Trailer Park: Ellery Queen Mysteries
In 1975, NBC ran Ellery Queen Mysteries, a show that lasted for 22 episodes and starred Jim Hutton as the eponymous detective. It was one of several television adaptations of Ellery Queen, and was created by the writing and producing team behind Columbo and Murder, She Wrote.
(Ellery Queen, of course, was the pen name created by two cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee--you can learn more about that at this link).
Here's a description of the television show, from Wikipedia:
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.
It wasn't exactly well-received at the time, with critic Richard Schickel calling it "a garage-sale period piece." But 35 years later, when the series was released on DVD, critic David Wiegand called it a "completely satisfying guilty pleasure."
Here's the trailer for the show, and after you're done watching it, you can check out the two Ellery Queen books we're currently offering through MysteriousPress.com: The Roman Hat Mystery and Calamity Town.
