I think I figured out what puberty was all about while watching the network TV series Peter Gunn. The hero, Peter Gunn, would be lying on the sofa, drinking a cold martini while nuzzling his girlfriend's ear very carefully, when the phone would ring—meaning that somewhere in the big town there was a murder, and it was time for Pete to go to work. It was the coolest show on TV as the sixties kicked in.

Gunn, played by the Clooneyesque Craig Stevens, was a private detective in a big city. He wore cool clothes and listened to cool jazz and hung out a club called Mother's where his hot girlfriend Edie, played by the impeccable Lola Albright, sang cool jazz most coolly. The show was the creation of Blake Edwards, shortly before he created the Pink Panther films, and it was scored by the great Henry Mancini. The urgent Peter Gunn theme remains one of the most covered tunes of all time, and set the standard by which action themes would be judged. (Actually I think Mancini got royalties from the B-52's for the similarity between their hit "Planet Claire" and the Gunn theme.) The soundtracks for Peter Gunn and the popular Blake Edwards sequel series, Mr. Lucky, were huge influences on me, and were often heard on my cable show TV Party. I opened one show by kissing six girls, one after another, to the track "Dreamsville" from The Music from Peter Gunn (available on 2 CDs).

Craig Stevens played Pete as a very, very Cary Grant kind of private eye. He wasn't a tough guy as much as he was a serene, sardonic sophisticate of few words who generally beat the bad guys by being more relaxed than they were. He wore narrow-lapelled sharkskin suits with one or two buttons, flat-front pants, white shirts with French cuffs, plain black-knit ties, button-down or pinned club collars. A quarter-inch of squared-off handkerchief showed in his breast pocket. The suits were probably bespoke because Pete wore neither belts nor suspenders. His pants fit. The one thing that separates his tailoring from what's fashionable today is that the waist of his flat-front pants is actually at his waist. I believe this is why his shirt never comes untucked when he is being beaten up by thugs. His tailor was a genius because you could never see the bulge of his snub-nose .38.

Pete lives in a world of jazz played by cool cats, and his adventures are accompanied by the greatest soundtrack in the history of television. Sometimes jazz features in the plot and sometimes a famous jazz cat shows up to sit in at Mother's, like when Edie says, "Pete, do you know Shorty Rogers?" Sometimes there is so much cigarette smoke in Mother's that you think it's fog.

The entire Peter Gunn series, all three seasons, is now available on DVD in two volumes. It's my current alternative to crime-scene investigations and reality TV. Peter Gunn is perhaps the coolest show in the history of TV, with its closest rival probably Blake Edwards's other sixties series, Mr. Lucky. Even Pete's cop friend Lieutenant Jacoby, played by Herschel Bernardi, is way cool. Other TV cops have tried to emulate Gunn's cool, but few have approached his jaded "we are not a cult, Lieutentant Jocoby, we are a cosmic one-ness."

Peter Gunn exists in the same sort of jazzy, nutty world as Dragnet, but Pete is a part of it, not looking down on the freaks like the reactionary Sergeant Joe Friday of the LAPD, played by the uptight Jack Webb. Peter Gunn is no narc, and he accepts all oddballs as part of the infinite scheme of the universe.