Cloak and Dagger
May 7, 1950 – October 22, 1950 · 24 broadcasts
Cloak and Dagger came out of a 1946 book of the same name by Corey Ford and Alastair MacBain, two OSS officers who wrote up what their service had actually done behind enemy lines in the Second World War. NBC put it on the air on 7 May 1950 as a half-hour anthology, and Ford himself introduced the premiere. Each week a different agent drew a different assignment -- Berlin with a walkie-talkie, Tibet with a cover story, a Paris nightclub, the Burmese hill country -- and because the show had no continuing hero, there was never any guarantee the agent would come home. Sometimes he did not. The scripts were credited as suggested by real case files, with the British crime journalist Percy Hoskins researching and Wyllis Cooper -- the writer behind Lights Out and Quiet, Please -- doing much of the writing and direction, one of the few jobs he took on alone for NBC. Louis G. Cowan produced, Sherman Marks supervised, and a deep bench of New York radio actors passed through: Everett Sloane, Joseph Julian, Berry Kroeger, Les Tremayne, Jackson Beck, and a young Martin Balsam and Eileen Heckart among them. Karl Weber turned up more than any of them, announcing and acting by turns. It never found a sponsor and it never found a large audience. NBC moved it off Sunday afternoons to Friday evenings in September, brought it back to Sunday in October, and closed it on 22 October 1950 after 24 broadcasts. Twenty-two survive.
Episode Spine
1950
Cloak and Dagger came out of a 1946 book of the same name by Corey Ford and Alastair MacBain, two OSS officers who wrote up what their service had actually done behind enemy lines in the Second World War. NBC put it on the air on 7 May 1950 as a half-hour anthology, and Ford himself introduced the premiere. Each week a different agent drew a different assignment -- Berlin with a walkie-talkie, Tibet with a cover story, a Paris nightclub, the Burmese hill country -- and because the show had no continuing hero, there was never any guarantee the agent would come home. Sometimes he did not. The scripts were credited as suggested by real case files, with the British crime journalist Percy Hoskins researching and Wyllis Cooper -- the writer behind Lights Out and Quiet, Please -- doing much of the writing and direction, one of the few jobs he took on alone for NBC. Louis G. Cowan produced, Sherman Marks supervised, and a deep bench of New York radio actors passed through: Everett Sloane, Joseph Julian, Berry Kroeger, Les Tremayne, Jackson Beck, and a young Martin Balsam and Eileen Heckart among them. Karl Weber turned up more than any of them, announcing and acting by turns. It never found a sponsor and it never found a large audience. NBC moved it off Sunday afternoons to Friday evenings in September, brought it back to Sunday in October, and closed it on 22 October 1950 after 24 broadcasts. Twenty-two survive.