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No sooner had Raymond Burr ended his nine-year run as TV's Perry Mason than he jumped full-force into another long-running series, Ironside. One of the first of the "gimmick" cop dramas, this property was introduced as a two-hour, made-for-TV movie on March 28, 1967, in which it was established that Robert T. Ironside (who else but Burr?), chief of detectives for the San Francisco Police Department, had been wounded by a sniper's bullet, which damaged his spine and left him paralyzed from the waist down. Though forcibly retired after 25 years on the force, the irascible, now wheelchair-bound Ironside refused to remain inactive. Setting up living quarters in an empty office, Ironside launched a new career as private detective and--with the blessings of police commissioner Dennis Randall (Gene Lyons)--special SFPD consultant. Naturally, Ironside's physical limitations obliged him to take on a team of loyal assistants, beginning with his former colleagues, Sgt. Ed Brown (Don Galloway) and socialite-turned-policewman Eve Whitfield (Barbara Anderson). Comparatively new to the team was Mark Sanger (Don Mitchell), a former street punk who hired on as Ironside's bodyguard and aide; by the time the series had run its course, Mark had become a lawyer and family man, marrying a woman named Diana (Joan Pringle) while on a case. As for the others on the team, Eve Whitfield departed after four seasons due to a contract dispute between Barbara Anderson and the series' producers; her replacement was rookie cop Fran Belding (Elizabeth Baur), the daughter of a murdered police captain. Created by Collier Young, the weekly, hour-long version of Ironside ran on NBC from September 14, 1967 through January 16, 1975. The series yielded a pair of brief cop-show spinoffs, the George Kennedy vehicle Sarge and the Jessica Walter starrer Amy Prentiss. And in 1993, many of the original cast members were summoned for a TV-movie "reunion",The Return of Ironside.