Naked City (TV series)

This article is about the 1958 television series. For other uses, see Naked City (disambiguation).

Naked City
Genre
Created byStirling Silliphant
Starring
Narrated byLawrence Dobkin
Opening theme
Composers
Country of originUnited States
No. of seasons4
No. of episodes138
Production
Executive producerHerbert B. Leonard (1962–1963)
Producers
Running time
  • 30 minutes (1958–1959)
  • 60 minutes (1960–1963)
Production companies
Original release
NetworkABC
ReleaseSeptember 30, 1958 (1958-09-30) –
May 29, 1963 (1963-05-29)
Infobox instructions (only shown in preview)

Naked City is an American police procedural television series from Screen Gems that aired on ABC from 1958 to 1963. It was inspired by the 1948 motion picture The Naked City and mimics its dramatic "semi-documentary" format. As in the film, each episode concluded with a narrator intoning the iconic line: "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them."

The Naked City episode "Four Sweet Corners" (1959) inspired the series Route 66, created by Stirling Silliphant. Route 66 was broadcast by CBS from 1960 to 1964, and, like Naked City, followed the "semi-anthology" format of building the stories around the guest actors, rather than the regular cast.[1] In 1997, the episode "Sweet Prince of Delancey Street" (1961) was ranked number 93 on TV Guide's "100 Greatest Episodes of All Time" list.[2]

  1. ^ Cohan, Steven; Hark, Ina Rae, eds. (1997). "Wanderlust and Wire Wheels: The Existential Search of Route 66". The Road Movie Book. London: Routledge. p. 144. ISBN 978-0-4151-4937-2.
  2. ^ "Special Collectors' Issue: 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time". TV Guide. June 28 – July 4, 1997.