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Popular Culture Review
TV Noir: The Twentieth Century
Ray Staraian
Amazon Books, 2010
Ray Starman’s TV Noir: The Twentieth Century is clearly a labor of love
which offers a readable and easily accessible wealth of information for both
researchers and Noir fans. Intended for a general audience, this is not a strictly
scholarly book but does contain a useful bibliography.
I won’t belabor the definition of Film Noir with which I am sure readers of
this journal are familiar. What many readers may be less familiar with is the
extent to which Noir was part of television in the
Century which Starman
refers to as “the Six Ages.”
The Early Age from 1949 to 1951 brought three categories: Police, Private
Detectives, and Reporters. For example, Martin Kane: Private Eye, first a radio
serial, paid homage to both Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade and lasted from
1949 to 1954, the major character being played first by William Gargon, then
Lloyd Nolan, followed by Mark Stevens, and finally Gargon again in a
syndicated series The New Adventures o f Martin Kane set in London and Paris
atmospherically suited to noir.
The Golden Age (1952-1961) added Spies to its categories with / Led
Three Lives, and saw police shows dominating the air such as Dragnet, The
Lineup, The Naked City, the Untouchables, and M Squad. In the Post-Golden
Age (1962-71), Starman adds Westerns, Science Fiction, and War to his
categories. Few of the shows in this period lasted more than a season, none more
than three.
In The Controversial Age, the categories drop back to two—Police and
Private Detective, with Private Detectives outnumbering Police seven to four,
featuring such heavy weights as Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer's Mickey
Spillane, and Spencer for Hire.
Starman concludes with The Comfortable Age (1987-1999), it has nine in
the Police category including Twin Peaks and NYPD Blue. The sole entry in
Science Fiction is TheX-Files.
Throughout he adds interesting details about production, casting, and
popularity. Concluding, he discusses how far noir has come from Bogie and
Bacall. Referring to TheX-Files he writes, “The threats to Mulder and Scully are
external and internal. Threats from a million miles away and threats from the
interior of their own beings. The condition remains the same. The perfectibility
of man/woman has not been reached. We don’t live in the ideal. We live in the
world of noir, existential, hard and a mix that makes us human and at least lets
us sometimes appreciate the good that often occurs.”
Felicia Campbell, University of Nevada, Las Vegas