"Arrest and Trial"

TV I'm currently reading The Great Television Series by Jeff Rovin, a eighties book charting the history of heroes on US television up until that point. Not an easy monograph to like, the structure unfocused and all over the place, it's nonetheless filled with charming nuggets about the nature of television production in that era.

- Each episode of the original series of Dragnet was shot in three days and budgeted at $30,000, Producer Jack Webb “worked the schedule so that the show was before the camera for two weeks straight, after which the crew edited and scored several programmes at once”. Stand alone cop drama produced on a soap opera schedule.

- Here's a twenty-four year old William Russell, later Ian in Doctor Who talking about his appearance as Sir Lancelot in The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, firstly about his rubber armour:

"The blasted things weighed ninety pounds [...] and when they squeezed me into one, I could hardly list the bloody axe. Then they had to hoist me into the saddle with a derrick. And whenever anyone hit me in the jousts, I went down in a limp and stayed down. Finally, they had to undress me with wrenches."

"All our writers have done is clean up the plots just a bit. Lancelot's loves are now strictly platonic. He is still clean-cut and never takes advantage of an opponent, although when aroused the fellow can take on all comers."

"We had a genuine hero, of a sort. During the filming of one of the episodes, a horse stepped on David Morrell's foot. Morrell, who plays, Sir Kay, couldn't dislodge the beast and was forced to stand there smiling blandly with eight hundred points of horse on his toes, for ten minutes of shooting."

Around such anecdotes whole conventions have been planned.

- Rovin also unwittingly demonstrates that even what appear to be really original formats, or re-engineerings of formats, have been done before. Witness "Arrest and Trial" (that's Arrest and Trial) which ran for just a season but a version of which would later straddle the world:

(It ran for) ninety minutes a week, a length not easily plugged with substitute fare - and the appeal of its actors. Leads Ben Gazarra and Chuck Connors were able to pull a steady crowd despite the dubious merits of their showcase. Cazarra appeared as Los Angeles detective Nick Anderson, who in the first forty-five minutes of each episode tracked down a suspect and put him behind bars. In the "Trial" segment, attorney John Egan (Connors) tried to prove the defendant innocent. Needless to say, there was no love lost between Anderson and Egan, which made for the series' most interesting moments. But the overall effect of "Arrest and Trial" was that of breathlessness. The show was always racing to touch all of its bases - from crime to enter Anderson to exit Anderson and enter Egan, to verdict to exit Egan - week after week after. Will all this plot going on, there was never any room for characterisation. And ninety minutes is a long time to sit and watch cardboard cutouts hurry about their business. Still, it was a clever idea that, with a bit more elbow room, might have been a unique saga of the modern judicial process."

All Dick Wolf needed to do was made the trial bit about prosecutors, give it less "elbow room" by cutting the show down to an commercial hour and Law & Order has run for decades.

Updated:  This is delicious.  From the section about the early 70s:

"James Garner's "Nichols" was another major letdown, a series intended to be the former TV superstar's dramatic return to the medium after a successful movie career.  Garner portrayed Nichols, an eighteen-year army veteran who retired at the outbreak of World War I to avoid any violent undertakings.  However, Nichols also did not want to work for a living, so he took a job as sheriff of a small Arizona town.  There, he tried to avoid doing his duty at all costs.  However, the televiewing public didn't cotton on to "Maverick" revisited, so a change was made to the series, a move which could best be described as tacky. Around midseason, Nichols was killed in the line of duty, and his tough, serious minded brother (also Garner) came to town to pick up where his predecessor had left off. The show was cancelled in a matter of weeks."

It might seem tacky, but it's also not unknown for recent series to pull the same trick. The many characters of Ali Larter in Heroes, Locke in Lost. Of course, they're telefantasy.  Perhaps it's only acceptable if there's already weirdness in abeyance.   I think it's a genius way of re-engineering your series, though given the quality of characterisation in that period, one wonders if the writers took full advantage of the narrative possibilities, not least amongst a townspeople having to deal with a different sheriff with the same face.