Roy Huggins

Roy Huggins (July 18, 1914 – April 3, 2002) was an American novelist and an influential writer/creator and producer of character-driven television series, including Maverick, The Fugitive, Hunter, and The Rockford Files.

Huggins was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1935–1941, where he was a Ph.D. student in political science until the outbreak of World War II.

He is best known as the creator of long-running shows such as Maverick with James Garner, 77 Sunset Strip with Efrem Zimbalist Jr., and The Fugitive with David Janssen, all on ABC.

[9] In 1962, Huggins took a job as a vice president in the television division at Universal (then known as Revue Studios), where he spent the next 18 years.

At Universal, he co-created The Rockford Files starring James Garner and produced The Virginian, Alias Smith and Jones, and Baretta, among other series.

Beginning in the late 1960s, Huggins phased out his other pen names and began using the pseudonym John Thomas James for virtually all of his television scriptwriting, usually on the shows he was producing.

A Warner-owned property was used as the basis of the script for the first broadcast episode of Maverick, substituted for the actual pilot, which was run second to cheat Huggins out of his creator residuals.

In another example, Jack L. Warner deliberately had the pilot to 77 Sunset Strip, entitled Girl on the Run, screened briefly at movie theaters in the Caribbean to legally establish that the television series derived from a film, rather than, as was actually the case, several books and novellas Huggins had written in the 1940s.