Cops and Robbers: When Real Detectives Walked Into a Radio Play
In 1956, CBS Radio Workshop tried something remarkable.
Instead of giving actors another carefully scripted detective drama, CBS created a fictional crime, cast professional radio actors as the suspects and witnesses—and brought in real experienced detectives to investigate it.
The detectives questioned the characters as though the crime were real. The actors had to respond in character to questions they couldn’t entirely anticipate. Somewhere between radio drama, improvisation and reality programming, Cops and Robbers became an experiment in what happens when the person across the microphone…
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