Alfred Hitchcock, one of the greatest and most influential film directors of the 20th century, brought noir and hardboiled pulp crime stories to a TV audience via his classic NBC series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (later The Alfred Hitchcock Hour). Hitchcock championed the work of short fiction greats like Robert Bloch (also the author of Psycho), Cornell Woolrich, and Patricia Highsmith. This episode reviews the ways Hitchcock’s television experiment influenced the crime genre for decades, and how he pushed the envelope every week.
