This week in TV Guide: February 3, 1968

This week's big event is the opening of the 10th Winter Olympics from Grenoble, France*, and ABC is all over it. The network promises “a 27-hour Olympic orgy” with at least one prime-hour a night, a 15-minute nightly wrap-up, and daytime weekend coverage. Included will be unprecedented live coverage, via Early Bird satellite, of the Opening Ceremonies at 7:45 a.m. CT on Tuesday morning.

*Back in the days when the Winter Olympics were actually held, you know, in a country that has an actual winter climate.

The U.S. is hoping to make a better showing in this Games than in 1964, when speed-skater Terry McDermott was the lone American gold medalist (with the U.S. taking home a paltry six medals in total), but the only Yank with a real chance for the gold is America's sweetheart, figure skater Peggy Fleming. Nonetheless, ABC plans to cover all the angles, with a 250-man staff using 40 color cameras to bring the pictures back home. Roone Arledge wants the games to be more than just a technical marvel, though: "Figuring out where the drama will be and shooting it – that’s more important than technical wizardry." In other words, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat – or, as Jim McKay would say many times over the years, "up close and personal”' – that’s the ABC way.

Twenty-seven hours doesn't seem much of a broadcast “orgy,” does it? By the time of the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, the TV schedule had expanded dramatically, to take advantage of the favorable time-zone (and to help pay for the enormous amount ABC was shelling out to win the rights). This kind of saturation coverage has remained the rule since, to the point that new sports are added, it would seem, simply to give the broadcasters more to show. Now, when you add up all the different platforms used to broadcast the Olympics, you've got more than 27 hours of coverage a day.

And so, when one looks at the Close-Up that accompanied ABC’s coverage of the first week of the Games, it’s kind of nice to see how simple things are, how naïve. The 1968 Winter Olympics were not free from controversy, but they were still a sporting event to be covered, not a made-for-TV spectacle that saturates everything in sight. What a concept.

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During the 60s, the Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace were the premiere variety shows on television. Whenever they appear in TV Guide together, we'll match them up and see who has the best lineup.

Palace: Host Phil Silvers introduces singers Connie Stevens, Jack Jones and Polly Bergen; comedian Henny Youngman; the Waraku Trio, Japanese pantomimists; and the rocking James Brown Revue.

Sullivan:  Scheduled guests: singer-actress Michele Lee; comedians Jackie Vernon, Stiller and Meara, Morecambe and Wise, and Stu Gilliam; dancer Peter Gennaro; and acrobats Gill and Freddie Lavedo.

I think it's a pretty straightforward week; Phil Silvers is very funny, Henny Youngman can be very funny, Jack Jones is very smooth, and James Brown is very, very rocking. Ed's show isn't bad, mind you, but compared to the hardest-working show on TV the choice is obvious: the Palace dances all the way to the win.

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Throughout the 60s and early 70s, TV Guide's weekly reviews were written by the witty and acerbic Cleveland Amory. Whenever we get the chance, we'll look at Cleve's latest take on the shows of the era. 

This week we're on the mean, crumbling streets of New York, along with the cops of ABC's half-hour drama, N.Y.P.D.—or, as Cleveland Amory calls it, OKTV. Don't take that as an insult, though; "It may not be everybody's cop-in, but at least it's not a cop-out." For one thing, as the only network show filmed in New York ("Gun City"), it presents a look decidedly different from California. The small, 16-mm cameras make the entire city a shooting stage, taking us places we wouldn't normally visit, and it looks authentic.

There's also a well-written and well-developed trio of characters, with a good cast of actors playing them: Jack Warden as Det. Lt. Mike Haynes, who in Warden's hands is "believably tough and has believable heart"; Frank Converse as Det. Johnny Corson ("completely recovered, you'll be happy to know, from his trying amnesia in Coronet Blue"); and Robert Hooks as Det. Jeff Ward ("in TV, at least once in a while, handsome is as handsome does.") And the plots are good if sometimes a bit worn (one episode was a little psychopathic for Amory, but "it was nonetheless engrossing" with a fine performance from Hooks), and even when we have a bit too many clichés, the stories are "generally fine."

I reviewed this series myself a couple of years ago, so I was glad to see Cleve give it the thumbs up, but he does have one reservation: "in one episode there was a girl named Jilly Ammory. And they made her an ex-convict. Now why, we ask you, did they do a thing like that? Next they'll have some character who is an ex-critic."

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It's the question that follows Ben Gazzara around no matter where he goes, no matter who he speaks to. When are you going to die?

The question isn't as rude as it sounds, nor is it as existential as all that. No, it refers to Paul Bryan, the character Gazzara plays in the hit NBC series Run for Your Life, who at the outset was given no more than eighteen months to live. The series is now in its third season; hence the question that dogs Gazzara throughout this press junket through New York, followed by TV Guide's intrepid reporter Edith Efron. At first Gazzara takes it in good humor, all bonhomme and masculine laughter, reminding an interviewer that "Little Orphan Annie never grows up," lauding the writers for keeping the series' quality high, the usual dog-and-pony act. But as the day wears on, Efron watches Gazzara's defenses start to drop. A one-minute plug on Hugh Downs' Concentration is followed by a radio interview with Ed Joyce, then an appearance on NBC with Lee Leonard, a talk with Art Fleming on NBC Radio's Monitor, an interview with Bob Stewart, a pre-Tonight show prep with Johnny Carson's staffers. And, bit by bit, the weariness and frustration that Gazzara feels toward series television begins to show.

To Joyce, who quotes the well-known director Elia Kazan as calling Gazzara "one of the three most brilliant actors working in the English language," he comes close to dropping the façade, baring the soul. "This kind of work doesn't tap all the muscles," he admits, and when Joyce suggests that some might view Gazzara as a sell-out, the actor doesn't argue. "The plays don't keep coming, the films are fewer and farther between. An actor has to work." This will be his last series, he promises, but "I'm coming out of this one with loot." 

As the day progresses the bonhomme dries up, the answers become rote and mechanical, the eyes deaden. By the time of the interview with Bob Stewart, all his defenses are broken. Asked to complete the sentence "Doing a regular series is like ______," Gazzara replies, "Being in purgatory." Between interviews, he tells Efron that the problem is "that there's so little opportunity for complex acting" in Run for Your Life. "It's scripts, it's directors. I'm becoming interested in movies. Something is happening in European films. They're nonobjective, but they're personal.   They're not the creation of a bunch of bureaucracies." Unlike television, he might as well have said.

The process of selling yourself is often a distasteful one for celebrities. It's the very thing that Sammy Davis Jr. found so difficult to stomach when his variety show started, and his failure to do it at the beginning, when it most mattered, was one of the many reasons for its downfall. Gazzara understands the necessity of turning himself into a "zoological creature" putting himself on display for tourists. But understanding it doesn't make it easier. When he sits down with Efron for the last time, after the Carson pre-interview, she says about the drained Gazzara that "It would be an act of cruelty to conduct an interview." All she can ask him, with a wry sympathy, is, "When are you going to die?" to which he says, with an exhausted smile, "You know, Little Orphan Annie . . . she never grows up," after which he finishes the last of his drink with a gulp.

This will be Run for Your Life's final season, and at the end Paul Bryan's fate is still uncertain; Gazzara will later say that viewers became cynical about the show's seeming disregard for Bryan's life expectancy. (One website, after a studied analysis of the timeline indicated by the episodes, estimated that the show covered about 20 months from first episode to last.) One can understand Gazzara's frustration with the series; I mean, if you were considered "one of the three most brilliant actors working in the English language," would you be happy while your peers were on stage and in the movies and you were doing a weekly show?

Maybe, for that sack full of loot.

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Care for a quick look through the week?

On Saturday, Wide World of Sports (4:00 p.m., ABC) covers a semifinal bout in the heavyweight elimination tournament to choose a successor to Muhammad Ali, who was stripped of the title for refusing military induction. The winner of the Jerry Quarry—Thad Spencer fight will take on Jimmy Ellis later in the year for the heavyweight championship. Quarry will win the fight, Ellis will later take the title, and he in turn will lose to Joe Frazier down the line. But all that is another story.

Sunday afternoon features another of Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" (2:30 p.m., CBS), this time an all-Beethoven program. Later in the afternoon, NBC carries final round coverage of the Bob Hope Desert Classic from Palm Springs, California (3:30 p.m.), which will be won by the great Arnold Palmer. And moving to primetime, the men of the Seaview confront the Abominable Snowman on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (6:00 p.m., ABC). I wonder who will win?

On Monday, singer/actor/activist Harry Belafonte starts a one-week stint as guest host on the Tonight Show (10:30 p.m., NBC), with a star-studded lineup featuring Senator Robert Kennedy and his wife Ethel; Bill Cosby; Lena Horne; and actress Melina Mercouri and her husband, movie producer Jules Dassinn. A great lineup but wait until we get until Thursday. If you can't stay up that late, "One or My Baby," an episode of Danny Thomas's anthology series, has a few stars of its own in Janet Leigh and Ricardo Montalban (8:00 p.m., NBC).

In addition to the opening of the Olympics on Tuesday morning, Mike Douglas welcomes former Vice President and current presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon (4:00 p.m., WCCO). I Dream of Jeannie (6:30 p.m., NBC) gives us a thorny problem: Jeannie's locked in a safe, which has an explosive mechanism that will go off unless a demolitions expert can disarm it. Making things more difficult, the man who opens the safe will become Jeannie's new master. How does it end? Tune in next week and see if Larry Hagman's still in the credits. For less suspense, Tuesday Night at the Movies (8:00 p.m., NBC) has McHale's Navy Joins the Air Force; that's the one without Ernest Borgnine. Where is he? Guest starring on The Jerry Lewis Show (7:00 p.m., NBC), of course!

On Wednesday, it's another of Fred Astaire's acclaimed specials (8:00 p.m., NBC), with his partner Barrie Chase and a bevy of artists promoting "today's sound"—Simon and Garfunkel, Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66, the Young-Holt Trio and the Gordian Knot. Personal opinion, of course, but I think I'll stick to Fred's specials from the early '60s.

You remember that on Tuesday I mentioned Thursday night's Tonight Show lineup? Harry Belafonte's guests are Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Paul Newman and comedian Nipsey Russell. And herein lies a difference between late-night talk shows of the past and present. Belafonte had an incredible guest lineup that week; I haven't even mentioned Sidney Poitier, Robert Goulet, Aretha Franklin or Dionne Warwick. One of Belafonte's guests is a Nobel Prize winner, the other is a candidate for president of the Unite States. Can you imagine Kimmel or Fallon with that kind of a lineup? Or that two of the biggest headliners would be dead less than five months later? (I wrote about Belafonte's week as host here.)

NET has another of its unusual dramas at 10:00 p.m. on Friday. Entitled "The Successor," the British play "focuses on the deliberations of a convention [in other words, conclave] of Catholic cardinals as they elect a new pope. The cast contains characters such as the Cardinals of Palermo, Boston and Paris, plus some generically named prelates. I wish I could find something more about it, but I can't. This is the year Pope Paul VI releases his encyclical Humanae Vitae, after which many in the media probably wished the Church was meeting to select a new pope.

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Finally, this week's TV Teletype gives us a preview of coming attractions. Sheldon Leonard, the producer of I Spy, has acquired rights to James Thurber's works with the intent of making an hour-long series for the 1968-69 season. That turns out to be My World and Welcome to It, which stars William Windom. It premieres on NBC in 1969 and runs only 30 minutes, but though it's cancelled after a single season it's still fondly remembered by many classic TV fans.

ABC has plans for a new daytime chat-and-info show called This Morning, a 90-minute daily show that premieres next month. It's hosted by Dick Cavett, and will run in daytime for less than a year before shifting to prime time, and then to the late-night slot to replace Joey Bishop.

And then there's the one that got away, the one we would have liked to see. It's a pilot called City Beneath the Sea, and if all goes well for producer Irwin Allen, it will become part of the primetime schedule. "It's about a futuristic city under the ocean," writes Joseph Finnigan, who adds that "Maybe [Allen'll] cast Lloyd Bridges as mayor." Sadly, the movie never turns into a regular series, and we're forced to conclude that Finnigan is right. Imagine Lloyd Bridges as mayor, with Richard Basehart and David Hedison as head of the city's defense system? It's a sure-fire idea, that is. TV  

This week in TV Guide: February 3, 1968

This week the big TV event is the opening of the 10th Winter Olympics from Grenoble, France, and ABC is all over it.  The network promises “a 27-hour Olympic orgy” with at least one prime-hour a night, a 15-minute nightly wrapup, and daytime weekend coverage.  Included will be unprecedented live coverage, via Early Bird satellite, of the Opening Ceremonies at 7:45am CT on Tuesday morning.

The U.S. is hoping to make a better showing in this Games than in 1964, when speed-skater Terry McDermott was the lone American gold medalist  (with the U.S. taking home a paltry six medals in total), but the only American with a real chance for the gold is figure skater Peggy Fleming.  Nonetheless, ABC plans to cover all the angles, with a 250-man staff using 40 color cameras to bring the pictures back home.  Roone Arledge wants the games to be more than just a technical marvel, though: “Figuring out where the drama will be and shooting it – that’s more important than technical wizardry.”  In other words, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat – or, as Jim McKay would say many times over the years, “up close and personal” – that’s the ABC way.

ALL: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION

Twenty-seven hours doesn't seem much of a broadcast “orgy,” does it?  By the time of the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, the TV schedule had expanded dramatically, to take advantage of the favorable time-zone (and to help pay for the enormous amount ABC was shelling out to win the rights).  This kind of saturation coverage has remained the rule since, to the point that new sports are added, it would seem, simply to give the broadcasters more to show. Now, when you add up all the different platforms used to broadcast the Olympics, you've got more than 27 hours of coverage a day.


And so, when one looks at the Close-Up that accompanied ABC’s coverage of the first week of the Games, it’s kind of nice to see how simple things are, how naïve.  The 1968 Winter Olympics were not free from controversy, but they were still a sporting event to be covered, not a made-for-TV spectacle that saturates everything in sight.  What a concept.

***

During the 60s, the Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace were the premiere variety shows on television. Whenever they appear in TV Guide together, we'll match them up and see who has the best lineup..

Palace: Host Phil Silvers introduces singers Connie Stevens, Jack Jones and Polly Bergen; comedian Henny Youngman; the Waraku Trio, Japanese pantomimists; and the rocking James Brown Revue.

Sullivan:  Scheduled guests: singer-actress Michele Lee; comedians Jackie Vernon, Stiller and Meara, Morecambe and Wise, and Stu Gilliam; dancer Peter Gennaro; and acrobats Gill and Freddie Lavedo.

Neither show overwhelms this week, and that's why I'm giving the slight nod to the Palace.  Phil Silvers is very funny, Jack Jones is very smooth, and Henny Youngman can be very funny, particularly in small doses.  On the other hand, while I love Jackie Vernon as the voice of Frosty the Snowman it's almost impossible to watch his stand-up without thinking of it, and I've never been a big fan of Stiller and Meara.  Maybe next week will be better.

***

Well.  It seems as if just a couple of weeks ago I was writing about Ben Gazzara, noting that the article in question was a pretty snark-free one.  I also mentioned that there was one from a year later that portrayed him "in a slightly less flattering light."  That would be this issue, and the article is by Edith Efron, who follows Gazzara around for the day on his press junket through New York.  And the one question that confronts Gazzara no matter where he goes, no matter who he speaks to: when are you going to die?

It's not as serious as it sounds, nor is it as existential as all that.  It refers to Paul Bryan, the character Gazzara plays in Run For Your Life, who at the outset of the series is given no more than eighteen months to live.  The series is now in its third season; hence the questions.  At first Gazzara is all bonhomme and laughter, reminding the interviewer that "Little Orphan Annie never grows up," lauding the writers for keeping the series' quality high, the usual dog-and-pony act.  But as the day wears on, Gazzara's defenses begin to drop.  A one-minute plug on Hugh Downs' Concentration is followed by a radio interview with Ed Joyce, then an appearance on NBC with Lee Leonard, a talk with Art Fleming on NBC Radio's Monitor, an interview with Bob Stewart, a pre-Tonight show prep with Carson's staffers.  And, bit by bit, the weariness and frustration that Gazzara has with series television begins to show.

To Joyce, who quotes the well-known director Elia Kazan as calling Gazzara "one of the three most brilliant actors working in the English language," he admits that "This kind of work doesn't tap all the muscles," and that an actor's career doesn't always go the way they'd want.  "The plays don't keep coming, the films are fewer and farther between.  An actor has to work."  This will be his last series, he promises, but "I'm coming out of this one with loot."  As the day progresses the bonhomme dries up, the answers become rote and mechanical, the eyes deaden.  By the time he gets to Stewart's, all his defenses are down.  Asked to complete the sentence "Doing a regular series is like ______," Gazzara replies, "Being in purgatory."  Between interviews, he will tell Efron that the problem is "that there's so little opportunity for complex acting" in Run For Your Life.  "It's scripts, it's directors.  I'm becoming interested in movies.  Something is happening in European films.  They're nonobjective, bu they're personal.   They're not the creation of a bunch of bureaucracies."

The process of selling yourself is often a distasteful one for celebrities.  It's the very thing that Sammy Davis Jr. found so difficult to stomach when his variety show started, and his failure to do it at the beginning, when it most mattered, was one of the many reasons for its downfall.  Gazzara understands the necessity of turning himself into a "zoological creature" putting himself on display for tourists.  When he sits down with Efron for the last time, after the Carson pre-interview, she says of the drained Gazzara that "It would be an act of cruelty to conduct an interview."  All she can ask him, with a wry sympathy, is "When are you going to die?" to which he says, with an exhausted smile, "You know, Little Orphan Annie . . . she never grows up," after which he finishes the last of his drink with a gulp.

***

Care for a quick look through the week?

On Saturday, ABC's Wide World of Sports presents a heavyweight semifinal bout, with Jerry Quarry taking on Thad Spencer in Oakland.  The winner will face Jimmy Ellis for the title vacated after Muhammad Ali was stripped of it for refusing military induction.  Quarry will win the fight, Ellis will later take the title, and he in turn will lose to Joe Frazier down the line.  But all that is another story.

Sunday afternoon features another of Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" on CBS, this time an all-Beethoven program.  It's up against NBC's coverage of the final round of the Bob Hope Desert Classic from Palm Springs, California, which will be won by the great Arnold Palmer.  ABC has a preview of the coming Winter Olympics.

Monday, singer/actor/activist Harry Belafonte starts a one-week stint as guest host on the Tonight Show, with a star-studded lineup featuring Senator Robert Kennedy and his wife Ethel, Bill Cosby, Lena Horne, and actress Melina Mercouri and her husband, movie producer Jules Dassinn.  A great lineup, but wait until we get until Thursday.

In addition to the opening of the Olympics Tuesday morning, Mike Douglas' show, which airs at 4pm CT on Channel 4, has a star guest of its own in former Vice President and current presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon.  And NBC's I Dream of Jeannie gives us a thorny problem:  Jeannie's locked in a safe, which has an explosive mechanism that will go off unless a demolitions expert can disarm it.  Making things more difficult, the man who opens the safe will become Jeannie's new master.  How does it end?  Tune in next week and see if Larry Hagman's still in the credits.

On Wednesday, it's another of Fred Astaire's acclaimed specials, with his partner Barrie Chase and a bevy of artists promoting "today's sound" - Simon and Garfunkel, Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66, the Young-Holt Trio and the Gordian Knot.  I think I'll stick to Fred's specials from the early '60s - that is, unless "The Sounds of Silence" describe the noise Simon and Garfunkel make.  This isn't a train wreck, it's more like one of those 500-car pileups.

You remember I mentioned Thursday night's Tonight Show lineup?  Tonight Belafonte's guests are Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Paul Newman and comedian Nipsey Russell.  And herein lies a difference between late-night talk shows of the past and present.  Belafonte had an incredible guest lineup that week - I haven't even mentioned Sidney Poitier, Robert Goulet, Aretha Franklin or Dionne Warwick.  One of Belafonte's guests is a Nobel Prize winner, the other is a candidate for president of the Unite States.  Can you imagine Kimmel or Fallon with that kind of a lineup?   Or that two of the biggest headliners would be dead less than five months later?

NET has another of its unusual dramas on Friday.  Entitled "The Successor," the British play "focuses on the deliberations of a convention [in other words, conclave] of Catholic cardinals as they elect a new pope.  The cast contains characters such as the Cardinals of Palermo, Boston and Paris, plus some generically named prelates.  I wish I could find something more about it, but I cant.  This is the year Pope Paul VI releases his encyclical Humanae Vitae, after which many in the media probably wished the Church was meeting to select a new pope.

There are other things on this week - come back on Monday and see which day I chose.

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Finally, this week's TV Teletype gives us a preview of coming attractions.  Sheldon Leonard, the producer of I Spy, has acquired rights to James Thurber's works with the intent of making an hour-long series for the 1968-69 season.  That turns out to be My World and Welcome to It, which stars William Windom.  It actually premieres on NBC in 1969 and runs only 30 minutes, but though it's cancelled after a single season it's still fondly remembered by many classic TV fans.

ABC has plans for a new daytime chat-and-info show called This Morning, a 90-minute daily show that premieres next month.  It's hosted by Dick Cavett, and will run in daytime for less than a year before shifting to prime time, and then to the late-night slot to replace Joey Bishop.

And then there's the one that got away, the one we would have liked to see.  It's a pilot called City Beneath the Sea, and if all goes well for producer Irwin Allen, it will become part of the prime time schedule.  "It's about a futuristic city under the ocean," writes Joseph Finnigan, who ads that "Maybe [Allen'll] cast Lloyd Bridges as mayor."  Sadly, the movie never turns into a regular series, and we're forced to conclude that Finnigan is right.  Imagine Lloyd Bridges as mayor, with Richard Basehart and David Hedison as head of the city's defense system?  It's a sure-fire idea, that is. TV  

This week in TV Guide: January 7, 1967

T his week's cover story on Ben Gazzara, written by Maurice Condon, is surprisingly devoid of snark.  It is, indeed, simply a visit by Condon to the Manhattan neighborhood where Gazzara grew up, to see some of the places where he spent his childhood, and talk with the people who knew him.

What we find out is that Gazzara was a talented actor from the beginning, appearing in numerous plays at the Boys' Club, taking his craft seriously, and determined to become successful.  And - that's about it.  There's no evidence that he was a bully, a thief, a truant; rags-to-riches stories about overcoming a poor childhood in the slums are, according to his brother, figments of press agents' minds, and the neighborhood priest at the church where Gazzara served as an altar boy debunks any tales about he and other altar boys getting "stoned" on sacramental wine.  In fact, the priest proudly mentions that Gazzara and his wife returned a few years ago to have their daughter baptized at the church.*

*The Catholic Gazzara, who was married three times and divorced twice, was already with his second wife at the time; wonder how they pulled that off?  No irony intended, just curious.

In fact, just about the only bad thing you find out about Ben Gazzara is that he used to stick his fingernail into the centers of penny candy at the corner shop, looking for the ones with pink centers that would win him a prize.  And the only reason that comes out is that a friend used the knowledge to blackmail him into stopping his coaching of her at the Drama Club, where he made her go over her sole line in a play over and over again.  She was 12 at the time, he was a little older.  He laughed and told her that she could "say the line any way you want to, just so you don't squeal to your grandpa.  But you're missing your chance to be a great actress."

I note the gentleness of this article because there's another one from a year later, during the final season of Run for Your Life, which portrays Gazzara in a slightly less flattering light - complaining about the rat-race of promoting a television show and tired of scripts that don't require any real acting of him.  It's a common complaint of classically trained actors, and often an accurate one, but it can come across as whining at the same time.  We'll leave that for another time, though.  Gazzara was a tough actor, frequently a very good one, and this is a nice portrait of the actor as a young man.

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During the 60s, the Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace were the premiere variety shows on television. Whenever they appear in TV Guide together, we'll match them up and see who has the best lineup..

Palace: Host Ray Bolger presents singer Diahann Carroll; actress Audrey Meadows; the singing King Family; impressionist Adam Keefe; Paul Revere and the Raiders, rock 'n' rollers; and the Morgan Ashton Family, acrobats.

Sullivan:  Ed's scheduled guests are Ethel Merman; singer Gordon MacRae; flamenco dancer Jose Greco; comics Myron Cohen, Flip Wilson, and Ross and Hunt; the Serendipity Singers; the Muppets puppets; King Toys, doll act; and the Canadian Black Watch and Dragoon, pipe-and-drum band.

Two good lineups to choose from this week.  The great Ray Bolger recreates his Scarecrow routine from The Wizard of Oz, Audrey Meadows (sister of Jane) is usually good fun, and Paul Revere and the Raiders were big stuff in the late '60s.  On the other hand, I was never a big fan either of Diahann Carroll (Julia) or the King Family.

Ed's lineup is vintage - Merman and MacRae have big voices, Jose Greco is one of the greatest of flaminco dancers, Myron Cohen is a terrific storyteller, and the Muppets are the Muppets.  As for Flip Wilson and the Serendipity Singers - again, not big fans.  On balance, I'm giving the edge to Sullivan, but if you chose the Palace, I wouldn't have any complaints.

***

The evening news programs on CBS and NBC expanded to 30 minutes within a week of each other in September 1963, less than three months before the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  The changes reflected the growing importance of news, with the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and various other foreign affairs crises demanding more and more attention.

More than three years later, on Monday, January 9, ABC joins the party, as Peter Jennings With the News goes to a half-hour, and in color to boot!  The fact that it takes ABC so long to join the other two networks is another indication that the network still lags behind its senior partners, not only in the news department but overall.  As a matter of fact, ABC will have only four prime-time shows in the top 25 at the end of the 1966-67 season with Bewitched, in seventh place, as the network's top-rated program.  ABC's era of dominance is still over a decade away.

One interesting note about all this is the addition of Howard K. Smith with daily news analysis.  Smith had left CBS in 1961 with hard feelings after refusing to remove controversial remarks from a civil rights documentary.  His move to ABC was not without controversy either - I'm thinking here of his premature "Political Obituary of Richard Nixon" in 1962 - and so his appearance with Peter Jennings is a welcome return.  By 1969 he'll be a co-anchor on the news, first with Frank Reynolds and then with Harry Reasoner.  Eventually, he'll return to being a commentator and Jennings will reemerge on World News Tonight, first as one of the co-anchor trio and later as sole anchor, as ABC becomes the dominant news network.

***

There's another return to the airwaves this week - the enduring cop drama Dragnet.  When last we saw Joe Friday and his partner Frank Smith patrolling the streets of Los Angeles, it was 1959; Friday had just been promoted to lieutenant and Smith to sergeant, and while the series was no longer in the top 30, it was still a solid hit when creator Jack Webb decided to hang it up and develop other programs.

Dragnet '67 premiers at 8:30pm CT on NBC, with Webb back as Joe Friday*.  He has a new partner, though; Webb wanted Ben Alexander back as Frank Smith, but by this time Alexander was sleuthing around on ABC's Felony Squad and was unable to get out of his contract, so Webb settled on Harry Morgan to play his new partner, Bill Gannon.  In reality, Gannon is no more than Smith with a different name, the two characters more or less indistinguishable - a combination of solid police work and quirky humor.

*Once again a sergeant; Webb thought it made for more interest. 

Dragnet is just one of a number of series making their debuts this week in the Second Season.  Also on NBC is Captain Nice, starring William Daniels, while CBS counters with the similar Mr. Terrific, with Steve Strimpell (both shows on Monday), and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on Sunday*; we all know how that turned out.  As is to be expected, third-place ABC has the most new programming, with The Invaders on Tuesday night, the Wednesday Night Movie on - you guessed it - Wednesday, Tim Conway's Western comedy Rango on Friday, and the return of The Avengers on Saturday.

*A variety show " 'in the tradition of the Jackie Gleason and Red Skelton shows,' say the producers hopefully."  Obviously they knew something we didn't.

***

Let's take a random look at some of the other programs on this week.

Mission: Impossible (Saturday, CBS):  "In Zurich, Switzerland, the IMF must bankrupt a scheme by neo-Nazis who are intent on recovering Hitler's hidden millions to finance a fourth Reich."  Oh, those wacky Nazis!  Actually, this is a pretty good episode of a very good series.

On Gilligan's Island (Monday, CBS) "The castaways re-enact the sinking of their boat in an attempt to soothe the Skipper, who's decided to end it all because a radio broadcast blamed him for the plight of his passengers."  Never pictured Skipper as that kind of guy.

Also on Monday on NBC, I Dream of Jeannie: "Jeannie has created a marvelous miracle fabric that can withstand anything, even Dr. Bellows' clumsy efforts to learn how it was made.  Groucho Marx makes a cameo appearance as himself."  I wonder how they worked him in?

The Fugitive (Tuesday, ABC): Kimble is forced to help a California sheriff conceal his son's holdup attempt.  The boy, critically wounded, is at the sheriff's home, where the fugitive doctor has been ordered to perform surgery."  Sounds a bit far-fetched, but this is from the show's final season, when many fans noticed a drop-off in quality.

Whirlybirds (Channel 11, syndicated, Thursday afternoon): "A glib-tongued deacon hires the Whirlybirds to transport him to a preaching engagement in a nearby city.  When some toughs threaten the deacon at the airport, Chuck and P.T. begin to doubt his integrity."  Watched this as a kid when it always seemed to be on Saturday afternoons.  Would it hold up today?  I don't know.

Ben Casey (rerun, ABC, Friday noon): "A staff psychiatrist is disturbed by her patient's revelation under the influence of drugs."  No kidding!  The psychiatrist is played by Patricia Neal, who later that year would appear in the movie Hud, for which she'd win a Best Actress Oscar the next year.  She took TV roles around then because the work helped her cope with the sudden death of her first daughter.

***

From time to time TV Guide gives us profiles of up-and-coming starlets, those who are supposed to be The Next Big Thing.  Sometimes these actresses do indeed go on to bigger and better things, but most of the time they enjoy brief, undistinguished careers that fall short of the fame that was thought to be in their future.

This week we have a story about Melodie Johnson, who's parlayed a non-speaking role in Bob Hope Theater ("I got killed before I had a chance to say anything") into guest-starring roles in Laredo, Run for Your Life, The Rounders, and the movie that served as a pilot for The Name of the Game.  What's notable about her in the article, aside from her blonde hair and blue eyes, is that "Melodie Johnson" happens to be her real name - what one Hollywood veteran termed "a real starlet's name" - which her mother got from a character in an Andy Hardy movie, played by none other than Donna Reed.

So what happened to Melodie?  Off to Google, where we find that she's had quite an interesting life since January 1967.  She never did become a huge star, although she worked steadily in television throughout the '70s, but we do find out two rather striking facts about her.  One is that after acting, she became a writer, publishing short stories and essays, and authoring four mystery novels, one of which earned her an Edgar Award nomination for best first novel.  The other is that the man mentioned in the article as her husband, "Bones" Howe, is in fact still her husband, after 51 years of marriage.  Now that is probably as great an accomplishment as any we've seen in these profiles.  By any definition, we can conclude that Melodie Johnson Howe has had a successful life indeed.

***

And finally a little teaser for an upcoming show next Sunday - and a reminder that even before that's what it was called, that's what it was called.

TV  

Ben Gazzara, R.I.P.

About Ben Gazzara, three memories:

First, of course, was Run For Your Life.  Now, I don't have clear memories of it - I was, after all, only five or six when it was on.  But I remember him running, always running.  And lying in the back of an ambulance.  And sitting next to someone lying in the back of an ambulance.  And that he was supposed to be dying, but he never seemed to look any different.  And that his dying didn't have anything to do with him having been in the back of the ambulance.*  But I do recall that I liked the show, even at five or six.

*And an opening title scene that looked as if it had been shot on the Bonneville Salt Flats.  But that may also have had something to do with Craig Breedlove, who was breaking the land speed record at the time, and who I watched on Wide World of Sports. 

Then there was a two-part TV movie, The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald.  This was a movie that speculated on what would have happened had Oswald not been shot by Jack Ruby but lived to stand trial.  Gazzara was the prosecuting attorney, and Lorne Greene the defense attorney.  (John Pleshette, in his pre-Knots Landing days, was Oswald, for what it's worth.)  At the time, back in 1978, I was inclined to buy into the JFK assassination conspiracies - it seemed like an exciting thing to believe in.  And that was the crux of the movie, that Oswald had been part of a conspiracy, that Gazzara was relentless in his efforts to prove Oswald's guilt, and that Greene was desperate to get his client off - without, as it happened, Oswald's cooperation.  I also remembered that Oswald was kept in a glass booth in the courtroom, ala Adolf Eichmann.  A nice historical touch, I thought, since Eichmann's trial occurred in 1961, and would have been a strong influence on an Oswald trial in 1964. 

Finally, there was an article I ran across in an old TV Guide I picked up a few years ago.  This was from near the end of Run For Your Life, and Gazzara was clearly tired of it - the endless publicity hawking, the show itself.  He struck me as not particularly likeable under the circumstances, and desperately unhappy.  He was a talented actor - everyone acknowledged that - but he was trapped by acting in an inferior medium, on an inferior product.  He ached, it seemed, to work in the less commercial projects of friends like John Cassavetes.  There was something sad about the whole thing: here he was, talented, with an opportunity that many actors would give a right arm for, and yet he was tremendously frustrated, almost like a caged animal.  And it's too bad that someone could have all that going for him and still be unhappy.*

*I know, I'm overlooking other work he did, such as Anatomy of a Murder.  Yes, he was very good in that, but when I think of that movie I'm not thinking of Gazzara, but of Jimmy Stewart.  Or Lee Remick.

I wonder, in fact, if Ben Gazzara was ever completely happy with his work.  Was his talent a blessing, or a curse?  He wanted, it seems, to do so much more with it, partly because he was considered so talented that others thought he should do more with it.  I suspect he must have eventually reached a peace with it.  His later work in the 70s with Cassavetes was his kind of work.*  He received three Tony nominations for his acting on the stage, and won an Emmy late in life for a TV movie.  But then - there's the quote from an interview with Charlie Rose in 1998.  "I won't tell you the pictures I turned down because you'll say, 'You are a fool,' and I was a fool."

For a better appreciation of Ben Gazzara's career, I think this piece by Stephen Bowie is very good.  But even if he didn't always (or even usually) get satisfaction from his work, he certainly provided some to those who watched him.  And that, all in all, is not too bad. TV