This week in TV Guide: November 19, 1955

The holiday issues of TV Guide are always my favorites, not only because they offer special programs, but because they bring back memories of Thanksgiving and Christmas past. This week, we go all the way back to 1955, and what we'll see is that, for all its differences, there are still so many similarities between Thanksgivings then and now.

Take parades, for instance. Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade has already become a television staple, with this year's coverage hosted by Buffalo Bob Smith, and including special appearances by Danny Kaye and his daughter Dena, Lee Acker and Rin Tin Tin, and Hopalong Cassidy. The parade, then as now, is on NBC, but it starts at a much later time than we're used to—11:00 a.m. Eastern—and the running time is but one hour, not the three hours of today's bloated broadcast. It's also preceded by two other parades: the J.L. Hudson parade in Detroit, hosted by ventriloquist Jimmy Nelson and his dummy, Danny O'Day (10:15 a.m., ABC), and the Gimbels parade from Philadelphia (10:15 a.m., WCAU, with the national audience joining at 11:30 a.m. on CBS). Considering this is the Philadelphia edition of TV Guide, it's not surprising the close-up is heavy on details, but I've never seen one that includes the entire parade lineup; kind of cool, don't you think? Anyway, the Detroit parade runs for 45 minutes, while Philadelphia takes the prize at an hour and 45. 

(The parade action actually starts on Thanksgiving Eve, with coverage of the Bamberger's Parade of Lights, from Newark, New Jersey (6:00 p.m., CBS). The Bamberger's parade (sponsored by the department store of the same name) was held from 1931 to 1957, and was on Thanksgiving Day until the last couple of editions. Coverage of this year's parade is hosted by CBS newsman Charles Collingwood, and features Abbott and Costello, Phil Silvers, Captain Kangaroo, and Rin Tin Tin, among others. I think having something big on Thanksgiving Eve is a great idea, myself.)

Something else that's the same on Thanksgiving: football! At noon, it's the Detroit Lions in their annual Turkey Day classic, taking on the Green Bay Packers (ABC), followed by the traditional college clash between Texas and Texas A&M (2:00 p.m., NBC). Although the Packers and Lions don't play each other every Thanksgiving nowadays, they're playing in this Thanksgiving of 2025, while A&M and Texas play on Black Friday. As I said, it's the same, only different.

For some people—not me, but there are some—the highlight of Thanksgiving is the National Dog Show. That wasn't on back in 1955, but that's not to say there wasn't special programming on Thursday afternoon: what better than the seventh annual Longines Wittnauer Thanksgiving Television Festival (5:00 p.m., CBS), hosted by  Frank Knight, and featuring Basil Rathbone, Burl Ives, the famous Longines Symphonette and the Choraliers under the direction of Eugene Lowell, and the Corps de Ballet. You don't see programs like that anymore; I guess their time ran out. 

I don't know whether or not networks even bother with first-run programming on Thanksgiving night nowadays, but in 1955 they did, and the highlight of tonight's anthology dramas may well be Climax! (8:30 p.m., CBS) which features "Portrait in Celluloid," written by Rod Serling, directed by John Frankenheimer, and starring Kim Hunter, Jack Carson, Audrey Totter, and Don Taylor in the story of a writer's agent who's spent years living off the one great writing success of his own, an Oscar he won back in 1929. Now, he finds himself with an opportunity for a comeback in the shape of a young writer who's written a great script. What's interesting about this is parallel to Serling's own writing career: the tag line for "Portrait in Celluloid" contains a line about an award-winning writer who "finally learns he can't bank forever on a single success." Serling himself was in a similar spot, identified almost exclusively as the author of the award-winning teleplay "Patterns." It wouldn't be until the next year that Serling was able to break from that pattern (no pun intended) with "Requiem for a Heavyweight." 

Not a bad Thanksgiving, do you think? Nary a turkey in sight.

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As you know, there are few television genres bigger in the mid-1950s than the quiz show, and we have two examples in this week's issue to prove it. First up is Kathy Pedell's look at the man with all the questions, Dr. Bergen Evans. Evans, longtime English literature professor at Northwestern University, is known as the "question authority," responsible for the questions you hear on quiz shows from ABC’s Down You Go to CBS's The $64,000 Question. Speaking of Evans, Question's associate producer, Mert Koplin says, "The man is a Biblical authority, is writing a dictionary on contemporary American usage of words and knows literature the way a professor of the subject should. He could pull whole series of questions out of his head without once reaching for a book." And yet Evans describes himself as a "good research man," who knows little about jazz and nothing about baseball; those questions get farmed out to other authorities. He "reaches for books often," and won't use any question if the answer can't be authoritatively verified.

On the matter of what constitutes a "fair" question, Evans is firm: it should be "one which asks for information an expert in the field would be reasonably expected to know." In fact, what he'd really like to see is "to bring on a renowned scholar, quiz him on his specialty and throw him to the wolves." He says "There isn’t a man alive who couldn’t be stumped by a question in his field," and points to conversations he's had with his colleagues at Northwestern, in which he asks them if they'd be willing to serve as the expert that a contestant is allowed to consult for the final $64,000 question. (Similar to the phone-a-friend gimmick from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) "All said, 'No.' The reasoning: If the contestant turned to the expert for help and if the expert let him down, the blow would be terrible. The expert has too much to lose and not enough to gain."

Anyway, Evans doesn't choose the final questions actually used on the programs; he groups them according to difficulty level, then works with Koplin and executive producer Steve Carlin to choose 66 of them (one for each of the eleven levels in Question), from which Koplin and Carlin make the final choices. "That's a decision," Evans says, "which I'm happy not to have on my conscience.

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On the flip side, there's Dan Jenkins's review of the NBC quiz show The Big Surprise, which, no surprise here, is the network's answer to the aforementioned $64,000 Question, the CBS megahit. Jenkins, in the great tradition of Our Critic Cleveland Amory, does not mince words: the first edition of The Big Surprise "took all the worst features of Question, This Is Your Life and Strike It Rich, putting them together with a fine and total disregard for a maxim once propounded by playwright Moss Hart: The members of an audience may not know— or even care—why a show is wrong, but they certainly know it is wrong."

With nowhere to go but up, the show was quickly retooled, dropping its gimmick of rewarding people who'd done good deeds, added an "electronic brain" element, and "took off at a hard gallop toward its one purpose in life: to give away, if humanly possible, $100,000, thus topping the loot given away by 'that other show.'" The problem is that, again no surprise, Question is a much better show than Surprise, and while it can't match the $100,000 grand prize, it more than makes up for it with "careful planning and showmanship." Even veteran quizmaster Jack Barry can't save this turkey, for it's unlikely that "his wealth of experience has prepared him to emerge unscathed from his present assignment." In 1956 (yes, the show lasts that long), Barry will be replaced as host by Mike Wallace (bet he never talked about that on 60 Minutes), and even later we'll find out that The Big Surprise was part of the quiz show scandal. Are we surprised?

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The Big Surprise happens to air on Saturday night (7:30 p.m., NBC), with Mrs. Kyra Shirk going for $100,000 in the category of ballistics. However, your better bet is to cast your lot with Ford Star Jubilee's brilliant presentation of Herman Wouk's "The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial" (9:30 p.m., CBS), which Wouk adapted for the theater from his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The story, which takes place entirely within the courtroom, stars most of the original Broadway cast, including Lloyd Nolan as Captain Philip Queeg, Barry Sullivan as defense attorney Barney Grenwald, and Frank Lovejoy as Lt. Stephen Maryk, the man accused of staging the mutiny. Charles Laughton, who directed the play on Broadway, rehearsed the cast for tonigh's broadcast, which is directed by Franklin Schaffner. I've always believed that The Caine Mutiny to be a deeply flawed story, with Wouk's misplaced sympathy for Queeg challenging the reader's own judgment, but there are no complaints with this adaptation.

Sunday is a good day for cultural enlightenment, starting with the Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation of George Bernard Shaw's satire "The Devil's Disciple" (4:00 p.m., NBC), produced by and starring Maurice Evans, with Ralph Bellamy, Teresa Wright, and Margaret Hamilton. It's one of Shaw's so-called "Plays for Puritans," in which all ends well but "love doesn't make the world go round." Meanwhile, Omnibus has Oliver Goldsmith's 18th-century comedy of manners, "She Stoops to Conquer," starring Michael Redgrave and Hermione Gingold. (5:00 p.m., CBS). Later on, ABC's Famous Film Festival, the first primetime network movie series, which featured British movies made within the past decade or so, airs the television debut of The Lavender Hill Mob (7:30 p.m.), the 1951 comedy classic starring Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway in a scheme to rob a bank of a treasure in gold. 

Sid Caesar and his crew satirize Anchors Aweigh-style movies on Caesar's Hour (Monday, 8:00 p.m., NBC). That's followed by a program of Thanksgiving music on Voice of Firestone (8:30 p.m., ABC), and then Robert Montgomery Presents (9:30 p.m., NBC) has the story of a female mystery novelist who becomes involved in the murder of a young girl whose name is the same as that of a character in one of the novelist's stories. To complicate things, the authoress was apparently the last person to see the young girl alive. Geralding Fitzgerald and Alfred Ryder star.

Former First Daughter Margaret Truman is a special guest on the Playwrights '56 presentation "Daisy, Daisy (Tuesday, 9:30 p.m., NBC), which stars Tom Ewell and Jane Wyatt in the story of an author who helps publish a gushy romance written by "a dying 17-year-old Australian girl." Nancy Walker helps Red Skelton celebrate Thanksgiving on his show (9:30 p.m., CBS), featuring a fish peddler (Red) whose hopes for a romantic dinner go afoul when the turkey he's supposed to bring flies away. 

Besides the Banberger's Parade, Wednesday sees some pre-Thanksgiving festivities in the form of "The Courtship of Miles Standish" on Matinee Theater (3:00 p.m., NBC), based on the poem by Longfellow. On Father Knows Best (8:30 p.m., NBC), "Jim is very proud of Kathy, who has written the best Thanksgiving Day poem in the fourth grade, until he hears the poem. His disappointment increases when plans for a family dinner go awry." Oh, dear. Rod Serling returns for a second look this week; besides his script for Climax! on Thursday, he's the author of "Incident in an Alley" on The United States Steel Hour (10:00 p.m., CBS), with Farley Granger starring as a rookie policeman tortured by guilt after being forced to kill a young boy in the line of duty.

Is there anything else on Thanksgiving that we haven't already covered? Well, there's Assignment India (5:00 p.m., NBC), narrated by former ambassador Chester Bowles, an hour-long color documentary on India, including an interview with Prime Minister Nehru, and rare clips of Gandhi. The score is by Alan Hovhanness, the great American 20th century composer; quite a coup to have him working on a television program. And Johnny Carson's guest on his early primetime series (10:00 p.m., CBS) is William Bendix, star of The Life of Riley.

The week ends (and the shopping season begins) with an interesting episode of Crossroads (8:30 p.m., ABC) entitled "The Good Thief"; it's the true story of Army chaplain Fr. Emil Kapaun, who resisted torture and brainwashing by his Chinese Communist captors during the Korean War, and tried to help his fellow POWs by stealing from Communist food stores. Fr. Kapaun died in captivity in 1951, and for his efforts he was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in 1951, the Legion of Merit in 1955, and the Congressional Medal of Honor in 2013; he was declared a Servant of God by the pope in 1993. James Whitmore plays the Fr. Kapaun, and you can see that episode, by the way, on YouTube.

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And now a word about Jack Benny, the man on this week's cover, the "top man" in the business of comedy, and without doubt one of the most loved entertainers in the business. Benny, says one friend, "is the kind of guy every kid should have as an uncle. He’s as honest and comfortable as an old shoe. He’s decent. He laughs at even the most terrible jokes—the kind kids are full of. He could even get ’em interested in their violin lessons. And he’s rich without making a big thing of it." An associate of his calls him "the kind who will be sitting in a hotel room with his press agent and suddenly want breakfast—and who will reach over for the phone and call Room Service himself. Forty-nine out of 50 comics wouldn’t dream of doing that—unless they wanted to put on an act." And he belies the "nice guy" curse that has been the kiss of death for more than one Hollywood performer.

He's also one of those rareties, a comic who shares the spotlight wth others, who doesn't care who gets the credit as long as the audience laughs. He's had a guest list over the last few years that is second to none, and he's effusive in his praise of other comics. His secret, in his own words, is simple: "If a comic situation is basically honest, it’s gotta be funny. If I were a lousy violin player, this routine wouldn’t be funny. But I’m a pretty good violin player. I’m just good enough to make a fluff look funny." (Would that more "comedians" took that advice today.) He also knows how to keep his team happy and together; two of his four main writers have been with him for a dozen years; Don Wilson has been on the show for 21 years, and Rochester for 17; Hilliard Marks, the producer, is on his 10th season, and Ralph Levy, the director, as been there for five.

Now 61, there were rumors that his twice-monthly show might move to airing weekly; he considered it, but ultimately rejected the idea. He did, however, agree to appear in several episodes of CBS's Shower of Stars, and as a concession to his workload, he decided to drop his radio show of 21 years. Regardless of how long or where he is, though, you can be sure his fans will follow. It's good to know that sometimes nice guys do finish first.

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Finally, here's a reminder from TV Guide that it's not too early to start thinking about those Christmas gift ideas. My point here isn't the incredible price ($5 for one year!), it's just that this ad is so darn festive! It's a great way to usher in the Christmas season, don't you think?

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