Word: eye
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...crooks, too quick to be caught and domesticated by the classiest doll, TV's private detective runs second to only one competitor in the race for ratings. So far, in a season riddled with old scandals and new specials, the Cowpoke is still top draw, but the Eye has impressive fire power, and by year's end he may well be top gun. The TV tally sheet already lists 62 shows (network and syndicated) devoted to some variation of Cops & Robbers. Police detectives practice their profession on the networks only a few hours a week...
...armed support of law and order calls for a combined budget of upwards of $1,250,000 a week-a bankroll that supports sleuths ranging from a corn-fed country operative named Hannibal Cobb, who appears in five-minute syndicated slices, to a brand-new sunburned entry, Hawaiian Eye, with a mixture of lets and lead, and a full hour on the screen. As the corpses pile up in the living room, citizens who know crime only from the tabloids follow the Eyes like men on the trail of their most desperate hope. And as the evenings pass, one Eye...
Faithful to this rigid ritual, few writers busy paying for their swimming pools and Thunderbirds with Private Eye cash could take the facetious oath of Britain's Detection Club-that their heroes "shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them . . . not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence...
Like the Western. TV's Private Eye certainly cannot lay claim to realism, either. His real-life counterparts work out of the country's 5,000 agencies (and earn a collective income of about $250 million a year), not out of swank bars and seedy clip joints. They spend more time at plant protection or gathering over-the-transom divorce evidence than avenging mink-clad corpses. TV Eyes, says San Francisco's crew-cut professional Eye, Hal Lipsett, are altogether too tough. They ignore the real Eye's tricky devices and subtle techniques-the telephone...
...despite all the stereotyping, the TV Eye can be topnotch entertainment. He is what sometime Saturday Review Critic John Paterson called "every man's romantic conception of himself: the glorification of toughness, irreverence, and a sense of decency almost too confused to show itself." The Private Eye is the ordinary citizen "become suddenly, magically aggressive, become purified by righteous and legitimate anger-and become, at last, devastatingly effective." Properly presented, he is as much a part of American legend as the super-cowboy, just as surely escapes the conventional, rule-ridden world by taking the law into...