Radio Recap: Wanted!

Wanted! aired on NBC radio July 7 to September 29, 1950. You might recall that was the same summer CBS ran the series Somebody Knows which offered cash to listeners who helped them solve crimes. (apparently no one ever claimed the money) By contrast, Wanted! retold true life crime cases and encouraged their listeners to help catch the men responsible without offering them cash -- yet the series claimed three arrests came about thanks to listeners' efforts.

That Somebody Knows and Wanted! aired simultaneously certainly demonstrates there was a trend towards more authentic true crime programming at the time. The big success of Dragnet must have convinced the networks it was worth trying to dip into the genre but to come at it from a different angle than that series.

While Somebody Knows dramatized crime with actors, Wanted! relied primarily on narrator Fred Collins (a familiar NBC voice) to describe the crimes with only a few dramatizations using actors. Instead of relying primarily on performers, the series interviewed witnesses and police officials about each episode's subject. This grants Wanted! a bit more authenticity than Somebody Knows. It does mean you end up with people whose performances are not professional, but since they're simply recounting their own experiences it suits the program.

When it comes to CBS versus NBC, 9 times out of 10 I prefer CBS, but this is that time I will vouch for what NBC was doing; the format of Wanted! is very simple and there isn't a lot of variety from week to the next. Still, I found the series lively, thanks to better-than-usual music, which is usually where NBC falls apart; for instance, the episode on Henry Clay Tolett gives one of the episode's criminals a recurring light-hearted theme played on a tuba to emphasize his incompetence at crime.

You can listen to Wanted! at the Old-Time Radio Researchers' Library!