A NAKED CITY

Considering my advancing age, I still am not old enough to remember seeing the television series, Naked City, in its original run. (It ran from 1958 to 1963. My earliest TV-sucking memory goes way back to 1966. Impressive, huh?) The first time I was introduced to it was in 1978 when the Global Television Network -- 'formerly known as a good network' -- started playing it around midnight. I was in high school then and I remember that my fellow students and I would often ask each other whether or not we had watched Naked City the night before. We probably asked, "where have you been hiding all this time?" The show is outstanding. I have caught a couple episodes of the modern versions of City... programs with the names of Homicide, NYPD Blue, and such; fine shows in there own right, from what I have seen, but very inferior to their obvious model. Isn't that the way it normally is, though? Fans of current series always think that 'their show' invented everything -- this is what I call fandom arrogance and ignorance: This is fine in itself as you can't expect 'fans' to be little television series historians. They watch what is presented to them. If it isn't on TV then how do you expect the average viewer to see older or more elusive programming? Naked City was filmed in glorious black and white. Apparently, the new home-video versions of Naked City are beautiful to look at. (Like most old shows, the negatives have not been touched since printing elements were first struck to make the original air-dates. Copies for syndication were printed from these 'interpositives' and 'internegatives' made off the original camera negatives. Don't listen to these DVD reviewers who use the term "clean up" -- which they do so to an extreme. The original negs are 'mint' because they have hardly been touched!) Television series shot in B&W suffer greatly in the modern syndication market. As a matter of fact it is not uncommon for a TV station or network to bypass the early B&W season(s) and go straight to the later colour ones when airing an old show that was a mix of the two. Any show photographed in shades of grey only, or short in seasons, suffers greatly in the rerun market. The Outer Limits (1963 - 1965), one of the greatest of all time, ran only one and a half seasons and was fittingly shot in B&W. This is why most have never seen it. (Even though Limits and The Twilight Zone are two different shows, the former is superior; but few know that as Zone ran for five years making it rich for syndication.) I saw a lone episode back in 1988 when CKVR -- a station that used to be outstanding -- started running Naked City late at night, along with Mission Impossible, The Outer Limits, and others. Why, oh, why were shows so much better then than any now? Hold on a moment, why has my computer screen gone 'pinky'? Oh... that's better. I didn't think it was the monitor. Back to the story: I was watching CKVR late at night and thought what I was seeing was a movie. Whatever it was had just started and whatever it was looked very cinematic in style. "What could this movie be?", I asked myself. "This can't be a television series." Just then, the opening titles for Naked City came up. Oh, that's why...