No other casting choices were discussed, according to Cannell. According to Cannell, Musante declined to continue after the first season, and the network was in search of a similar show. That gritty series based on the real-life experiences of an unconventional undercover cop starred Tony Musante. ABC was in talks with the actor when the acclaimed series “Toma” ran from 1973-74. “Baretta” came along when Blake was near the top of his acting game. “I think he uses it in the performance,” Cannell said. Cannell (who died in 2010) once noted that Blake was as brilliant as Baretta but that “the devil gets into him,” creating part of the intensity seen onscreen. Upon news of Blake’s possible involvement in Bakley’s murder, many remarked about the “eerie” similarity to the actor’s most famous film role in Richard Brooks’ 1967 adaptation of Truman Capote’s novel-as-reportage “In Cold Blood,” in which Blake and Scott Wilson played the young killers of an entire Kansas family. Speaking in a 2011 interview with Tavis Smiley, Blake acknowledged, “If I weren’t so sick and so troubled, I might not have been an actor.” Blake was acquitted of the murder charge, as well as of one count of soliciting murder, in his criminal trial in 2005, but in a civil trial later that year, he was found liable for the wrongful death of his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, and ordered to pay her family $30 million, a sum later halved by an appeals court.

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