Before Robert Stack showed up in Airplane! as Rex Kramer, he was dead serious as Eliot Ness in The Untouchables.
The show aired on ABC from 1959 to 1963 and gave TV viewers a gritty trip back to Prohibition-era Chicago. Stack played Ness as the calm, tough, incorruptible federal agent leading his team against gangsters, bootleggers, and mob bosses.
It had tommy guns, raids, speakeasies, gangland hits, and that hard-boiled narration from Walter Winchell that made every episode feel like a crime file being opened.
And here’s a fun connection: Leslie Nielsen, who later co-starred with Stack in Airplane!, also guest-starred on The Untouchables in the episode “Three Thousand Suspects.” So before they helped make deadpan comedy history, they were both part of this very serious crime-drama world.
Looking back, The Untouchables helped shape the TV crime drama: sharp suits, mob danger, straight-faced lawmen, and the kind of dramatic seriousness that made Airplane! even funnier years later.
