National Broadcasting Company

The National Broadcasting Company is identified as the broadcaster of Bounty Law, the half-hour Western series that established Rick Dalton as a television actor. The network’s role in the account is specific but consequential: it places the show within a named broadcast institution and gives Marvin Schwarz a concrete basis for reviewing the length and reach of Dalton’s television career. The novel does not otherwise depict the network’s operations or assign it responsibility for the show’s creative or production choices.

Bounty Law on the Network

During a meeting about Dalton’s career, Schwarz checks that Bounty Law aired on the National Broadcasting Company, and Dalton confirms it. Schwarz then asks about the series’ duration and broadcast history. Dalton describes it as a half-hour program, with twenty-three minutes of content once commercials are allowed for. The exchange treats the show’s format as a practical fact in reconstructing his résumé, rather than as evidence about the network’s scheduling or commercial policy.

Dalton recalls that Bounty Law began in the fall schedule of the 1959–60 television season and went off the air in the middle of the 1963–64 season. The dates establish a run spanning several television seasons. The book also records that the series never made the transition to color, but supplies no explanation for that circumstance and does not say whether the decision belonged to the network, the program’s producers, or another party.

Career and Audience Reach

The National Broadcasting Company connection matters to the novel’s account of Dalton because Bounty Law is the prominent television credit Schwarz examines while considering the actor’s prospects. Schwarz’s questions establish the show’s network, format, and run before he turns to the larger question of how Dalton might be received in foreign film markets. The scene presents the network affiliation as one item in an industry résumé, not as proof that the broadcaster directed Dalton’s later career or secured him overseas work.

Elsewhere, Schwarz consults research on where Bounty Law aired in Europe. His notes identify Italy, England, Germany, and Belgium, but not France. That passage concerns the show’s international circulation and the extent to which audiences might recognize Dalton; it does not specify that the National Broadcasting Company itself arranged or controlled those broadcasts. Keeping the distinction clear matters: the novel connects the series to the network in its account of its original American broadcast, while treating its European reach as a separate fact relevant to the actor’s marketability.

Scope of the Network’s Role

The National Broadcasting Company is not presented as a character or as an institution with a developed plot of its own. Its directly established connection is that Bounty Law aired on the network. The available account does not name network executives, describe negotiations between the broadcaster and the show, explain the series’ cancellation, or attribute its monochrome presentation to a network decision. The organization’s significance here is therefore bounded: it anchors Dalton’s best-known television work in a specific broadcasting context, while the career assessment and foreign-film opportunities discussed around it belong to the agent–actor conversation rather than to any action attributed to the network.