An undercover draw 

Before Mike Connors played a violent detective on Mannix (which got complaints from viewers and warning memos from the network), he played a violent detective on Tightrope (which got complaints from viewers and a cancellation from the network in 1960 after one season).

Connors played an undercover cop who infiltrated criminal organizations to save the innocent and lock up the guilty. Besides the danger to him if the hoods found out he was a cop, the local police usually didn't know he was working undercover. Often at the show's climax he had to duck gunshots from both sides and get away into the night.

I remember watching Tightrope in syndication in the early 1960s. I'd come home from school and turn on the TV in the afternoon and watch the morality play unfold.

An undercover smirk

Tightrope was like a lot of the sixties syndicated cop shows, for instance M Squad starring Lee Marvin and the first incarnation of Dragnet. Tightrope opened with harsh music and a harsher narration.

The undercover man told us which criminal organization he was infiltrating and whose innocent life was at risk if he failed.

Invariably, when he first met the crooks, they searched him for a gun. He let them find one on his belt or in a shoulder holster. But they never kept looking.

The undercover man always wore a short revolver tucked in a holster in the small of his back. In every show, when the hoods figured out he was a cop and were about to kill him, he whipped out his gun in a balletic movement and got the killers who had the drop on him. (Here's a link to sexy scene between Mike Connors and Barbara Bain before she started doing Impossible Missions.)

Around 1962 or 1963 the bounty hunters and sheriffs gave way to private eyes and cops.                                                        

I read a short story entitled “Distant Signals” in The Twilight Zone magazine in the 1980s about aliens who came to Earth and hired the writer and actor in a sixties Western series that had been canceled years before. The aliens had picked up broadcasts from space and were hooked on the show. They wanted the original creators of the show to finish the storyline.

"Distant Signals" was turned into an episode of the anthology series Tales from the Darkside with Darren McGavin as the low-budget actor-hero—very fitting! In the Tales from the Darkside version the old TV show that the aliens loved was turned from a Western into a private eye show. That worked, too.

Down these mean (or dusty) streets a man must go.

The Rebel, The Deputy, The Rifleman, the man on the Tightrope, Peter Gunn, and many more.