Public Prosecutor (TV series)

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]

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.

• 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

• 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

• Public Prosecutor at IMDB
• Crawford Mystery Theatre at IMDB
• List of episodes at CTVA
• DuMont historical website
• "The Case of the Comic-Strip Murder" (aired September 20, 1951) at Internet Archive
• "The Case of the Man Who Wasn't There" (aired January 17, 1952) at Internet Archive