Trivia / Peter Gunn

• Breakaway Pop Hit: The theme music hit #1 on the Billboard chart and stayed there for ten weeks, and the show's soundtrack LP received the first Album of the Year award when the Grammy Awards began. (To be fair, it was the late 1950's.) A remake of the theme by the Art of Noise reached #2 on Billboard's Dance chart in 1986. It has since been used multiple times in other works as incidental music (most famously The Blues Brothers), to the point many people don't know it was made for a specific TV show, which probably must have led many people discovering that it's titled "Peter Gunn Theme" to wonder who this Gunn guy is. Indeed, it even charted in 1959 in Britain (despite...well see No Export for You below) in a Cover Version by Duane Eddy. And again in the UK in the '80s via the Art of Noise.
• Cast the Expert:
  • In "The Comic", the role of a murderous, demented comedian was played by then-hot stand-up comic Shelley Berman.
  • Another episode featured Diahann Carroll as a nightclub singer who's being threatened by her ex-husband.
• Channel Hop: The show aired for two seasons on NBC before jumping to ABC for its third and final season.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The Gunn movie has never been released on any physical home video format, with a pan-and-scan Netflix version the only current way to see it.
• No Export for You: It didn't get sold to British television due to concerns over its violence. (The kind of violence the show featured wouldn't be a problem today.) The 1998 TV-movie has been shown on British TV, and the original series can be found on Amazon Prime. Unsurprisingly, Henry Mancini's music from the series had much less trouble getting exported to Britain.