Obituary: Robert Guy Barrows (1926-2008)

Television writer Robert Guy Barrows died on January 31.  Barrows penned scripts for some of the top dramas, action shows, and westerns of the mid-sixties and early seventies: Ben Casey, Big Valley, Daniel Boone, Mission: Impossible, The Virginian, Run For Your Life, four for The Man Who Never Was.  He wrote the Fugitive episode wherein Kimble hides out in a home for the sightless and solves the problems of several embittered blind people, and three Kraft Suspense Theatres including “The Gun,” a strident gun control piece starring Eddie Albert.  My favorite Barrows script was his first Kraft, “The Machine That Played God,” with Anne Francis as a woman who kills her abusive husband in self-defense, but starts to lose confidence in her version of events after she flunks a lie detector test.

Barrows wrote most (but not all) of those scripts with his second wife, Judith, who was nine years his junior.  Shortly after Judith died in a car accident in 1970, Barrows’ productivity as a TV writer largely ceased.

In latter years Barrows had returned to his home state of Colorado, and recently resurfaced on the web.