This episode drew a 23.5 rating and 37 share (about one rating point behind "Columbo," the network's number one hit), astonishingly high for a series that had been written off as dead the previous season and had been delayed until after the November sweeps so it wouldn't drag down the Sunday Mystery Movie's average rating. NBC quickly scheduled three more episodes to run in January. The bottom fell out of the ratings (it didn't help that the Janaury 23 and 30 episodes went up against "Roots"), and the show was shelved again until March. The series had an average rating of 17.5 for the season, which taken as a whole was acceptable (and ran ahead of "McCloud" by two rating points), but there was no saving it, "McCloud" or the unfortunate "Lanigan's Rabbi" (brought in as a midseason replacement for "Quincy," which was going it alone as a weekly series).
To explain the absence of Sally, it's now 8 months after Sally died in a plane crash.
The series from this point on could be argued to be a "spin-off," since the title and basic premise both changed dramatically. McMillan and Wife was now called simply McMillan, and two of the show's four main characters had departed. This version only survived for a single season.
This was the first episode aired after two of the four principle cast members decided to leave the series. Susan Saint James wouldn't agree to the terms of the contract NBC and Universal offered her at the end of the fifth season, and Nancy Walker left when she was signed to star in her own series on another network. Walker's character of the maid/housekeeper was replaced by Martha Raye in a similar role, and Saint James' as Rock Hudson's wife and romantic interest morphed into a series of guest star "girlfriends."
The white car driven by Jeff is a De Tomaso Pantera.