-and-a half years after his Tonight Show debut, Prinze was sitting in Johnny Carson’s chair, serving as its youngest-ever guest host.
Then just as quickly it all came to an end. Midway through the sitcom’s third season, in the early morning hours of January 28, 1977, Prinze, who’d days before performed at the Inaugural Ball for incoming President Jimmy Carter but with escalating mental-health and drug-and-alcohol issues, shot himself in the head in his Los Angeles apartment. He died the following day, leaving behind an estranged wife and a ten-month-old son (actor Freddie Prinze, Jr). He was 22.
(Though the death was ruled a suicide in 1977, some in Prinze’s circle contended it was accidental, the result of gun-play. In 1983, a jury in a civil trial brought by Prinze’s family against two insurers agreed, ruling that the actor died as a result of a what was seen as a medication-induced accident.)
Seven episodes of Chico and the Man’s 21-episode third season were left hanging in the balance upon the actor’s death — four filmed with Prinze and waiting to be aired, three others written and waiting to be shot. All of it unfolded under a death pall over the next three months, with the season of Chico and the Man wrapping in April 1977. And with it, Prinze’s legacy.
Curiously — and hardly helping earlier complaints about ethnic stereotyping — NBC renewed the sitcom for a fourth season, casting unknown 12-year-old Gabriel Melgar to replace Prinze, portraying Mexican orphan Raul, a.k.a. Chico, whom Ed Brown finds hiding in his garage and decides to adopt. (Chico Rodriguez, it was explained, had gone off to work with his father, though in later episodes it was revealed that he’d died.) There was no coming back from a sitcom’s title-star (then-)suicide, however: Ratings plummeted, and the comedy was pulled in January 1978, two days before the first anniversary of Prinze’s death. Its remaining episodes were quietly burned off that summer.
Today Freddie Prinze is probably remembered more for his son than for Chico and the Man, fated to television’s sidelines by its short run, dark exit, and sobering lesson on show-business excess. A lengthy Time magazine reflection published a week after his death included this observation from then-fellow comedian and close friend David Brenner: “There was no transition in Freddie’s life. It was an explosion. It’s tough to walk off a subway at age nineteen and then step out of a Rolls-Royce the next day.”
But 50 years ago this month Freddie Prinze did explode onto the scene as few in his community (or at his age, in general) had done. And despite its brevity, wrote Xochitl Gonzalez in a 2022 clickamericana.com appreciation, Chico and the Man did manage to leave a lasting legacy. “It broke new ground by bringing Latino culture into American living rooms, and its exploration of themes such as racial and generational tension, combined with its comedic charm, made it a standout sitcom of the 1970s.”
How young is death at 22? Had Freddie Prinze lived, he’d have turned just 70 this past June.
And he’s gone 47 years.
Jim McKairnes teaches and writes about American television history.
