Most of Rolfe's career was spent in television. Rolfe flourished as a freelance writer, producer and showrunner over a career that lasted four decades. In 1963 David Susskind and Dan Melnick hired Rolfe as a vice-president at their
Talent Associates-Paramount, Ltd. production company. Three weeks later, Rolfe quit saying he felt better working alone and that he should resign "before I involved myself too deeply".
Cheyenne Rolfe wrote the 1958 "The Last Comanchero" episode starring
Edd Byrnes.
Johnny Nighthawk Co-written by Rolfe, Lou Morheim and Barney Slater in 1959, this
Alcoa-Goodyear Theatre episode was an unsold pilot for a proposed series about the exploits of Johnny Nighthawk, the adventurous owner and pilot of a one-plane airline.
The Twilight Zone Using a script outline created by Rolfe in 1961,
Rod Serling wrote
A Quality of Mercy, the 80th episode of the American television anthology series
The Twilight Zone.
The Eleventh Hour Rolfe was a contract writer for CBS but left in 1962 to produce
The Eleventh Hour, a
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer star vehicle for
Wendell Corey. Rolfe co-wrote the lyrics to the show's second season theme song "Theme from The Eleventh Hour" with
Harry Sukman. The score was written by Irving Elman.
Have Gun - Will Travel Rolfe co-created the highly regarded television western series
Have Gun – Will Travel for CBS from 1957 through 1963 with
Herb Meadow. Rolfe had approached CBS with a show idea featuring a contemporary New York City private eye who perused out of town newspapers for leads for work. The network said they were more interested in a Western, so Rolfe changed both the era and the locale of the proposed show. Rolfe's primary character was "Paladin", a professional gunfighter named after one of Charlemagne's knights and played by
Richard Boone. Not a typical television western cowboy, Paladin was almost an anti-hero. Set in the 1870s, Paladin lived in San Francisco's Hotel Carlton and charged a $1,000 (or higher) fee for his services. If he chose to help someone who couldn't afford his fee, he would work for free.
Have Gun - Will Travel was the third most watched television program in America during the show's first three years. The song was chosen one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time by the
Western Writers of America. Rolfe and Meadow hired a number of new writers during the show's 6-year run, many of whom would later create outstanding television, film and books. Among them:
Gene Roddenberry, creator and writer of the original
Star Trek series, wrote 23 episodes of
Have Gun - Will Travel and won a
Writer's Guild award for one of them,
Bruce Geller, creator of the TV series
Mission: Impossible and
Mannix,
Sam Peckinpah who would later direct the film
The Wild Bunch and
Irving Wallace, author of the books
The Agony and the Ecstasy and
The Man also wrote for the show.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Producer
Norman Felton had been developing a television spy series named
Solo with
Ian Fleming, the creator of
James Bond. Fleming named the proposed series' lead character "Napoleon Solo" but hadn't told Felton the character name had already been used in the script of the upcoming
Goldfinger film.
Cubby Broccoli, producer of the Bond films, forbade Fleming to continue working on Felton's project. Felton then approached Rolfe, who was at that time working on
The Eleventh Hour. Felton asked Rolfe to create a framework for the series. Rolfe's 80 page prospectus for the show included the show name
The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the pilot episode "The Vulcan Affair", created the backstory for the
U.N.C.L.E. organization including the acronym and 30 story ideas.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. gun Rolfe's attention to detail included specifying special props necessary to create the show's illusion of world spycraft, including the famous "Man From U.N.C.L.E. gun". Rolfe said "I wanted one gun capable of shooting single shots or rapid-fire automatic shots, with sound or silently. I also wanted sleep inducing darts, explosive bullets and just bullets, and a gun that could convert to a long-range rifle. I wanted everything in the U.N.C.L.E. gun, and the one thing I had forgot, I had put in the Thrush gun - an infra-red light, so the Thrush people could shoot at night". The guns themselves actually received 500 fan letters a week, many simply addressed to "The Gun".
Departed the show Rolfe left the show at the end of its first season. After his departure the show changed direction and exchanged its subtle, tongue-in-cheek humour for more overt gags, culminating in the high-camp third season. Rolfe did not approve of the change in direction and felt the show lost its way after the first season. In an interview given shortly before his death he commented: I've always felt
U.N.C.L.E. was a show that needed a particular kind of a mind to direct it. You needed somebody that could do drama and then also lay humor into it but could sense when the humor had to be stopped and when you had to make the drama take over. And you could talk forever about it, but unless you walk in with that instinct, you're not going to get it. And I think that some of the people that followed me didn't have an instinct for it. So they got silly with it... They never sat down, they didn't really grasp the drama - that you had to have the dramatic spine. ==Later career==