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His work habits are abominable. He is busiest when the sky over the city is a grey suspicion of dawn, the hour when streetwalkers quit, grifters count their take, and busted junkies begin to jitter with the inside sweats. He is a loner, but his world is filled with friends. He knows the cop with the abused arches, the complaisant heiress, the slick saloon proprietor, the sick comic, the sullen stoolie who talks in the guarded whisper of cell block and exercise yard. He is furiously honest, but he can spot a rigged wheel with a sharper's skill. He is hard-muscled, handsome, handy with a snub-nosed, 38, and his hide is as tough as the bluing on a pistol barrel. Decent, disillusioned and altogether incredible, he is a soap opera Superman. He is television's "Private Eye."
Smarter than the cops, craftier than the crooks, too quick to be caught and domesticated by the classiest doll, TV's private detective runs second to only one competitor in the race for ratings. So far, in a season riddled with old scandals and new specials, the Cowpoke is still top draw, but the Eye has impressive fire power, and by year's end he may well be top gun. The TV tally sheet already lists 62 shows (network and syndicated) devoted to some variation of Cops & Robbers. Police detectives practice their profession on the networks only a few hours a week; it is the civilian shamus who lays down by far the heaviest barrage. At least 15 of the Private Eyes now visible have survived other seasons; the four newcomers—Staccato, Philip Marlowe, Bourbon Street Beat, Hawaiian Eye—came on behind a resounding drum roll of publicity. On the ABC network alone there are twelve detective shows, three of them back-to-back on Friday nights.
This surge of interest in the armed support of law and order calls for a combined budget of upwards of $1,250,000 a week—a bankroll that supports sleuths ranging from a corn-fed country operative named Hannibal Cobb, who appears in five-minute syndicated slices, to a brand-new sunburned entry, Hawaiian Eye, with a mixture of lets and lead, and a full hour on the screen. As the corpses pile up in the living room, citizens who know crime only from the tabloids follow the Eyes like men on the trail of their most desperate hope. And as the evenings pass, one Eye blurs inevitably into another, a TV trouble that even an honest repairman cannot cure.