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Not unless there are some cable channels that can run 16mm prints like it's 1975.

Simple: Some rightsholders are diligent stewards of the cultural legacies entrusted to them, and others aren't.

It became The Doctors and the Nurses for the final season because CBS wouldn't renew it unless Brodkin put some dudes in. That was a real slap in the face to the original stars, who were suddenly demoted to supporting players in their own show (Shirl Conway pointed out in the press that the...

The Nurses (of which I've seen about half) is a good show, but it's kind of the Brodkin B-team. No Reginald Rose (and no other equivalent, strong creative voice), less Ernest Kinoy and Larry Cohen, and less charismatic actors than Marshall and Reed. Brodkin made his lawyer the producer at one...

"The Noose" is a lynching story, but it's kind of a cop-out; I guess they weren't allowed to include a racial angle in such an inflammatory context. Kinoy's "Blood County" is a more indirect and effective allegory for violence against civil rights activists.

I've seen the whole run, yes. Almost ten years ago, but I had the foresight to take good notes (even though I'm usually lazier than I should be about that).

Hackett turns up one more time in the second season, but it's a classic example of a character being too far outside the central setting and storytelling of the show to be of much use. (Judging from her credits, Hackett seems to have moved to L.A. by 1962, which may have limited her...

Which is, of course, highly debatable ... and that episode incorporates such a debate, with the Prestons on opposite sides.

Click on the link. Copy the headline. Paste the headline into Google. Click on the WSJ piece when it comes up in the Google results. Same firewall workaround as with the New York Times.

I'm not sure what alternate approach you're calling for, Jack. You just seem to be doing backflips to find a way to condemn The Defenders for something more substantial than its failure to align with your own politics. Anyway, here's Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. (Edit...

Nah. Bonanza can suck it.

I guess "The Man With the Concrete Thumb" would run afoul of the paranoid anti-government arm of the right (which always exists more in rhetoric than in practice). But it favors an authoritarian solution over an activist one and that does seem quite conservative -- and yes, probably more so...

Well, the pendulum swings both ways ... There are issues where the consensus has moved to the left since the sixties (gay rights) and others where it's moved far to the right (gun control). Seen in hindsight, The Defenders advocates for ideas that have come to pass (legalization of abortion)...

Perhaps they could put a trigger warning on subsequent releases.

Yes, that's the corner The Defenders turned with "The Benefactor": into full-on advocacy for (mostly) progressive points of view. No fig leaf of objectivity. Still a rarity in scripted television.

They just didn't pay attention to continuity at that level because they couldn't imagine anybody cared. All this work was done on manual typewriters and mimeograph machines. Nobody had the time or inclination to comb through a two month-old script to dig out a character name that might've been...

Stephen Battaglio (David Susskind's biographer) has a nice piece on the show and the DVD release in the L.A. Times.

You'd have to ask a Rosenman expert to clarify that for certain. Apart from the pilot, the only on-screen credit for music during the first two seasons is a "music supervisor" credit for Ronald Noll (a CBS staffer), so that's the major clue that most of the music was tracked. Could they have...

Leonard Rosenman wrote the theme and a full score for the pilot, but apart from cues recycled from that, The Defenders used tracks from the CBS library for all of the first two seasons. It's a little odd that Brodkin, who generally kept the network at bay as much as possible, would outsource...

Larry Cohen is a great self-promoter and I've never shed my suspicion that he was subtracting a few years from his age to play up the teenaged TV writer angle ... but who knows, maybe he really was that prodigious. Steve Mitchell (who produced the Combat and Thriller DVD extras) has a...

Larry Cohen's episodes are great -- like Ernest Kinoy and the show's only female writer, Ellen Violett, he basically nailed it every time -- but indeed, he doesn't show up until Season 2. I guess the theory was that subsequent volumes, even if they're forthcoming, might not have a budget for...

The one that made my jaw drop was the third season's "Climate of Evil," an attack on inhumane prison conditions which makes it very clear that the Prestons' client (Dean Stockwell) is being raped by a guard.

I didn't get a response when I asked Shout for a review copy, which is unusual. Maybe they'd already decided to dump it.

I think "Gideon's Follies" is great. As literate as you'd expect from a Defenders comedy (references to Sandburg and Cocteau), and how can you go wrong with Julie Newmar as a topless nympho?

The "kangaroo court" thing is another silly gimmick they had to get out of their systems. There's an even dumber one coming up in "The Tarnished Cross."

Sounds like we all owe this Mark Topaz guy a big debt of gratitude: http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/tv/why-quality-tv-comes-from-new-york-not-hollywood-1.12058054

If anyone is curious about the order in which the episodes were filmed, I'm about 90% sure that the sequencing of Reginald Rose's Defenders scripts at Columbia reflects that order: http://findingaids.cul.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-rb/ldpd_4078688/dsc The first season of The Defenders had a weird...

"Death Across the Counter," the third episode broadcast, is the series' pilot, so some of you may want to start watching there.