Ellery Queen (TV series)

Ellery Queen
Main title design by Jack Cole and N. Lee Lacy
Format	Period drama
Created by	Richard Levinson William Link
Starring	Jim Hutton David Wayne Tom Reese
Theme music composer	Elmer Bernstein
Composer(s)	Elmer Bernstein Dana Kaproff
Country of origin	United States
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	22 (23 with pilot)
Production
Executive producer(s)	Richard Levinson William Link
Camera setup	Single-camera
Running time	45–48 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	NBC
Audio format	Monaural
Original run	September 11, 1975 (1975-09-11) – April 4, 1976 (1976-04-04)

Ellery Queen is an American television detective mystery series that ran for one season from 1975 to 1976 on NBC. It starred Jim Hutton as Ellery Queen, and David Wayne as his father, Inspector Richard Queen. One of several television adaptations of the Ellery Queen mystery novels, the series was created by the writing and producing team of Richard Levinson and William Link, who also created such mystery fare as Mannix, Columbo and Murder, She Wrote.

Adaptation

A pilot for the series premiered on March 23, 1975, with the made-for-TV movie Ellery Queen (also titled "Too Many Suspects"), adapted from the 1965 Ellery Queen novel The Fourth Side of the Triangle. A total of 22 episodes followed in the show's single season. The theme music was by Elmer Bernstein. The last episode aired April 4, 1976.

Structure

Set in post-World War II, the show closely followed the format of the early Ellery Queen mystery novels, which carefully laid out the clues before the reader/audience and invited them to attempt to solve the mystery before Ellery Queen presented the solution. In the early Queen books, just prior to the presentation of the solution to the mystery, a "Challenge To The Reader" was issued, in which the suspects and clues were reviewed and the reader challenged to guess the solution to the crime. In the show, this tradition was preserved by having Ellery Queen break the fourth wall and speak directly to the viewer prior to the commercial break that led into the final act. The final act always employed the time-honored detective cliché of calling together all the suspects, with Ellery Queen presenting the solution to the group, frequently upstaging and skewering the solution proposed by whichever rival sleuth was also in the episode.

Cast

In addition to lead actors Jim Hutton and David Wayne, the series featured regulars Tom Reese as Inspector Queen's right-hand-man Sergeant Velie, John Hillerman as radio detective Simon Brimmer, and Ken Swofford as reporter Frank Flannigan.

Reception

Richard Schickel, reviewing the series in September 1975, called it "a garage-sale period piece"; he said "the presence of Guy Lombardo, some ancient autos and the oldest of detective story conventions (all suspects are assembled in one room to await the results of the detective's ratiocinations) are supposed to evoke nostalgia. They do not—and the format's stasis is numbing."

Thirty-five years later, David Wiegand, reviewing the series when it was released on DVD, called its formulaic structure a "completely satisfying guilty pleasure" and asserts the "appeal of the series is that the clues are actually there in the development of each show, and just before the denouement, Ellery breaks the "fourth wall" and asks if you've figured it out.

List of episodes

Pilot (98 minutes):

• "Ellery Queen" a.k.a. "Too Many Suspects" (1975·Mar·23), with Ray Milland

Episodes:

№	Title	Special guest	Airdate
1	"The Adventure of Auld Lang Syne"	Joan Collins	1975·Sep·11
2	"The Adventure of the Lover's Leap"	Ida Lupino	1975·Sep·18
3	"The Adventure of the Chinese Dog"	Orson Bean	1975·Sep·25
4	"The Adventure of the Comic Book Crusader"	Donald O'Connor	1975·Oct·02
5	"The Adventure of the 12th Floor Express"	Tyler McVey	1975·Oct·09
6	"The Adventure of Miss Aggie's Farewell Performance"	Eve Arden	1975·Oct·19
7	"The Adventure of Colonel Nivin's Memoirs"	Robert Loggia	1975·Oct·23
8	"The Adventure of the Mad Tea Party"	Larry Hagman	1975·Oct·30
9	"The Adventure of Veronica's Veils"	George Burns	1975·Nov·13
10	"The Adventure of the Pharaoh's Curse"	Ross Martin	1975·Dec·11
11	"The Adventure of the Blunt Instrument"	Eva Gabor	1975·Dec·18
12	"The Adventure of the Black Falcon"	Tab Hunter	1976·Jan·04
13	"The Adventure of the Sunday Punch"	Lloyd Nolan	1976·Jan·11
14	"The Adventure of the Eccentric Engineer"	Dorothy Malone	1976·Jan·18
15	"The Adventure of the Wary Witness"	Michael Parks	1976·Jan·25
16	"The Adventure of the Judas Tree"	Dana Andrews	1976·Feb·01
17	"The Adventure of the Sinister Scenario"	Vincent Price	1976·Feb·08
18	"The Adventure of the Two-Faced Woman"	Vera Miles	1976·Feb·29
19	"The Adventure of the Tyrant of Tin Pan Alley"	Ken Berry	1976·Mar·07
20	"The Adventure of Caesar's Last Sleep"	Stuart Whitman	1976·Mar·14
21	"The Adventure of the Hard-Hearted Huckster"	Bob Crane	1976·Mar·21
22	"The Adventure of the Disappearing Dagger"	Walter Pidgeon	1976·Apr·04

DVD release

The series, including the pilot, was released on DVD - in Australia (region 4, PAL) on 15 September 2010 and in the US by Entertainment One (region 1, NTSC) on September 28, 2010. The Australian release will also include the earlier TV movie Ellery Queen: Don't Look Behind You which Levinson and Link co-wrote under their pseudonym 'Ted Leighton'.^{[citation needed]}

External links

• Ellery Queen at the Internet Movie Database
• Ellery Queen at TV.com
• William Link from the Museum of Broadcast Communications