You know if you watch "Breakfast at Tiffany's" you get to see New York at street level, alley level all kinds of levels. Naked City takes you inside all of those nooks and crannies you might wonder about as you watch Holly Golightly race down the streets and alleys after her cat.Naked City not only excels in its cinematography of this great city but consistently includes captivating, colorful stories "one of the 8 million" as well as characters with dimension and growth throughout the original 4 seasons. The show exists in an era where our modern age is in its infancy. We see modern air travel mixed with ancient cold water flats and old- timer police detectives physically beating out confessions in contrast to newer psychological techniques used to help the citizens and the police understand each other. The changes in automobiles and communications technologies, the dimensions of the professional detective and the tolls the job can take on their personal lives. The creators of this show were not caught up on "solving" every case neatly. They left room for the collateral damage of true tragedy and unfair justice to bleed through the scripts, demonstrating a very human quality and realism in its raw glory.Before attempting to review this masterpiece I was sure to watch each and every episode thanks to RETROTV and DECADESTV. Before 2014 I had never heard of this show but have always appreciated great writing and colorful character development, Naked City has all that. It's also worth noting how many actors have sprung from this series into critically acclaimed and solid performers still going today. In many cases Naked City was their first television debut or close to it. Finally Paul Burke, Horace McMahon, Harry Bellaver and Nancy Malone deserve a place highlighting their fantastic chemistry and ensemble performances in television history. After watching every episode at least once, I can't believe we didn't see more from Paul Burke and Nancy Malone as well as Bellaver even though it's noted that Horace McMahon died just a few years after the series concluded, one of his last performances in Family Affair.

Not every great actor gets to be recognized for great work. Most of the good actors working today have names most of us will never know. But there was a time when TV was THE place to showcase you talents as an actor. The 1950's and 1960's provided tons of actors chances to show what they could do, and many went on to become well known names. But most of them , for reasons that were not their fault, practiced their art in relative obscurity. That's why I love watching shows like The Naked City. Yes Virginia, there was a golden time when great writing and really fine acting made TV such a pleasure to watch. Back then producers had much more time to develop characters and situations because an hour show like The Naked City had far fewer interruptions for commercials. An hour show really was pretty close to an hour. Every time I watch an episode of this fine program I am reminded of just how much change has not been kind to TV. Now a days it's really hard to find good writing and good acting on prime time TV. Constant interruptions for commercials and flashy graphics have distracted us from developing plot lines that people can relate to. The stories in The Naked City were about real people in situations that almost anyone could relate to. I Just finished watching a fine episode that featured Jack Warden and Carol O'Connor. O'Connor would go on to star in All In The Family but he was doing fine dramatic work in TV and movies long before that. And sadly, Jack Warden is still a name most people draw a blank on. I love those dramatic shows from the 50s and 60s. You just don't see those kind of lovingly crafted shows anymore. Too bad....

This one is the kind of series that made early TV the first rate entertainment is was (but seldom is today). Naked City was also the fertile ground wherein the show "Route 66" was also born. One of the early episodes--"Four Sweet Corners"--was about two young guys who teamed up to go against a neighborhood gang. Those two (played by Bobby Morris and George Maharis) would be the catalyst for the Route 66 series, except Bobby Morris died unexpectedly, so Martin Milner starred opposite Maharis in Route 66.Actress Lois Nettleton, one of the guest stars on Naked City, explained why the show was so well done, saying that it, "..focused on the atmosphere and reality of the people involved in the story. It was more personal." She is right. They just don't put this kind of effort into dramatic shows today. The star of this show was actually the streets New York City. You can't beat that kind of casting.For a good take on the series, I recommend Jim Rosin's book, "Naked City, The Television Series." Then get some DVDs of the show and see why it was ahead of its time.

As others have noted, Naked City was essentially an anthology series (a now gone genre that was common in the late 50s/early 60s), rather than a "police procedural". The scripts varied in quality and some veered a bit too much toward the sentimentality and sanctimony that passed for quality television in the show's era. Nonetheless, it provided many sides of New York and probably showed off the city better than any subsequent New York-based show. "Naked City" was put together by many of the same people responsible for "Route 66", which was the yin to this show's yang--restless loners who went everywhere (rather than cops rooted in New York) and and served up a similar range of characters in places all over the country, with similar kinds of scripts. Whatever the limits of the writing, the show was well-acted and had strong regulars, as well as a range of guest stars and bit players that seems amazing from our vantage point in the present.Regarding previous comments: The city has changed less than one might expect in the last few decades. I rented a DVD that included a scene at 3rd Ave & 68th St. A few days before, I happened to be in that area--except for one corner, much of the area looks much as it did in that 1961 episode. As for the "diversity" of the show and NYC: New York in 1960 had a much smaller proportion of minorities than cities such as Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Washington DC, etc. Also, the big drug-fueled crime wave of the late 60s to the 80s had not begun and the racial disparity in arrests and incarceration was not as large as it has become in the present day. African Americans lived in Harlem, but also middle class sections of Queens and economically mixed areas of Brooklyn; it was never as ghettoized as many other places such as LA or Chicago and there was a significant middle class. In 1960, New York still was very much a city of Irish, Italian, & Jewish immigrants and their descendants, with healthy doses of Greeks, Eastern European gentiles, Scandinavians, and others. In addition, the show's occasional African-American guest star or even its inclusion of Black faces in crowds were radical steps for their time and the sort of thing that engendered sponsor resistance. Even after the passage of Civil Rights laws, Black faces were rare on television. Naked City was far ahead of its time, even if it seems anachronistic now. Pontiac may have been a sponsor, which would explain the 4 door hardtops (top of the line cars in their day) for the cops and old Fords for the perps. OTOH, location filming was novel and has never been cheap, so the expendable perp cars would have been potential junkers.My guess is that "Naked City" was popular among everyday police officers for the same reason that "Barney Miller" was--it humanized the individual cop, showed the tedium of their job, and portrayed the world of odd and unexplainable characters that filled their day. It's doubtful that anyone would want to identify with the likes of Andy Sipowicz (NYPD Blue), even he that seems more realistic to a TV viewer.