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.