East Side/West Side

Superb drama series showcasing the young George c. Scott and a Hall of Fame list of guest stars. One characteristic of the series is that the episodes don't conclude with the conflicts neatly resolved. When the episodes conclude we are not told if the little girl went back to school or if the neighborhood was successfully integrated. The feature of unresolved conflict was unique in dramatic tv at the time, and may have contributed to the series low ratings and regrettable cancelation.

I have nurtured a fond memory of George C Scott's performances in East Side/ West Side since I first watched the series over 40 years ago. Although I obviously recall its power through the prism of nostalgia, I would definitely love to see some of the episodes again. I now live in the CBD of an Australian city, nowhere near as animated as the Big Apple of course, but ES/WS has local resonances for what it is like to interact with the homeless and disadvantaged on a daily basis, and to engage in their stories.I have noted somewhere on this site that old episodes have been digitally restored and available somewhere, but I guess I will be unlikely to follow this through, preferring to wait for an archival DVD production.

Great series with George C Scott at his usual best! Gritty black and white, ahead of its time. On location on streets of the Big Apple just made it that much more realistic, like Naked City was! Can not believe it lasted only one season. Just goes to show you how stupid the bean counters on the networks are!

This was not George C. Scott's only television series, as someone stated elsewhere. While "East Side/West Side" is a brilliant drama with intelligent stories and an incredibly talented cast, George C. Scott was the lead in an abysmal FOX Channel series called "Mr. President" (1987). Both Mr. Scott and FOX would have liked to forget this programme.

Also, as far as "Naked City", that series often did not have neatly tied-up endings. Often, the endings were left deliberately ambiguous to make the audience think. While certainly not the poster child for civil rights programming, "Naked City" did show a multi-ethnic NYPD, and there were often Hispanic and African-American characters/actors with sizable parts in individual episodes. I can't say that the episode "The Contract", about Chinese-Americans and the conflict of cultures was the greatest representation of Asians on television -- especially with James Shigata, Khigh Dhiegh and Abraham Sofaer all playing Chinese -- but the characters were treated with respect, and not as stock figures.

Beautiful series-- a one-season long experiment that tried to reflect a tumultuous time-period (its single season encompassed JFK's death, the Civil Rights Bill, killings of Civil Rights workers in Alabama, escalation of fighting in Vietnam). George C. Scott played a social worker in Manhattan, Cicely Tyson his secretary, and before they softened the series toward the end toward whimsey, they produced at least three episodes that have stuck in my head for nearly 40 years: 1. social services take-away the child of a prostitute, who was portrayed as a devoted mother-- her grief was seismic; 2. a young black father who loses a baby to a rat's attack gets a weapon and wanders through Harlem looking for someone to kill; 3. a middle-class black couple moving to the suburbs sets off a calculated real-estate stampede, and even the liberal whites who sponsored them finally rebukes them. The second of these episodes was blocked-out in Georgia-- am surprised we got to see the other two; criticism at the time inevitably used the killing word "grim". Actors were drawn from the NY casting-pool, and shooting was done in the streets of the city.