Speaking to the rather “non-liberal” approach of “Naked City,” I also specifically recall one of the earlier half-hour episodes, in which a guy seems to just snap, and goes across the street and shoots and kills some innocent people in a store. Never uttering a word. Still on the loose, and still violent, he walks around town, as the police try to track him down.
But the ‘gist’ of it was that there was no explanation, no answer, as to why the guy cracked and went violent. He just did. And he had to be stopped and taken down, to protect society. The point of the writer was simply that there was no reasoning, no understanding. Just a burst of madness that no one who knew the guy predicted.
Later writers and the whole cultural-liberal zeitgeist would have felt compelled to construct some large psychological backstory to explain his actions. Even wallow in it. And at worst, would even try to deflect the blame towards society rather than the individual.
Similarly, there was a fairly early episode of “Gunsmoke” which had Matt and Chester actually ‘ambush’ a group of murderous marauders who’d been raiding farms and killing the occupants, including women and children. There was no gratuitous “you’re under arrest.” Matt and Chester just flat out killed them, while the baddies were out in the open, approaching. Didn’t give them a chance. The marauders were vicious killers, and Matt and Chester were outnumbered. Now, this was around 1957. That ‘ambush’ would not have flown by the time of the “Gunsmoke” episodes of the 1960s.
-PJ