TV SERIES · 1975– · USA
Switch
58 archived facts 5 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (58)
- #001
Switch was cancelled after its third season, with the final episode airing on 9 July 1978. In August 1979, Robert Wagner returned to television in the pilot film Hart to Hart (1979), in which he starred alongside Stefanie Powers and Lionel Stander.
- #002
Eddie Albert and Robert Wagner were the only two actors to appear in every episode of the series.
- #003
After being let go from Marcus Welby, MD (1969), Sharon Gless won the role of Maggie Philbin.
- #004
Sharon Gless initially admitted she was a little nervous about working with Eddie Albert, but she genuinely liked him nonetheless.
- #005
In the final season, Pete Ryan (Robert Wagner) moved into an apartment above Malcolm Argos's (Charlie Callas) bar.
- #006
When the series began, Eddie Albert was sixty-nine years old.
- #007
Frank MacBride had acrophobia.
- #008
While working on this series, Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood had founded their own production company, "Rhona 2", which co-owned Charlie's Angels (1976), The Love Boat (1977), Vega$ (1978), Fantasy Island (1977) and Hart to Hart (1979). They were hired to work together at Spelling-Goldberg Productions.
- #009
Long before Robert Wagner and Sharon Gless appeared in this series, both were lifelong Eddie Albert fans.
- #010
After the cancellation, Charlie Callas reunited with Sharon Gless on Cagney & Lacey (1981), in the fourth season, tenth episode, "Lady Luck".
- #011
During the scene transitions in the first season, the image shrinks into a small circle, which first narrows and then widens like a spinning coin.
- #012
In one episode, Frank MacBride played the piano in a nightclub; in real life, Eddie Albert was a nightclub singer.
- #013
After appearing as a guest actor in Universal Television programs for several years, Eddie Albert was producer Glen A. Larson's first choice for the former lead role of Frank MacBride, and he accepted the part because of his lifelong friendship with his devoted fan Robert Wagner.
- #014
Eddie Albert and Robert Wagner appeared in The Longest Day (1962).
- #015
This was not Robert Wagner's first time working with Glen A. Larson. Their collaboration began while working on It Takes a Thief (1968).
- #016
This series was inspired by The Sting (1973).
- #017
Shortly after this series was cancelled, Eddie Albert and Sharon Gless appeared in the film Crash (1978).
- #018
This series premiered on CBS on Tuesday, 9 September 1975, at 22:00 EDT/21:00 PDT, moving Hawaii Five-O (1968) to Fridays at 21:00 ET/20:00 PT on the same network.
- #019
The series had three theme songs, though two of them were rarely heard. The show opened with a Stu Phillips theme that was quickly dropped, even though the music continued as background scoring at the end of many episodes. In the second season, Ed Sauter wrote a theme used for about eight episodes and heard only once; for all other episodes the theme was written by Glen A. Larson, the first season's executive producer (the first official theme song, not counting McCloud (1970), was not attributed to anyone).
- #020
Several actors who appeared as guest stars alongside Eddie Albert on this series had previously guested on Green Acres (1965): J. Pat O'Malley, Don Porter, Gordon Jump, Bernie Kopell, Len Lesser and Bob Hastings.
- #021
Robert Wagner worked with Sharon Gless again on the short-lived series The Trials of Rosie O'Neill (1990).
- #022
Pete T. Ryan's real name was Peterson. It was not used until the fourth episode of the first season.
- #023
In one episode, Pete occasionally read a detective novel aloud. The novel's events coincided suspiciously well with what the villain, a corrupt private detective, was currently doing.
- #024
When the fourth episode of the previous season aired, the series ranked last in the ratings from the start of the season to that point (although Mulligan's Stew (1977), the season's lowest-rated series, had not yet premiered). CBS, which had ordered and paid for twenty-two episodes, gave the show another chance by placing it in the Monday slot vacated by Rafferty (1977), but the network suffered its only Monday-night decline in its history and the ratings did not improve significantly. In January, CBS cancelled all of its Monday shows (it gave Maude (1972) a Saturday-night death sentence, and cancelled outright The Fitzpatricks (1977), which ranked second from last, and the troubled The Betty White Show (1977)), effectively cancelling this series. Ironically, when the show got a third chance in a Sunday-night time slot that summer, it drew its best ratings ever.
- #025
Years after the series was cancelled, Eddie Albert was proud of Sharon Gless, with whom he had worked on the popular 1980s TV crime drama Cagney & Lacey (1981).
- #026
While working on the series, Robert Wagner also appeared in the film Midway (1976), which was likewise produced by Universal Television.
- #027
In an interview, Sharon Gless said that after she left Marcus Welby, MD (1969), it was Robert Wagner who, as Maggie Philbin's first choice, rescued her from her real-life crisis and revived her career. He was right for the role.
- #028
Co-writer and story consultant David Chase would later write and produce another popular crime drama, The Rockford Files (1974), and later create another famous series, The Sopranos (1999).
- #029
To help Glen A. Larson develop the series, Roy Huggins (who co-created The Rockford Files (1974) with Stephen J. Cannell) introduced him to David Maurer's 1940 book The Big Con, said to be the stolen basis for The Sting (1973). Shortly before that recommendation, James Cagney had introduced him to another Maurer book set in 1920s New York City.
- #030
The series resembled The Rockford Files (1974), which was also produced by Universal Television.
- #031
In the first episode, Ryan was arrested before he went to work for MacBride, and Mac was the top police officer who caught him.
- #032
In the second and third seasons the stories began to grow dull, which led to the series being cancelled.
- #033
Pete Ryan (Robert Wagner) called Frank MacBride (Eddie Albert) a "sadist" when he nearly killed his partner. Eddie had played a sadistic prison guard in The Longest Yard (1974).
- #034
Frank was nearly caught while secretly surveilling an office, and while waiting for the office to empty again he had to climb out the window and stand on a ledge dozens of metres above the ground.
- #035
Roger E. Mosley, Val Bisoglio, Anne Schedeen and Greg Mullavey were the first guest stars in the TV movie pilot episode, while Julie Sommars was the first guest star of the television series.
- #036
Pete served time at San Quentin State Prison.
- #037
This series did not mark the first time Eddie Albert worked with Natalie Wood. Their first encounter was when they worked together on an episode of I'm a Fool (1954).
- #038
Nearly the majority of the episodes took place in nightclubs.
- #039
Switch was the second television series to feature two private detectives working out of a detective agency. The first was Barnaby Jones (1973), which also centered on two private detectives running a detective agency.
- #040
A year after Switch was cancelled, Sharon Gless worked with Edward Albert (son of Eddie Albert) on The Last Convertible (1979), which was also produced by Universal Television.
- #041
Eddie Albert, unhappy with the scripts for the series, offered to pay the writers out of his own pocket in an effort to improve the quality of the scripts.
- #042
The series was replaced in the spring by The Incredible Hulk (1977), also produced by Universal Television, and that summer it returned for its final 10 episodes, which went unaired until it was cancelled outright.
- #043
James Garner accused Glen A. Larson of essentially rewriting the scripts of The Rockford Files (1974) for this series without any permission, and was fined. The writing credit on the episode Death by Resurrection (1975) was revised to go to the writers of the original Rockford episode This Case Is Closed (1974), which also featured Sharon Gless as a guest star, since it was the entire basis of the Switch episode. Even so, Garner felt the penalty taught nothing, because Larson persisted in the plagiarism and later copied the theme music from The Rockford Files for one of his shows.
- #044
Before playing the lead in this series, Sharon Gless had appeared a year earlier as a guest star in an episode of The Rockford Files (1974), playing Rockford's daughter, who wants her father investigated and is planning to marry while Rockford is in trouble in New Jersey and has to return to Los Angeles, where he is kidnapped by gangsters.
- #045
Many of the crew who worked on this series had also worked on the rival detective show The Rockford Files (1974), which was likewise produced by Universal Television and had also aired a year earlier.
- #046
Eddie Albert would also work with Lorenzo Lamas on Falcon Crest (1981), but Lamas never shared a scene with Albert on any of these shows. In one episode Lamas played a bodyguard, and in another a football contestant.
- #047
Eddie Albert spent most of his acting career playing both good-natured men and villains.
- #048
In one episode Ryan said "Golly", a word used in Green Acres (1965), the series Eddie Albert had previously worked on.
- #049
In one episode Pete asked a taxi driver whether his driving instructor was Steve McQueen. Coincidentally, both Robert Wagner and Steve McQueen appeared in the film The War Lover (1962), in which they played bomber pilots.
- #050
Before working with Sharon Gless on Cagney & Lacey (1981), Martin Kove had worked with her on one episode of this series.
- #051
Frank MacBride spent his time in World War II. In real life, Eddie Albert enlisted in the United States Coast Guard and was discharged in 1943 to be commissioned as a lieutenant in the United States Naval Reserve.
- #052
Feather and Father Gang (1976) and McCoy (1975), which copied this series, failed to succeed, unlike this series. The most coincidental thing is that all three shows premiered in the same year.
- #053
Pete Ryan (Robert Wagner) and Malcolm Argos (Charlie Callas) were con men.
- #054
Frank MacBride worked as a police officer before he retired. He came out of retirement and began working as a private detective.
- #055
According to Glen A. Larson, Eddie Albert wanted to play Pete Ryan so that his character could get the girl, but in the end he took the role of Frank MacBride instead and showed up to work in a tracksuit that came down past his knees, and Albert's character was meant to be an unglamorous, cheap police officer.
- #056
Before coming to the audition, Sharon Gless had to cut her hair very short.
- #057
Before sharing the lead in The Incredible Hulk (1977), Jack Colvin appeared as a guest star in an episode of this series as one of the lieutenants.
- #058
Seasons 1 and 2 were successful, while season 3 declined, so it was cancelled in 1978.
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