New York City policewoman Casey Jones' assignment to fight crime often entails her going undercover in some of the seediest and most dangerous parts of the city. Decoy is a groundbreaking American crime drama television series created for syndication and initially broadcast from October 14, 1957, to July 7, 1958, with thirty-nine 30-minute black-and-white episodes. It was the first American police series with a female protagonist. Many Decoy episodes are in the public domain.
Suspicion is the title of an American television mystery drama series which aired on the NBC from 1957 through 1959. The executive producer of Suspicion was film director Alfred Hitchcock.
Lt. Frank Ballinger is a no-nonsense plain clothes cop in the elite M Squad Division. The Squad's task is to root out organised crime and corruption in America's Second City, Chicago.
The New Adventures of Charlie Chan is a British-American crime drama series that aired in the United States in syndicated television from June 1957, to 1958. The first five episodes were made by Vision Productions in the United States, before production switched to the United Kingdom under ITC Entertainment and Television Programs of America.
Meet McGraw is an American dramatic television series starring Frank Lovejoy in the role of the hard-hitting detective McGraw, a man specifically given no first name in the program. Forty-one half-hour episodes aired on NBC during the 1957-1958 season, sponsored by Procter & Gamble. The series was produced by the Desilu Studios, most of whose productions were broadcast by CBS. The theme song for the series is "One For My Baby" by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer.
Meet McGraw preceded The Bob Cummings Show on Tuesday evenings on NBC. It aired at 9:00pm ET/PT opposite John Lupton’s Western series, Broken Arrow on ABC and Bud Collyer's To Tell the Truth quiz show on CBS.
After its cancellation, Meet McGraw was repeated as The Adventures of McGraw on ABC in 1958-1959, but not in prime time. A number of episodes of the series, including "Mohave" and "Lady in Limbo," are available on DVD.
While this sounds like a western, THE SHERIFF OF COCHISE was a contemporary police drama set in Cochise County, AZ. Sheriff Frank Morgan was eventually promoted to U.S. Marshall and given the entire state of Arizona to keep under control (the series title would subsequently change to U.S. MARSHAL and remain in syndication until 1960)
The Edge of Night was an American television mystery series/soap opera produced by Procter & Gamble. It debuted on CBS on April 2, 1956, and ran as a live broadcast on that network until November 28, 1975; the series then moved to ABC, where it aired from December 1, 1975, until December 28, 1984. There were 7,420 episodes, with some 1,800 available for syndication.
This is a 7-part German crime series by Peter A. Horn. In self-contained and unconnected episodes, the great detectives of crime literature solve various cases. Sherlock Holmes (Ernst Fritz Fürbringer) and Dr. Watson (Harald Mannl) start things off, followed by Auguste Dupin, David Wilson, Father Brown, Inspector Bucket, Sergeant Cuff and Hercule Poirot. Every episode of this early crime series in the early days of television was still broadcast live. It could hardly have been more irregular: it was broadcast in loose succession on different days at different start times in prime time, and the length of the broadcast varied between 25 and 50 minutes.
Fabian of the Yard is a British police procedural television series based on the real-life memoirs of Scotland Yard detective Robert Fabian, produced by the BBC and broadcast between November 1954 and February 1956. It is considered the earliest plice procedural made for British TV, sharing many points of commonality with the U.S. series Dragnet.
There were 36 episodes in total, of 30 minutes each. The first thirty were broadcast consecutively on Saturday evenings between 13 November 1954 and 22 June 1955, with the exceptions of Christmas Day and New Year's Day which happened to fall on a Saturday. For unknown reasons, the final six were held back, and later broadcast intermittently between November 1955 and February 1956.
Mark Saber refers to a half-hour 1950s detective television series that took different forms and titles during its run. Tom Conway portrayed Mark Saber as a plainclothes English detective working with the Homicide Division of the N.Y.P.D. in Mystery Theater which aired on ABC from October 1951 to June 1954. Donald Gray portrayed Mark Saber as a one-armed private detective based in London. In The Vise which aired on ABC from September 1955 to June 1957. Donald Gray also portrayed Mark Saber in Saber of London which aired on NBC from October 1957 to May 1960.