Richard Levinson teamed with William Link to write and produce some of the most memorable hours of U.S. network television in the history of the medium. Moving easily from series to made-for-television movies, the partners created, wrote, and produced at a level that led many of their peers to describe them as the Rolls and Royce of the industry. They received two Emmys, two Golden Globe Awards, three Edgar Allan Poe Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, the Writers Guild of America Award, and the Peabody Award.

As high school classmates, Levinson and Link made early use of wire recordings as an aid to developing their dramatic writing skills, then continued their collaboration through university studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Following graduation and military service, the two moved to New York to pursue a career in television, only to discover that the production end of the business had largely moved west. In 1959, their drama about army life, "Chain of Command," was produced as an installment of Desilu Playhouse, then chosen by TV Guide as one of the best programs of the season. With that success, the team, known fondly by many of their associates as "the boys," moved to Los Angeles, where in 1960 they were the first writers placed under contract by Four Star Productions.

For the first ten years of their work in Hollywood, Levinson and Link wrote episodes for various television series. In 1967 they created one of their own: Mannix. However, that series was taken in a direction opposite to their original intention by head writer Bruce Geller. In 1969 the partners first grappled with contemporary problems in a pilot for the lawyers segment of The Bold Ones. Their work on this series pre­ saged their use of television to explore serious social and cultural themes in the made-for-television-movie format. They wrote and produced nine "social issue" films as well as launched one of the most popular of all television detectives, Lt. Columbo.

Frustrated by Hollywood production routines, Levinson and Link had returned briefly to New York earlier in the decade to write a stage play titled Prescription: Murder. That play introduced the Columbo character and became the foundation for the Columbo series, starring Peter Falk, which began on television in 1971 as part of The NBC Mystery Movie. As Levin­ son noted in an interview, "Columbo was a conscious reaction against the impetuous force of Joe Mannix." Columbo was, at one point, the most popular television show in the world. Translated into numerous languages, the show still retains enormous popularity.

In November 1983, Link and Levinson went to Toronto to film an HBO movie, The Guardian, examining urban violence, fear, and responses to those realities. After a long and frustrating effort to cast the film on a very tight budget, Link and Levinson chose Louis Gossett Jr. to play the title character, John Mack, and Martin Sheen to play the protagonist, Mr. Hyatt. In the movie, Hyatt and his fellow tenants in a New York apartment feel so threatened by the growing violence in the neighborhood that they hire a professional "guardian," only to discover that this man quickly establishes his own authority over them, one by one. In the course of the story, Mack successfully intimidates all the tenants even as he physically subdues and ultimately kills an intruder. One after another, the tenants trade freedom for security. Hyatt resists until he is threatened by a street gang and Mack saves his life.

As always, Levinson worried about the climax of the piece, left intentionally ambiguous. The final scene in The Guardian is an exchange of glances between Mack and Hyatt as the latter leaves the building for work the morning following his rescue. Sheen noted in an interview on the set that he played the expression to convey a sense of "What have I done?" Levinson, however, saw in the final frame on Hyatt a "spark of hope." In either interpretation, the underlying question of the drama is made clear: does security demand denial of freedom? Sheen saw it as a parable and related the story to his own concerns regarding U.S. military­ political issues and the belief that the only way to get security is to give up more and more freedom. For the writers, the television movie was "only" posing questions. But they saw the implications of what they were doing. In the end, the descent character was not a hero, and the frozen stare could signal either hope or despair.

 Long and intense conversations between the writers on such issues regularly led to that same conclusion: "We don't have to have the answers, we just raise the questions." For Levinson, however, the posing of such questions set his personal direction as a dramatist. O:1e sees this in the Crisis at Central High (1981), where Joanne Woodward portrayed assistant principal Eliza­beth Huckaby in a drama about racial integration set in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1958. Although evenhanded, the moral high ground in the movie belongs to Huck­aby and integration. Levinson 's moral questions are equally evident in the sympathetic treatment of Private Eddie Slovik in the story of the only U.S. soldier executed for desertion in World War II, The Execution of Private Slovik (1974), and they inform the search for responsibility and judgment in The Storyteller (1977), an exploration of the role of television in instigating social violence.

In the summer of 1986, just a few months prior to his premature death, Levinson explored the problems inherent in another high-profile social issue-terror­ism-in his last script, "United States vs. Salaam Ajami." The television movie was finally aired in early 1988 as Hostile Witness. In the film, he sought to provide a valid defense for a Lebanese terrorist charged in a U.S. court for a crime committed in Spain against an American tour group. In the story, the terrorist is kidnapped and brought to justice in a federal court in Virginia. Striving to achieve an objective portrayal of the motives for the terrorist and introduce to the audience some comprehension of such an individual's rationale, Levinson was determined to raise philosophical questions, but he wanted no weaknesses in the case against the terrorist.

     In 1987 Levinson died at the age of 52. When Link accepted their joint election into the Television Hall of Fame in November 1995, his words were almost all devoted to Levinson, who would, he said, be pleased with the recognition.