"The irony? Richard Kimble is innocent..."

I felt a little frisson Wednesday night when I tuned into NBC's broadcast of the show's original episode.

This felt different from watching old TV shows on cable. Cable always seems like a sparsely populated universe far removed from real time.

But here was the original "Fugitive" on network prime-time, broadcast to a wide audience, just the way it used to be. Here were the familiar credits (A QM Production). Here were the familiar scene designations (Act I, Act II, Act III and that dramatic, tragic word: Epilog).

Here was David Janssen.

On Thursday, I heard a number of old "Fugitive" fans say that watching Wednesday night's rerun transported them back to their childhoods.

There was the oddity of watching black and white in prime time. There was the oddity of seeing a percolator instead of a Mr. Coffee, a phone that rang eternally without a machine to answer, an airport where passengers disembarked on the tarmac.

Under the spell of "The Fugitive" Wednesday, I could clearly see my siblings and me frantically finishing our homework and the dishes to make sure we could tune in on time. I could see our mad scramble to claim our places on chairs and the sofa. We may have loved the "Man from UNCLE," but only "The Fugitive" could make us shut up for an entire hour.