Crime Story (TV Series)

Crime Story (TV series)

Crime Story is an American TV drama, created by Gustave Reininger and Chuck Adamson, that premiered in 1986 and ran for two seasons on NBC. The executive producer was Michael Mann, who had left his other series Miami Vice to oversee Crime Story and direct the film Manhunter. The show premiered with a two hour pilot — a movie which had been exhibited theatrically — and was watched by over 30 million viewers. It was then scheduled to follow Miami Vice on Friday nights, and continued to attract a record number of viewers. NBC then moved the show to Tuesdays at 10 pm opposite ABC's Moonlighting, hurting its ratings to the point that NBC ordered its cancellation after only two seasons.

Set in the early, pre-Beatles 1960s, the series depicted two men — Lt. Mike Torello (Dennis Farina) and mobster Ray Luca (Anthony Denison) — with an obsessive drive to destroy each other. As Luca started with street crime in Chicago, was "made" in the Chicago Outfit and then sent to Las Vegas to monitor their casinos, Torello pursued Luca as head of a special Organized Crime Strike Force. The show attracted both acclaim and controversy for its serialized format, in which a continuing storyline was told over an entire season, rather than being episodic, as was normal with shows at the time (including Miami Vice).

The first season ended with Ray Luca and Pauli Taglia on the lam, hiding from Torello in a Nevada desert shack, which is located in an Atomic Bomb test area. An A-Bomb explodes, presumably obliterating Luca and Taglia, in one of the most memorable cliffhangers in television history, leaving viewers wondering whether they were dead or alive.