He's a convict who has exhausted all appeals. He's also an innocent victim of blind justice.

But as the train hurtles him toward his destiny, fate intervenes. A switch is missed, the train derails and Kimble is free. Free "to hide in lonely desperation. To change his identity. To toil at many jobs." Free "to search for a one-armed man he saw leave the scene of the crime." Free "to run before the relentless pursuit of the police lieutenant obsessed with his capture."

Through four prime-time seasons (1963-67), Dr. Kimble (played by David Janssen) became one of the most famous characters in TV history: "The Fugitive." When it aired 40 years ago Wednesday, the final episode -- featuring Kimble's final confrontation with the one-armed man -- became the highest-rated TV episode in history. (Even today, only the final episode of "M*A*S*H" and the "Who Shot J.R.?" episode of "Dallas" rank higher among series episodes.)

I discovered "The Fugitive" in reruns in the early 1990s. I watched it every day, taped every episode. When those videocassettes faded, I bought bootleg DVDs of the program from Canada. When Paramount Home Entertainment began releasing restored versions of the program on DVD this month, I was beyond thrilled.

You don't need me to tell you "The Fugitive" was a great show, graced with fine writing, wonderful acting, tension-filled scripts and William Conrad's stentorian narrations opening and closing each episode. TV Guide hailed it as "the best TV drama of the 1960s." The writer Stephen King deemed it "absolutely the best series done on American television."

It's also the most daring and subversive network series ever broadcast.

"Daring" is a relative term in TV land, where the primary mission is offering Americans escape from the real world. In 1967, for example, when hippies celebrated the summer of love, race riots burned and U.S. soldiers fought in Vietnam, the top three programs were "The Andy Griffith Show," "The Lucy Show" and "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C."

Even "All in the Family" was behind the cultural curve. The show was celebrated for depicting the tension between middle America (represented by Archie Bunker) and the counterculture (embodied by his son-in-law, Michael Stivic), but this battle had been raging for years by the time "All in the Family" premiered in 1971.

Questions for a culture

"The Fugitive," on the other hand, pushed the envelope as it beamed a true counterculture message into the homes of rock-ribbed Americans. Kimble's travails articulated the broad discontent, the mistrust of authority and the concern for the downtrodden that were blossoming in the 1960s.

Like the heroes of Jack Kerouac's seminal Beat generation novel, Kimble lived "on the road." The show's first episode was set in Tucson, Ariz. The next week found him in the Missouri hills. Then it was on to West Virginia, California, New Mexico, Alaska. Through these travels he embodied a desire for freedom and adventure at odds with the safe comfort of suburban life spreading across post-war America.

The most mobile man in a famously mobile society, Kimble was also the king of reinvention in the land of reinvention: Each stop brought a different name and a different job. One week he was James Lincoln, bartender; then Jim Fowler, handyman; then Al Fleming, gas station attendant.

Kimble, of course, did not seek this liberty. He had been forced to drop out of mainstream society. He wanted to clear his name and settle back into the bourgeois life he had known in Stafford, Ind. But for viewers, the rambling life of this proto-hippie seemed intensely exciting.

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