Half-Hour Television Dramas

[I'll undoubtedly have more on Peter Gunn at some point -- if for no other reason than the clothes are to die for -- but here is a small note on it in relation to the compression required of half-hour television dramas.]

Half-hour dramatic shows have to be almost insanely compact, which means they rely a lot on generic shorthand. Peter Gunn is a great example of this -- it's like re-writing a Chandler novel as a haiku. People do things in the 13th minute of a Gunn episode not so much because of what happened in the 12th minute, but because that is what they would have to do in the 13th minute of a half-hour detective show, in order to keep things moving along.

There is actually a Gunn episode ("The Chinese Hangman") that is an unacknowledged rip-off/condensation of Out of the Past, and is almost incomprehensible if you don't know the source material.

UPDATE (5/31/2009): Another first season Gunn episode, "The Dirty Word," is distinctly Chandleresque, with Pete more emotionally involved than usual, and a complete novel's-worth of plot crammed into the breathless half-hour. Tony Barrett, a prolific television writer, wrote this particular teleplay; I cannot find any record of him publishing novels (under his own name, anyway), but he feels like a frustrated novelist.