Commentary marked the 60th anniversary of Decoy's 1957 premiere, calling it an obscure but highly significant landmark in TV history.
On the 60th anniversary of its original premiere, journalist John Gizzi published a retrospective piece reflecting on the historical importance of Decoy, describing it as an "obscure-but-highly-significant landmark" in the history of American television.
The anniversary commentary, published around October 14, 2017, sought to correct the historical record by reaffirming that Decoy, not later and more famous series, deserved recognition as the first-ever television series to feature a woman police officer in the starring role. The piece highlighted star Beverly Garland's portrayal of Patricia "Casey" Jones and detailed how the series had largely been forgotten despite its trailblazing premise.
Such retrospective attention is significant in the study of women's television history: many pioneering works by and about women were under-documented or dismissed in their own time, only to be rediscovered decades later by historians and critics working to fill gaps in the historical record. The 60th-anniversary commentary served exactly this function for Decoy, reintroducing a new generation of readers and television historians to a series that had predated better-known policewoman dramas like Police Woman (1974) by nearly two decades.
This piece of criticism helped cement Decoy's reputation among television historians as a genuine, if overlooked, milestone in the depiction of women in American law enforcement dramas.