NBC Mystery Movie

The NBC Mystery Movie
Genre	Movie of the week
Theme music composer	Henry Mancini
Country of origin	United States
Language(s)	English
Production
Running time	90 min. (1971-1974, 1976-1977) 120 min. (1974-1976)
Broadcast
Original channel	NBC
Original run	1971 – 1977
Chronology
Related shows	Amy Prentiss Banacek Columbo Cool Million Faraday & Company Hec Ramsey Lanigan's Rabbi Madigan McCloud McCoy McMillan & Wife Quincy, M.E. The Snoop Sisters Tenafly

The NBC Mystery Movie is the general name of an American television series, produced by Universal Studios, that was broadcast by NBC from 1971-77. At times, it was divided into several versions that were broadcast concurrently during different nights of the week and were entitled The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie and The NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie.

Mystery Movie was a "wheel show", or "umbrella program". That is, it rotated several programs within the same time period throughout the season. For its initial 1971-72 season, it featured a rotation of three detective dramas that were broadcast during Wednesday nights for 90 minutes, from 8:30-10:00 p.m. in the Eastern Time Zone.

Background

The origin of the "wheel" format was a joint programming and creative production agreement between the NBC Television Network and Universal Studios Television and Motion Pictures dating from 1966. By that agreement, NBC ordered a multi-year series of dramatic anthology productions from Universal Studios which would be broadcast as NBC series television programming in the United States (both as originals and re-runs), but Universal retained the rights to overseas release of these products as feature length films. Also, NBC would not offer these shows subsequently as TV re-runs for international sales.

The first series created under this agreement was Fame Is the Name of the Game, an anthology of four programs. It was followed by The Bold Ones, Four in One and The Men. While it was a long and profitable collaboration, it finally succumbed to the changes of the commercial broadcast market regarding both structure and content by the end of the decade.

By the late 1970s, the increase in the popularity of situation comedies—coupled with the comedies' lower production costs and much greater scheduling flexibility and resale opportunities—surpassed that of these drama anthologies, whose episodes had typically longer run-times (ranging from one to two hours). The anthologies could not reasonably be reduced for briefer broadcast times for the re-run market. They were not designed for casual or short-term viewers, who would have little interest in the character or the story of an individual episode. Each episode and each series were of widely varying quality, making re-sale in re-runs difficult. While they lasted, the best of them employed the finest actors, writers and production standards available.^{[citation needed]}

Production history

The three original 1971-72 shows of The NBC Mystery Movie were:

• McCloud, starring Dennis Weaver as a New Mexico lawman reassigned to the New York Police Department, which debuted the previous season as part of the hour-long NBC wheel show Four in One.

• Columbo, starring Peter Falk as a deceptively bumbling Los Angeles homicide detective. The series was derived from a 1968 made-for-television movie, Prescription: Murder, which starred Falk in the same role.

• McMillan & Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James as a husband-and-wife crime-fighting duo. Hudson's character was a sophisticated San Francisco police commissioner. Saint James later left the series and it was renamed McMillan.

The umbrella series was counted a great success in its first season and finished at number 14 in the Nielsen ratings for the 1971-1972 season. Columbo was nominated for eight Emmy Awards and won four categories.

The success of Mystery Movie prompted NBC to reschedule the original three shows to the competitive 8:30-10:00 Sunday evening time period for the second season as The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie.

A fourth show was added to the rotation and lasted two seasons (1972–74):

• Hec Ramsey, starring Richard Boone as a gunfighter turned frontier forensic detective in the Old West, was produced by Jack Webb.

In addition, a clone of the umbrella series, The NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie debuted in the original time period and featured three new programs:

• Banacek, starring George Peppard as a free-lance insurance investigator of Polish ancestry in Boston. Like Hec Ramsey, it lasted two seasons (1972–74).
• Cool Million, starring James Farentino as a private investigator and security / retrieval expert whose fee per case was the name of the series.
• Madigan had Richard Widmark reprising his 1968 film role as a streetwise veteran detective of the NYPD.

During the 1973-1974 season, the programs rotating on Sunday remained the same, while on Wednesday, Cool Million and Madigan were canceled and Banacek rotated with three new series:

• Faraday & Company, starring Dan Dailey as a private detective who returns to Los Angeles after a quarter century in a South American jail.
• Tenafly, starring James MacEachin as an African-American private detective.
• The Snoop Sisters, starring Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick as two elderly sisters who routinely found mysteries which they solved.

Even rescheduling to Tuesday nights as The NBC Tuesday Mystery Movie during January 1974 didn't help ratings, however, and the midweek series was canceled, while the Sunday series continued.

During subsequent years, Columbo, McCloud and McMillan and Wife rotated with a fourth series, which changed each year. These included:

• Amy Prentiss, starring Jessica Walter as the fictional first female chief of detectives for the San Francisco Police Department.
• McCoy, starring Tony Curtis as a professional con-man / thief.
• Quincy, M.E., starring Jack Klugman as a medical examiner in the L.A. County Coroner's office.
• Lanigan's Rabbi, about a small town police chief (Art Carney) and his best friend, a rabbi and amateur sleuth (Bruce Solomon), based on Harry Kemelman's popular Rabbi Small mysteries.

Of all the wheel series, only the original three -- Columbo, McCloud and McMillan & Wife -- survived for the entire run of the Mystery Movie. Most of the others were very short-lived, and with the exception of Hec Ramsey and Banacek were all only on the air for one season. Quincy, M.E. proved to be such a hit that NBC spun it off into its own weekly series midway through the final Mystery Movie season, the only Mystery Movie series to receive this honor, and the spin-off series ran until 1983.

Presentation

The Mystery Movie theme music was composed by Henry Mancini.

The opening credits consisted of a mysterious figure carrying a flashlight slowly walking towards the camera in a desert landscape under dramatic clouds, as images representing the various rotating series appeared sequentially on the screen; at the end, an announcer (Hank Sims) presents that night's main actors and series (example: "Tonight, starring Peter Falk as Columbo"). Some syndicated episodes of Columbo retain this opening credit sequence, though slowed towards the end to avoid showing the title caption which includes "NBC" and (after the first season), a day of the week.

The Wednesday Mystery Movie Theme was composed by Quincy Jones for its first season and had an animated open to show the lineup, The tune was very uptempo and the open did not look at all like the Sunday Movie, an audio version of The wednesday version intro to Cool Million can be found by searching on google.

Post-series

ABC launched a revival of the mystery wheel show idea, appropriately titled the ABC Mystery Movie, which lasted from February 1989 to August 1990. Columbo returned as part of ABC's revival, along with a revival of Kojak and three new series: B.L. Stryker, Gideon Oliver, and Christine Cromwell.

After the ABC Mystery Movie ended its run, a further fourteen Columbo TV movies were broadcast between 1990 and 2003. McCloud was also featured in one further TV movie, The Return of Sam McCloud, during November 1989.

In addition to Columbo, Banacek, McCloud, and MacMillan and Wife have also been seen in syndication in the past and still do air on various stations from time to time. Quincy currently airs on Retro Television Network, a digital television network that also has aired episodes of McCloud and MacMillan and Wife in the past. Currently, Banacek is aired on the Retro Television Network Sunday Mornings (February 2011).

Popular culture references

• The cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 would often reference the NBC Mystery Movie, either through referencing characters, or a subtle recurring joke;^{[clarification needed]} whenever a character in their spoofed movie shone a flashlight, one of the robots would remark, "It's the NBC Mystery Movie!"

• A 2008 episode of The Simpsons, "Dial 'N' for Nerder", ended with a reference to the NBC Mystery Movie's opening sequence, featuring Nelson Muntz as Columbo, Dr. Hibbert as Quincy, Rich Texan as McCloud and Mr. Burns and Smithers as McMillan and Wife.

• In an episode of the cartoon King of the Hill, Hank Hill refers to Hec Ramsey as an under-appreciated part of the NBC Mystery Wheel.

External links

• NBC Mystery Movie at the Internet Movie Database
• TV Archives: NBC Mystery Movie