What I've been watching: February, 2026

Shows I've Watched:

The Rebel

Blue Light

Nixon in China

Aou may recall my occasional series "If I Ran the Network," in which I propose ideas for various series that might run on a fictional television network. (Then again, you might have a better chance of remembering it if I did a better job of running it more than just occasionally.) Anyway, one idea that has come true, more or less, is that of the Saturday Night Opera, which we've taken to watching the past couple of months. Most of these have been 20th-century operas, including one I reviewed last month, Doctor Atomic by John Adams.

This month features another Adams work, Nixon in China, based on President Richard Nixon's historic 1972 trip to Communist China. Now, if that seems like an unlikely subject for an opera, you're right; even Adams was somewhat skeptical when he received the commission. However, the result was one of the greatest operas of the late 20th century, a work that manages to be both historic and creative, and unlike anything that anyone might have expected. In this Metropolitan Opera performance from 2011, James Maddalena reprises his role as Nixon (which he created in 1987 for the opera's world premiere in Houston), with Janis Kelly as Pat Nixon, Robert Brubaker as Chairman Mao, and Russell Braun as Chou En-lai, and Adams himself conducting.

Adams's music could best be described as a pleasing minimalism, with elements of atonality that nevertheless avoid many of the less pleasant aspects of dissonance. The story is built around four major events: the arrival of the Nixons and the president's meeting with Mao; a tour by Mrs. Nixon of various sites in China; a visit to the Peking Opera where a Chinese political ballet is performed; and the final night of the trip, in which the principals reflect on the events that brought them to this time and place.

In interviews, director Peter Sellars has talked about how the production of the opera has evolved over the years, particularly since more and more of the atrocities committed by Mao have come to light, while Maddalena has mentioned the depth and complexity of Nixon's character, which he describes as peeling away various layers of an onion. This, along with the historical nature of the opera's events, should enable it to remain in the repertoire without undergoing some of the more bizarre reinterpretations that have become commonplace in modern opera productions; it would be difficult, for instance, to stage it as science fiction or to place it in the American antebellum South, as I've seen in some operas I won't mention right now.

Two things that stand out every time I see this opera: first, the second act political ballet, "The Red Detachment of Women," in which the villain of the piece, an unscrupulous landlord taking advantage of the peasants, is played by the same singer who portrays Henry Kissinger, in this case Richard Paul Fink (who played Dr. Edward Teller in Doctor Atomic). Fink's portrayal, which includes a fair amount of interaction with the ballet dancers, is both harrowing and hilarious, given that everyone recognizes that the character so closely resembles Kissinger.

But the real power of the opera comes to light in the final act, in which Dick and Pat reminisce about his time in the Pacific during World War II; Mao and Chiang Ch'ing dance together; and Chou, dying of cancer, looks back with the faint air of disillusionment carried by a man who, with glistening eyes looks into the distance, asks rhetorically "How much of what we did was good?" It is a profoundly moving moment in an act that transcends everything we've seen to this point, a surrealistic look at the ways in which these characters have been scarred in one way or another by how their lives have played out. It is as good a meditation as one will ever see of the immense price that history demands from those who dare to shape it. Whatever one might have been expecting in this opera, this would not have been it; it provides a powerful conclusion to an opera of unique depth and emotion, and well worth the investment in time.

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As we seem to be on the subject of historical events, let's go back now to that post-antebellum time following the American Civil War, and the philosophical Western, The Rebel, co-created by and starring Nick Adams. I wrote about this series at some length a few years ago, so I'm not going to go into great detail about the existential meaning of the war, or of this series. Instead, let's look at it for what it is: a very effective half-hour drama that provides both action and an opportunity for reflection.

Adams plays Johnny Yuma, a former Confederate soldier looking for both adventure and a meaning to his life following the war. In that sense, it's reminiscent of another Western, Rod Serling's The Loner, which sought to break away from the conventions of the genre. The Rebel doesn't quite go that far; its situations are more traditional, and Adams's character is a more conventional Western hero. He does, however, have one trait that stands out: a journal that he keeps as he tries to come to terms with the horrors of war and the things he sees and experiences during his journeys.

Although Adams would be nominated for an Academy Award for Supporting Actor in 1963's Twilight of Honor, I'd never really paid that much attention to him in the roles I'd seen him play. He famously self-funded his Oscar campaign, and I'd frequently seen his name used as a punch line for such campaigns. Well, he's really good in The Rebel, and I mean really good. Perhaps it's just me, but he seems to infuse his character with a certain depth, a dignity and gravitas that one doesn't often see in shows like this. I recall a particular moment where he encounters a man who had deserted his unit during a critical battle; notwithstanding the "fog of war" that can cause men to do strange things under stress, Yuma reacts with a subtle but visible disgust that this man would have actually run from his duty—and, perhaps more important, his brothers-in-arms. 

Yuma does the things you'd expect him to do: fights for the underdog, fights against injustice, sees both sides of the conflict with the Indians, etc. He stops to help those who need help, and helps fight their battles even though they're not his battles. But Adams displays a toughness in the role that I hadn't expected. He's more than willing to beat the crap out of the bad guys or hold their heads under water until they cry uncle, and quite honestly, I'm much more partial to that than I am to seeing a hero who tries to get everyone together to talk it out like reasonable adults. Screw that; I say, if you've got a gun, use it! (Of course, with an attitude like that, you can see how television shows got in so much trouble over excessive violence.)

The Rebel may not be a great show, although it ran for two seasons. It is, however, a good one, and frequently a very good one. As I say, I've come to have a greater respect for Adams as an actor, and I like his character. The Rebel is a rare example of a Goodson-Todman production that isn't a game show, and for the most part it's a successful one. There is one sour note though, and that's the theme song, played at the beginning and end, and sung by Johnny Cash. There's nothing wrong with the song per se, and Cash is, of course, a legend, but the song's line doesn't do Cash's voice any favors, calling for a certain smoothness in the high notes that doesn't really suit his style. It's a small quibble, though, and I suspect that Cash fans are fine with it. I'm not his biggest fan myself, but who am I to complain?

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Our trio of "based on historical events" ends with a World War II drama, Blue Light, that stars Robert Goulet as David March, an American journalist who has supposedly renounced his American citizenship and joined the Nazis in their campaign to conquer the world. It's a ruse, however, as we're shown in the premiere episode; Goulet is actually a deep-cover sleeper agent; having successfully been planted in Germany prior to the war, he ingratiated himself with the Nazi hierarchy, even taking orders from Hitler, while secretly reporting back to the Americans under the code name "Blue Light," and occasionally being called on to sabotage Nazi war efforts. We're frequently reminded of the importance of March's mission: he is the lone survivor of a 18-man infiltration unit, thus he must be protected. He receives his orders from French underground member Suzanne Duchard (played by Christine Carère), who herself poses as a Gestapo officer.

This is another of the half-hour dramas that used to be common on television in the 1950s and 1960s before the networks were forced to give up a half-hour of prime time to local affiliates. The format works both for and against the show; stories are forced to cut extraneous events in favor of spare, lean storytelling that can work under the right circumstances. It can also be a detriment if the stories are forced to wrap up too quickly and too conveniently. Blue Light is not immune to to the latter, but what helps mitigate this tendency is that the series functions much like a serial, with each episode leading into the next, so much so that the first four episodes were edited into a feature-length movie after the show's cancellation.

Now, this is by no means a perfect series. It's been said that Goulet, who was a star on Broadway and in television for such hits as Camelot, Brigadoon, and Carousel, to branch out into truly dramatic acting, and in Blue Light there's nary a hint of Goulet the recording star; it's very much to the series' credit that they made David March a journalist rather than an entertainer, which would have given the excuse to have Goulet sing a couple of songs in each episode. On the other hand, perhaps the series would have lasted more than 17 episodes if they had done that; one of the drawbacks, one would suppose, of the half-hour format.

Goulet does, however, acquit himself very well as a dramatic actor. He's credible as a tough, smarmy turncoat who secretly carries the burden of playing the heel (his girlfriend was so distressed at his apparent act of treason that she committed suicide; he had been unable to tell even her of his true mission), and at times he shows a true ambivalance about his work, such as an early episode in which March is ordered to kill a fellow double-agent to assuage the Nazis of their suspicions about him; the fellow agent is not only an American but a friend with whom he's worked in the past. The fact that this agent was suffering from an incurable disease and had volunteered for the mission to give his death some meaning was no real solace to March, who worked to find a way in which he could throw the ever-suspicious Nazis off his trail while not having to kill his friend. ("There might yet be a cure!") All right, that was perhaps a little too neat of an ending, but the premise was really good, and posed an interesting moral dilemma.

Something difficult to accept, however, is the many scenes in which March and Duchard discuss his secret plans in settings where they're literally surrounded by German officers and Gestapo agents. Yes, I know they're supposed to be talking sotto voce, and the only reason they seem to be talking so openly is so they're audible to the viewers. Still, it works against the show's credibility, which is important when you're dealing with a premise such as this. Blue Light is not particularly a good show (in fact, the most recent episode we watched was average at best, managing to pack more than a half-hour's worth of cliches into its story), but it's not a bad show either, which is something, and it's an enjoyable show to watch, which is something more. The Rebel may be the better show of our hour-long bloc, but Blue Light mostly holds up its end of the bargain. TV

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What I've been watching: January, 2026

Shows I’ve Watched:
Leonard Bernstein Doctor Atomic The Bell Telephone Hour The Iceman Cometh

Most of the time, my choices in this space focus on television series, and for good reason: this is called "It's About TV," after all, not "It's About Everything Else." (If you want to read that, go to my new author Substance, "In Other Words," which just started yesterday.) It occurs to me, however, that this is a somewhat self-limiting proposition, in that you can watch many different things on television—assuming you don't use your laptop or phone, just about everything you stream comes through your television set. And if you expand the definition of "TV" to include that, it opens up a whole new horizon of things to write about. This comes in especially handy when you've been watching the same series of shows for the past few months.

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Having spent an entire paragraph explaining this, it therefore makes perfect sense to start my review of the last month's viewing with an actual television series—two of them, in fact. The first might more properly be considered an occasional series of specials: Leonard Bernstein's series of music lectures that were first presented on (or in place of) Omnibus, the public affairs variety show that aired on all three networks, at one time or another, during the 1950s and 1960s. These aren't the Young People's Concerts that many of you might be familiar with; these are programs done for a general audience, not limited to children. And it shows; while Bernstein, to his eternal credit, never dumbed down his programming for young people, the shows he presented on Omnibus attain a much higher level. So high, in fact, that I have trouble keeping up with some of his concepts.

I have no trouble watching, though, because even if you don't understand everything Bernstein is talking about, you get the gist of it, and when it starts to make sense—when the pieces begin falling into place—it actually gives you a bit of a rush, sort of like answering a question correctly on the old College Bowl series. On one recent program we watched, Leonard Bernstein on Rhythm, which was originally broadcast on March 13, 1960, Bernstein opens the program with films of a beating heart. He then goes to show how rhythms are built upon this natural part of the body: not just the simple beat-beat-beat rhythm, but the in-and-out of breathing, for example—in and out, one and two. He then elaborates on how classical music has been built on these rhythms: four beats, one-two, one-two; followed by a matching set that maintains the same rhythm even though the notes may be varied. These couplets of four-note sections now make up eight beats. This is then multiplied to create various passages that may repeat themselves in various ways throughout the piece. In fact, almost all music written prior to the 20th Century was composed in this manner, either in sets of two or sets of three, but always based on the number two. It is, he says, just like a mathematical equation. I hasten to add that I may not have all this right; I was struggling a bit to keep up. But you get the idea. 

Bernstein then goes on to demonstrate, both at the keyboard and while conducting the New York Philharmonic, how this changed in the 20th Century, using examples that range from Stravinsky to Copland to Gershwin. The patterns become more unpredictable, less symmetric, which helps give them the excitement and movement that can make Stravinsky, for instance, so enthralling to hear. By the end, even though I didn't understand everything, I understood enough. What made it most enthralling, though, was Bernstein's obvious love for his subject and the passion and excitement he was able to transmit to the viewing audience. Anyone with even a vague interest in music will find it impossible to resist. Richard Nixon once wrote that what separates leaders from thinkers is that leaders express their ideas in such a way to inspire, if not compel, others to follow them. If you can't articulate your ideas in such a way, then you're not a leader; you're a thinker. Bernstein comes across the same way; no matter how music was presented to you in school by your music appreciation teacher, it probably didn't captivate you the way Bernstein does. The man's enthusiasm is infectious. I've remarked before that Bernstein left a mixed legacy: his private life was often suspect, and his political ideology was idiotic at best. But when it comes to teaching, to injecting a love of music in those listening to him, to even just talking about music, he has no equal. Of all that he contributed during his lifetime, nothing can even come close to this, and we should all be grateful. It's one of the reasons why, despite all his flaws, I can't help but love Bernstein when I see him in these shows.

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Another kind of music appreciation comes to us from The Bell Telephone Hour, the long-running series that was broadcast on NBC from 1959 to 1968. If you remember this, it might well be from the live Christmas specials presented each year, often on or near Christmas Day itself. But there's so much more to it than that, and thankfully, there are some episodes out there, thanks to YouTube, that you can watch and enjoy.

Earlier this week, we saw Robert Young host an hour on the American musical, and while Young might seem at first an odd choice for this—I've never thought of him as having a particular relationship to music—he does a very good job. As I mentioned, for most of its run, Telephone Hour was shown live, which means that in an episode like this, done before a live studio audience, with many separate segments, you need someone who can project the right amount of gravitas, combined with a personable personality and the knack of getting things right. Young certainly fills the bill there, whether he's introducing ballet stars Patricia McBride and Edward Vilella doing the Slaughter on Tenth Avenue dance sequence, the Brothers Four performing a song from Porgy and Bess, or Andre Previn and his trio doing the overture from West Side Story, the show is in good hands. Throw in songs from stars of the time such as Lainie Kazan, Earl Wrightson and Lois Hunt, and a monologue by Young to commemorate Thanksgiving Day (which was less than a week away), and you've got the kind of entertainment that makes people of our age ask why there isn't anything like that anymore.

So Telephone Hour was closely identified with both classical and popular music. In its last season or two, however, its emphasis shifted to filmed documentaries exploring various music topies, whether the history of jazz (Jazz, the Intimate Art, which includes profiles of and performances by Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck and Charles Lloyd and is ten times better than anything Ken Burns could put on, at one-tenth the length, or South Carolina's Spoletto Festival. One of the many lingering gripes I have with my childhood is that The Bell Telephone Hour was frequently preempted in the Twin Cities by other programming; I suppose it was thought too highbrow for some of us yocals. Thankfully, with the internet, I'm at last having my revenge.

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What's this, you say? More music? In a word, yes. Most of the Metropolitan Opera presentations done in HD for movie theaters were later repeated on PBS's Great Performances at the Met, so this counts as television. And recently we went back to look at one performance that we did see in the theater, many years ago: Doctor Atomic, the stunning opera by John Adams that tells the story of the testing of the atomic bomb. Now, you might not think that the bomb is a natural subject for an opera, and you'd be right; how many productions can you remember where a mock-up of "the gadget" (as the bomb was frequently referred to during its development) is the centerpiece of the set, always present even when you can't see it? 

As is typical of most modern opera, Doctor Atomic is mostly sung-through, meaning that instead of traditional arias, duets, choral pieces and the like, the dialogue (taken from the notes, memos, diaries, and letters of those people who actually worked on the Manhattan Project) is set to music and sung without repetitions. In the wrong hands, this can make for an extremely boring few hours. Adams pulls it off though, in the same way that he did with another unlikely subject for an opera, Nixon in China. This is due in no small part to the performance of Gerald Finley as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Sasha Cooke as Kitty Oppenheimer, Richard Paul Fink as Edward Teller, and Eric Owens as General Leslie Groves, the head of the project. The first act features a scene with Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty, which is unspeakably intimate without either of them taking off their clothes or even kissing; it's all carried by the choreography and the words, and it is breathtaking. Having seen the movie Oppenheimer a couple of years ago, it gives us a slightly different view of their relationship, but it is fascinating nonetheless.

The moment is exceeded by the concluding aria of Act One—the opera's only aria—"Batter My Heart," set to the text of John Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV." Finley is spellbinding, and the music, especially at the act's conclusion, is dynamic, driving, propulsive—and laced with dark overtones that hint at what the scientists are well aware of: after the development of the Bomb, the world will never be the same again. The YouTube description calls it "thrilling," and that sums it up pretty well. Opera in general, and this opera in particular, might not be your cup of tea; it doesn't have to be. But it packs a wallop nonetheless.

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I've been saving the longest for last. When The Iceman Cometh has been presented on television, it's usually been over two parts: sensible, given that Eugene O'Neill's play runs for nearly four hours, without commercial interruption. However, having watched it a couple of weeks ago, I can vouch that this is the only way to watch it. (Thankfully, it comes with an intermission for bathroom breaks.)

The television version, which aired on Play of the Week in 1960 and starred Jason Robards in the lead as Hickey (and Robert Redford as Parritt), is very good. That, however, is not the version we watched; instead, we opted for the 1973 film adaptation, which was directed by John Frankenheimer, and features a dynamite cast that includes Lee Marvin as Hickey, Fredric March as Harry Hope, Robert Ryan as Larry Slade, Tom Pedi as Rocky Pioggi, Bradford Dillman as Willie Oban, Sorrell Booke as Hugo Kalmar, and Jeff Bridges as Don Parritt. It's a faithful adaptation of the play, trimmed for time but otherwise intact, and it is a brutal experience; the flophouse at which the action takes place resembles nothing so much as hell on earth; Hickey, the travelling salesman whose regular appearances everyone anticipates, arrives this time not as the life of the party, but as a harbinger of doom, an avenging angel, a man preaching a unique type of repentance that involves giving one's self up to the freedom of nihilism.  Make sure you've got some antidepressants available while you're watching it.

Frankenheimer, of course, cut his teeth on live television, and his direction here is steady. And while the performances are uniformly good, a couple of them really stand out, those of Marvin and Robert Ryan. This was Ryan's final screen performance, and he conjures up every bit of world-weariness as a former political anarchist who no longer believes in the cause, and is now simply waiting for death to overtake him. In any other play, his role as a kind of Greek chorus would be what everyone talks about afterward, because he's twice as good as anyone else (including March, as good an actor as has ever graced the stage). However (and you knew there had to be one of those in here somewhere, didn't you?), when Marvin takes the stage, it's as if nobody else exists. Truly. He underplays the role with his patented menace; the quieter he is, the calmer and more collected, the more dangerous he becomes. When he's on camera, he's twice as good as Ryan, and in this play, that's really saying something. It's a performance that legitimizes Marvin's Oscar win (for the comedy Cat Ballou), and certainly could have scored another nomination here. I have a few qualms about O'Neill's play; I would have preferred a slightly different twist at the end, which I won't bore you with here, but who am I to compare myself to O'Neill? Anyway, like Doctor Atomic, this is not for everyone. But if it is for you, you'll thank me for introducing it to you. TV

If you enjoy the content here and want to support my broader creative work, please consider making a donation at my Ko-fi page. Any amount you contribute helps me continue writing, researching, and sharing these articles and projects. Thank you!

This week in TV Guide: April 10, 1965

Even the word sounds quaint, old fashioned. Smut. Sounds like something your grandmother might have warned you about, and if she'd been around in 1965, reading TV Guide, she might have felt justified after reading Leslie Raddatz's article—first in a three-part series—on "Smut in the Living Room."

It's one of the first articles we've seen that indicates a shift, perhaps ever so slight, toward sex replacing violence as the number one concern of television viewers. Raddatz suggests that this may be due to television's ever-increasing use of movies to fill in scheduling gaps. With those older movies that have been staples of broadcasting since the start comes the newer fare from Hollywood, which New York Times critic Bosley Crowther describes as containing "an unmistakable surge of sensuality and just plain smut." Two of the leading offenders of the moment are Kiss Me, Stupid, which Playboy (of all sources) described as "amateur night at a third-rate burlesque house" and The Carpetbaggers, described by Life as "An untalented leering paean to sex." Since this is a three-part article, we're not going to see a comprehensive analysis of the situation right away; indeed, in part one, Raddatz focuses his attention on two men in particular: Billy Wilder, the man who brought us Kiss Me, Stupid; and Joseph E. Levine, the producer of The Carpetbaggers.

Wilder won't discuss Kiss Me, Stupid, but Raddatz has plenty to say about Wilder, whose career and his work "have often verged on an, at best, unconventional and sometimes seamy borderline." Critics have addressed "the inner nihilism, the impatience and contempt for the audience" in many of his movies, and a former associate calls him "the only guy I know who could sneer 'Merry Christmas.' " Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he's one of Hollywood's most honored directors, with the Oscars to prove it. 

   Is this as hot as it gets while fully clothed?

Wilder came from humble origins—when he moved from Berlin to the United States, he initially lived in an unused ladies' lavatory of a hotel—and Raddatz wonders, in the psychoanalytical style of the times, if his desire to bend the boundaries of acceptability somehow constitute "a defense of his base beginnings." His movies tend to deal with "distasteful or single-entendre themes," such as adultery in Double Indemnity and The Apartment, alcoholism in The Lost Weekend, drag in Some Like it Hot, prostitution in Irma la Douce, and—raising the states—double adultery in Kiss Me, Stupid, which Life, in its put-down of the movie, said included "situations and a dialog that would generate blushes in a smoker car." Wilder, an opponent of censorship by "ladies' clubs in Nebraska," professes delight with television, since it gives those in movies "something to look down on."

Levine, whose movies, like Wilder's, have won honors, has several already running on television: "Two Women, which involves the rape of a woman and her teen-age daughter, Room at the Top, which concerns adultery; A Taste of Honey, which deals with illegitimacy and homosexuality; and The Mark, which is about a suspected child molester." The movies run later in the evening, at 10:00 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and carry with them a respectability that seems often to be absent from Wilder's films. 

They also tend to spark less outrage than those of Wilder's, and Raddatz wonders if this might be the answer to a problem faced by television programmers. "The great thing," according to one Hollywood journalist, "is that television has taken over the place of program pictures and B pictures, so that good adult movies can be made. If these adult films can’t be shown on television, does it mean that all motion pictures are to be made at the level of the TV viewer?" In other words, the critics can focus their barbs on Kiss Me, Stupid and the like, allowing "worthwhile adult films in dignified fashion" such as Room at the Top and Two Women to be viewed as acceptable alternatives. 

Or, he wonders at the conclusion of part one, when these new displays of smut turn up on television, will we see things come to a point? Will we see more self-regulation, or is the government, "—either through Congressional committees or the Federal Communications Commission—preparing to move into this sensitive area?"

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From 1963 to 1976, TV Guide's weekly reviews were written by the witty and acerbic Cleveland Amory. Whenever they appear, we'll look at Cleve's latest take on the shows of the era. 

The question before us is this: is For the People really for the viewers? Cleveland Amory is inclined to think so, although he concedes it may not be for all the people. But as a logical successor to The Defenders, he thinks this legal drama will do just fine. Like its predecessor, the show is long on realism, and desiring of topicality—even though its grittiness may, at times, come close to discouraging us. But, he says, if you stick with it, you won't be sorry.

For the People, as the title might suggest, takes the opposite tack from The Defenders (given that it's produced by the same people, comparisons are unavoidable), with William Shatner as assistant D.A. David Koster, an earnest, bulldog prosecutor, aided by his boss (Howard Da Silva), a friendly detective (Lonny Chapman), and his loyal wife (Jessica Walter), who sometimes wishes he could just let go of the job for awhile. It boasts an equally fine lineup of guest stars, all of whom turn in particularly fine performances. It is, Cleve says, as "equally exciting" as The Defenders, but "even more penetrating and engrossing." 

As someone who, for the most part, appreciated The Defenders and, in fact, has seen a couple of episodes of For the People, I can sympathize, even agree, with much of what Amory says. Where we part company, though, is in the matter of the show's star. Amory sees Shatner as "right up there in the big leagues with David Janssen, Robert Lansing, Vic Morrow and Richard Crenna," to which I can only scoff. This is not to be unduly harsh on the Shat, but I've always felt that he was almost always the weak link in every production he's appeared in. In For the People, as in most of his roles, he comes across either as overly intense, or so over the top that you'd think he was working behind a deli counter, he's hurling so much ham around. I know a lot of you might not agree with me on this, but to suggest that he's in the same league as those other actors is probably the funniest thing I'll read in this issue; he might conceivably be close to Morrow (although I can't envision Shatner in Combat!), but as for the other three, it strikes me as, frankly, preposterous. Apparently the viewers felt at least somewhat the same: For the People lasts but 13 weeks before shuffling off this mortal coil.

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This week may seem to you a lot like last week, which wouldn't be surprising, given that Easter doesn't have a fixed date each year. (If you're interested in just how the date for Easter is determined, you can read about it here.) One of those duplicates from last week is the Masters, golf's first major of the season, which concludes this weekend with CBS's coverage of the third and fourth rounds (Saturday, 2:00 p.m. PT, Sunday, 1:00 p.m.) What promises to be a thrilling showdown between golf's big three of Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player—tied for the lead after 36 holes—fails to materialize as Nicklaus puts the pedal to the metal over the weekend, shooting 64-69 to finish with a then-record score of -17, winning by nine shots (another record at the time) over Palmer and Player, who finish tied for second.

One of the commentators on CBS's coverage is Dr. Cary Middlecoff, who won the Masters himself in 1955; this week, he sits down with Melvin Durslag to discuss what he sees as a threat to golf's success on television: overexposure. There's no question that televised golf is thriving at the moment, helping lift prize money to a then-unheard-of $3.5 million over 43 PGA tournaments. (By comparision, last year's Masters—a single tournament—offered $20 million in prize money, including $3.6 million for the winner.) Much of the popularity for the sport, Middlecoff believes, is due to former President Eisenhower, the world's most famous golfer. "While he was in office, he played golf, he watched golf and he talked golf. He made people conscious of the sport." And Arnold Palmer, the most charismatic golfer around, has certainly made the sport attractive. But Middlecoff sees a dark side to all this. "The money is rolling in now," he concedes, "but we could be heading toward overexposure. I wonder what's going to happen if people start watching tournaments, say, 30 times a year on TV." He thinks 15 televised tournaments a year would be about right; "Otherwise, the public will lose interest."

This might sound ridiculous at first glance. Is there any such thing as overexposure for a sport on television? For a long while—during the Tiger Woods boom—people couldn't seem to get enough of it on TV. The result is that today, every tournament is televised, either on networks or cable. And not just the final holes of the final two rounds, either; by shuttling between stations, one can see every shot, not only of those weekend rounds, but the first two rounds as well. And when you combine that saturation coverage with prize money that encourages the top professionals to play only a handful of tournaments each year, plus a general lack of charismatic stars—well, is it any wonder why ratings for golf have fallen dramatically over the past few seasons? Having most of the world's best players competing in rival golf leagues doesn't help, either. Clearly, there are probably two dozen tournaments that could be dropped from the TV schedule without anyone noticing. Which would leave us with somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 tournaments that become important viewing. Just what the doctor ordered, it would seem. (Or dentist, in Cary Middlecoff's case.)

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As with last week, this Sunday is Palm Sunday, which leads into some interesting seasonal programming, chief among them being the one-act Passover opera "The Final Ingredient," commissioned by and airing on ABC's Directions '65 (Sunday, 1:00 p.m.). The music is by David Amram, with a libretto by Arnold Weinstein, based on a television play by Reginald Rose. Amram, who most recently composed the movie score for The Manchurian Candidate), also conducts the orchestra in this story of inmates in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, preparing to celebrate the Seder for Passover. Willialm Covington, Joseph Sopher, and Malcolm Smith are among the stars in this production, which ABC likely hoped would become an annual event, a la "Amahl and the Night Visitors." Not for the first time, I'm amazed at how little information there is out there on a program that was considered important at the time, was composed by a prominent composer, and was released on record. More info than we see on some lost programs, but still, it goes to show how lost the television historian would be without TV Guide.

Among other Passover programs, there's also "From Exodus to Selma; Marching for Freedom" (Sunday, 10:30 a.m, KRON in San Francisco), in which Bay Area rabbis who participated in the Selma civil rights march discuss "the Jewish concept of freedom found in the Passover as translated into present-day civil rights action." It's a prime example of the social justice bug, one of the plagues of the 1960s, working even then to infect religion, turning it away from the spiritual and toward earthly things.

Continuing, NBC presents a Palm Sunday Mass from St. Peter in Chains Cathedral in Cincinnati (8:00 a.m.). Later Sunday, it's That I May See (11:15 p.m., KSBW in Salinas), with Ruth Hussey and Raymond Burr in a story of Bartimeus, the blind beggar healed by Christ. Tuesday's Bell Telephone Hour (10:00 p.m., NBC) offers an hour of music saluting both the sacred and romantic aspects of spring, hosted by Olivia de Havilland, and featuring Metropolitan Opera star Richard Tucker, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Dorothy Collins, Ron Husmann, Anita Gillette, and dancers Edward Villella and Patricia McBride. On Thursday, the First Baptist Church choir and orchestra of San Jose presents a half-hour of Easter music (7:30 p.m., KNTV in San Jose). Finally, a pair of seasonal movies commemorate Good Friday; at 9:00 p.m. it's The King of Kings (KVIE in Sacramento), Cecil B. DeMille's original silent spectacular from 1926, starring H.B. Warner; then, at 10:00 p.m., Paul Newman stars in 1955's The Silver Chalice (KXTV in Sacramento). Newman, by the way, was a better actor than William Shatner.

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Thursday night's Kraft Suspense Theatre (10:00 p.m., NBC) airs "Rapture at 240" (video here), the pilot for the upcoming fall series Run for Your Life, starring Ben Gazzara as a man faced with an unspecified terminal illness*, leaving him a couple of years to squeeze in a lifetime of living. The fact that Run for Your Life ran for three seasons always seems to have tainted the series a bit, and some have thought that this was a reason ratings for the series dipped that third season, leading to the show's cancellation. I don't know about that; after all, M*A*S*H, Hogan's Heroes, and Combat! all had longer durations than the wars in which they took place; as someone once pointed out, TV time runs differently from normal time. (There's a website out there that actually posited an unofficial timeline showing how the episodes could have taken place in the given time.) My suspicion is that it might have had more to do with the main character, Paul Bryan, not always being all that likeable, but then I could be reading my own thoughts about Ben Gazzara into that. I think Gazzara might have preferred that the series lean a little more into the existentialism inherent in its concept, which I would agree with. One thing I think we can agree on is that Ben Gazzara was a superior dramatic actor to, say, William Shatner. 

*Some sites have posited that the disease from which Paul Bryan was suffering was chronic myelocytic leukemia, which is plausible as diseases go. It is true, however, that it was never given a name in the series, and if it were, it would be in this pilot, where we see Bryan's doctor giving him the death sentence.

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Among the rest of the week's highlights, we have more sports: Saturday, it's bowling's preeminent event, the $100,000 Firestone Tournament of Champions in Akron (3:30 p.m., ABC; video here). Billy Hardwick defeats Dick Weber in the final, taking home a prize of $25,000—more, I'll have you know, than Jack Nicklaus got for winning the Masters. Yes, bowling was a big sport back then. In prime time, KRCR in Redding carries David L. Wolper's documentary The General (6:30 p.m.), a profile of General Douglas MacArthur on the first anniversary of his death. Later, The Hollywood Palace is preempted for the special "Mission to Malaya," a profile of Peace Corps volunteers and the hardships they deal with in Malaya. (9:30 p.m., ABC)

On Sunday, the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers clash in the fifth game of their Eastern Division final (2:00 p.m., ABC), with the Celtics taking a 114-108 victory and a 3-2 lead in the best-of-seven series. The Celtics eventually win in seven, on their way to a five-game victory over the Los Angeles Lakers and their seventh consecutive NBA championship. And now that I think about it, it's probably a good thing Palace was preempted this week, because I don't think it would have had a chance against Ed Sullivan's lineup, which includes Maurice Chevalier, Cab Calloway, the San Francisco Ballet, singer Felicia Sanders, Soupy Sales, Gerry and the Pacemakers, juggler Rudy Schweitzer, comedian Loundon Lee, light heavyweight champion Jose Torres, and Stiller and Meara.

Saturday was the first anniversary of Douglas MacArthur's death; Monday is the 20th anniversary of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Charles Kuralt hosts a one-hour special, "FDR Remembered" (10:00 p.m., CBS), looking at the personal side of the late president. Included among the interviews is one with Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. at the family home in Hyde Park, New York. 

Monday was baseball's Opening Day, and in honor of the season, the Channel 7 all-night triple feature begins with It Happened in Flatbush (Tuesday, 1:00 a.m.), with Lloyd Nolan as a former big-leaguer hired as manager of a team on its last legs. Carole Landis co-stars. Wednesday, Robert Cromie's guest on Book Beat is Ladislas Farago, discussing his book Patton: Ordeal and Triumph, the basis for the 1970 movie biography that won an Oscar for George C. Scott. 

The late Richard Chamberlain is put in charge of the annual nurses and residents' review on Dr. Kildare (Thursday, 8:30 p.m., NBC), giving us a chance to find out that the staff of Blair General Hospital is not only much larger but much more talented that we might have thought, what with Darryl Hickman, Rosemary De Camp, ◀ Dorothy Provine, and Jud Taylor being among the guest stars. 

On Friday, Jack Paar's Good Friday show includes Charlton Heston (a better actor than William Shatner, by the way), who reads a passage from Genesis that inspired Michelangelo's painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; author Morris West (whose previous novels include The Shoes of the Fisherman), discussing the Vietnam situation in conjunction with his new novel, The Ambassador; and Bob Newhart, who has nothing to do with Good Friday, but is always welcome for good humor. (10:00 p.m., NBC)

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We haven't had a fashion spread for a while, so I can't think of a better time for one than now, to wrap up the week. It features Barbara Barrie modeling the year's hottest trend: leather. For motorcycle riding, you know. 

Of course, any fan of The Avengers could talk to you about leather. TV  

This week in TV Guide: April 7, 1956

With tensions between the United States and Canada running high at the moment, it seems appropriate to lead off this week with an article from Gordon Sinclair, the legendary Canadian journalist who in 1973 will become famous south of the border for his editorial on behalf of America at a time when the rest of the world is taking potshots at her. He's writing on the state of Canadian television, which he describes as "green," as it was in America a few years before; "there's no doubt that the future is just as bright" but at this moment, don't expect to see "the same slick technique you get in the States." Indeed, TV in Canada is still a little rough around the edges: "Our scripts are pedestrian, our crews are inexperienced and our directors seem hesitant to direct. Or even to suggest to performers older than themselves how to play a scene better."

Canadians produce 38 hours of network television each week, ranking third behind Hollywood and New York. Canadians have produced stars of American television, including Lorne Greene, Gisele MacKenzie and Barry Morse. (But no William Shatner?) Canadian shows have their share of curvy females, including Joan Fairfax and Shirley Harmer. But American television is still more popular than many home-grown shows; one of those native shows, Cross Canada Hit Parade (similar to Your Hit Parade in the States) is a twice-weekly musical showcase. A guest star ("usually American") is invited to sing a top record; MacKenzie, Canada's "most glittering expert in the field of song," has never appeared on the show. She was offered as much as $2,000 for a one-shot, but "showed no interest." And Fairfax, who was once voted "Miss Canadian Television" (because of her picture tubes?) has a Monday variety hour she co-hosts with Denny Vaughan, but it's beaten in the ratings by Robert Montgomery Presents; "You see, American programs are highly popular north of the border."

One of Canadian television's sitcoms, the French-Canadian Plouffe Family, is unique in that "it must be the only dramatic show on earth bradcast in two languages by the same cast playing the identical parts." A nice trick if you can pull it off. And there's the comic team of Johnny Wayne and Frank SHuster, "who are vulgar or delightful, depending on how you feel about such stuff." (Ed Sullivan was one who obviously expressed the latter; he had the two on his show 58 times.) On the Jackie Rae Show, he says, Canadians occasionally get the unexpected—along with imported guests. There are even what Sinclair describes as "fleeting glimpses of high comedy," which means Canada's Jackie doesn't really measure up to America's Jackie (Gleason, that is). Don't despair, thoughf: Sinclair suggests Canadian television will one day thrive. After all, even the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the government-run entity that "frowns on press agentry and commercial exploitation" hasn't been able to completely subdue the spirit of Canadian TV.

Where, I wonder, is today's Gordon Sinclair? We could certainly use him, on both sides of the border.

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Let's make sure we take care of the cover stories. The cover picture of Garry Moore, host of the quiz show I've Got a Secret, along with the show's two female panelists of the time, Jayne Meadows and Faye Emerson (much better looking than the male panelists, Bill Cullen and Henry Morgan) doesn't really have anything to do with the inside story. That's about the "secret" files of I've Got a Secret, which aren't really that secret. What is a secret, or at least something many of you might not have known, is that IGAS was created by Allan Sherman, the singer-comedian who was Weird Al before Weird Al, best-known for the hit single "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah." This week Sherman talks about some of the up to 4,000 secrets he receives each week—people with 12 toes or 13 fingers or no eyebrows, but also people with relatives who came to America on the Mayflower or shook hands with Abraham Lincoln, a man who went over Niagara Falls in a rubber ball and lived to tell about it, the first man to cash a Social Security check, or the woman who won the first Miss America pageant. By the way, Sherman says, if you have 40 toes he'll take you, but if it's only 12, don't bother.

After that, we go down south to Nashville, and visit the Grand Ole Opry. The Opry is already an American institution, having started in 1925, and what's surprising about its transition to television is not that it's happened, but that it took this long. The 1955-56 fall season brought about the premiere of the Opry on ABC, where once a month it substitutes for Ozark Jubilee, another Country-Western program, and in rural areas (which, remember, make up a much larger part of America in 1956 than they do today), it is absolutely slaughtering the competition, Perry Como and Jackie Gleason.

This week's article takes a kind of quaint approach to the whole thing, pointing out that these Country stars are just as business-savvy as anyone—hardly surprising considering how successful the Grand Ole Opry has been over the years; and when you think of how big Country music has become as a business, I think it shows these "hayseeds" have always been pretty shrewd business people.

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Two new soap operas premiered last week on CBS, and they're unusual in that they run for 30 minutes, rather than the traditional 15-minute format (a carryover from radio; you notice a lot of shows fit into that category). You might have heard of them: As the World Turns and The Edge of Night. Incidentally, The Edge of Night started out as "the daytime version of Perry Mason," with Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner writing it, but the notoriously temperamental Gardner pulls out due to "creative differences,"* and the character of the heroic lawyer is changed from Mason to Mike Karr, played by John Larkin, who played Mason on the radio.

*According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, those differences include Mason having a regular girlfriend, which throws into question that intriguing relationship with his secretary, Della Street. That's something Gardner, who jealously guarded Mason's image, would never agree to.

Speaking of the great lawyer, there's an interesting item in this week's Hollywood Teletype: "If everybody can agree on the contracts, Fred MacMurray will wind up as lawyer Perry Mason in the new CBS hour-long detective series." Discussions had gotten to the point that a Gardner memo states, "Apparently Fred MacMurray is the person who will probably be selected." It's an intriguing thought; like Burr, MacMurray had played many the heavy in movies up to that time (and would continue to do so; check him out in The Apartment), and there are many who think that Burr brought, from those roles as a heavy, an underlying sense of menace that gave his Mason, especially in the early seasons, a real edge of danger. Could MacMurray have done the same? He was certainly talented enough, but when Burr finally had the chance to audition for the role (he'd previously been tried as Hamilton Burger), he is said to have so impressed Gardner that he told Bur, "In twenty minutes, you captured Perry Mason better than I did in twenty years." That, presumably, was the end of that.

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Baseball is back! Well, kind of; it's still Spring Training, but on Saturday the New York Giants take on the Cleveland Indians in a pre-season game live from Dallas, home of this week's TV Guide. (1:25 p.m. CT, CBS). Dizzy Dean and Buddy Blattner call the action. It's not the big sports story of the weekend, though; that would be the final round of the Masters Golf Tournament, live from Augusta, Georgia. (Sunday, 4:00 p.m., CBS) It's the first time for the Masters on television (and the start of the tournament's long association with CBS), and the first major championship for Jack Burke Jr.,  who came from eight shots behind to defeat amateur Ken Venturi by one stroke. It remains the last time no golfer broke par for the tournament. 

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There's some real star power in this week's shows. On Saturday night's Ford Star Jubilee (9:30 p.m., CBS), Orson Welles and Betty Grable make rare television appearances in the comedy "Twentieth Century," written by the famed Broadway duo of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Welles would come to do a lot of television in the last couple of decades of his life—remember those cheesy appearances on the Dean Martin roasts and the commercials for Paul Masson wine? ("We will sell no wine before its time.")—but in 1956 he was still a star, known for The War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane and The Third Man, and still two years away from his noir classic Touch of Evil. Ah, one has to pay the bills, however, and Welles was always looking for money for his latest projects, many of which sadly never came to fruition. As he once famously said, "I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts."*

*By the way, if you're interested in absorbing article on Welles, check out this New Yorker piece by Alex Ross from ten years ago, celebrating the Welles centennial. It truly seems as if Orson Welles could only have been a character concocted in an Orson Welles movie.

On Sunday afternoon the American composer Norman Dello Joio premieres his opera "The Trial at Rouen" on NBC Opera Theatre (3:00 p.m.). It's Dello Joio's second crack at rendering an operatic version of the story of Joan of Arc. His first, "The Triumph of St. Joan," premiered in 1950, but Dello Joio was never happy with it, and eventually reworked the story (but neither the music nor the libretto) into the 75-minute opera (plus commercials) that you'd be seeing on television. There's yet a third version to come, however, as Dello Joio will add some of the music from the 1950 version to the 1956 version while creating some new scenes and expanding on others, resulting in the 1959 version, also called "The Triumph of St. Joan." Many of the critics of the time will consider it to be the best of the three versions of the story.

That night, G.E. Theater (8:00 p.m., CBS) presents Judy Garland in an informal one-woman show, performing a half-hour of songs she's never before done in public, and backed by pianist Leonard Pennario and choreographer Peter Gennaro (who did Annie, West Side Story and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, among other Broadway hits). It's introduced by host Ronald Reagan.

If you happen to own the boxed set of Studio One episodes that came out a few years ago, you'll have seen the Rod Serling political drama "The Arena," airing Monday night (9:00 p.m., CBS), with Wendell Corey as an ambitious young senator dealing with the legacy (and feuds) of his father. (If not, you can watch it here.) You might have thought, watching it, that it was substandard Serling, one of the episodes that helped drive him to create The Twilight Zone. The problem, as he writes in his 1957 collection of television plays Patterns: Four Television Plays With The Author’s Personal Commentaries, is not a new one: interference from the network and sponsors. His reaction, however, shows us the direction he is already considering going:

I was not permitted to have my Senators discuss any current or pressing problem. To talk of tariff was to align oneself with the Republicans; to talk of labor was to suggest control by the Democrats. To say a single thing germane to the current political scene was absolutely prohibited. So on television in April 1956, several million viewers got a definitive picture of television’s concept of politics and the way government is run. They were treated to an incredible display on the floor of The United States Senate of groups of Senators shouting, gesticulating and talking in hieroglyphics about make-believe issues, using invented terminology, in a kind of prolonged, unbelievable double-talk… In retrospect, I probably would have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and peopled the Senate with robots. This would probably have been more reasonable and no less dramatically incisive.

I suspect this episode was included in the DVD collection because 1) it was Serling, and 2) it was in fairly good condition. There are likely better episodes that could have been chosen. "The Arena" isn't bad, mind you, but far from peak Serling.

Dinah Shore currently hosts a twice-weekly 15-minute show (Tuesday and Thursday evenings on NBC, filling the remainder of the half hour occupied by John Cameron Swayzee's News Caravan), but she's talking about dumping that in favor of an hour-long Tuesday night show; another idea is to keep the current show, while adding a number of hour-long specials. The latter gets a tryout tonight (7:00 p.m., NBC), with Dinah welcoming Dean Martin and Marge and Gower Champion. As it turns out, nothing could be finah than to catch an hour of Dinah: The Dinah Shore Chevy Show starts up this October, and runs until 1963. (Her 15-minute show, which airs at 6:15 p.m. tonight, is guest-hosted by Gordon MacRae.) And, in the "you might be interested" category, a note on The 64,000 Question (9:00 p.m, CBS) tells us that, "As of the 43rd show, emcee Hal March has given out $544,608 and nine luxury automobiles." 

On Wednesday, M-G-M Parade (7:30 p.m., ABC) presents "The Greatness of Garbo," the conclusion of a two-part tribute to the legendary star. (Presumably, Garbo speaks.) Parade is the subject of Robert Sanders' review this week, which isn't a positive one; last month, Walter Pidgeon had been introduced as the new host, and the format of the show had been altered to present serialized versions of movies along with clips from the M-G-M vault. The problem, Sanders says, is that this doesn't produce any new material for television; the studio execs seem to "presumptously believe that viewers will be eager to watch their old hit movies and promotional plugs for new movies." And when movies are chopped up into two or three parts, "viewers cannot help but lose interest." Anyway, it only has another month to run. One story you'll get to see all at once is "The Funny Heart," tonight's presentation on The U.S. Steel Hour (9:00 p.m., CBS), with Imogene Coca, the female side of the team that made Your Show of Shows such a success, making her dramatic television debut. 

Thursday we see another of those shows that we likely won't see today, The All-American Homemaker of Tomorrow (7:00 p.m., ABC), sponsored by Betty Crocker, with the aforementioned Hal March on hand to crown the winner (or whatever is was they did). The competition, which was comprised of high school students who'd won similar competitions at the local level, began in 1955, and ran through 1977. You might be interested to know that one of the future contestants will be now-Senator Elizabeth Warren, competiting in 1966 as the representative from Northwest Classen High School in Oklahoma City. Meantime, Shower of Stars (7:30 p.m., CBS) presents a review of current musical trends, with Frankie Lane and Joe E. Brown sharing the hosting duties. 

On Friday, John Newland, who we'll come to know better as the host of One Step Beyond, stars in "The Bitter Land" on Schlitz Playhouse of Stars (8:00 p.m., CBS), as a father heading West to revenge the death of his son during a bank robbery. Later, Edward R. Murrow interviews pollster George Gallup on Person to Person (9:30 p.m., CBS), discussing the exotic art of measuring public opinion. It was probably just as accurate then as it is today.

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Finally, there's a small ad on the bottom of Wednesday's listings referring to the social event of the year, perhaps the television event of the year, with the provocative question: "How much will you see?"

That event is the marriage of the Academy Award-winning actress Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco, and everybody who's anybody will be heading over there to cover it. At the end of this week's What's My Line?, John Daly mentions that both Dorothy Kilgallen and Arlene Francis will be in Monaco to cover the wedding (Dorothy for the New York Journal American, Arlene for her Home show on NBC), and a worldwide audience estimated at 30 million tunes in for the formal ceremony on April 19.

It's an interesting mix of attendees; with Rainier as a head of state, a vast assemblage of diplomats and other heads of state are present, while Grace's status as Hollywood royalty attracts such luminaries as Cary Grant (who costarred with her in the Monaco-based To Catch a Thief), David Niven, Gloria Swanson, Ava Gardner and Aristotle Onassis, and her iconic wedding dress is designed by MGM's Helen Rose.* In essence, this is Charles and Di before Charles and Di.

*According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, this dress was the inspiration for that worn by Kate Middleton for her wedding to Prince William.

There are actually two marriage ceremonies; the first, a civil ceremony required by law, was held on April 18, while the Catholic Nuptial Mass, the televised event, was held the following day at St. Nicholas Cathedral. I'm not sure of the answer to TV Guide's question of how much viewers will see, but here's a brief look at what all the shouting was about. TV