cult_tv_lounge

Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer was originally broadcast by CBS from 1958 to 1960. Bringing Mike Hammer to the small screen must have presented quite a challenge, Mickey Spillane’s novels being considered at the time to be remarkably violent.

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My boxed set of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. finally arrived a week ago. Yes, the big one, in the attaché case, all four seasons on 41 discs.

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Continuing my look back, here's the first half of season four of Xena: Warrior Princess:

Xena Season Four, episodes 1 to 11

The 2011 Cult TV Awards winners have been announced:

2011 Cult TV Awards

G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown detective stories are unusual not just in having a Roman Catholic priest as the crime-solver but also in looking at crime from a religious moral and spiritual vantage point. That’s not to say that you have to be a Catholic to enjoy them, but the Catholic perspective is there. Crime is more than just a mere puzzle in ( ... )

I’ve been getting into hardboiled 1950s American crime series recently. Most of the ones I’ve been watching have been private eye shows but M Squad is a hardboiled cop show. And it’s a good one.

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I found an episode of Sea Hunt on one of those Mill Creek public domain boxed sets. This show brings back some happy childhood memories for me. If someone tried to make an underwater adventure series like this was today it would be loaded down with preachiness and heaby-handed propaganda and would be completely unwatchable.

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Scandals at Shepperton Studios etc... Recommended by The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/apr/02/highereducation.news. Looks interesting.

Watching Johnny Staccato recently whetted my appetite for more late 50s TV private eye series. A year before Johnny Staccato NBC had started airing Peter Gunn, a series that enjoyed much greater success.

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The rise of television in the late 40s and the 50s more or less killed the traditional crime B-movie. But that doesn’t mean that tough guys, two-bit punks and no-good dames disappeared. They found a new home in the new medium. The edges were softened a little but some of the TV crime series of the 50s still managed to be surprisingly gritty ( ... )