Even the earliest 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 Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. 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, is born in a cycle of popular novels beginning in 1929, transfers to radio a decade later in a long-running weekly program, and migrates to television in 1950 in a live series, The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1950-51, Dumont: 1951-52, American Broadcasting Company [ABC]). This is the first of four series devoted to Ellery Queen, a mystery writer and amateur detective who is the direct inspiration for Angele 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 subgenere 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 include 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, then in the very next year is thrice reborn— in a Broadway play, in 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 catalog is a decisive clue to the stereotype of the lovable 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 1934 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 Myrna Loy’s definitive Nora: unlike her imitators and competitors, this woman is no mere sidekick but rather 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; and yet again in 2003, ABC), 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 30 minutes to an hour in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and crime series begin to exploit such defining features of television as it reduced visual field and the mandatory commercial interruptions.

Such an embrace of some of television’s distinctive features surely helps 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, and so on) within a familiar, orderly pattern. Every episode begins with a minidrama, 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 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 what must be called the mythic or ritual content of Perry Mason: an endlessly renewing drama of murder, justice perverted, and 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 minimized audiovisual vocabulary: a confident, swooping camera glides through a courtroom to a close-up of the hero, its graceful dipping motion a visual tracing of the rhythms of Fred Steiner’s dramatic themed music.

Similar audiovisual 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 wiseacre 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, not furtive, 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 bestselling albums) provided an elegant, haunting accompaniment to 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 (and wore extreme décolletage) 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 and 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 ram across the screen into its confining borders— could create plausibility 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 the 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 tune 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 June 3, 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 subtle visually but superficial in content, some of these programs even differentiated their heroes by strangely external and implausible attitudes. Cannon (1971-76, CBS), played by William Conrad, was balding and fat, but his excessive weight and his fittingly cumbersome Lincoln Continental did not noticeably inhibit his scriptwriters, 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’ Longstreet (1971-72, ABC) was blind and brought his seeing-eye dog and a special electronic cane to all investigations.

Barnaby Jones (1973-80, CBS) starred an aged Buddy Ebsen at the end of a long career that had apparently culminated in the role of Jed Clampett, patriarch of The Beverly Hillbillies (1962-71, CBS). The later detective series turned its protagonist’s geriatric aura to some use by emphasizing his country slyness and old-fashioned integrity, but there was unintended irony, a reminded of Ebsen’s visible decrepitude, in this remark by his policeman friend Lieutenant Biddle (John Carter) in an episode first broadcast in 1976” “Barnaby, if I ever get to heaven I expect I’ll find you there first, checking out the pearly gates for me.”

Mannix (1967-75, CBS) was perhaps the representative private-eye series 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. This thoughtless tough-guy element was so pronounced that, as Brooks and Marsh report, it incited the radio comedians Bob and Ray to create a continuing parody of the program, titled Blimmix, “in which the hero always held a polite conversation with some suspect, calmly agreeing that mayhem was the only answer, and then was invariably beaten to a pulp.”

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 25 years of such programming with a new complexity in content. The best detective shows develop a memory, the hero’s prior adventures bear on his current ones, and characters from earlier episodes or seasons reappear, adding complexity to themes and relationships. In the richest such programs, character, non 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- , ABC) Law & Order (1990- , NBC) and Homicide (1993-1999, NBC). 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 least, provocative entertainment.

Columbo (1971-77, NBC; continuing as an occasional TV movie), was technically a policier 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, writer-producers Richard Levinson and William Link’s most memorable creation. 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 Selleck 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 deepened as the series continued, as some episodes explored the show’s relation to its detective-story ancestry with modesty and wit. Moonlighting (1985-89, ABC) was a frequently brilliant tough also abrasive postmodern variation on the Thin Man formula, with Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd trading insults and cracking wise through the run of the series.

But Harry O and Rockford are 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, and 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, Juanita Bartless, Chas. Floyd Johnson, and David Chase, some of whom had worked with him in movies and in his earliest jobs in television. (Chase joined the show as a producer in 1976 and wrote or co-wrote 18 episodes, several of which deal with New Jersey mobsters who are clear ancestors of the characters in The Sopranos, the landmark Home Box Office [HBO] series Chase created in 1999.)

Antiheroic in tone, both series draw creatively on their stars’ previous work and also reflect something of the legacy of the antiwar movement and the broad social turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In a way, both Harry and Rockford are adult dropouts, living unpretentiously along the beaches of southern California. (Rockford’s minimal domicile is actually a mobile home.) But both protagonists are a generations older than the youthful protestors of that era, and they project a wariness and skepticism that seem to originate not in naïveté or adolescent discontent but in part in the muddles, disillusionment, even the physical humiliations of 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 O, Rockford is unpretentious and decent, equal post-heroic, probably the only TV detective to spend more time nursing his own injuries than inflicting hurt on others. Both Rockford and Orwell are great wheedlers, more likely to coddle or flame 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 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 nonexistent among the dolls and molls of detective stories.

“I hope these nuances are not escaping you, Orwell,” says Lieutenant Trench (Anthony Zerve), Harry’s police contact, in a typically abrasive encounter during his second season. Harry shakes his head. For viewers of Harry O and The Rockford Files, his answer ramifies: “I am very good at nuances.”

Private-eye series were scarce in the television of the affluent 1980s and 1990s, the years of Reagan and Clinton and the Internet stock market bubble, though police shows continued to thrive. As the broadcast era yielded to the dubious plentitude of cable and satellite television, the prime-time schedule came to be dominated by “reality programming,” and the old genres, at least for a time, fell into disrepute. Moreover, the medium’s preference for law-and-order heroes working for the police or government was much intensified after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Loner protagonists sympathetic to underdogs and suspicious of authority disappeared even from the reruns.

The only notable private detective of the early years of the new millennium, Monk (USA 2002-2009) rejects even the modest subversions of Harry O or Rockford. Wonderfully acted by Tony Shaloub (who won an Emmy Award in 2003 for best actor in a comedy series for his portrayal of Monk), Monk is a former cop on medical leave, suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. A variation of the Columbo formula, though less carefully scripted than its classic ancestor, Monk is a private-eye show in name only, for its protagonist works as a special consultant for the San Francisco Police Department on cases that are cerebral puzzles or locked-door mysteries. The detective’s character is compelling in this escapist series, and the plots are routine and derivative. Afraid of heights, germs, physical contact, and compulsively driven to straighten, repair, and disinfect the world’s disorder, Monk cannot function without his nurse-protector Sharona (Bitty Schram), a female Watson for this phobic, American Sherlock Holmes.

Valuable as a corrective to the still-widespread notion that TV programs and especially crime shows are interchangeably and entirely ephemeral, the essentially internal history proposed here must be complicated and supplemented by other perspectives. Cultural studies or anthropological approaches would understand the TV detective show as part of a larger 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, and the health or sickness of our institutions. The progression, that is, from Dragnet to Hill Street Blues and thence to the Law & Order spin-offs and surveillance fables generated by the terror of September 11, discloses aspects of a social history of our society. But this is not a simple affirmation of such stories or of some comforting progress myth. For our genre texts carry and rehearse and diffuse the lies, the prejudices, and the self-delusions of our society as well as its ideals. Harry O 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 and, theoretically, endless. In this, the TV series embodies a useful truth: that culture itself is a process—not any fixed thing at all but a shifting, ongoing contention among traditional and emerging voices, forces, and ideologies.