Detective
programs have been a permanent presence on American television,
and one way to understand them is to recognize that--like their
more numerous siblings, the police shows--their development enacts
in miniature many aspects of the larger history of the medium as
a whole. They begin as live programs, recycling prose fiction, movies
and radio shows, the earliest of them such as Man Against Crime
(1949-56, CBS, NBC, Dumont) and Martin Kane, Private Eye (1949-54,
NBC) conceived and produced in New York City by advertising agencies.
Erik Barnouw's history of American broadcasting discloses that the
tobacco sponsors of Man Against Crime prohibited fires and
coughing from all scripts to avoid negative associations with their
product; the book also describes the technical and narrative crudity
of these early programs. The length of radio episodes could be gauged
accurately by counting the words in the script, but the duration
of live action on TV was unpredictable, varying treacherously from
rehearsal to actual broadcast. To solve this problem, Barnouw writes,
every episode of Man Against Crime ended with a search that
the hero (played by Ralph Bellamy) could prolong or shorten depending
on the time available.
Even
the earliest phase detective shows can be subdivided into recognizable
subgenres. Man Against Crime and Martin Kane are simple
versions of the hard boiled private eye, a figure invented in the
1920s in stories and novels by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler
and reincarnated in the movies of Humphrey Bogart and other tough
guy actors. Other 1950s series recycle detectives in the cerebral,
puzzle-solving tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock
Holmes stories, and Agatha Christie. The character Holmes makes
his first appearance on American television in 1954 in a syndicated
filmed series that lasts only a single season. Ellery Queen, an
American Sherlock Holmes, first appearing in a cycle of popular
novels beginning in 1929, appears on radio a decade later in a long-running
weekly program, and on television in 1950 in a live series, The
Adventures of Ellery Queen (1950-51, Dumont; 1951-52, ABC).
This is the first of four series devoted to Ellery Queen, a mystery
writer and amateur detective who is the direct inspiration for Angela
Lansbury's long-running character in Murder, She Wrote (1984-96,
CBS). The classic whodunit pleasures of Ellery Queen--as well as
its relative indifference to social or psychological realism--are
crystallized in its structure: Queen's adventures in all media usually
conclude with a summary of the story's clues and a challenge to
the reader or viewer to solve the mystery before Ellery himself
supplies the answer in the epilogue.
A
third subgenre of the detective story also makes an early appearance
in the new medium. A hybrid of screwball comedy and mystery, this
format usually centers on the adventures of a married or romantically
entangled couple, amateurs in detection who are often distracted
in the face of villainy and mortal danger by their own erotically-charged
quarrels. Examples: Boston Blackie (1951-53, syndicated),
Mr. and Mrs. North (1952-53, CBS; 1954, NBC) and, a bit later,
The Thin Man (1957-59, NBC). Each of these escapist half-comedies
placed more emphasis on interpersonal badinage than on the realities
of urban crime, although the social whirl of the modern city was
often a background in all three series.
Like most television detectives of the 1950s, these protagonists
had originated in older media. A durable embodiment of disreputable
and elegant self-reliance, Blackie first appears in American magazine
stories at the turn of the century, a jewel thief who moves easily
in high society and has served time in prison but now prevents crime
instead of committing it. Surreptitious and resilient, he turns
up in silent films and reappears in sound movies and on radio in
the 1940s. Still quick with a wisecrack, he is more respectable
in his TV incarnation than his prototypes in the older media, according
to several commentators, and aided by a girlfriend named Mary and
a dog named Whitey, is said to have been remodeled in the image
of the movie version of Nick Charles, hero of The Thin Man,
who is also in partnership with a woman and a dog.
Mr.
and Mrs. North has a similar mixed-media ancestry, originating
in prose fiction in 1940 by a writing couple, Richard and Frances
Lockridge; in the very next year appears as a Broadway play, a Hollywood
movie starring Gracie Allen as Mrs. North, and--most durably--in
a weekly radio series that runs on CBS and later NBC until 1956,
outlasting the TV series to which it gave rise. Gracie Allen's presence
in this catalogue is a decisive clue to the stereotype of the lovably
addled female on which Mr. and Mrs. North relies.
No such stereotype mars The Thin Man, but despite an energetic
performance by Phyllis Kirk as Nora, the TV version is a mere derivative
echo of its famous predecessors, Hammett's 1940 novel and, especially,
the series of five MGM movies starring William Powell and Myrna
Loy as Nick and Nora Charles (1934, 1936, 1939, 1941, 1944). The
Kirk character hints at what comes across with charming serious
authority in Myrna Loy's definitive Nora: unlike her imitators and
competitors, this woman is no mere sidekick but her detective husband's
true moral and intellectual equal--a rare female in this masculine
genre.
Following
the success of I Love Lucy (1951-61, CBS) and Dragnet
(1952-59; revived, 1967-70, NBC), both filmed in Hollywood, production
shifts to film and to the West Coast, and the economic structure
of the new medium is stabilized: production companies sell programs
to the networks, which peddle commercial slots to advertisers who
have no direct creative control over programming. The standard format
for crime shows changes from thirty minutes to an hour in the late
1950s and early 1960s, and crime series begin to exhibit a richer
audio-visual texture, learning to exploit such defining features
of television as its reduced visual field and the mandatory commercial
interruptions.
Such an embrace of some of television's distinctive features surely
helps to explain the success of the Raymond Burr Perry Mason
(1957-66, CBS), one of the first TV series to achieve greater complexity--and
popularity--than the books and radio episodes from which it derives.
An American version of the whodunit, the program is a kind of primer
on the uses and gratifications of genre formulas. Both a courtroom
melodrama and a detective story, its appeal to viewers and its power
as drama are grounded in TV-specific features. Its highly segmented
narrative structure, for example, exploits the commercial interruptions,
organizing the plot in predictable units that offer viewers the
simultaneous pleasures of recognizable variations (different performers,
settings, motives, etc.) within a familiar, orderly pattern. Every
episode begins with a mini-drama, establishing a roster of plausible
suspects for the murder in which it culminates. Every episode dramatizes
the arrest and imprisonment of Perry's client, known to be innocent
by the very fact that Perry has taken on the defense. The second
half-hour of every episode is always a courtroom trial in which
Perry's deductive genius and his brilliance in cross examination
combine to force a confession from the real murderer. Every episode
contains an explanatory epilogue, often at table in a restaurant
or other convivial space signifying the restoration of normality
and order, in which Perry discloses the chain of reasoning that
led him to the truth. This intensification of the structural constraints
inherent in the format of the weekly series strengthens or enables
what must be called the mythic or ritual content of Perry Mason:
an endlessly renewing drama of murder, justice perverted, justice
redeemed.
The very title sequence of Perry Mason signals something
of the way TV drama by the late 1950s had begun to develop an appropriately
smallened audio-visual vocabulary: a confident, swooping camera
glides through a courtroom to a close-up of the hero, its graceful
dipping motion synchronized with the rhythms of Fred Steiner's dramatic
theme music.
Similar
audio-visual effects are intermittently present in two notable series
created by Blake Edwards, Richard Diamond, Private Detective
(1957-60, CBS, NBC) and Peter Gunn (1958-61, NBC, ABC), both
of which center on wise-acre heroes whose sexual bravado is more
important to their appeal than their brains or their marksmanship.
Richard Diamond's place in TV history is secured by two of its
cast members: the protagonist was played by a young David Janssen,
smooth-faced, unfurtive and just learning to mumble, in rehearsal
for his memorable work in The Fugitive (1963-67, ABC) and
Harry O (1974-76, ABC); and the role of Diamond's throaty
secretary belonged briefly in 1959 to Mary Tyler Moore, who received
no billing in the credits and, in keeping with the macho objectification
of women common in detective mythology, was shown on camera only
from the waist down.
Especially
in its music, Peter Gunn was a more compelling program than Richard
Diamond, though its plots were reductive and often as violent
as those of The Untouchables (1959-64, ABC), notorious even
in its own day for its surfeit of murder. Henry Mancini's original
jazz variations--later collected in two best-selling albums--made
an elegant, haunting undersong for the show's moody, film-noirish
editing and camera work. Gunn himself, portrayed in a minimalist
physical style by Craig Stevens, often repaired to a nightclub called
"Mother's" where his girlfriend Edie Hunt (Lola Albright) sang jazz
for a living.
Peter
Gunn had a genuine individuality, but its half-hour episodes,
photographed in black and white, must have seemed obsolete by the
end of the decade. Hour-long series, shot in glossy, high key color
in exotic locales and filled with physical action became the standard
during the 1960s. In a sense this trend was part of the industry
project of finding ways to adapt action-adventure material to the
exigencies of the small screen. Car chases, acrobatic action were
not impossible on television, though such things could never be
as riveting here as in the movies. But artful editing and clever
camera placement--emphasizing action in depth that moved toward
or away from the camera and avoided trajectories that ran across
the screen into its confining borders--could create plausibly exciting
effects. Glossy production values, then, often as an end in themselves,
set the tone for most TV detectives of the 1960s.
One
of the founding programs in this gloss and glamour mode was 77
Sunset Strip (1958-64, ABC), produced by Warner Brothers and
created by Roy Huggins from his own 1946 novel. The theme music
and lyrics for the show aimed for a tone of jivey, youthful "cool"
and included the sound of snapping fingers. The show appealed strongly
to younger viewers, primarily through the character of a jive-talking
parking lot attendant called "Kookie" (Edd Byrnes), who was perpetually
combing his luxuriant wavy hair and trying to persuade the detective
heroes, played by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., and Roger Smith, to let
him work on their investigations. The series title named the agency's
upscale Hollywood address, but many episodes required travel to
exotic foreign locales where the camera could ogle wealth and pulchritude.
Roger Smith wrote and directed the most memorable episode of the
series, "The Silent Caper" (first telecast 3 June 1960), in which
the hero learns about a mob kidnapping from newspaper headlines
in the opening sequence and proceeds to rescue the distressed damsel
in a series of heroic improvisations, the entire adventure unfolding
without a single line of dialogue.
In
this period of what might be called technical exploration, the private
eye genre, like other forms of action- adventure, remains essentially
plot-driven, and despite the fact that the protagonist returns each
week for new adventures, every episode remains self-contained, void
of any memory of prior episodes. Often effective visually but superficial
in content, some of these programs even differentiated their heroes
by strangely external and implausible attributes. Cannon (1971-76,
CBS), played by William Conrad, was balding and fat, but his excessive
weight and his fittingly cumbersome Lincoln Continental automobile
did not noticeably inhibit his script-writers, who provided fisticuffs
and races by foot and by vehicle sufficient to challenge an Olympic
athlete or Grand Prix driver. Even more implausibly, James Franciscus's
Longstreet (1971-72, ABC), was blind, and brought his seeing
eye dog and a special electronic cane to all investigations.
Mannix
(1967-75, CBS) was perhaps the representative private eye of the
era. Played by the rugged and athletic Mike Connors, Mannix was
not physically challenged, but one might be tempted to doubt his
brainpower, for he was quick to the punch and seemed to conduct
most of his investigations by assault and battery.
Finally, in its third or "mature" stage--roughly corresponding to
the mid 1970s and beyond--the private eye series combines the visual
subtlety achieved over more than twenty-five years of such programming
with a new complexity in content. The best detective shows develop
a memory, the hero's prior adventures bear upon his current ones
and characters from earlier episodes or seasons reappear, adding
complexity to themes and relationships. In the richest such programs
character, not violent action, drives the story, and the subject
matter itself engages reality more seriously and topically than
the muscle-flexing violence of earlier shows had generally allowed.
Harry
O (1974-76, ABC) and The Rockford Files (1974-80, NBC)
are the primary examples of these principles of accretion and refinement.
Equivalent instances among police shows are Police Story (1973-77,
NBC), Hill Street Blues (1981-87, NBC), NYPD. Blue (1993-
), Law and Order (1990- ) and Homicide (1993-99).
But a significant minority of other detective series beginning in
the 1970s and after also achieve new levels of excellence and imaginative
energy, combining memorable acting with elegant cinematography and,
often, superior writing to become, at the least, provocative entertainment.
A short list of these programs:
Such programs include Columbo (1971-77, NBC; continuing as
an occasional TV- movie), technically a policeman but in spirit
one of American television's wittiest variations on the mystery-puzzle
format--the detective as triumphant (and dogged) rationalist as
well as working class avenger. Tenafly (1973-74, NBC), was
a short-lived but thoughtful series centered on a black private
eye, played by James McEachin, whose gentleness and husbandly decency
undermine many media stereotypes. Magnum, PI (1980-88, CBS)
starred Tom Sellek as an engaging and self-deprecating Vietnam veteran,
living in the guest cottage on a picturesque estate in an even more
picturesque Hawaii. Magnum's character deepens as the series continues,
and some episodes explore the show's relation to its detective-story
ancestry with modesty and wit. Moonlighting (1985-89, ABC) was a
frequently brilliant, though also abrasive post-modern variation
on the Thin Man formula, with Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd,
in fighting trim, trading insults and cracking wise through the
run of the series.
Harry
O and Rockford remain the most compelling private detectives
in television history. Both series are the work of writers, directors
and producers with long experience in the crime genre and a specific
history of collaboration with their stars. Janssen's creative ensemble
included Howard Rodman, creator of the show and writer of the two
pilot films that led to the series, producer-director Jerry Thorpe,
directors Paul Wendkos, Richard Lang, Jerry London; and writers
Michael Sloan, Robert C. Dennis, Stephen Kandel, and Robert Dozier.
Garner's collaborators included his former agent-turned-executive
producer Meta Rosenberg and such TV veterans as Roy Huggins, Stephen
J. Cannell, David Chase, Juanita Bartlett, and Charles Floyd Johnson,
some of whom had worked with him in movies and in his earliest jobs
in television.
Anti-heroic
in tone, both series draw creatively on their stars' previous work
and also reflect something of the legacy of the anti-war movement
and the broad social turmoil of the late 1960s and early 19070s.
In a way both, Harry and Rockford are adult drop-outs, living unpretentiously
along the beaches of southern California. (Rockford's minimal domicile
is actually a mobile home.) But both protagonists are a generation
older than the youthful protesters of that era, and they project
a wariness and skepticism that seem to originate not in naiveté
or adolescent discontent but in part in the muddles, disillusionments,
even the physical humiliations of reach middle age.
Janssen's
Orwell especially is a figure of pain and diminished expectations,
divorced and solitary, living on a disability pension from the San
Diego police department. Fitting himself with rueful slowness into
his broken-down toy of a sports car, middle aged and sagging like
its owner, or stiffly climbing the wooden steps of his rickety beach
house, he seems a subversively modest hero, the fugitive grown older
and wiser.
Less
melancholy and wincing than Harry Orwell, Rockford is unpretentious
and decent, equally post-heroic, probably the only TV detective
to spend more time nursing his own injuries than inflicting them
on others. Both Rockford and Orwell are great wheedlers, more likely
to coddle or flatter information out of their sources than to threaten
them. "Why should I answer you?" asks an officious bureaucrat in
one episode of Harry O. Janssen's response is characteristic, a
half-audible mumble, delayed for a moment as he settles on the edge
of the bureaucrat's desk: "Because my feet hurt?"
Rockford
is the richer, more various and more playful text, partly because
it had the advantage of lasting six years, while Harry O was canceled
abruptly after its second season despite reasonably strong ratings,
possibly a casualty of the crescendo of complaints against media
violence that developed in the mid 1970s. Like the police series
that appear in the same "late" period of the network era, Rockford
is something of a hybrid, combining elements of comedy and the daytime
continuing serial with the private eye format. Though Rockford's
adventures are self- contained, usually concluding within the confines
of a single episode, his father "Rocky" (Noah Beery) and a wide
circle of friends and professional colleagues are recurring characters,
and the momentum of their lives as well as their unstable, shifting
intimacy with Rockford himself deepen and complicate the
program. The recurring women characters in Rockford--Jim's tough,
competent lawyer Beth Davenport (Gretchen Corbett); the blind psychologist
Megan Dougherty (Kathryn Harrold), a client who becomes Jim's lover;
and Rita Capkovic (Rita Moreno), a resilient, loquacious prostitute
who enlists Rockford's help in changing her life--exhibit qualities
of intelligence, moral courage and independence rare in women characters
in our popular culture and virtually non-existent in the molls and
dolls of detective stories.
Valuable
as a corrective to the still widespread notion that TV programs
and especially crime shows are interchangeable and entirely ephemeral,
the essentially internal history proposed here must be complicated
and supplemented by other perspectives. Recent scholarship on popular
culture would suggest in the broadest sense the TV detective show
is part of a larger cultural project in which the conventions of
genre function in part as enabling devices, their reassuring familiarity
licensing an exploration of topics that might otherwise be too disturbing
or threatening to acknowledge or discuss openly. On this view all
television programs, and particularly the prime time genres, collectively
sustain an open-ended, ongoing conversation about the nature of
American culture, about our values and the norms of social life.
Cop and private eye shows are fables of justice, heroism and deviancy,
symbolically or imaginatively "policing" the unstable boundaries
that define public or consensus ideas about crime, urban life, gender
norms, the health or sickness of our institutions. The progression,
that is, from Dragnet to Hill Street Blues discloses
aspects of a social history of our society. But this is not a simple
affirmation of such stories, nor of some comforting progress-myth.
For our genre texts carry and rehearse and diffuse the lies, the
prejudices and self-delusions of our society as well as its ideals.
Harry 0 and Rockford share the prime time schedule
with Mannix and Charlie's Angels (1976-81, ABC). Inevitably
ambivalent, in conflict with themselves, genre stories reflect and
embody cultural divisions.
A
chief virtue, then, of television's most fundamental of all programs,
the series, is precisely that it is continuing, theoretically endless.
In this the TV series embodies a great and useful truth: that culture
itself is a process, a shifting, unequal, endless contention among
traditional and emerging forces. -David Thorburn
