These Images From a Forgotten Sixties TV Show Will Startle and Amaze You!
January 10, 2014
Yes, that’s right. I’ve decided to Upworthy-ize the blog!
But seriously – anyone out there recognize the obscure series from which these frame grabs were taken? It’s not quite like anything else that was on TV at the time, and I’m probably going to write more about it soon.
It’s been over a month (!) since my last entry here, and obviously I’m still vamping with picture posts. But I’ll have some meatier pieces here soon, as well as more for The A.V. Club in the near future. In the meantime I’ve also started contributing to my old friend Stuart Galbraith IV’s new film website, World Cinema Paradise, starting with this survey of some obscure ’70s exploitation films. There’s some good writing there; check it out!
The Classic TV History Blog 
January 10, 2014 at 3:01 pm
The lady in the 4th picture resembles Jean Simmons. If I’m right, the only US TV series she did the 1960s was ‘Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre’.
January 10, 2014 at 4:13 pm
Nope. (Although “Crazier Than Cotton” is an amazing hour of television.)
January 10, 2014 at 4:40 pm
It looks like a New York produced TV show, like maybe something Herbert Brodkin created. I’ll guess Hawk or Coronet Blue or some show in that elk.
January 10, 2014 at 5:08 pm
Good guess, in terms of Brodkin’s independence (although little of his output is this visually bold) … but it’s from another corner of the TV universe entirely.
January 10, 2014 at 5:18 pm
The Eleventh Hour?
Breaking Point?
January 10, 2014 at 6:09 pm
Lawbreaker with Lee Marvin, right?
January 10, 2014 at 6:31 pm
We have a winner! To claim your No-Prize, etc., etc…..
January 10, 2014 at 6:15 pm
The third photo is of a famous seafood restaurant in Philadelphia that went belly up in 2009. Was this stock footage? I’m not aware of a ’60s TV series that filmed an episode in Philly, but maybe it happened.
January 10, 2014 at 6:34 pm
Unless they started cheating in the episodes I haven’t gotten to, these were all, amazingly, filmed in the actual cities where the crimes occurred, with many of the real police and victims playing themselves and the other roles (i.e., the criminals who were too incarcerated to do any reenactments) filled by local actors. I’m not quite sure what I think of it dramatically, but the time capsule value is off the charts.
January 11, 2014 at 12:11 pm
Sounds a bit like my favorite trash-tabloid cable show of all time, City Confidential (1999-2006), which will also have considerable time capsule value, and which scored big points with me because it always strove, in its pop-sociological way, to establish the milieu of whatever town the episode was centered on.
January 11, 2014 at 12:22 pm
It’s an interesting paradox that these dramatic recreation shows are amateurish junk to the contemporary viewer but fascinating at a 50-year remove. I’d love to see Day in Court or the ’60s Divorce Court, with (low-rent) actors reenacting actual trial transcripts, but I can’t imagine they survive in any quantity.
January 19, 2014 at 8:02 pm
The composition and framing in some of these images have an unusual power.