The Outsider is an American detective drama created by Roy Huggins and starring Darren McGavin.
[1] 40-ish Los Angeles–based private eye David Ross (Darren McGavin) is a group-home raised orphan with no family, originally from Puyallup, Washington.
At the age of 19, while riding the rails, Ross got into an altercation with a railroad policeman and inadvertently ended up killing him while trying to defend himself.
Most episodes of The Outsider begin near the story's climax, with Ross in some sort of imminent, life-threatening danger.
Many of Ross' cases involve eccentric Hollywood or Southern California types, with whom he copes in a bemused fashion.