Primer is The A.V. Club's ongoing series of beginners' guides to pop culture's most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you. This week: A brief history of—and notable highlights from—television's long-term love affair with procedurals, mystery stories, and the colorful characters who figure out whodunit.
TV Detectives 101: "And then a case walked through the door…."
At their most basic, detective stories are about questions that need answering, whether they be "Is my husband sleeping around?" or "Who killed that guy?" No matter how often the mystery genre gets run through the filters of modernism, postmodernism, naturalism, expressionism, parody, or what-have-you, the stories work best if the hero or heroine has a job to do. In fact, over the decades, the most popular detective shows have often kept extraneous character detail to a minimum, instead focusing on how diligent folks solve impossible riddles. (After all, there's no expiration date on a jigsaw puzzle.)
One of the first and longest-running TV detective shows was Dragnet, which made the jump from radio to television in 1951, then ran for eight full seasons in the '50s before leaving the air, only to return thrice more: once in the late '60s in a version featuring original star-producer-director Jack Webb, and then again for short revamps in the late '80s and early '00s. By the time Dragnet debuted on the radio in 1949, the first flower of film noir—heavily informed by the pungent pulp fiction of the likes of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain—was stating to wilt, and gritty crime-stories were moving toward the new trend of docu-realism. Dragnet was docu-realist to the point of absurdity. At the start of an episode, Detective Joe Friday (played by Webb) would state the time and the place where the action was taking place, then walk the audience through a single crime (or series of unrelated crimes), emphasizing the routine legwork through which he and his partner cracked cases. Webb was a moralist, and in the '60s version of Dragnet especially, he often used the show as a platform from which to preach the gospel of law and order. But he kept the foundation of the show simple: crime, clues, apprehension, justice.
The procedural model Dragnet popularized on TV has proved profitable to countless writers and producers, even when they aren't telling stories about cops. The Perry Mason series—which began in novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, then was adapted for the movies in the '30s and the radio in the '40s before finding a home on TV in 1957—follows a defense attorney who perpetually frees the innocent by figuring out who the real criminals are, then breaking them down on the witness stand in what starts as a routine cross-examination. As portrayed by Raymond Burr on TV, Mason has a broad streak of kindness mixed with arrogance, and the development of his personality—along with his interaction with his secretary and private investigator—helped establish the model for the character-based detective series that became more popular in the '70s. (Not to mention inspiring the long-running Matlock, which is essentially a Dixie-fried, geriatric Perry Mason.) But the Perry Mason TV series was still rigidly formulaic, right down to the flustered D.A. undone week after week by Mason's keen eye for detail and flair for courtroom theatrics.
In fact, the Perry Mason formula is so sound that it enabled the procedural mystery to move outside the realm of cops and lawyers. The title character of the '70s series Quincy, M.E. does work for the state and assists the police, but he isn't, strictly speaking, an agent of law enforcement. He's an L.A. County medical examiner who suspects foul play is involved with seemingly every corpse that wheels into his morgue. Through his medical skills and general nosiness, Quincy (played by the inimitable Jack Klugman) sniffs out murderers and draws attention to social problems, from anorexia to the scourge of punk rock, even if it gets him in trouble with his superiors. Take away the social consciousness (and the murder), and the spirit of Quincy lives on in the current hit House, a Sherlock Holmes-inspired mystery series in which the "detective" is a diagnostician and the "criminals" are rare diseases and viruses—and, of course, the patients who lie about how they picked up these bugs in the first place.
In a practical, show-business sense, House also draws its inspiration from the popularity of CSI, itself a sort of flashier version of Quincy, albeit one in which the forensic scientists know in advance that their corpses are murder victims. And CSI—along with the half-dozen other case-heavy, character-light procedurals that have aired on CBS in the '00s—owes a lot of its existence to the Law & Order family. When the original Law & Order debuted on NBC in 1990, it was something of an afterthought show, lacking big-name stars or glamorous subject matter. What it had was a gimmick: the first half of each episode was dedicated to two cops tracking down a murderer; the second half was about the D.A. office putting that killer away. It was half Dragnet, half Perry Mason (albeit on the side of the prosecution), with a touch of Quincy in the way the show considered hot-button subjects "ripped from today's headlines." And while those hot-button subjects may look dated in re-runs, the cases themselves—and how they get cracked—have proven timeless.
In fact, the success of Law & Order in near-constant repeats on TNT convinced the cable channel to generate some original programming in a L&O vein. The result was The Closer, basic-cable's most-watched original series of all time as of fall 2008. Returning to the diverse Los Angeles that Dragnet once mapped out so well, The Closer follows a driven detective from Atlanta (played with a too-honeyed accent by Kyra Sedgwick) as she leads a group of veteran cops in investigations of "priority homicides": murders likely to draw a lot of media attention, and that therefore need to be closed quickly. The Closer is more interested in the personal life of its heroine than most modern procedurals—in that way, it's more like the character-driven detective shows in the "intermediate" category below—but it isn't exactly continuity-heavy. As with all the other shows on this 101 list, The Closer keeps its strength in its reliable formula: A body turns up, along with the job of finding who's responsible.
Intermediate: "As for me, my name is…"
While film noir was transforming into docu-realism, some producers were trying to hold fast to the hard-boiled private-eye tradition that pre-dated and partially molded noir, while also trying to update it for the jet-fueled '50s. Writer Blake Edwards concocted the breezy gumshoe Richard Diamond for radio (and later TV), then in 1959 whipped up Peter Gunn, a stylish show about a quasi-Beatnik dick with a thing for jazz and copious connections in the demimonde. Though it was beaten to the air by the equally swingin' 77 Sunset Strip (and shadowed by 77's spin-offs, including Hawaiian Eye and Surfside 6), Peter Gunn's exact mix of expressionistic style and careful character development planted a seed that would start to blossom more than a decade later, leading to a thicket of detective shows in which the people mattered more than the procedure.
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