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A lot of the non-sitcom TV shows were shot on the Universal lot. Always the same streets. And all those car chases in the same Los Angeles canyons.

I loved The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman when they first aired .Over a decade ago, I bought the DVDs. Hadn't seen the show in over 30 years.

Jamie Sommers helps a scientist defect from East Germany. They have a car chase in dry canyon country (obviously Los Angeles, not East Germany). An East German helicopter chases them with a machine gun (though no machine gun is visible on the helicopter). We cut to the helicopter's interior -- and see rice paddies below -- obviously stock footage from Vietnam. And the same exterior shot of Stasi hq is used three times -- with the same people walking by the building.

OK, the crime-action shows will always suffer from cheap production values compared to sit-coms. So yes, many scenes in Mannix take place in the Brady household. A lot of the rich people's houses in Columbo also seemed familiar, as did the Rolls-Royces. The Fugitive and the Rockford Files are two action dramas that disguised the cost cutting fairly well, and remain quite watchable. For shows like "Get Smart" and "Batman" the cheese is a featured ingredient. Oddly, an attempt to revive the formula in "Sledgehammer!" in the '80s failed, and I blame the lack of chemistry between the leads. Also, the short-lived Logan's Run TV show also failed as Gregory Hines and Heather Manzies (sp?, RIP) had limited acting chops and les chemistry, unlike Michael York and Jenny Agutter in the big screen version.

Contrast that with the Odd Couple, where I believe Tony Randall/Jack Klugman exceeded the chemistry of Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau and far-surpassed the likeability (which is necessary in a long-running sitcom vs. a 90 minute movie).