Answers Out of the “Blue”

There may well be readers among us who’ve been waiting four whole decades for this revelation. It has to do with Coronet Blue, a CBS-TV summer replacement series starring Frank Converse (later the co-star of a CB Radio-era trucker show called Movin’ On) that--despite being well-regarded by many viewers--was abruptly canceled in the fall of 1967, leaving behind an unresolved mystery.

Wikipedia spells out the premise of Coronet Blue this way:

Frank Converse’s character, an amnesiac who is found floating in an unnamed body of water and whose only memory is the phrase “Coronet Blue,” discovers that he has been targeted for assassination by a mysterious group of killers. He adopts the name “Michael Alden,” a combination of the name of his doctor and the name of the hospital where he was taken to recover. Over the remaining episodes he attempts to discover his identity and the identities of his assailants.

Much of the reason for the continuing interest in this 1967 drama revolves around the fact that it was crossed off the CBS schedule before viewers learned the meaning of “Coronet Blue,” or the secret of Alden’s true identity. But TV Squad notes that the answer is revealed in a biography of the show’s creator, Larry Cohen:

When the Brodkin Organization took over the series, they wanted to turn it into an anthology ... so they played down the amnesia aspect until there was nothing about it at all in the show. It was just Frank Converse wandering from one story to the next with no connective format at all. Anyway, the show ended after seventeen weeks and nobody found out what ‘coronet blue’ meant. The actual secret is that Converse was not really an American at all. He was a Russian who had been trained to appear like an American and was sent to the U.S. as a spy. He belonged to a spy unit called ‘Coronet Blue.’ He decided to defect, so the Russians tried to kill him before he can give away the identities of the other Soviet agents. And nobody can really identify him because he doesn’t exist as an American. Coronet Blue was actually an outgrowth of “The Traitor” episode of [the 1961-1965 E.G. Marshall courtroom drama] The Defenders.

Although TV Squad makes it sound as if this “revelation” is brand-new, the quote above actually comes from a 1996 book called Larry Cohen: The Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker, by Tony Williams. Nonetheless, that book saw print through a small North Carolina publisher of scholarly works, and it wasn’t widely distributed. In all likelihood, it demanded the attentions of an online news site such as TV Squad to let most Coronet Blue watchers in on the secret of Michael Alden’s back story. Finally.

READ MORE: “Short-Lived Shows: Coronet Blue--Video,” by Bob Sassone (TV Squad); “Coronet Blue” (Television Obscurities).