Along with Harry O, which I've written more than enough about here, another crime-type TV show I liked was Police Story, which went on NBC in 1973. It stayed on for a number of years, sometimes as a weekly series and sometimes as specials. It was an anthology with a few recurring characters. Basically, it was a different story every week about a different police officer of some kind working in Los Angeles.
It was, as the titles told us, "Created by Joseph Wambaugh," Mr. Wambaugh was a former police officer who became a best-selling author of books about his profession, both fiction and non-fiction. I remember wondering back in '73 just what he had "created" in creating this show. Do you get a creator credit for saying, "Hey, let's do a series that's about a different cop every week"? I guess you do — and as I got more into the TV business and understood more about writing for the medium, I realized Wambaugh probably had a lot to do with setting the tone of the show and its commitment to not sensationalize and to depict police work with a then-unprecedented level of accuracy.
And there was another credit I wondered about. There was an episode that starred Hugh O'Brian and Sue Ane Langdon. I was, then as now, a careful watcher of credits but back then, I wasn't watching on a VCR or TiVo. I couldn't freeze-frame or rewind…and in that episode's opening credits, I saw something for two seconds which seemed odd to me. But I couldn't go back and I failed to catch the episode in reruns so I just forgot about it.
Well, I just stumbled across it on YouTube. Here is a screengrab of that odd title card that caught my eye when as a mere lad of 21 in 1973, I noticed this…
How the heck did that get on the air?