Saturday, December 26, 2015

What Might've Been: Decoy (1957)

What Jack Webb and Dragnet did, dramatizing and adapting cases from the files of the Los Angeles Police Department, other shows were copying. In New York, one such series took a look at police work from a woman's point of view.

Decoy lasted just 1 season as a starring vehicle for Beverly Garland ("The Alligator People"), whom most TV trivia scholars might associate more with her run during the later years of the sitcom, My Three Sons. Garland was cast as undercover detective Casey Jones, and, like Webb, Garland doubled as narrator.

In "To Trap a Thief", Casey poses as a blackmailer who'd already been captured to capture a previously undetected suspect in a robbery case.




Even though there were sitcoms (The Goldbergs, Beulah) and Westerns (Annie Oakley) with female leads, it seems that folks weren't quite ready for a crime drama with one. Not only that, but, as we've noted before, there was a glut of crime dramas in those days, moreso than there is now.

Rating: B.

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