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You and me, Rick. I'd love to see I Kiss Your Shadow, alas, I don't know how you can acquire it. Bus Stop was produced by Fox, so they may be able to help you, may some day put the show on DVD (God knows, there weren't that many episodes). My guess is that the epiosde you're referring to is as good as King says it is. It was directed by John Newland, a gifted man with impeccable horror credentials: he directed the classic Thriller episode Pigeons From Hell.

I never watched Bus Stop during (or after) its network run, but I remember the controversy over it vividly, which struck me as strange since the title of the show sounded so innocuous, as in "how can a TV show with the title Bus Stop cause any trouble at all?". The title made it sound about as exciting as watching paint dry. The show's credits over at the IMDB are quite impressive as to guest stars, directors and writers, at the level of a first rate anthology series from the period. Was Fox the most adventurous of the movie studios when it came to producing TV series? It seems that way. Their television division wasn't cookie cutter like Warners, producing variations of the same show in the same genre. Columbia's Screen Gems produced the high quality Naked Cityand Route 66, but my sense is that those two weren't wholly in-house shows, that their producers (independent, semi-indie?) were the real brains and muscle behind the series.




BTW, do you (anyone?) know what the deal was with violence on television during those years? I don't remember the average prime time series being particularly violent. Sitcoms and family-oriented westerns were the norm, Lassie still roamed the hills of California, Disney was big, ditto Ed Sullivan. Yet those were called "the violent years". For what, The Untouchables? That one took the most heat, as I recall, after the famous Bus Stop episode. Yet I do remember some shows being grim, nearly morbid as to theme, at least some of the time, and certain episodes of some series, even The Rifleman, could give me the heebie-jeebies. One Step Beyond was another potential nightmare inducer, more for what it implied than what it showed. It was so controversial in local reruns in Boston as to start a mass letter writing campaign by parents of young children to have it taken off the air! That was actually a major local new story for a while. There was an edge to many shows, and some seemed to deliberately push the envelope, Thriller being a good example of one. Its horror episodes were extremely gruesome for that time, often implicitly, at times explicitly . Rampaging scarecrows and malevolent grannies set ablaze, running into the darkness, were scarcely the norm on the tube back in the day.

There were those dark undercurrents on the tube back then, circa 1959-62, not a whole lot, but they were there. The title of The Twilight Zone was emblematic in many respects. Portents of things to come, post November 22, 1963? Even the somewhat later The Fugitive was a dark show, especially early on. The Outer Limits pushed the boundaries, too.

The Bible is grisly as hell at times, and Shakespeare was no wussy when it came to violence and people coming to bad ends (King Lear, anyone?). Dostoyevsky wrote about all manner of violence. It's always been there, I agree. Even the civilized ("civilized"?) French had the Marquis de Sade, the Grand Guignol. But TV got the hits because it was popular entertainment with few pretensions to high culture aside from the so-called golden age of Serling and Chayefsfky, so Disney, Captain Kangaroo and the Nelsons were the gold standards for kids under eighteen.



I do think that TV had a dark side for a few years, though, not enough to warrant the alarm bells it set off but it was there. The Untouchables was both highly popular and highly controversial, the nearest small screen equivalent of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (in print) that I can think of in terms of what it represented in the public mind, so to speak. The funny thing is that the James Bond films got away with violence, sex and much more, maybe because they were British and stylish, which made those flicks somewhat respectable. Imagine if there had been an American film series during the same period about Mike Hammer featuring Lee Marvin, getting into fights, bedding the babes. There would have been a public outcry.