Quinn Martin, among the most prolific and consistent television producers, helped to create and control some of television’s most successful and popular series from the 1950s through the 1970s. At various times in the 1960s and 1970s, Martin simultaneously had as many as four series on various networks.

Martin’s early television career consisted of writing and producing for many shows at Ziv Television and at Desilu Productions. He produced the Desilu Playhouse two-hour television movie “The Untouchables,” which served as the basis for the series. Under Martin, The Untouchables became a huge hit for the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Martin left after the first two seasons to form his own production company, QM Productions. The first series from QM, The New Breed, was unusual for Martin in that it was unsuccessful. During the years at Desilu and the first years of QM, Martin surrounded himself with a cadre of writers, directors, and producers who would later ably serve him when he was juggling the production schedules of several series. Alan Armer, George Eckstein, Walter Grauman, and John Conwell are but a few of the names to appear again and again in the credits of QM productions.

QM and Martin entered into an era of considerable success in the 1960s. Among the shows to come from QM during this period were The Fugitive, Twelve O’clock High, The FBI, and The Invaders, all broadcast on ABC. Indeed, the relationship between QM and ABC was enormously beneficial to both despite repeated charges that they rode to their mutual successes on a wave of violent programming that began with The Untouchables and continued as a central stylistic feature in QM programs.

It was also during this period that two aspects of Martin’s approach to television production emerged. First was the QM segmented-program format: a teaser; an expository introduction that often employed the convention of a narrator; a body broken into acts I, II, III, and IV; and an epilogue, using an off-screen narrator to explain or offer insight into the preceding action. So recognizable did this convention become that it was parodied in the 1982 sitcom Police Squad. Second, Martin compartmentalized his productions. This was done not only out of necessity, resulting from the volume of television being produced by the company, but also because of the trusted individuals with whom Martin populated QM. At QM, the writers, producers, and postproduction supervisors had very well defined tasks and would rarely stray beyond the parameters established by Martin. John Conwell, casting director and assistant to Martin for years, often referred to Martin as “Big Daddy” because of his paternalistic approach to production.

Additionally, as John Cooper reports, Alan Armer credited Martin with changing the face of the telefilm by moving from the soundstage to the outdoors and by ensuring authenticity by employing night-for-night shooting, as described in The Fugitive (see Cooper). Too often producers would save a few dollars by sim- ply darkening film footage shot during the day to simulate nighttime. Not Quinn Martin. He made money, and he spent money. In 1965 Television Magazine quoted Martin as saying that the 10 percent he would have paid an agent (if he had retained one) was simply rolled back into production.

The successes of QM and Martin continued well into the 1970s. Preeminent and longest running among the QM shows of this era were The Streets of San Francisco, Cannon, and Barnaby Jones, itself a spin-off of Cannon. Martin had at least a half dozen other series in prime time during the 1970s. During this period, virtually every QM show dealt with law enforcement and crime.

Since the first days of The Untouchables, Martin had been criticized for using excessive violence in his productions. A new criticism was now mounted against Martin’s work because of the subject matter. Critics claimed that Martin’s shows enforced the dominant ideology of the inherent value of law and order. They suggested that the bulk of Martin’s work legitimized a right-wing, conservative agenda. As Horace Newcomb and Robert Alley indicate in The Producer’s Medium, Martin openly acknowledged his fondness for authority and his positive presentation of institutions of police powers—individual, state, and federal (see Newcomb and Alley).

Martin sold QM Productions to Taft Broadcasting around 1978. Part of the agreement required Martin to leave television production for five years and not to compete with Taft. Martin became an adjunct professor at Warren College of the University of California, San Diego. In the late 1980s, Martin became president of QM Communications, which developed motion pictures for Warner Brothers. He died in 1987, leaving a production legacy of 17 network series, 20 made-for- television movies, and a feature film, The Mephisto Waltz. No one has yet surpassed his streak of 21 years with a show in prime time.