77 Sunset Strip was broadcast when I was a child and young teenager. It was a lighthearted detective show of a type popular at that time. It was well-made and the cast, especially the rotating male leads playing the detectives, was very good. I saw almost every episode and loved it, but to my way of thinking it had one very serious problem that made me angry at the end of every episode. As mentioned, there were a couple of rotating male leads, and each episode had a crime-story plot with one of the rotating make detectives, a male guest star "bad guy," and a female guest star "girl." The plots were mostly good fun but as was common at the time, good fun was usually also quite violent. Each episode normally ended with a shoot-out in which that episode's detective killed the episode's bad guy, while the girl-of-the-week watched. All that was par for the course in detective shows of the late fifties/early sixties, and I didn't find it particularly disturbing. The thing that WAS very disturbing and that made me really angry at the time, was the fact that after the gunfight the detective would completely ignore the dead body of the man he had just killed, walk over to the girl-of-the-week, and kiss her. She always happily accepted the kiss. I recall thinking at the time that if I ever saw a shooting that resulted in death, and the killer "hero" then walked over and tried to kiss me, no matter how bad a person the dead man had been, I would teach that "hero" a lesson about respect for life and death that would also cause him to treat women with more respect.
Review of 77 Sunset Strip
