What was the first murder ever shown on TV?
Not to sound too morbid, but one of the easiest ways to sell a TV series to an audience is to promise them at least one murder, if not many more. Whether fictional or ripped from real life, death is one of the easiest selling points any show can have.
That’s arguably truer than ever in the modern age, where people can’t get enough of killing in its many forms. There’s so much media available for consumption across so many different platforms, but one constant is that murder will always be among the most popular.
True crime podcasts are everywhere, to the point that they’ve become an industry unto themselves, and many of those audio programmes get adapted for the screen as either dramatisations or documentaries. Speaking of the latter, almost any docuseries that airs on a streaming service and promises murder and mayhem is guaranteed to draw in a crowd, underlining how the lure of death continues bordering on obsession.
What’s always been one of the small screen’s preferred storytelling methods? The procedural. What generally tends to happen in the most-watched or most well-known procedurals? The characters become embroiled in a mystery of the week case that, more often than not, tends to revolve around, yep, a murder.
Murder mystery TV shows have also been thriving in the streaming age as the whodunit enjoys a renewed surge of interest, because there are few things a captive audience loves more than playing a guessing game as they know exactly who gets killed from the jump, but it’s up to them to try and fit the pieces together before the characters onscreen can figure it out.
It’s hardly a new thing, either, with the format dating right back to the earliest days of broadcasting in its most rudimentary form. Television is quickly catching up on the centenary of the murder mystery TV show, but it was decades before death was beamed into households worldwide.
What was the first crime show to air on TV?
As mentioned, the formative years of television were largely driven by trial and error, and it wouldn’t be until the 1930s that regularly scheduled programming powered by recurring shows became a staple of the format. As a pioneer on that front, it makes perfect sense that the BBC would be involved.
First premiering in August 1938, Telecrime lived up to its billing. A cross between a stage production and a whodunit, the first five episodes ran between ten and 20 minutes in length and were filmed live, which meant that they couldn’t be recorded due to the technological limitations of the time and have since been lost to history.
A progenitor to the modern procedural, Telecrime offered enough hints to allow audiences to solve the crimes without having it spelt out for them by the characters, leaving behind a lasting legacy it could have never imagined when the 17th and final episode was broadcast in November 1946.
What was the first murder shown on TV?
The first murder shown on TV and the first person to be murdered on live television are both tied to the same event, which was the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
Abraham Zapruder’s footage of the president being shot and killed wasn’t the only film of the JFK assassination, but as the most complete footage of the infamous event, it was the one most widely circulated and shared by news networks across the world in the aftermath, although as an amateur work captured by a bystander, it was never broadcast live.
However, there were live cameras rolling when Lee Harvey Oswald was being escorted through the local headquarters of the Dallas police two days later when nightclub owner Jack Ruby emerged from the gathered throng and shot the assassin once in the abdomen at close range.
Oswald was pronounced dead from his injuries less than two hours later, making his death the first that was ever shot and broadcast live on TV.
