The Better Half-Hour

In a society where speed is worshiped and deliberation is devalued, it is ironic that some shorter forms of artistic expression have been gradually marginalized in our culture. The half-hour drama is a forgotten television art form whose heyday was more than fifty years ago. Between the mid Fifties and early Sixties, the half-hour format was seen as a viable way to bring dramatic stories to the masses. This was an era when short stories were regularly published in popular magazines such as Playboy, Colliers and Esquire. These shorter forms of expression were not seen as truncated works, but compactly written stories that could, particularly in the case of television, effectively communicate a social or moral philosophy in an entertaining 24 minutes of screen time. Being a young visual medium, television was keen to exploit this brief format in order to provide a variety of dramatic choices. The anthology shows, mysteries and westerns described below are the best examples on DVD, of the lost art of half-hour drama.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Season One (1955) This was the first influential anthology show on U.S. television. Its clever use of the rotund auteur as master of ceremonies and the high quality of scripts adapted from popular short stories made it an icon of the new format. With the Hitchcock imprimatur and generous helpings of his trademark macabre humour, the show was an immediate success and other programs would soon copy this winning formula including: One Step Beyond and Thriller. The first season has all of the ingredients in place for the long seven-year run of the show, boasting top Hollywood stars and big-screen quality craftsmanship. Two of the most memorable episodes from this auspicious debut season are both directed by the master himself: Revenge, a harrowing tale of rape and retribution starring Vera Miles and Ralph Meeker, and Breakdown, a stylistic tour-de-force starring a nearly mute and immobile Joseph Cotten.

Have Gun Will Travel: Season One (1957) The most off-beat and literate of half-hour westerns featured an erudite hired gunslinger embodied by the threatening black-clad person of Richard Boone a.k.a Paladin. Brimming with action, each episode was also a moral tale that presented its enigmatic lead character with a problem to solve while avoiding the easy solution of violence. Perhaps the only western ever to contain a hero who quoted Shakespeare and the Greek philosophers, this landmark series paved the way for subsequent half-hour westerns like Wanted Dead or Alive, Bat Masterson, and The Rifleman. Favourite early episodes include The Outlaw, with Charles Bronson, and The Bride, with Mike Connors.

Peter Gunn: Set One (1958) The ultimate style-over-substance detective show starring ultra cool Craig Stevens as the jazz club-haunting sleuth. Keeping dialogue to a minimum and noir style to a maximum, this series set the mood for an entire generation of gumshoes on television.Richard Diamond, Private Detective, may have premiered earlier, but Gunn creator Blake Edwards captured the laid-back hip of a new Playboy culture, where swinging tunes, snappy threads, and a mean right hook got you the sexiest doll in town. Later series such as Johnny Staccato, and T.H.E. Cat attempted to replicate the formula with middling popular response. Due to the lack of original masters some early episodes suffer from print damage on DVD and the entire first season has yet to be released in North America. Episodes to watch for include Pecos Pete, where Gunn goes western, and Edie Finds a Corpse, when Gunn's jazz singer girlfriend is drawn into his shadowy world of danger. Edwards later revived the character for a one-shot feature film version tersely entitled Gunn (1967).

The Twilight Zone: Season One (1959) Without a doubt the most famous dramatic half-hour of all-time, and a tribute to the talents of one man, series creator Rod Serling. Although it featured scripts by other famous writers such as Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, the majority of the scripts were written by Serling himself, in his uniquely poetic narrative style. Thematically unforgettable, these highly literate fantasy stories took the anthology format into a whole new realm of pop culture entertainment. So indelible is its ongoing power to enthrall, that even today, many actors and directors are besieged by legions of adoring fans as a result of their brief association with the show. Well remembered episodes from the first season include: And When The Sky Opened starring Rod Taylor, and Walking Distance, Serling's own poignant autobiographical elegy of his youth starring Gig Young.

Danger Man: The Complete First Season (1959) Briefly shown on U.S. television, this British produced spy series was the most influential import of its time. Preceding James Bond, John Steed, and Napoleon Solo, hero John Drake was a trouble shooter for NATO at the height of the Cold War. Leading man Patrick McGoohan was made an instant star portraying the ever-resourceful Drake, always eschewing guns when fisticuffs would suffice. Later the show would expand to an hour format and take on a more overtly British tone as opposed to the more mid-Atlantic atmosphere of the half-hour episodes. With superb production values, tight story-lines, and strong performances from producer Lew Grade's usual repertory of memorable British Faces, this was the first in what was to be a veritable explosion of Sixties spy television. Stand-out shows include A Time To Kill, with Darren Nesbitt, and Position of Trust, with Donald Pleasence, and a pre-"Moneypenny" Lois Maxwell.