WHEN ELLERY QUEEN MET NBC -
(The 1975 series)

Satire, it is said, closes on Saturday nights. In an article published some years back in the San Francisco Weekly reflecting on the spotty career of satirist Tom Lehrer, Jack Boulware offered the following explanation of the truth underlying the cliché: “satire never makes any money and people don’t understand it.”

A true corollary to satire’s epitaph is the fate of the televised mystery short story. A smartly written television mystery series, particularly a whodunit, rarely lasts more than a season. And forget about anthologies – other than Alfred Hitchcock and The Twilight Zone they invariably cave in a few weeks. The success of classical mysteries on the airwaves it has been observed, like the success of satire, is directly and inversely correlated to the intellectual effort demanded from the viewers.

I know, I know. You will point to the many CSIs and Law and Orders that seem to grind on forever. Or you will remind me that Murder She Wrote lasted for 12 seasons. But comparing classic mysteries, particularly “fair play” intellectual brain-teasers, to those admittedly successful series is, I would posit, like comparing Milton Berle to Tom Lehrer. It is not Burlesque that closes in a week – it’s satire.

Two paragraphs back I was tempted to state that smartly written television mysteries rarely last more than 13 weeks, but that would have been historically at least a bit unfair. One of the finest whodunits ever developed for television in fact lasted a full season.

              
Above: Ellery Queen MCA TV press Kitt 1975-76

NBC’s 1975-1976 Ellery Queen series was developed for television by Richard Levinson and William Link, of Columbo fame. They approached the series with both a love and an understanding of the Queen oeuvre. Earlier Queen movies and television series simply could not get the tone right. They tended to lessen the intricacy of the Queen plots while at the same time re-inventing Ellery into a humorous or even slapstick foil. An earlier NBC pilot for an Ellery Queen series went so far as to surrealistically and disastrously handed over Ellery’s role to Peter Lawford, who played him as a “mod” Brit. Levinson and Link had been behind that effort originally, but as they watched the pilot develop they insisted that their names be removed from the final version, which aired as a two hour movie on NBC.

But, for whatever reason, the fates shown kindly on Levinson and Link and their persistence was rewarded with one more chance.  In NBC’s 1975-1976 Ellery Queen series, amazingly, they made everything click. The result was a series that was true to the literary Queen and that delivered wonderful “fair play” mysteries to viewers every week.

Levinson and Link, by all accounts lifelong Queen fans, were given free hand that time by NBC to do Ellery Queen the way they wanted.  The producers anchored the series in 1947 and set a stylistic tone in keeping with the Queen works of the 1940s. The late Jim Hutton captured Ellery magnificently as a good-natured, absent-minded young man – a character who more neatly matched the Ellery of the 1940s heyday of the series (as contrasted to the pince-nez dandy from the earlier Queen volumes).



Right: Add for NBC's Ellery Queen NBC's Sunday Mystery Movie

While the absent minded nature of Ellery was in many respects itself re-invention, it was re-invention that worked because it did not stray impermissibly from the original. In an earlier article that I wrote for Criminal Briefs I addressed the problems faced by someone trying to write about a character created by others.  (I wrestle with these problems myself whenever I get the opportunity to write Ellery Queen pastiches, as I did with Kurt in “The Book Case” and then again on my own in “The Mad Hatter’s Riddle”.)  In that earlier article I offered the following rule that I apply when utilizing a character created by others – like the physician, I “try first to do no harm.” There are leeways that can be taken with an existing character, but at the end of the story the character should remain recognizable. The pastiche writer owes this, I believe, to the original character and author.  The befuddled and clumsy Ellery of the movies failed this test, I believe –  the character was played too broadly; Ellery was transformed into a burlesque of the original. But, by contrast, the absent minded Ellery created by Mr. Hutton, and as envisioned by Levinson and Link, evolved a bit but still rang completely true.

In the 11 October 1975 issue of TV Guide, published the week that the NBC series premiered, Rand Lee, a son of Manfred B. Lee who was half of the duo behind the Queen volumes, made precisely this point:
"...In many ways, Ellery is a lot like his creators. The NBC Ellery Queen pilot film captured the "authentic" Ellery nearly as he has ever been captured; after watching that film . . . Cousin Fred [Dannay] remarked it was like seeing himself as a young man. Had Dad lived to see the pilot (he died in 1971 of a heart attack), he might have said the same thing about himself. One can imagine the NBC Ellery being cornered at a party by an enthusiastic fan and falling asleep in his chair while she gushes at him; chopping up redwood patio furniture to use in building bird cages; finally succumbing to the charms of some pretty girl but forgetting to formally propose to her until their wedding day. My father actually did all those things. ..."

So, too, the show captured the Inspector, even though it dropped the “Old Man’s” trademark mustache. Hutton’s charm and natural manner played perfectly against David Wayne’s crusty Richard Queen, and a more perfect Sergeant Velie than that delivered by Tom Reese is hard to imagine.

But while each of these ingredients was necessary to the show’s critical (if not commercial) success, it was the caliber of the whodunit mysteries that were the hallmark of the series. Though the episodes varied in quality, each was ultimately redeemed by its plot, the production values, and the marvelous cast.    The stories were also perhaps the best televised approach to classic “fair play” detective short stories ever brought to the television screen. All of the clues were meticulously displayed for the viewer – the camera, in fact, would often linger on the critical clue for a long moment, daring us to figure out its significance – and when Ellery invariably turned to the screen three-quarters of the way through each episode to offer up his “challenge to the reader” we had only ourselves to blame if (when!) we still could not decipher the truth that Mr. Queen had just gleaned.

So why did this erudite, stylistic and highly praised series last but one year? Hearkening back to the beginning of this discussion, I think it is the same reason that satire closes in a week. The show was, too good, it demanded more than the television audience was willing to commit.

In a 2002 article ”Confessions of a Mystery Writer" William Link concluded as much. "Thinking back,” he wrote, “the Queen series was too complicated for its own good. I remember spending an entire afternoon with Dick [Levinson] trying to figure how keys on a keychain would fall into what configuration in one’s pocket when placed there. When audiences didn’t respond the lesson was learned: "[o]ur failure with Ellery Queen was our template” for future efforts, Levinson observed.  We deliberately made the clues on Murder She Wrote easier to decipher, including a very guessable murderer now and then. Part of our psychology was to reward the focused viewers because they might then be motivated to return the following week. Another unexpressed reason was that it was far easier to come up with facile clues than sweating bullets over keys in a pocket… The upshot was that ‘Murder She Wrote‘ thrived for 12 seasons, Ellery Queen [only] one."

In short, the Queen show simply refused to write to a least common denominator. It played to a higher appreciation level.  And like good satire, which closes on Saturday night, that ultimately proved its undoing.  The series closed in 1976.