Frederick Ziv - Ziv Television

Ziv Television

By 1949, the company had opened a television production subsidiary, Ziv Television Productions; it produced some of America's best-remembered shows, including television versions of The Cisco Kid (1949, soon to become the first American television program filmed in color) and Mr. District Attorney, and such original creations as Highway Patrol (perhaps the best-remembered Ziv production), I Led Three Lives (one of the few 1950s television crime dramas that addressed the real or alleged Communist menace as an overt subject), Bat Masterson (fictionalising the legendarily dapper marshal, gunfighter, and eventual sportswriter of the same name), and Sea Hunt.

Ziv Television Productions trademarks included odd (for the times) twists on the genres of his shows, twists like a crime-fighting underwater explorer (Lloyd Bridges as Sea Hunt protagonist Mike Nelson) and Highway Patrol itself, perhaps the first crime drama to show large urban regions weren't the only places where criminals liked to roam. The company's closing logo---the name Ziv in large, Romanesque lettering, inside the frame of a television screen---was one of the most familiar sign-off logos of its time.

The company's fortunes shifted almost overnight in the mid-1950s. In 1955, they were America's leading and largest independent producer (with a reported two thousand employees at one point), and Ziv was able to buy his own television production studio, after years of leasing from the Hollywood studios. A year later, the networks realized how successful they could be syndicating reruns of their previous hits, a move that cut deeply into the first-run syndication market. Ziv himself began producing series for the networks, beginning with The West Point Story for CBS in the fall of 1956.