Public Prosecutor (TV series)

Public Prosecutor was an American television series produced in 1947–1948, which first aired in 1951.

Public Prosecutor
GenreCrime/Panel show
Directed byLew Landers (6 episodes)
Presented byWarren Hull
StarringJohn Howard
Anne Gwynne
Walter Sande
Country of originUnited States
Original languageEnglish
No. of seasons1
No. of episodes26
Production
ProducerJerry Fairbanks
CinematographyAllen G. Siegler
Camera setupMulti-camera
Running time30 minutes
Production companyJerry Fairbanks Productions
Release
Original networkDuMont Television Network
Picture formatBlack-and-white
Audio formatMonaural
Original release1951 (1951) –
1952 (1952)

Broadcast history

Public Prosecutor was the first dramatic series to be shot on film (in this case, 16 mm film to save production costs), instead of being performed and broadcast live.[1][2][3] John Howard starred in the title role of a public prosecutor, along with Anne Gwynne and Walter Sande.

Jerry Fairbanks Productions filmed the pilot episode in Hollywood[4] in 1947. After the NBC Television Network picked up the series, Fairbanks filmed 26 twenty-minute episodes for a planned network premiere in September 1948.[5][6][7]

However, the series was pulled from the network schedule when NBC decided it preferred thirty-minute episodes.[8][9]

Production of the still unseen series was suspended in October 1948 due to high costs and the lack of a national sponsor.[10] Instead, the NBC anthology series Your Show Time became American television's first filmed dramatic series to be broadcast, in January 1949.[11] The earliest syndicated airings of Public Prosecutor were in February 1951.[12]

The DuMont Television Network broadcast the series as Crawford Mystery Theatre (named after sponsor Crawford Clothes) September 6–27, 1951, and continuing locally to February 28, 1952. The producers turned it into a panel show to fill out the program to 30 minutes. Each week, three guest panelists watched an episode, which was halted just before the climax. Each panelist then tried to guess the identity of the guilty party.

When Public Prosecutor was syndicated in the 1950s, the episodes had been edited to fit a 15-minute time slot.[13][14] Film historian Thomas Schatz writes,

Narrated by Howard, who addresses the camera throughout much of the story, the bare-bones mystery plots are condensed to fit into fifteen-minute segments modeled after the format of radio episodes. The verbal exposition is so insistent that the images begin to seem redundant; the episodes truly resemble radio with pictures. Sets are undecorated. Actors appear distracted, if not anguished, as they try to hit their marks consistently in the first take. In spite of the opportunities for shot selection offered by the Multicam system, the camera work consists mainly of single-take medium shots or simple over-the-shoulder dialogue sequences.[15]

Episode status

One episode of Public Prosecutor is known to exist in the collection of the Museum of Broadcast Communications. Internet Archive has two episodes, "The Case of the Comic-Strip Murder" (September 20, 1951) and "The Case of the Man Who Wasn't There" (January 17, 1952). As many as 20 episodes of the series may exist.

See also

References
  1. "Half Hour Video Films Shot in 2 Days, Cost $10,000", The Washington Post, May 1, 1949, p. T1.
  2. Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, 1948, v. 51, no. 6, p. 592.
  3. "NBC Mulls Video Pix Distrib", Billboard, Nov. 6, 1948, p. 11.
  4. Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, University of California Press, 1999, p. 436. ISBN 9780520221307.
  5. "The News of Radio", The New York Times, March 17, 1948, p. 50.
  6. "The News of Radio", The New York Times, April 6, 1948, p. 46.
  7. The terms 15-, 20-, and 30-minute episodes refer to the combination of program and commercial breaks.
  8. "Bristol-Myers Mulls 'Prosecutor' Series", Billboard, August 27, 1949, p. 10.
  9. Stanley Rubin, "A (Very) Personal History of the First Sponsored Film Series on National Television", E-Media Studies, vol. 1, issue 1 (2008).
  10. "News of TV and Radio", The New York Times, Oct. 24, 1948, p. X11.
  11. Rubin, ibid. Although Rubin writes that Your Show Time went on the air in September 1948 on the East Coast, no evidence has been found for this. The New York Times published an article on January 17, 1949, about the debut of the series on network television.
  12. "Brewers Ogle TV As Spring Nears", Billboard, February 24, 1951, p. 6.
  13. "Official Loses Distribution of Fairbanks Film", Billboard, Jan. 19, 1952, p. 8.
  14. "Consolidated TV, Fairbanks in Deal", Billboard, August 9, 1952, p. 10.
  15. Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, University of California Press, 1999, p. 438. ISBN 9780520221307.

Bibliography
  • David Weinstein, The Forgotten Network: DuMont and the Birth of American Television (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004) ISBN 1-59213-245-6
  • Alex McNeil, Total Television, Fourth edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1980) ISBN 0-14-024916-8
  • Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows, Third edition (New York: Ballantine Books, 1964) ISBN 0-345-31864-1
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