1950s

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz filmed before a live studio audience with three cameras, inventing the modern sitcom and the rerun eco...

Ralph Kramden, Brooklyn bus driver, threats to the moon, and working class frustration as farce. Gleason filmed the classic 39 epi...

Just the facts: Webb played Sergeant Joe Friday with flat affect and documentary narration, the LAPD procedural as a straight face...

Twenty seasons and 635 episodes: Dodge City, Matt Dillon, Miss Kitty, Doc, and Festus. The adult western came from radio with film...

The Master of Suspense hosted, drew his own profile, and delivered ghoulishly deadpan introductions censored for sponsor comfort. ...

Rod Serling, Emmy winner turned genre prophet, narrated five seasons of morality plays at the edge of reality. The gremlin on the ...

Raymond Burr defended the innocent for nine seasons with a record of confessions extracted on the witness stand. The courtroom for...

A jazz soaked private eye in a nightclub world, scored by Henry Mancini with a bass line that became a standard covered by the Blu...

The Cartwrights ran the Ponderosa in color from the first season, NBC showcasing its new color broadcasts. Fourteen seasons, 431 e...

Sergeant Bilko, motor pool con artist, ran every racket at Fort Baxter. Silvers machine gun delivery and Hiken ensembles of chumps...

The Cleavers of Mayfield: Ward, June, Wally, and the Beaver, childhood rendered as a gentle moral fable. Told from the kids point ...

Head em up, move em out. Cattle drives from San Antonio to Sedalia, with Eric Fleming as trail boss and an unknown Clint Eastwood ...

Eliot Ness versus Al Capone in Depression Chicago, narrated by Walter Winchell like a machine gun dispatch. Robert Stack as Ness, ...