I may well be overly harsh toward
Nowhere Man, but I found it frustratingly contrived. What I hated -- on top of the absurdity of an "everyone's out to get you" premise set out in the wild all over the country instead of in a finite, controlled environment, and the general sense that they had no consistent idea what the conspiracy was actually about -- was that the lead character's paranoia always failed him
exactly at the moments when he needed it most. For most of an episode, we'd see him acting with caution and suspicion toward people, aware that They were out to get him and that anyone could be Their agents -- but then, at exactly the moment when it was most obvious to me that he was being led into a trap, he would suddenly become utterly trusting and gullible and allow himself to be trapped.
Of course, that relates to why I don't like paranoia-based stories in general, because they're so damn predictable. It's always self-evident that nothing is what it seems, anyone who looks friendly is going to betray the hero, everything is always going to turn out in the worst possible way, etc. There's no suspense because you can see the twists coming a mile away.
Anyway,
Nowhere Man's creator Lawrence Hertzog really seemed to like
The Fugitive knockoffs. Five years earlier, he made a failed pilot called
Project: Tinman that was shown in one of those "showcase" nights that networks used to have where they'd burn off a couple of rejected pilots in their movie-of-the-week slot, and I happened to record it on my VCR. I still have a copy, and last year I rewatched it and
reviewed it for my blog. I remembered liking it because it was similar to Roddenberry's
The Questor Tapes, but on revisiting it, I found that it wasn't very good at all, more like the watered-down, network-mandated retool of
Questor that Roddenberry self-cancelled the series rather than agreeing to make.
)
