The Untouchables

The series began as a two-part episode of Desilu Playhouse in April 1959, moved to ABC that October and ran until 1963. Robert Stack played Eliot Ness, Walter Winchell narrated in newsreel present tense, and each week the programme presented itself as a federal case file opened for the audience.

It shares a source with the 1987 film — the memoir Ness wrote with the sportswriter Oscar Fraley, published in 1957 after Ness had died — and it exhausted that source quickly.

What happened after the book ran out

Later episodes gave invented crimes to real, named gangsters, set them in cities the squad never worked, and wrote Ness into cases that belonged to other agencies or to nobody at all. Capone's family sued over the use of his name. The Federal Bureau of Investigation objected to a Prohibition agent being credited on screen with work the Bureau considered its own. None of it slowed the programme down.

The argument it started

Italian-American organisations objected that the criminals were given Italian surnames almost without exception while the men on the other side were not. A sponsor boycott followed in 1961 and the producers agreed to reduce the practice. It is the first sustained public argument about how this material should be handled on screen, and it set the terms for the arguments that came after The Godfather and The Sopranos.

The verdict here is loosely based rather than dramatised. The series keeps a real man, a real city and a real memoir, and invents nearly everything that happens inside them.