Whispering Smith (TV series)

Whispering Smith
Audie Murphy as Tom Smith.
Genre	Western Detective
Written by	Lawrence Menkin Tom Seller Frank H. Spearman (story)
Directed by	Herbert Coleman Edward Ludlum Pete Lyons Christian Nyby
Starring	Audie Murphy Guy Mitchell Sam Buffington
Theme music composer	Richard Shores
Country of origin	United States
Original language(s)	English
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	26
Production
Producer(s)	Herbert Coleman Richard Lewis Joseph Hoffman
Running time	30 minutes
Production company(s)	Whispering Productions Revue Studios
Distributor	Universal Television NBCUniversal Television Distribution
Release
Original network	NBC
Picture format	Black-and-white
Audio format	Monaural
Original release	May 8 – October 30, 1961

Whispering Smith is an American Western series that originally aired on NBC. It has the same ultimate source material as the 1948 movie of the same title (and some other films), but differs in some significant respects.

In the series, Audie Murphy stars as Tom "Whispering" Smith, a 19th-century police detective in Denver, Colorado. Filming of the series began in 1959, but the program did not air until May 8, 1961, because of unexpected production problems.

Whispering Smith combines elements of CBS's Have Gun  – Will Travel starring Richard Boone, NBC's Tales of Wells Fargo starring Dale Robertson, the syndicated Shotgun Slade with Scott Brady, and ABC's The Man From Blackhawk, a Stirling Silliphant production starring Robert Rockwell. While the Western setting of the series is unique, it is otherwise a standard detective program.

The 1948 film was about a railroad policeman named Luke "Whispering" Smith in frontier-era Wyoming, pursuing a gang of train robbers loosely modeled on the Hole in the Wall Gang. It was based on a novel by Frank H. Spearman from which that film derived.