Sea Hunt is an American action adventure television series that aired in syndication from 1958 to 1961 and was popular for decades afterwards. The series originally aired for four seasons, with 155 episodes produced. It stars Lloyd Bridges as former Navy diver Mike Nelson, and was produced by Ivan Tors. Development Series executive producer Ivan Tors conceived the idea for Sea Hunt while working on the 1958 film Underwater Warrior. He tried in vain to sell the series to all three major networks, but each network passed on it because they felt that a series set underwater could not be sustained. Tors then decided to sell it into the first-run syndication market. He teamed up with Ziv Television Programs and was able to sell it to more than 100 syndicated markets before it debuted in January 1958. Lloyd Bridges was cast as lead character Mike Nelson. Sea Hunt was intended as a comeback vehicle for Bridges due to his brief black-listing from acting. He was black-listed after admitting to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a member of the Actors' Laboratory Theatre, a group that was tied to the Communist Party. Bridges was given a crash course in scuba diving by Zale Parry and Courtney Brown, and Brown served as his underwater stunt double. Bridges was also educated in the art of scuba equipment by Brad Pinkernell on the beach in Southern California from 1956 to 1957 after a chance meeting when Pinkernell was coming out of the ocean with his scuba gear on. Over the course of the show's run, Bridges got more involved in the underwater stunt work, graduating from close-ups in the earliest episodes to doing all but the most dangerous stunts by the end of the series' run. Synopsis Mike Nelson (Lloyd Bridges) is a free-lance scuba diver, a former Navy frogman, who left the service about four years before the series begins, and member of the United States Coast Guard Auxiliary. He is a well-known expert on diving who is often called on for difficult or dangerous projects. He travels on his boat the Argonaut and outmaneuvers villains, salvages everything from a bicycle to a nuclear missile, rescues children trapped in a flooded cave, and other such adventures. In the pilot episode, he rescues a Navy pilot from his sunken jet. No dialogue was possible during the underwater sequences, so Bridges provided