"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: The John Gregory Orchestra, "It Takes a Thief"

Song: "It Takes a Thief" by The John Gregory Orchestra
Released: 1972
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: British bandleader/arranger John "Chaquito" Gregory's cover of Dave Grusin's slick It Takes a Thief theme lacks the funky bass playing and urgent percussion that I love so much about Grusin's third-season arrangement of the theme. But Gregory's rendition is the only cover of the theme that's available (it's also the only recording of the theme that's available), so it'll do.

The It Takes a Thief theme is my favorite Grusin tune. It's the perfect opener for a '60s espionage procedural I've often found to be more enjoyable than most '60s American spy shows because it has a criminal as its hero, which is more interesting to me than the company man types who were frequently the leads in '60s spy shows. Plus, as Alexander Mundy, Robert Wagner was the epitome of cool and quite skilled with the show's moments of light, not-too-campy-like-the-worst-seasons-of-U.N.C.L.E. comedy. This ease with comedy was a skill that the future Number Two later put to great use when he literally made a mess of his debonair image in the funniest thing he ever did, the 1989 SNL "Sloppy Eater" sketch (Parks and Recreation has got to find a way for Rob Lowe to work in his amusing and dead-on Wagner impression, which he's done in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and on talk shows).

In 2006, Universal announced that Will Smith was attached to a big-screen version of It Takes a Thief, which hasn't been made yet. Nah, I can't see him playing a smooth thief like Mundy. Smith is more entertaining when he's playing a fish-out-of-water hero like in the original Men in Black and Hancock and is less entertaining when he tries to be suave. Mundy is more of a Taye Diggs or Idris Elba role or a role for Michael Weatherly, whose onscreen dad on NCIS happens to be Wagner himself.

Pushing for more Asian Americans as leads on screen or in fiction is an uphill battle that I continue to be passionate about, so why not think outside the box and get Sung Kang from Justin Lin's Fast Five, who looked like he was channeling Mundy in that surprisingly good heist flick, to play him? Just rename him Alexander Moon.

Then again, why make an It Takes a Thief movie when the USA show White Collar is currently doing a better job at channeling Wagner's old show than whatever the movie version would have attempted to do?

The people who run Sleuth have no Cloo

When NBCUniversal (now one word instead of two) added Sleuth to its stable of cable channels in 2006, it was an alright idea for a channel: Nick at Nite with guns. For its first couple of years, Sleuth's 24-hour lineup was comprised of reruns of NBCUniversal-owned cop or detective shows like Dragnet, Magnum, P.I., Miami Vice and the always-worth-revisiting Homicide: Life on the Street.

But like so many other channels, of course, Sleuth has strayed from its original purpose. These days, DirecTV channel 308 is an ill-defined dumping ground for reruns of current original shows from its sister station USA (Royal Pains, In Plain Sight)--and Walker, Texas Ranger. With content like a doctor show (Royal Pains), a cop show with very little detective work because of its focus on witness protection (In Plain Sight) and a cop show with no detective work that's only watchable when Conan O'Brien's around to butt in with snarky and appalled commentary (Walker), the name Sleuth doesn't make much sense anymore. Cloo--the new name that Sleuth will assume on a yet-to-be-confirmed future date a la the still-inane 2009 conversion of its other sister station Sci Fi to Syfy--makes even less sense. What's next? NBCUniversal rebranding USA as YouSA? (They also own Telemundo. Maybe they should rename it YouEse.)

Occasionally, Sleuth has done something nice like temporarily revive a show I've longed to see again (Keen Eddie, The Rockford Files) or air a 007 marathon or the surprisingly good 1973 made-for-TV caper movie/unsold anthology show pilot The Alpha Caper, which isn't on DVD and stars Henry Fonda as a forcibly retired parole officer who teams up with the ex-cons he used to watch over--two of whom are played by Leonard Nimoy and Larry Hagman--to hijack a shipment of gold. But otherwise, as a fan of the private eye and caper genres, I've found Sleuth to be a wasted opportunity, regurgitating too many of the same broadcast network procedural reruns that can already be found on USA (House, NCIS).

Unless it's airing a White Collar episode I've never seen before or a Burn Notice rerun with a useful spy tip I need to jot down, Sleuth isn't worth my time. The channel's so cheap it doesn't have any on-air hosts or any original programming that could have given Sleuth a distinctive personality, like how breezy procedurals have become USA's forte or how FX has become synonymous with edgy comedies and gritty and violent but intelligently written dramas (the only original show that Sleuth has produced is a 2006 I Love the '80s-style special about "America's Top Sleuths").

It's owned by NBCUniversal and it's called Sleuth (that is until the name change to Cloo takes place), so why isn't the channel diving into the NBCUniversal library, with its vast history of influential crime shows, and pulling out classic sleuthy properties like Columbo (R.I.P. Peter Falk) or the other NBC Mystery Movie shows? Shouldn't a channel called Sleuth be a little, uh, sleuthier?

Also, as someone who stopped finding Law & Order interesting after an ailing Jerry Orbach left the mothership (although the later pairing of Jesse L. Martin and Jeremy Sisto was a great and too-brief one during the mothership's Law half, as was the duo of Chris Noth and Annabella Sciorra on Criminal Intent), I don't think Sleuth needs to be another repository for Criminal Intent and Special Victims Unit reruns (TNT has exclusive rights to reruns of the mothership, which explains its absence on the NBCUniversal channels' schedules). Okay, maybe Criminal Intent is tolerable once every weekday, but a five-hour Goren-thon like the ones Sleuth often does is overkill. Plus, Sleuth is the sixth channel on the dial that currently airs Criminal Intent reruns, after USA, Bravo, Oxygen, WGN and the local MyNetworkTV affiliate. Enough already, man.