Top Secret
June 12, 1950 – October 26, 1950 · 19 broadcasts
The Baroness is titled, European, and very good at getting into rooms she should not be in. Ilona Massey -- Budapest-born, trained as an opera singer, and billed every week by an announcer who could not say her name without calling her gorgeous -- plays an Allied agent working against the Nazis before and during the Second World War. Each half hour is one assignment, closed out with the promise that the story you just heard had, until now, been top secret. NBC built the series on its own market research. The network had found listeners tiring of private eyes and asking for something more naturalistic, and Top Secret was one of three shows that came out of that finding. What arrived was unusual for 1950: a spy series led by a woman who uses her position and her charm, but who can also fight and run when the script needs her to. It is a short, strange, well-made run. Nineteen broadcasts across the summer and autumn of 1950, unsponsored, restlessly rescheduled from Mondays to Sundays to a Friday, back to Mondays, and finally to Thursdays. Harry W. Junkin produced, directed and helped write it; Allan Sloane, who had dramatised the Sicily landings for the Peabody-winning The Man Behind the Gun and would be blacklisted two years later, wrote the scripts; Dr. Roy Shield scored it. On one broadcast the espionage stops so that Massey can sing.
Episode Spine
1950
The Baroness is titled, European, and very good at getting into rooms she should not be in. Ilona Massey -- Budapest-born, trained as an opera singer, and billed every week by an announcer who could not say her name without calling her gorgeous -- plays an Allied agent working against the Nazis before and during the Second World War. Each half hour is one assignment, closed out with the promise that the story you just heard had, until now, been top secret. NBC built the series on its own market research. The network had found listeners tiring of private eyes and asking for something more naturalistic, and Top Secret was one of three shows that came out of that finding. What arrived was unusual for 1950: a spy series led by a woman who uses her position and her charm, but who can also fight and run when the script needs her to. It is a short, strange, well-made run. Nineteen broadcasts across the summer and autumn of 1950, unsponsored, restlessly rescheduled from Mondays to Sundays to a Friday, back to Mondays, and finally to Thursdays. Harry W. Junkin produced, directed and helped write it; Allan Sloane, who had dramatised the Sicily landings for the Peabody-winning The Man Behind the Gun and would be blacklisted two years later, wrote the scripts; Dr. Roy Shield scored it. On one broadcast the espionage stops so that Massey can sing.