NBC Mystery Movie
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The NBC Mystery Movie is the umbrella title of an American television series, produced by Universal Studios, 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 series created from a 1968 made-for-television movie, Prescription: Murder, which starred Falk in the same role.
- McMillan and Wife 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 Gunfighter turned frontier Forensic Detective 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 lasted 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 Francisco Police Department), Faraday & Company, Lanigan's Rabbi (about a small town police chief and his best friend, a rabbi and amateur sleuth), McCoy (starring Tony Curtis as a professional con-man / thief), 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 February 1977. It featured Jack Klugman as a medical examiner in the L.A. County's coroner's office.
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 (Hank Sims) presents that night's stars and series (example: "Tonight, starring Peter Falk as Columbo"). It was also the same opening used in Ironside for its second season.[citation needed] Some syndicated episodes of Columbo retain this opening credit sequence, though slowed down towards the end to avoid showing the title caption which includes "NBC" and (after the first season), a day of the week. Columbo returned in 1989 as part of ABC's revival of the Mystery Movie concept, which lasted for two seasons, and then in a further fourteen TV movies between 1990 and 2003. McCloud appeared in one further TV movie, The Return of Sam McCloud, in November 1989.
[edit] Pop Culture References
The cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 would often reference the NBC Mystery movie, either through referencing characters, or a subtle running gag; whenever a character in their spoofed movie shone a flashlight, one of the robots would remark, "It's the NBC Mystery Movie!"
A 2008 Simpsons episode, Dial 'N' for Nerder, ended with a reference to the NBC Mystery Movie's opening, featuring Nelson Muntz as Columbo, Dr. Hibbert as Quincy, Rich Texan as McCloud, and Mr. Burns and Smithers as McMillan and Wife.
