Public Prosecutor (TV series)

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

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]

The format was patterned after daytime radio dramas, which ran in 15-minute installments.

Public Prosecutor was pulled from the network schedule when NBC decided it preferred 30-minute episodes.[7]^[8]

Production of the still-unseen series was suspended in October 1948 due to high costs and the lack of a national sponsor.^[9] Instead, the NBC anthology series Your Show Time became American television's first filmed dramatic series to be broadcast, in January 1949.^[10] The earliest syndicated airings of Public Prosecutor were in February 1951.^[11]

The DuMont Television Network broadcast the series as Crawford Mystery Theatre (named after sponsor Crawford Clothes) September 6–27, 1951, and continuing locally until 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. Veteran radio announcer and future game-show host Warren Hull presided over the half-hour version of Public Prosecutor.

When Public Prosecutor was syndicated in the 1950s, the episodes had been re-edited to fit a 15-minute time slot.^[12][13] 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.^[14]

Episode status

One episode of Public Prosecutor is in the collection of the Museum of Broadcast Communications. Currently there are at least 10 episodes posted on YouTube.^[15] Alpha Video has released eight episodes of the series in a two-volume DVD set.

Episodes

See also

• List of programs broadcast by the DuMont Television Network
• List of surviving DuMont Television Network broadcasts
• 1947-48 United States network television schedule
• 1951-52 United States network television schedule

References