Radio Recap: Indictment

"Indictment; a formal written charge of crime as the basis for trial of the accused. If the balance scales of justice are to remain righted, there must be trials, there must be convictions; the vital step which leads inexorably to these is the accusation of guilt by the grand jury: the Indictment!

Indictment was a latter-day CBS program from 1956-1959. It starred Nat Polen as district attorney Edward McCormick and Jack Arthur as assistant district attorney Tom Russo. The series' content was based on the files of the real-life ADA Eleazer Lipsky.

Indictment is something of a variant on detective shows, where instead of detectives, you have district attorneys who are searching for the right kind of pressure to deploy against an arrested individual that will force a confession out of them - usually by getting them to turn on whoever their partner-in-crime was.

The only reason I became fascinated with Indictment was that I learned three latter episodes of Suspense - "Infanticide" (October 11, 1959) "The Thimble" (November 22, 1959) and "End of the Road" (January 31, 1960) - were recycled from scripts used on Indictment. And yet, no one seems to know which episodes of Indictment. I've yet to see a decent log of the series and with only 7 episodes known to exist, it's a barely-glimpsed corner of OTR, despite being linked to one of radio's greatest programs.

Unfortunately, outside of the link to Suspense, there's little to say about Indictment. For a CBS series, the production values are pretty low - all the music is canned (some it recycled from Harry Alan Towers programs!) and sound effects are very limited. The series is also hampered by poor audio mixing, as in the episode "The Grand Slam Heist" in which a baseball game is being played in the background of a scene but the game's audio is louder than the dialogue! Despite being transcribed, Indictment has a number of flubbed lines, suggesting they didn't have the resources (or the self-respect) to do retakes. Decades later, television's Law and Order proved you could wring good drama out of legal wrangling but for radio it's just not engaging enough.

You can hear Indictment's remaining 7 episodes at the Old Time Radio Researchers Library.