While Dr. Kimble is en route to death row, the train derails over a track defect, allowing him to escape and begin a cross-country search for the real killer, a "one-armed man" (played by Bill Raisch).

He adopts many nondescript aliases, and toils at low-paying, menial jobs (i.e. those that require no identification or security checks, and bring about little social attention).

In the episode "Nemesis", he distracts, then knocks out, a forest ranger (played by Kurt Russell's father Bing), then quickly unloads the man's rifle to ensure he cannot shoot him if pursued.

Richard Kimble's family makes scattered appearances throughout the series, most notably his sister, Donna (Jacqueline Scott) and her husband, Leonard Taft (played by James Sikking, Lin McCarthy and James Anderson in different episodes; Richard Anderson played Leonard Taft in the classic two-part final episode, "The Judgment").

Ray was not mentioned again in the show, and the third-season episode "Running Scared" dealt with Richard Kimble and his sister Donna reuniting to grieve over their father's death.

[4] Dr. Richard Kimble is pursued by the relentless Stafford police detective Lt. Philip Gerard (Barry Morse), a formidably intelligent family man and dedicated public servant.

As he remarks to an LA police captain in "The Judgment, Part 1", the show's penultimate episode, "I've lost a lot of things these past four years ... starting with a prisoner the state told me to guard."

In one episode, when a female witness remarks that Kimble killed his wife, Gerard simply replies, "The law says he did," but with a tone of doubt audible in his voice.

In the epilogue, Gerard explains to Brame's widow Sharon (Elizabeth Allen) that he wanted to go after both men, but that Arthur was a career killer and far more dangerous, while Kimble "has done the one murder he'd probably ever do."

Stanford Whitmore, who wrote the pilot episode "Fear in a Desert City", says that he deliberately gave Kimble's nemesis a similar-sounding name to see if anyone would recognize the similarity between "Gerard" and "Javert".

[6] One who recognized the similarity was Barry Morse; he pointed out the connection to Quinn Martin, who admitted that The Fugitive was a "sort of modern rendition of the outline of Les Misérables.

"[6] Barry Morse accordingly went back to the Victor Hugo novel and studied the portrayal of Javert, to find ways to make the character more complex than the "conventional 'Hollywood dick'" as whom Gerard had originally been conceived.

In the season-three episode "Wife Killer", reporter Barbara Webb (Janice Rule) discovers that the One-armed Man carries a wide range of identifications using various names.

Bill Raisch played a bitter war veteran who starts a bar fight with Kirk Douglas' John W. Burns in the 1962 film Lonely are the Brave.

"Angels Travel on Lonely Roads" has in both parts, in addition to Sister Veronica, Albert Salmi as Chuck Mathers, the brutish owner of a gas station who gives Kimble trouble and later tries to collect the reward money when he finds out who Kimble is; filling in for Gerard (this is the only two-parter in which Gerard does not appear) are Sandy Kenyon as a local sheriff and Ken Lynch as a local plainclothes police detective.

Coincidentally, the show's music supervisor, Ken Wilhoit, was married to Susan Hayes, who had had an intimate relationship with Sheppard prior to the murder and testified during the first trial in 1954.

[12] The show presents a popular plot device of an innocent man on the run from the police for a murder he did not commit, while simultaneously pursuing the real killer.

The theme of a doctor in hiding for committing a major crime had also been depicted by James Stewart as the mysterious Buttons the Clown, who never removed his makeup, in The Greatest Show on Earth.

Writer David Goodis claimed that the series was inspired by his 1946 novel Dark Passage, about a man who escapes from prison after being wrongly convicted of killing his wife.

[citation needed] The plot device of a fugitive living on the run from the authorities was loosely inspired by Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables.

The Richard Kimble character was inspired by the novel's protagonist, Jean Valjean, an ex-convict living a life as a fugitive and having numerous aliases, as well as helping people around him.

[citation needed] Pete Rugolo, who had worked on David Janssen's earlier series Richard Diamond, Private Detective, composed the original music for The Fugitive.

Gerard is spotted by Jean Carlisle (Diane Baker), an old friend of the Kimble family's, who is working as a typist with the Los Angeles Police Department.

Chandler learns from Donna that she had received a phone call from someone who claimed that he knew who really killed Helen Kimble, and arranged a meeting that night at an abandoned stable.

Kimble and Gerard head over to the Chandler residence and learn from Betsy that he is luring Johnson to an abandoned amusement park to kill him to atone for his cowardice.

It fell out of the top 30 during the last two seasons,[19] but the series finale, in which Dr. Kimble's fate was shown, currently holds the third rank for the all-time highest U.S. television household share, at 72%.

There are no subtitles or alternate languages, but English closed captions are provided, and the "liner notes" consist merely of TV-Guide-style episode synopses inside the four-disc holder.

However, the film remained true to its source material—in particular, the notion that Kimble's kindness led him to help others even when it posed a danger to his freedom or physical safety.

A short-lived TV series remake (CBS, October 6, 2000 – May 25, 2001) of the same name also aired, starring Tim Daly as Kimble, Mykelti Williamson as Gerard, and Stephen Lang as the one-armed man.

A spinoff that was broadcast on the Quibi platform, features Boyd Holbrook as a new fugitive, blue-collar worker Mike Ferro, who is wrongly accused of setting off a bomb on a Los Angeles subway train.