The series is similar to the book, and focuses on the adventures of a newspaper proofreader who through years of secret practice has gained James Bond-like skills in many forms of physical combat, shooting, and in activities as diverse as rock climbing and scuba diving.
The grateful publisher rewarded Holliday with a trip around the world, which set the scene for him to solve crimes and thwart foreign spies in every port of call he visited.
Other cast members included actor Ainslie Pryor as Holliday's reporter sidekick, Joel Smith,[2] and Sebastian Cabot as Monsieur Cerveaux,[3] a criminal mastermind he repeatedly encountered.
Three additional scripts were commissioned (via WGA records- Pandora's Box, The Rustled Rocket and The Treasure Trove), and four previously-unbroadcast episodes aired during reruns in 1959 (The Surplus General, The Diamond Eater, The Amontillado, The Invisible Man, as well as Pasto Duro and The Vanishing House).
[9][10] Star Wally Cox was well known for portraying the title role in Mister Peepers, an early live NBC sitcom about a mild-mannered junior high school science teacher; it was typecasting he was never able to escape in later years.
Reviewing the premiere episode of the show, Jack Gould wrote in The New York Times, "The series may work out as a Cox video vehicle, but avid Holliday enthusiasts might have some reservations.
Jerry Franken, in a review in the trade publication Billboard, called the presentation an "incredible mangling" of Gallico's story, adding that it sometimes "verged on the ludicrous".
In Europe he fights spies and Nazis, finds his true love (and has affairs with several other women), achieves some fame as a foreign correspondent with his newspaper back in New York, and becomes the man of action he aspired to be.
The drunken debauched lord which Holliday sees in a night club is contrasted with the high ideals of Chivalry and the poetry of Chaucer(...) Where the British have been found wanting, a single plucky and quixotic American attempts to step into the breach".