Peter Gunn “Let’s Kill Timothy” (January 19, 1959)

Blake Edwards’ gumshoe-jazz fugue, which never seemed to take its rote film noir iconography very seriously, was always a little twee for my tastes, but in this outing Edwards (who directed and co-wrote, with Lewis Reed) pushed the comedic element so far that the result was a kind of dadaist gem that could be mistaken for an outtake from his filmic masterpiece The Party.  In the first ten minutes, there’s a lot of standard chitchat about Gunn playing bodyguard for some two-bit jewel thief’s pal, a guy named Timothy – and then Timothy turns up and for no particular reason he’s a trained seal on a leash.  For the rest of the show Gunn and his cop sidekick (Herschel Bernardi, whose comic timing was always impeccable and who I’m guessing improvised the line where he says the whole situation seems very “inconguous”) vamp and mug and seem to be having a great time as they follow the seal around waiting for it to, er, pass the diamonds that the thief has fed it inside a fish.  There are bathroom jokes, and Henry Corden turns up as a beatnik creator of “sound paintings” with titles like Ode to a Purple Baboon.  You just have to go with it.  Which should happen more often on TV, especially in formulaic genre shows like Peter Gunn.