NBC Mystery Movie
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The NBC Mystery Movie was an American / Universal Studios television series that aired on NBC from 1971 to 1977. At times throughout its run, it split into several versions that ran concurrently on 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 shows within the same time slot throughout the season. In its initial 1971-1972 season, it premiered with a rotation of three detective dramas that ran on Wednesday night from 8:30-10:00 in the Eastern Time Zone.
The three original 1971-72 shows were:
- McCloud, which starred Dennis Weaver as a New Mexico lawman reassigned to the New York Police Department, had debuted the previous season as part of the hour-long NBC wheel show Four in One.
- Columbo, which starred Peter Falk as a bumbling but deceptively clever Los Angeles homicide detective, was a new series created from a 1968 made-for-television movie, Prescription for Murder, which starred Falk in the same role.
- McMillan and Wife was a new show that starred Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James as a husband-and-wife crime-fighting duo. Hudson's character was the upscale 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 1971-72 season. Columbo was nominated for eight Emmy Awards and won in four categories.
The success of Mystery Movie prompted NBC to move the original three shows to the competitive 8:30-10:00 Sunday evening for the second season as The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie. A fourth series, the Jack Webb-produced Hec Ramsey, starring Richard Boone as a cowpoke turned crime-fighter in the Old West, was added to the rotation and lasted two seasons (1972-1974).
In addition, a clone of the umbrella series, The NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie debuted in the original time slot and featured three new shows:
- Banacek, starred George Peppard as a free-lance insurance investigator in Boston. Like Hec Ramsey, it last two seasons (1972-1974).
- Cool Million, starred James Farentino as a private investigator and security / retrieval expert whose fee per case was the title of the series.
- Madigan, had Richard Widmark reprising his 1968 film role as a streetwise veteran detective with the NYPD.
Other series that were later part of the Mystery Movie series are Amy Prentiss (starring Jessica Walter as the first female chief of detectives for the San Franscisco Police Department), Faraday & Company, Lanigan's Rabbi (about a small town police chief and his adult son, a rabbi and amateur sleuth), McCoy, starring Tony Curtis, Quincy, M.E., The Snoop Sisters, and Tenafly, starring James MacEachin as a family-man private detective.
Of all the wheel series, only the original three -- Columbo, McCloud and McMillan and Wife -- survived for the entire run of the Mystery Movie. Most of the others were short-lived (usually just one season), with the exception of Quincy which became the only Mystery Movie series to outlast its parent program when it was spun-off into its own weekly series in the spring of 1977. It featured Jack Klugman as a medical examiner in the L.A. County's coroner's office.
Two one-time-only movies - Backlash of the Hunter and The Marcus-Nelson Murders - served as the pilots for a successful weekly series: The Rockford Files and, on CBS, Kojak, respectively.
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 as images representing the various rotating series appeared in cameos on the side of the screen; at the end, an announcer presents that night's stars and series (example: "Starring Peter Falk as Columbo"). Some syndicated episodes of Columbo retain this opening credit sequence.
Both Columbo and McCloud would return in sporadic TV-movies during the early 90's.
