A Very Progressive Robin Hood

My wife and I have been hanging around the apartment - cowering from the bitter cold - this weekend. And, as is often the case on occasional lazy inside days like this, we find ourselves taking advantage of available technology to watch free TV via the web. Recently, she discovered a 1950s serial called "The Adventures of Robin Hood." The show was produced in the UK for distribution in the US. It was a big budget affair for the time ... shot on 35mm film, with a fairly well-known cast, solid production values, and great writing. Like really great writing.

At first I wasn't paying much attention to it, but after few episodes, I began to realize that the show had very left-wing positions on class, sex, race (via the vehicle, as with class, of dealing with the institution of serfdom), democracy, justice, liberty and state oppression. So I started putting two and two together: great writing [check], late 1950s [check], produced abroad [check] and aimed at the American market no less.

So, I thought, "I wonder if this show was written by blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters?"

I checked for background info on Wikipedia, and sure enough it was. Turns out the show's producer Hannah Weinstein had left-wing sympathies and hired a number of blacklisted screenwriters - including Ring Lardner Jr., Waldo Salt, Robert Lees, Adrian Scott and Howard Koch, - to create over 140 episodes between 1955 and 1960. Other progressive writers also created episodes, including the German socialist crime writer, jazz critic and psychoanalyst Ernest Borneman.

The Adventures of Robin Hood aired in the US on CBS between 1955 and 1958 - no mean feat considering the times - and on ITV in the UK from 1955 to 1960, commanding an audience as large as 32,000,000 viewers weekly in the UK and US at the height of its popularity.

The series is streets better than most overhyped contemporary remakes of the Robin Hood story, and all without CGI shots from the "arrow's point of view." It is a prime example of why very few current TV dramas come anywhere near some of the classic series of the 1950s and 1960s in terms of social relevance and general quality (although I'm happy to name a few newer shows that I think deliver the goods in future posts).

Check it out on Hulu anytime. They have 117 episodes ready for your viewing pleasure. Highly recommended