This week in TV Guide: June 14, 1958

According to the television calendar, we're now into "Rerun Season," Between cable, streamers, and on-demand, I'm not sure most people today would actually understand what "Rerun Season" is, but back in 1958, June was officially proclaimed as the end of television's "regular" season, a time to take inventory of the past season and proclaim winners and losers. Therefore, much of our attention this week will be spent not on what is, but what was, and what will be, beginning with Frank DeBlois' year-end review of the 1957-58 season.

Among the winners are CBS' Gunsmoke, one of the biggest of winners in the Western genre; the "charming" Leave It to Beaver, hailed as television's best new comedy series; ABC's American Bandstand, "a national favorite among teen-agers", and a flock of drama series, including Hallmark Hall of Fame, Omnibus, Kraft Theatre and Playhouse 90. There's also praise also for news documentaries from Edward R. Murrow and Lowell Thomas, and docu-series like The Twentieth Century and Bell System Science Series. There's praise aplenty too for variety shows from Victor Borge ("Comedy and Music"), Mary Martin ("Annie Get Your Gun"), Stars of Jazz, Crosby and Sinatra on The Edsel Show, the Young Peoples Concerts of Leonard Bernstein, The General Motors 50th Anniversary Show and NBC Opera Theatre.

And then—well, there are those shows that didn't do so well, such as Sid Caesar Invites You on ABC, which "was often embarrassingly bad," series by Frank Sinatra and Eddie Fisher that were "respectively bad and fair," and "flops" by Gisele MacKenzie, Guy Mitchell and Polly Bergen. As far as the quiz show circuit is concerned, there's The $64,000 Question, which "supposedly enables a viewer to win thousands," and that's before they found out it was rigged. On the other hand, Frank found NBC's You Bet Your Life to be "a refreshing contrast," in which "Groucho [Marx] continues to prove that money isn't always everything on television."   

While there is much to like about the season just ended, DeBlois notes that there are still too many Westerns—17 on the networks, and another 15 in syndication—and dramas seem to be declining. But then, who determines the difference between a good show and a bad one? It is the critic, which one TV executive described as "any former obituary writer who happens to own a television set."

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We're not just looking backwards in this issue, though; there's also a preview of coming attractions for this summer. Although the networks aren't looking for prestige dramas or breakout hits as they do today, they are looking to add some new blood, and perhaps find a series or two that has some staying power. They promise "at least 18 spanking new shows," including eight—count 'em, eight—quiz shows.

There is, for example, E.S.P., ABC's panel show, hosted by Vincent Price, which may well be "the most interesting of the new shows" but runs only from July 11 to August 26. On the other hand, Buckskin, replacing Tennessee Ernie Ford's Thursday night show on NBC, is a "promising newcomer" that debuts July 3 and actually makes the fall schedule, with original episodes lasting until May 1959, and appearing in summer reruns in both 1959 and 1965. The closest any network comes to "experimental programming" is probably NBC's plan to run 13 pilots (or "test films," as they're described) in hopes that "some will attract enough interest to win network time slots next fall."

Some familiar faces make appearances in unfamiliar settings: Andy Williams, for example, who's pinch-hitting for Pat Boone this summer (Thursdays at 9:00 p.m. on ABC); it's still awhile before he becomes a staple of NBC's regular schedule. George Fenneman, the longtime sidekick to Groucho Marx, gets to host his own show, ABC's Anybody Can Play, on Sunday nights at 9:30 p.m. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, mainstays for years on television, get a chance at their own show, filling in for Steve Allen Sundays at 8:00 p.m. (going up against Ed Sullivan); and a rotating list of stars including Edie Adams, Stan Freberg, and Rowan and Martin take over for Dinah Shore.

There's the switcharoo: Destiny takes the place of Zane Grey Theater, while reruns of Zane Grey fill in for December Bride. I Love Lucy moves back to its original Monday night timeslot with a series of reruns, taking the place of Danny Thomas' show; Lucy, in turn, is replaced in its current timeslot by reruns of Gerald McBoing-Boing. There's the recycled show. On Trial, last seen in 1957, returns in reruns Saturdays at 10:30 p.m. as The Joseph Cotten Show (taking over for Your Hit Parade), while No Warning!, which has actually been on for a few months, is nothing more than warmed-over Panic! episodes from last season. And an as-yet unnamed anthology show, made up of reruns from Schlitz Playhouse and G.E. Theater, spells Red Skelton. Got all that?

The only interesting note I see is for Perry Mason; the series is "featuring new material in order to get a head start in next fall's race against Perry Como."  (Como is being replaced for the summer by bandleader Bob Crosby, brother of Bing, in a show that's live "purely in its technical sense.") That's a creative, nay innovative, approach to summer programming - nearly as creative as you might see today.

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This isn't to say  there aren't new shows on this week, and one of the most noteworthy is Playhouse 90's presentation of "A Town Has Turned to Dust" (Thursday, 9:30 p.m., CBS), written by Rod Serling, directed by John Frankenheimer, and featuring a cast including Rod Steiger, Fay Spain, James Gregory, and the great William Shatner. (If the town does turn to dust, it's probably the only thing that keeps Shatner from chewing the scenery. Besides, he'll have to fight of Steiger in that department.) Seriously, though, the play deals with some heavy issues, and the story behind the story is, if anything, even more interesting. It also helped propel Serling straight into The Twilight Zone.

For some time Serling had wanted to do a script based on the real-life story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black teenager who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for flirting with a white woman. His first stab at dramatizing the story was "Noon on Doomsday," written in 1956 for the U.S. Steel Hour, in which the murder victim was intended to be a Jewish storekeeper. As this article shows, though, the program soon became bogged down in politics, especially after word leaked out that the story might be based on the Till case. The location, which was never specified, was now to be New England, to avoid any possible suggestion that it could be in the South. The Jewish victim was now an "unnamed foreigner," and the killer was not a psychopath but merely "a good, decent, American boy momentarily gone wrong." (Happens all the time, doesn't it?) At no point in the script could the word "lynch" be used. It was a total beatdown for Serling, and although the show was pretty good, he complained that "its thesis had been diluted, and my characters had mounted a soap box to shout something that had become too vague to warrant any shouting."

"A Town Has Turned to Dust" is Serling's second crack at the Till story, but if he thinks it will be any easier this time (and, considering his past experiences with networks, he likely doesn't), he'll be sadly mistaken. When CBS gets done with his script, the story has been shifted to the American Southwest, the time period changed from the present day to the 1870s, and he victim is now a poor Mexican boy guilty of admiring a white girl from afar. Once again, the episode gets pretty good reviews; New York Times critic Jack Gould calls it "a raw, tough and at the same time deeply moving outcry against prejudice," and is particularly effusive in his praise for "superlative" performances by Rod Steiger and William Shatner, and the "superb" direction of John Frankenheimer, which he says "truly strengthened Mr. Serling's intent." Interestingly, the final paragraph of Gould's review references how both Serling and the show "had to fight executive interference, reportedly requiring some changes in the story line, before getting their play on the air last night. The theatre people of Hollywood have reason to be proud of their stand in the viewer's behalf."

While Gould's conclusion makes it sound as if Serling had the last word, the author himself felt quite differently. “By the time the censors had gotten to it, my script had turned to dust,” he later said. “They chopped it up like a room full of butchers at work on a steer.”  Was Serling justified in his outrage, or was he just a sensitive author who didn't want anyone to touch his work?  

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Among the week's other highlights, Ed Sullivan takes us on a tour of the Brussels World's Fair (Sunday, 8:00 p.m., CBS), with the celebrities appearing at the Fair, such as Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Mitzi Gaynor, William Holden, the Platters, French comedian Jacques Tati, and others.  and Maurice Chevalier. Remember when World's Fairs were a thing? They're still held on an occasional basis, but one of the drawbacks to the "global community" is that we've gotten used to seeing other cultures, whether on television or in our own communities, and the world, in a way, has become too small for these big expos.

Some of those new shows we were talking about earlier make their debuts this week, including The Joseph Cotten Show (Saturday, 10:30 p.m., NBC)  and ABC's Traffic Court on Wednesday. On Thursday, NBC premieres Confessions, which is not about Roman Catholic priests but does focus on convicted criminals, with a panel of sociologists, penologists, clergymen, psychiatrists and lawyers providing commentary. Frigidare Summer Theater, one of those clearinghouses for reruns of dramas from old anthology series, makes its debut on Friday on ABC.

TV Teletype tells us about two new series being prepared for a fall debut: Gunn for Hire, starring Craig Stevens, is set for Mondays on NBC. You know it by the name they finally settled on: Peter Gunn. Also on tap for NBC is a new Western series, Virginia City, going into production next month. When it debuts, it too will be under a different name: Bonanza.

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This week's cover features Robert Young, the beloved star of Father Knows Best, and Dan Jenkins' feature looks at the relationship between the show's adult actors and the children who play such a prominent role, as well as the impact the show has had on the American landscape, "impressing itself upon the collective conscience of the American Organization," in the words of writer Dan Jenkins.

In the 1957-58 season alone, Jenkins notes, the show has received requests from 22 organizations for personal appearances: a New York life insurance company (Jim Anderson, Young's character, is an insurance salesman), the U.S. Army Recruiting Services (Young and co-star Jane Wyatt appeared on the Army float in the 1958 Rose Parade), the National Safety Council (Young views his work for them as a year-around job), and the Mount Sinai Hospital and Clinic (recognizing Young as Father of the Year, "a title twice bestowed upon him by the National Father's Day Committee), among others.  The show, winner of three past Emmys, is seen in 21 countries and is a smash in Australia.

Yes, Father Knows Best is one of the most popular shows on television, a gentle, literate family comedy about "a pleasantly intelligent and happy American family with all the built-in values," and Robert Young is one of the most popular stars on television. For a generation he becomes the very model of a husband and father, and while Father Knows Best lives on in syndication, another generation will come to consider him the very model of what a doctor's bedside manner should be like, in Marcus Welby, M.D. None of this earns him credit with his real family, though: one of his daughters recently chastised him for saying he didn't know the answer to a question she asked. "Jim Anderson always knows," she said, to which Young replied, "Jim Anderson has two writers. Bob Young doesn't have any."

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This week's starlet is Whitney Blake who in a little over two years has gone from selling ice cream at an Oregon stand to becoming "one of TV's most active free-lance actresses". "I always wanted to be an actress," she says, but it wasn't until her family finally settled in Oregon that she was able to pursue her passion. "My mother wanted me to do something sensible, like get married. But I knew what I really wanted."

After studying at Pasadena City College, Blake heads for Hollywood, where she's seen by a talent agent, after which the roles just kept coming. She honed her skills playing in summer stock, and now she's ready for the future. "I'm an actress now," she says. "Even Mother now accepts that."

Indeed she is. In addition to her many guest-starring roles, Whitney Blake the actress will be best known for her four seasons as Dorothy Baxter in the sitcom Hazel. But there's also Whitney Blake the television mogul; she and her husband Allan Manings will create the sitcom One Day at a Time. And then there's Whitney Blake the businesswoman; in the '90s, she and her son will own the Minneapolis bookstore Baxter's Books, which over the years helped me fill a shelf or so in my library. (Had I known, I might have demanded to see the owner.) Most famous, perhaps, is Whitney Blake the mother; her daughter, Meredith Baxter, will inherit her mom's looks and have a pretty good career of her own.

So as TV Guide starlets go, Whitney Blake is definitely one of the winners.

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Finally, just to show that you can find magic out of even the most innocuous items, there's Wednesday's presentation on Kraft Theatre, a mystery entitled "Now Will You Try for Murder?" (9:00 p.m., NBC). The plot: "One of the biggest money winners in TV-quiz history is murdered on the day that he is scheduled to try for a record sum. An investigation reveals that a number of people connected with the show had motives for killing the contestant, including the top executive, the director, the producer and the producer's pretty assistant."

For every good reason, that reminds me of Dotto. The show airs weekdays at 11:30 a.m. on CBS, and since its January premiere, it's become so popular that a nighttime version is planned to debut next month on NBC. In this week's review, Dan Jenkins says that frankly, he doesn't see much to write about; it's "still another in the apparently never-ending succession of new quiz shows, [which] comes out of the same old mold." "The game's the thing," he says, "the money prizes rarely going higher than about $3000." 

And yet, only two months after this issue, Dotto disappears from the airwaves. It's not that it suffered a sudden drop in popularity; on the contrary, one could say that its cancellation came about because it got too much of the wrong kind of attention. It began the previous month, when one of the contestants, Ed Hilgemeier, discovered a notebook belonging to another contestant, Marie Winn. Turns out that notebook contained the answers to questions she would be asked on the show. Hilgemeier took his suspicions to the contestant defeated by Winn, Yaffe Kimball, and then to the show's producers. The producers paid all three of them off to keep quiet, but as often happens with these cover-ups, Hilgemeier wound up going to the authorities anyway. And—well, as Paul Harvey would say, I'm sure you all know the rest of the story.

I wonder: if this play had been scheduled to run later in the year, would the network still have aired it? Or would it have been cutting a little too close to the bone, so to speak?

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MST3K alert: Cat-Women of the Moon (1954) A rocket ship from the Earth lands on the moon. Sonny Tufts, Marie Windsor, Victor Jory. (Saturday, 1:00 p.m., WCSH in Portland) That description doesn't tell us much about this Rifftrax feature, so let's look at the Amazon description: "An expedition to the moon discovers a subterranean cavern of ferocious, love-starved cat-women who have not seen men in centuries." Yes, that's much better. TV  

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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  

This week in TV Guide: March 3, 1956

On the cover this week is a man who, once upon a time, was one of the most familiar faces on television: Hal March, host of the nation's top-rated program, The $64,000 Question, every Tuesday night at 9:00 pm CT on CBS. (Lynn Dollar, pictured next to March, is the show's "assistant.")

Hal March has that important quality that often makes the difference between a successful quiz show and one that comes and goes in a matter of weeks: likability. Contestants feel comfortable around him, and audiences like him because he's, well, human. One night he forgets to ask a contestant the $32,000 question, another time he accidentally gives the answer as well as the question, and then there was the time he almost forget the sponsor plug before signing off. . .

But, like Donald Trump in a completely different context, March doesn't seem to be hurt by these flubs. In fact, he's increasingly moving beyond quiz shows to other areas of entertainment. He's already appeared as himself on Perry Como's show, played a forger on Omnibus, acted opposite Maurice Evans and Vivian Blair on stage, and even made the big screen in the Warner Brothers movie It's Always Fair Weather. (We just saw him in an old Burke's Law episode last month, in which he played the killer.) The talk now is that March might be headed for Broadway, and more movies may be in store as well.

The scandals put all of that to an end, of course; although there's no evidence that March was involved in fixing games (if anything, the pressure to rig the show came not from the producers, as was the case with other quiz shows, but from Revlon, the sponsor), there's that taint of guilt by association, and with it March's opportunities begin to try up. There are the odd guest star bits here and there; he's good, not great, but very natural in his technique. By 1969, though, things seem to have turned a corner, and March signs up to host a game show called It's Your Bet. But only a few weeks into taping, tests show that March has lung cancer, and he dies in 1970, only 49 years old.

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If you've partaken in TV Guide's "As We See It" editorials over the years, then you know that one of their enthusiasms has always been for "quality" television; therefore, it's safe to say they're very enthusiastic about NBC's programming the next couple of weeks.

It begins this week with the network's telecast of George Bernard Shaw's witty "Caesar and Cleopatra," starring Claire Bloom and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Tuesday night on Producers' Showcase (7:00 p.m.), and continues next week with Laurence Olivier's big-screen version of Richard III* and Hallmark Hall of Fame's "The Taming of the Shrew." The programs face steep competition, especially "Caesar and Cleopatra," which has to deal with Burns & Allen, Arthur Godfrey and I Love Lucy on CBS. And while the editor, probably Merrill Panitt, points out that TV Guide "is far from a highbrow publication," he adds that they are "grateful for any sort of programming that tends to enlarge television's scope." How, for example, could one say that they don't like Shakespeare or The $64,000 Question unless they've seen them?

*For what it's worth, Richard III was the first three-hour telecast of a film ever in the United States; it was also the first time that a movie had ever aired on television (on a Sunday afternoon, so as not to affect the ratings) and opened in American theaters on the same day.

NBC should be thanked, Panitt concludes, "for gambling money and prestige on the theory that viewers want such fine fare." I suppose at some point they did, although even in the Golden Age documentaries suffered, and Voice of Firestone dragged down the ratings of every show on the network that night. Quality television has been said to have made a comeback on cable in the last few years, and indeed there is no doubt a high quality of drama available for viewing. But as for the classics, I don't think we'll be seeing them anytime soon. Not even on PBS.

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What else is on this week? Saturday night means one thing in many households: The Lawrence Welk Show (8:00 p.m., ABC), known at the time as The Dodge Dancing Party. Welk is the subject of an unbylined profile this week, and if you need any evidence of his popularity, consider this anecdote: Last year he and his orchestra played five nights a week at the Aragon Ballroom in Ocean Park, California grossed the maestro $100,000, which in today's dollars comes out to nearly $1.2 million. (Or "Ah-One point-Ah-Two" million, if you prefer.) Besides that, there's his income from his television show, and then the royalties from all those records he sells. So in other words, he's doing all right.

Now this is an interesting bit of counterprogramming. On Sunday's Famous Film Festival (6:30 p.m., ABC), it's the first of a two-part showing of the aforementioned G.B. Shaw's aforementioned Caesar and Cleopatra, made in 1945 and starring Vivien Leigh and Claude Raines. Now, let's think about this for a minute: if you've got a color TV, you can see NBC's Monday night production in color (the big-screen edition, although filmed in Technicolor, will be shown in black-and-white), and you won't have to wait until next week to find out how it ends. Even though the movie version airs one night earlier than its TV counterpart , I know which one I'd be watching. 

Monday is a fine day for music lovers, beginning with the premiere of The Gordon MacRae Show" (6:30 p.m., NBC). The star of Carousel and Oklahoma will host the 15-minute program (in color!) each Monday, as part of the half-hour block that includes John Cameron Swayze's Camel News Caravan. Meantime, young Roberta Peters is the guest soloist on Voice of Firestone (7:30 p.m., ABC). Peters, one of the greatest sopranos ever (as well as one of the most popular), is a frequent presence on television over the years, appearing on Ed Sullivan's show a record 65 times. 

On Tuesday, The Phil Silvers Show (7:00 p.m., CBS) presents one of the greatest episodes in sitcom history, "The Court Martial," in which Bilko winds up defending a chimp that's accidentally been inducted into the Army. Silvers himself called it "the funniest half-hour on television, unconditionally." Probably the funniest segment of this hilarious episode occurs during the court martial (which would have been funny anyway), when the chimp, given the name "Harry Speakup" by the induction center, begins acting up and Silvers, completely in character, ad-libs to the chimp's antics. You can see the other actors in the scene trying valiantly to keep from laughing, but Silvers never breaks stride. How wise they were to let the camera keep rolling. Unfortunately, the clip of this that used to be online has been taken down, but I'd be surprised if most of you haven't seen it.

Once Walt Disney made the decision to produce programming for television, it was just a matter of time before other studios followed suit, and we can see one early example of this on Wednesday with M-G-M Parade (7:30 p.m., ABC). The half-hour show, hosted for the final time this week by actor and future U.S. Senator George Murphy (next week, Walter Pidgeon takes over as host), is one of MGM's first ventures into television. They don't really get it, though, at least not with this series, which combines clips from vintage MGM movies of the past, and plugs for upcoming MGM releases. (This week, for example, Judy Garland sings in an excerpt from The Harvey Girls, and we see previews from the new movie Meet Me in Las Vegas, with Cyd Charisse and Dan Dailey.) Eventually, the studio succumbs to the show's bad reviews and adds more extensive, condensed versions of its classic movies. The series runs for another two months before fading from our screens.

For four seasons, the CBS anthology series Climax! presented various tales, mostly of the mystery type; it was later known as Climax Mystery Theater. However, this Thursday the show presents a real change of pace with "The Louella Parsons Story," based on her autobiography The Gay Illiterate. (7:30 p.m., CBS) Parsons, America's most influential (i.e. loved and/or feared) gossip columnist from the early '30s into the '60s, achieved a level of stardom as great as that of some of her subjects, and she maintained a feud with her hated rival Hedda Hopper for decades. What makes this show so unusual is not just the subject matter, but that following the story, there's a tribute from stars of the industry, emceed by Jack Benny and featuring Gene Autry, Charles Boyer, Rock Hudson, Susan Hayward and John Wayne, among others. An odd hybrid of genres, no?

It just didn't work out for Barry on Brooks. 

Friday on Our Miss Brooks (7:30 p.m., CBS), Connie (Eve Arden) tries to collect a $1,000 prize, despite the fact that the penalty for gambling is dismissal from the school. Our Miss Brooks is the subject of this week's review by Robert Stahl, who focuses on the changes to the show's format for this, the fourth and final season. Gone is the familiar public school, replaced by a tony private one; gone too is Mr. Boynton, Eve's long-time romantic interest, replaced by a physical education teacher (played by Gene Barry). And gone as well, says Stahl, is any subtlety the show might have had; "It would seem that Miss Arden and her writers don't have too much respect for their viewers' taste and intelligence," opting instead for unbelivable situations and slapstick humor. The changes have done nothng to improve the series, according to Stahl; while the producers, in an effort to rectify their mistake, have since brought back the Boynton character ("Barry has apparently read the writing on the blackboard because he has already fled the show"), it's a case of too little, too late. "Some of the situations might be funny if only the writers would lay off the slapstick." Instead, it's the show itself that gets laid off at the end of the season.

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According to the Teletype, Mister Peepers, which ends its three-season run in June, will be reborn as a weekday show, airing Monday through Friday afternoons. Wally Cox, of course, will return in the title role, but it's not certain how many other original cast members will join him. This never happens, for whatever reason, but I'm not surprised; the show had dropped in the ratings after Peepers had married his sweetheart (as shows often do), and it's difficult to imagine that it could have continued for long at a five-a-week pace. In reruns, maybe, but original episodes? On the other hand, it could have become television's first comedy soap. Think of the possibilities!

There's also an item about how sometimes the squeaky wheel does get the grease; ABC has fielded viewer complaints about the number of commercials in its Afternoon Film Festival, which interrupted the movie every five or six minutes. The new plan: limit the breaks to every ten or eleven minutes. There are also plans to have host Allyn Edwards give news headlines during some of the breaks. According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, Afternoon Film Festival also suffered from a lack of variety; ABC's deal with the J. Arthur Rank Company for 35 films meant that some titles were repeated every two or three weeks. 

And The Johnny Carson Show, which airs Thursday nights on CBS, will be wrapping things up at the end of the month. The sponsors have cancelled, and the show went through seven directors ("through no fault of Carson's") during its 39-week run. It returns as a daytime show through the summer, and later Carson will begin a five-year run as host of Who Do You Trust? before going on to even bigger and better things.

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Finally, we're always up for a good discussion on censorship, and this week we look at what gives a network censor headaches. A similar article appeared in a 1980 issue, and though there's a vast difference between the shows of the mid '50s and early '80s, the censor's job is pretty much the same. The censor in question is Stockton Helffrich, Director of Continuity Acceptance for NBC, and he strongly believes that one of the jobs of a censor is not to censor. "We are not kill-joys, spoilsports, crape-hangers or wet blankets," and part of the philosophy is that "children should be able to reach adulthood as really mature people without prejudices." What that means is that much of their work deals with censoring "racial stereotypes, religious oversimplifications, unkindness toward the physically handicapped, ignorance regarding the emotionally disturbed."

However, censors also represent the interests of sponsors, which means if your favorite show is brought to you by Your Gas Company, you probably aren't going to see someone commit suicide by sticking their head in an oven. If the show is sponsored by a billiard company, the script can't suggest that pool halls are the exclusive domain of underworld characters and shady punks. While the sponsors' interests clearly need to be taken into account, Helffrich warns against "authors and producers [indulging] in fearful knuckling under." In other words, don't self-censor yourself - let the professionals decide what ought to be included.

Oh, there's the occasional "low neckline," but Helffrich says those are "an exception on current TV," and there's no discussion of profanity; I suppose that isn't even an issue in 1956. For Helffrich and his three dozen colleagues (and assistants working with them), it's a never-ending job, encouraged by the occasional constructive letter from a viewer that "has made us take pause and try to do better." TV  

This week in TV Guide: November 6, 1953

For one of the first times in its short history, TV Guide has the chance to cover a real, live breaking news story, one of the biggest TV has yet seen: Arthur Godfrey's dismissal of Julius La Rosa on live television.

For the uninitiated, Julius La Rosa was a singer and a popular regular on Arthur Godfrey's show. On October 19, following a song by La Rosa, Godfrey announced—on the air—that "This was Julie’s swan song with us. Julius has asked for his release, and I will never stand in the way of anybody trying to improve himself. We wish him Godspeed." La Rosa, in fact, had no contract with Godfrey, and was given no warning that he was about to be sacked, let alone that it was going to happen on a live broadcast. Two days later, at a press conference, Godfrey confirmed that he had fired La Rosa. He said that La Rosa had "lost his humility," had refused to go to ballet class (required for all the regulars, so that they might appear more graceful on-air), and that morale among the cast was a problem. 

How big a story is this? Well, the New York Teletype, ordinarily one page, is two pages this week, both devoted one hundred percent to the Godfrey-La Rosa story.* More than this, however, the report is the kickoff to a flood of stories, almost all negative, that TV Guide runs on Godfrey over the next few months. 

*Lost in the hubbub was that Godfrey had also fired his longtime orchestra leader, Archie Bleyer, for having done some recording work with Don McNeill, star of ABC's Breakfast Club, on the air directly opposite Godfrey's morning show. The fact that Bleyer also owned the label for which La Rosa recorded was said to be a coincidence, not connected to Godfrey's move. Bleyer goes on to work with the Everly Brothers, Andy Williams, and others.

This isn't to say that TV Guide is singling out Godfrey for particular scorn; indeed, Godfrey had frequently featured in the magazine throughout the months since the national version had started. And the press which Godfrey received in the wake of the La Rosa firing was almost universally negative, if not outright hostile. Godfrey had never been particularly easy to work with, and there were plenty of negative stories out there about him, but given his popularity with the public, most of those stories were either spiked or ignored by a press that sought to cultivate favor with the Old Redhead. Now, however, the gloves are coming off, and, given all that hostile press, it could be said that TV Guide is merely reporting what's going on; if their coverage appears to be against Godfrey, it could simply be a reflection of the coverage at large.

This week's Letters section bears out how the public has been galvanized by the controversy. "A Disgusted Reader" in Streator, Illinois stands up for Godfrey; "It burns me up the way some people are always telling things they don't like about Arthur Godfrey. Why don’t they keep it to themselves or turn the dial? I wonder if they are not jealous. For as long as we can remember, Godfrey he has been a very big favorite of ours." On the other hand, "Teen-Agers" from Leland, Illinois provide the kind of negativity that Disgusted Reader is apparently talking about: "What is the matter with that dumb Arthur Godfrey? We teen-agers have always watched his shows but not any more if Julius La Rosa isn’t around. Why didn’t he fire Frank Parker—one of the worst singers there is? When Arthur was in the hospital, Robert Q. Lewis did a better job as a substitute." Robert Q. Lewis! Ouch!

La Rosa and Godfrey in happier times

The story continues to percolate over the years; Godfrey would later claim that one of the reasons he sacked La Rosa was that the young singer was engaged in an affair with one of the McGuire Sisters who happened to be married at the time; Godfrey not only disapproved of it personally, he also felt it would reflect poorly on his family show. Others felt Godfrey was jealous of the attention La Rosa got; it was said that his fan mail had begun to exceed Godfrey's. La Rosa rarely rose to the bait when the subject came up; he acknowledged that Godfrey "wasn't a very nice man" to him, but always gave him credit for having made his career. La Rosa would go on to make thirteen appearances on Ed Sullivan's show, sparking a feud between Godfrey and Sullivan.

As for Godfrey himself, he never recovers from the incident. The phrase "no humility" becomes a punchline for stand-up comedians, and Godfrey's relationship with the press deteriorates completely, with articles appearing linking Godfrey to affairs of his own with several female cast members. He fires more than twenty cast and crew members over the next couple of years, and in a bizarre incident his pilot's license is suspended for six months after he buzzes the control tower of Teterboro Airport in his DC-3. Most painful of all for Godfrey is the backlash from his formerly loyal fans. Having at one time hosted his morning show on both CBS TV and radio five days a week, with two additional prime-time programs on TV and another two on radio, by the late 1950s, he is reduced to his daily radio program, plus appearing on occasional TV specials. He is teamed up with Alan Funt as host of Candid Camera, but the coupling fares poorly and Godfrey is replaced after a single season. 

He remains a giant in the history of radio and television, a fascinating and contradictory man with many interesting viewpoints. He also remains an abject lesson in how quickly the mighty can fall—and how far. 

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On the cover this week is Warren Hull, emcee of the quiz show Strike It Rich, one of the most popular—and most controversial—shows on the air. As it happens, I wrote a piece about this show many years ago, in the early years of this blog, as an example of how television exploits people in order to provide entertainment for the masses: 

On this show, the halt, the blind and the needy catalogue their woes before 25,000,000 viewers and then, by answering routine quiz questions, tap the sponsor for money. And, if they’re lucky, some viewer's heart may be touched to the extent that he calls the show on the "Heart Line" and contributes more cash or gifts.

Henry McCarthy, New York's Commissioner of Welfare, has been a harsh critic of shows such as Strike It Rich. In particular, he's concerned about the children of families who benefit from appearing on the show; he fears they'll be harmed by "exposing their families to public gaze as objects of beggarly solicitation. It’s a miserable thing to do to children and may scar them for life." Other critics of the program—and there are many—say that the contestants could easily be given what they need without having to "debase" themselves in public, and that those involved with the show don't deserve the praise they receive, given that "they make a good living out of it." 

Of course, not everyone agrees with this assessment, especially the emcee. 

"We don’t force people to appear on our show or to say anything they don’t want to say," Hull says in answer to criticism that the "poor unfortunates" appearing on the show are forced to bare their souls to the public. "Let the people who have been criticizing us read some of the mail from people whose lives have been saved by us." Adds Walt Framer, producer and originator of the program, "We've been on the air over five years and in that time we’ve given a new start in life to over 1000 people." He also thinks that seeing stories of people in truly dire circumstances gives viewers a different perspective on their own problems—"First World problems," we'd call them today.

Since Strike It Rich started, it's given away more than a million dollars in cash, which Framer says is a "drop in the bucket" compared to contributions received by viewers. As for the accusation that he's profiting from the misery of others, "I could make just as good a living producing dramatic or musical shows. Of course, I make a good living from this show, but I don’t make nearly as much as I could." But Commissioner McCarthy points out that the show presents “no opportunity to make painstaking plans that will really rehabilitate."

There are many different angles to a story like this: the old "give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish" canard; the question of whether refusing charity is an indication of excessive pride; and the oldest one of all, whether or not the end justifies the means. The article ends with the note that, "The final arbiter will, of course, be the viewer." In that case, Strike It Rich is the winner; it began on radio in 1947, and its run on television lasted until 1958. But then, we still enjoy watching people bare it all for our entertainment today, so why should we be surprised?

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Academy Award winner Loretta Young is one of several Hollywood stars making the jump to TV this season, and she's done so with an NBC anthology series which she both introduces and stars in: Letter to Loretta. The title alludes to the show's unique format, in which the stories are based "on the fan mail which Miss Young receives from people seeking her advice on their personal matters." I'm cynic enough to take that explanation with a grain of salt, and in fact midway through the first season the title is changed to The Loretta Young Show, which makes a lot more sense. 

The show's trademark throughout its run, although it goes unmentioned in this week's review, is Young's entrance onto the set (said to be a recreation of her own living room), showing off her gown with a twirl as she comes through the front door of the room. It was, as the always-reliable Wikipedia points out, a gesture which was much parodied at the time, including by Ernie Kovacs; Young herself said that it allowed her a moment in each episode where she could be glamorous, after which she could play any character in the subsequent episode without fans wondering about her appearance. 

But enough about all that. Our question is this: is the show any good? Well, the critic seems somewhat surprised to report, it is. Based on the "weepy-eyed characters" Young has played throughout her movie career, one might have expected this to be a "glorified soap opera," but instead, the weekly stories are "full of charm and good humor." Young herself is more poised and confident than virtually any movie star who's ever made a similar transition to TV, utterly believable whether playing a department store clerk, a young mother, or a sophisticated wife. Her supporting casts are equally good, and the productions are of a uniformly high quality. It may not be the greatest drama ever seen on television, the review concludes, but it should provide the viewer with "many a pleasant half hour," as indeed it will for eight seasons and 165 episodes.

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Topper is another program getting the review treatment this week. Based on the 1937 movie starring Cary Grant and Constance Bennett as married ghosts and Roland Young as the man who purchased their old home, and whose life they haunt, this version made its debut this season, and already it's considered "one of the better new telefilm comedy programs of the season." 

Robert Sterling and Anne Jeffreys, real-life marrieds, are George and Marion Kerby, the fun-loving specters who died while skiing (along with their St. Bernard, Neil) while Leo G. Carroll plays Cosmo Topper, the "harried and henpecked bumbler" and subject of a reclamation project by the Kerbys, who decide they simply have to inject some fun into Topper's life. As is par for the course with these kind of characters (e.g. Mr. Ed, Mr. Snuffleupagus), only Cosmo can see the Kerbys and Neil, which is inconvenient for him but most convenient for us viewers. 

Topper is a fine adaptation not just of the movie, but of the bestselling novels by Thorne Smith that spurred the big screen comedy in the first place. The humor is sophisticated, sharp and witty—a family comedy, such as Father Knows Best, it is not—and contains fine doses of the satire which permeates Smith's novels. Sterling and Jeffreys are "probably the most charming pair of apparitions to have assumed bodily form on TV in years," and Carroll is the perfect foil for their shenanigans. The special effects, particularly the materialization and dematerialization of the Kerbys and scenes of objects floating through the air, are excellent. The only concern is whether or not the writers can keep things from wearing thin, and they're able to succeed for two seasons and 78 episodes.

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Friday night's Topper episode (7:30 p.m., CBS) involves Marion developing a crush on Cosmo Topper's new personal trainer; it's the fifth episode of the series, and it seems as good a place as any to start our look at the week's highlights. Meanwhile, on Person to Person (9:30 p.m., CBS), Ed Murrow's guest is composer Richard Rodgers.

An increasingly popular feature in today's saturated world of sports is the "whiparound," in which the studio host (or hosts) switches viewers back and forth between a number of different games depending on where the most excitement is at the moment. It may seem like something made for today's short-attention span fans, but it really isn't all that new; NBC is doing that very thing in 1953 with college football; they call it "Panorama Coverage," for weeks when the network is airing multiple regional games rather than one national broadcast. This Saturday is the second Panorama week of the season, with the network covering Florida vs. Georgia, South Carolina vs. North Carolina, Northwestern vs. Wisconsin, and Kansas vs. Kansas State. (1:45 p.m.) It's duly noted that the time blocked out for college games back in 1953 is two hours and 40 minutes; today's games run at least an hour longer than that. I suppose as long as it makes for more commercials, it's progress.

The Ed Sullivan Show and the Colgate Comedy Hour go head-to-head this Sunday, with Ed's program coming from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. (7:00 p.m., CBS) Ed takes viewers backstage, as some of opera's greats are shown rehearsing for upcoming performances; Rise Stevens, Richard Tucker, Cesare Siepi, Hilda Gueden, Robert Merrill and Roberta Peters are among those appearing. Over on NBC, Jimmy Durante is the host of Comedy Hour, with Jimmy's old partner Eddie Jackson, Roy Bargy and his orchestra, and special guest Frank Sinatra. Even with Frank, I think I'd have to go with Sullivan on this one. And on our other reviewed show this week, Letter to Loretta, Loretta Young plays a young widow and mother being wooed by a New York magazine editor who doesn't understand her devotion to her six-year-old son. (9:00 p.m., NBC)

I think most of us know that professional wrestling was one of the TV hits of the 1950s, with many of wrestling's stars becoming larger-than-life household names. Perhaps it's because they're such cartoonish characters that the description for Monday's All-Star Wrestling (7:30 p.m., WGN) asks the question, "Are wrestlers human beings?" That might sound a little humanistic, but TV Guide promises to get to the bottom of it: "The first of our series on wrestlers, in next week's TV Guide, gives the lowdown on phony wrestlers." Phony wrestlers?? Next, they'll be telling us that Santa and the Easter Bunny aren't real. Horrors.

Tuesday we get a chance to see one of the more amusing head-to-head contests in early television: Milton Berle's Buick-Berle Show (7:00 p.m., NBC) vs. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen's Life is Worth Living (7:00 p.m. DuMont). It was a friendly competition, with the two having the highest respect for each other; Sheen used to joke about being called "Uncle Fultie," and Berle kidded that the Bishop outdid him in the ratings because he had better writers. Elsewhere, Robert Preston stars in a rare straight-dramatic performance in the U.S. Steel Hour episode "Hope For a Harvest," co-starring Faye Emerson. (8:30 p.m., ABC) It's the story of a depression-era farmer saved from despair by the love of a good woman. 

Wednesday's late-night movie on the NBC affiliate WNBQ (remember, this is in the pre-Tonight era) is Hitler—Dead or Alive, starring Ward Bond as one of three former Alcatraz prisoners hired to capture Adolf Hitler in return for a one-million-dollar reward. (11:00 p.m.) I was going to scoff at this, sight unseen, but then I got to thinking: TV shows from The Dirty Dozen to Garrison's Gorillas to Jericho have used this type of premise for years. And after all, is it really that much more implausible than the U.S. government recruiting Mafiosos to assassinate Fidel Castro—if anyone knows how to carry out a hit, it should be a team of gangsters. And Quentin Tarantino did admit that the inspiration for Inglorious Basterds came from this movie. 

One of the points made in the discussion about Loretta Young's move to television centered around the number of movie stars premiering on TV this season, and I was struck by the number of them just on Thursday. There is, of course, Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life (7:00 p.m., NBC), but Groucho's been doing that gig since 1947. Better examples are Ray Milland, starring in the sitcom Meet Mr. McNutley (7:00 p.m., CBS), Charles Boyer, one of the Four Stars of the dramatic anthology Four Star Playhouse (7:30 p.m., CBS), and Ray Bolger, in the sitcom Where's Raymond? None of them were huge hits, but all three of them ran for at least two seasons, and Four Star made it to, appropriately enough, four, plus years in syndication under various titles. 

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MST3K alert: The Mad Monster (1942) Mad scientist develops a method of transplanting the blood of a wolf into a man. Johnny Downs, George Zucco, Glenn Strange. (Thursday, 11:00 p.m., WCAN in Milwaukee) OK, this is a really bad movie; it makes it to MST3K on merit. We do have the consolation of another episode of Radar Men from the Moon, however. And don't feel too sorry for Glenn Strange as Petro, the monster: he'll go on to play Sam, the bartender of the Long Branch Saloon, in 222 episodes from 1961 to 1973. That calls for a drink! TV