Television’s First Public Prosecutor

My colleague David Papke recently posted on “Law and Order and the Rise of the Pop Culture Prosecutor.”  David noted that unlike most lawyer television shows of the past, the long-running series focused on prosecutors rather than defense lawyers. While it is certainly true that most television and motion picture lawyers have been defense attorneys rather than prosecutors, the first-ever television lawyer show was actually about a prosecutor.

In 1947, Jerry Fairbanks Productions filmed a pilot episode of a show called Public Prosecutor, and when the show was picked up by NBC for broadcast in 1948, the company filmed an additional twenty-six episodes for the network.

Public Prosecutor starred John Howard (pictured above) as a prosecutor named Stephen Allen who both solved crimes and prosecuted miscreants.

In what would become the tradition of “good guy” prosecutors, Stephen Allen was much more interested in making sure that the actual guilty party was charged with the crime than he was in winning easy courtroom victories. (Star and narrator John Howard, whose real name was John R. Cox, is best known as the actor who played Kathryn Hepburn’s fiance in The Philadelphia Story and Fred McMurray’s boss on the long running television show, My Three Sons.)

Public Prosecutor is probably best remembered in the history of television for being the first television show to be filmed first and shown later. Earlier shows had been broadcast live.

Unfortunately, episodes of Public Prosecutor were filmed in twenty-minute installments — a common format for radio shows of that era — but in the fall of 1948, NBC decided to shelve the show in favor of another series whose episodes ran for thirty minutes, which had emerged as the new television standard.

Public Prosecutor sat in the can, unshown, until 1951, when its rights were purchased by the Dumont Network (one of the major players in early network television). To extend the episodes to thirty minutes, Dumont stopped the film just before the guilty party was revealed and brought in a panel to discuss what they had seen. The panel, along with the television audience, then tried to figure out “Whodunit?” Once the panelists had made their guesses, the film was restarted and the remainder of the episode was shown.

Public Prosecutor ended after the 1951-52 season, as no efforts were made to film additional episodes. However, surviving episodes from 1947-48 suggest that the show was quite good, particularly given the early date of its production. Two episodes, “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” and “The Case of the Comic Strip Murder,” can be viewed online at http://ctva.biz/US/Crime/PublicProsecutor.htm.  The former episode can also be see at http://www.archive.org/details/PublicProsecutor-CaseOfTheManWhoWasntThere.

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. David Papke

    It was interesting to read about “Public Prosecutor,” and I’m surprised the series didn’t go stale during four years in the can. If one looks through the list of of primetime lawyer series, other series concerning crime-solving prosecutors pop up. My favorite is “For the People” (CBS; 1965), starring William Shatner as an idealistic prosecutor just before he assumed his true destiny as Commander of the Enterprise. These isolated series having been noted, I think a primetime series constitutes a useful window on public assumptions and aspirations only if the series has a long run and/or inspires copy-cat productions. “Law & Order” is the best example we have of a lawyer series marking and contributing to a shift in public sentiment.

  2. Gordon Hylton

    If anyone has viewed the episodes linked above, they probably noticed that John Howard, the prosector, wore a Clark Gable-esque mustache in the series that is missing from his photo at the top of the post.

    Students of the 1940’s may also notice that Howard looks not so much like Clark Gable as he does Thomas E. Dewey.

    That resemblance is unlikely to have been coincidental. Although Dewey is now most often remembered as looking “like the little man on the wedding cake” (as Alice Roosevelt Longworth once described him), in the 1940’s and early 1950’s he represented the epitome of the crusading prosecutor.

    Dewey rose to prominence in New York politics when he left his Wall Street law practice to become a special federal prosecutor in 1935. His special charge was to investigate corruption in New York City which he did with great zeal. He approached his task aggressively and in 1937, he was elected District Attorney for New York County.

    His success in securing convictions of leading mobsters like Lucky Luciano made him a nationally known figure, and movies and radio quickly picked up on his fame. Marked Woman, starring Humphrey Bogart as a Dewey-like prosecutor and Bette Davis as the damsel in distress, was just one of several Hollywood movies based on Dewey’s exploits. He was also the model for the heroic prosecutor in the popular radio crime-fighting serial Gangbusters.

    In 1942, he was elected Governor of New York, and in 1944, he ran a surprisingly close race against Franklin Roosevelt as the Republican presidential nominee. In 1946, he was re-elected as Governor of New York.

    At the time that Public Prosecutor was filmed in 1947, Dewey was widely believed to be the likely Republican presidential nominee in 1948 (which he was) and to be the likely winner against the then highly unpopular incumbent Democrat, Harry S. Truman, who had assumed the presidemcy in the summer of 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt died (which he was not).

    When Public Prosecutor finally aired in 1951, Dewey was still Governor of New York — he was reelected in 1950 — and many Americans no doubt saw the resemblance which subconsciously at least reinforced the credibility of the show’s main character.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.