Lock-Up (TV series)
television series

Lock-Up is an American crime drama series that premiered in syndication in September 1959 and concluded in June 1961. The half-hour episodes had little time for character development or subplots. It instead presented a compact story without embellishment.
Series overview
The program stars Macdonald Carey as real-life Philadelphia corporate attorney Herbert L. Maris (1880–1960) and John Doucette as police detective Lieutenant Jim Weston. Maris died during the program's initial run.
Each episode began with the following introduction: "These stories are based on the files and case histories of Herbert L. Maris, prominent attorney, who has devoted his life to saving the innocent."
The foundation of each episode is the cornerstone of English and American jurisprudence: a person charged with a crime is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. The series featured stories of persons who were unjustly accused, usually due to circumstantial evidence. The program's primary theme is that when individuals are charged with a crime, not all is as it first appears and a thorough investigation is duly warranted in order to uncover vital facts pertinent to the case.
Herbert L. Maris had an uncanny sense about the honest, innocent persons who had been falsely accused. With his lucrative private practice of corporate law, he also had the time and resources to help these people.
“Lock-Up (TV series)” enters the record as television series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lock-Up, series and television can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Lock-Up (TV series)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Lock-Up, series and television provides the most credible route into that argument.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6665194. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1959, 1961, 1880 and 1960.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lock-Up (TV series)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.