Naked City

Naked City is an American police procedural television series from Screen Gems that aired on ABC from 1958 to 1963. It was inspired by the 1948 motion picture The Naked City and mimics its dramatic "semi-documentary" format. As in the film, each episode concluded with a narrator intoning the iconic line: "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them." The Naked City episode "Four Sweet Corners" (1959) inspired the series Route 66, created by Stirling Silliphant. Route 66 was broadcast by CBS from 1960 to 1964, and, like Naked City, followed the "semi-anthology" format of building the stories around the guest actors, rather than the regular cast. In 1997, the episode "Sweet Prince of Delancey Street" (1961) was ranked number 93 on TV Guide "100 Greatest Episodes of All Time" list. Synopsis Filmed on location in New York City, the series concerned the detectives of NYPD's 65th Precinct (changed from the film's 10th Precinct). Episode plots usually focused more on the criminals and victims portrayed by guest actors, characteristic of the "semi-anthology" narrative format common in early 1960s television (so called by the trade paper Variety). For the first season, the primary writer was Stirling Silliphant, who wrote 32 of the season's 39 episodes. Silliphant's work resulted in significant critical acclaim for the series and attracted film and television actors of the time to seek guest-starring roles. Many scenes were filmed in the South Bronx near Biograph Studios (also known as Gold Medal Studios), where the series was produced, and in Greenwich Village and other neighborhoods in Manhattan. The exterior of the "65th Precinct" was the Midtown North (18th) Precinct, at 306 West 54th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, in the second and the third season, and the current 9th Precinct, at 321 East 5 Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues before it was renovated, in the first and in the fourth seasons.