TV Noir: The Dark Genre on the Small Screen

The pioneering, incisive, lavishly illustrated survey of noir on television?the first of its kind.

Noir?as genre, style, movement, or sensibility?has its roots in the hardboiled detective fiction of the likes of Hammett and Chandler; the works of these authors were among the wave of post-WWII Hollywood films that in 1946 were, separately, tagged “film noir” by French cineastes Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier. But film wasn’t the only medium with a taste for a dark story. Hundreds of live dramas were staged on television in the 40s and 50s?adaptations of the works of Chandler, Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, W.R. Burnett, Dorothy B. Hughes and other writers of teleplays featuring brooding detectives and femmes fatales, gangsters and dark deeds. Dark storytelling gained traction on the small screen, with some key differences from film, not the least of which is the continuing hero, back week after week to address a new disruption of the social order.    

In TV Noir, noted film and television historian Allen Glover has written the first complete study of the subject, in this incisive, lavishly illustrated and exciting survey of the television programming that evolved concurrently with the film noir heyday. Deconstructing its key elements with astute and informed analysis, from NBCs adaptation of Woolrich’s The Dark Angel and the anthology programs of the 40s and 50s to the classic period with the likes of Dragnet, M Squad, and 77 Sunset Strip and the neo-noirs of the 70s and 80s including The Fugitive, Kolchak, and Harry O., Allen Glover presents the essential volume that, at last, plumbs the depths of TV noir.  

Rounding out the volume are the essays “Chaos and Order,”  “The Noir Setting,” “Light and Shadow,” and “The Investigative” Journey.”