What was the most influential television show of the 1950s? I Love Lucy? Disneyland? Twilight Zone?

Few would probably choose Peter Gunn, the private-eye show starring Craig Stevens that producer Blake Edwards launched in 1958. But a case could be made for the program.

It wasn’t the plot or the players that made Peter Gunn so significant but the Henry Mancini soundtrack that introduced West Coast jazz to a national TV audience. After this, TV soundtracks would never be the same.

The driving Peter Gunn theme song instantly became a classic, synonymous with action, adventure, and danger, noted Jon Burlingame in Dreamsville, a book that chronicles Mancini’s TV career between 1958 and 1961.

Burlingame points out that Mancini wrote scores for each of the 114 Peter Gunn episodes over the show’s three-year run using the cream of West Coast jazz artists (such as Johnny Williams before he became known as John Williams of Star Wars/ Jurassic Park fame) as well as 34 episodes of Mr. Lucky, the show Edwards produced for CBS between 1959 and 1960.

Mancini released two records from Peter Gunn and two from Mr. Lucky, all best-selling albums, said Burlingame. But a lot of original music produced for the shows didn’t make it onto vinyl, said the author, suggesting that Mancini’s prolific creativity is another reason to watch the shows again.

In an earlier interview (Mancini died in 1994), Burlingame said the composer told him that RCA Victor had so little confidence in the success of the first Peter Gunn soundtrack album that the company only pressed 8,000 copies for the initial run. They soon had to produce more. Peter Gunn sold 75,000 records in the first two months of its release in 1959, he said. The album went on to be the top-selling album on Billboard charts and received the first-Grammy awarded in the album of the year category.

RCA Victor soon saw the error of their ways, signing Mancini to a 20-year contract, said Burlingame, who provides a comprehensive guide to the Peter Gunn series in Dreamsville, offering plot summaries along with acting and music credits for each program. That’s where I noticed a similarity to several Peter Gunn plots and early Richard Diamond radio shows written by Edwards.

The book also contains little tidbits like the fact that Herschel Bernardi, who played Lt. Jacobi in the Peter Gunn series, was the voice of Charlie the Tuna in Starkist TV commercials that ran into the 1980s.

Mancini’s success with Peter Gunn kicked off a seven-year stretch between 1958 and 1964 that proved as productive a period as any musical artist short of Beethoven or the Beatles might have enjoyed.

A Mancini Top 10: TV shows/movies and significant songs:

Peter Gunn (Peter Gunn, Dreamsville)

Mr. Lucky (Mr. Lucky)

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Moon River)

Hatari (Baby Elephant Walk)

Experiment in Terror (Experiment in Terror)

Days of Wine and Roses (Days of Wine and Roses)

Pink Panther (Pink Panther, It Had Better Be Tonight)

Charade (Charade)

A Shot in the Dark (A Shot in the Dark)

The Great Race (The Sweetheart Tree)