Mannix

I've been watching the episodes on MeTV, which airs old stuff.

I saw a few of the first season before he switched to private practice. As a corporate private copy, he carried a PPK. As a solo practitioner, he carried a Detective Special. Which he could shoot, including hitting a laterally-moving target at 50 yards or better. His car phone was a full-duplex radio set; the calls went through an operator.

The one thing that was really nice was the episodic nature of the show. Too much of television has gotten into long story arcs, where if you haven't seen the previous episodes, you've no clue as to what is going on. You can watch an episode of Mannix and as long as you know that he's a private cop and that his secretary, Peggy Fair, was a widow raising a son, you pretty much had all of the background that you need to know in order to enjoy the show.

Don't get me wrong, extended storytelling is very effective. The Americans would pretty much such with stand-alone episodes. Still, it's nice to look at a few episodes collected on the ol' DVR and know that it doesn't matter in which order they're watched.

As for the guns: Colt and S&W revolvers, mostly. The only automatics I've seen so far have been PPKs and 1911s. One episode had Mexican Caballeros patrolling a hacienda; they had SA Colts (or imitations, it being Hollywood in the late 1960s).