The Defenders “Blood County” (September 22, 1962)

This unusual episode of the landmark legal drama took its protagonists, Manhattan defense attorneys Ken and Larry Preston (E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed), out of their comfort zone and into the backwoods of fictitious Blood County, Pennsylvania, where they attempt to rescue a hunter (James Broderick) railroaded into confessing to a girl’s murder.  Their adventure is by turns quaint, intellectually nail-biting (as they answer redneck jurisprudence with bedrock legal precedent, only to be shot down at every turn), and finally Parallax View-style paranoid, as the local lawyer (a young James Olson) who brought the Prestons in heads for the hills with a warning that the crooked cops and officials will resort to violence to protect their turf.  Director Buzz Kulik stages the climax, in which Larry Preston is savagely beaten and thrown across the county limit, with a chilling immediacy.  Of course, the covert subject of Ernest Kinoy’s prescient teleplay is the peril then being faced by civil rights agitators in the deep south. The rousing finale in which Preston smuggles in a federal marshal to finally restore some law and order parallels the equally cathartic faceoffs between blatantly corrupt, segregationist southern law officers and the Kennedy Administration’s Justice Department that viewers were then watching on the news.