This week in TV Guide: June 6, 1970

In this week's cover story, Digby Diehl has a candid and frequently poignant profile of Robert Young, one of America's favorite fathers who knew best, and now kindly and wise Marcus Welby, M.D. 

"I don't see anything wrong with the myth of the American father," Young says of his own role as Jim Anderson. "That is, as long as you realize that the American mother is really making most of the decisions." Young had fought long and hard to keep his character from being a typical television dad buffoon, but now he thinks things have evolved beyond that. "All those pat answers I used to give, going back to the old 'FKB' on radio, ar just too ridiculous now. The family unit is too related to the outside world and life is too complicated to get away with those old solutions. I doubt very much that father knows best any longer." 

Despite the outward similarities between Anderson and Welby, Young sees a real relevance in his role as the doctor who knows best. He spoke to many doctors in preparation for the role, and has embraced the holistic idea of medicine. "Today you have a headache and you take two aspirins; but you never treat the source of the headache. That's where the really skillful general practitioner can use his intimate knowledge of his patients better than the specialist." He's bullish on the potentials inherent in psychiatry; "I'm very excited that I have such tremendous equipment in the brain to learn and experience so many new things. You could say I'm a nut on mind-expansion." When Diehl mentions that he's starting to sound like a hippy, Young doesn't disagree; "I find that there are similarites in their concern with fuller use of the mind. I think that their motivation is right and their method—I mean drugs—is wrong."

He also sees drug usage as a symptom of something he has intimate experience with. "I think I understand a lot about these kids today because I took a lot of a chemical—alcohol—into my system over the years. I was addicted, but now I don't need it any more, so I don't drink." He's candid, with "a total lack of self-pity" about his long battle with alcoholism. "I've been terribly frightened all of my life. I think I was born frightened. I just reached the point where I was in such a constant state of terror. I couldn't face people. I couldn't face the day without a few martinis." Everyone in the theater, he says, is that way. "They're all terrified, frightened, insecure people who have found this remarkable outlet of playing all these characters who are not themselves." He credits his wife with stabilizing his life: "She  married a frightened boy, not a mature man, and without her I might have ended up a destitute drunk on Fifth Street."

His new series, which, based on the ratings, seems set for a long and successful run, has given him a new energy. He'd been in a state of semiretirement for seven years, following the end of a one season series called Window on Main Street, and was living a relaxing, content life in a retirement community in Rancho Santa Fe. But "you can only shovel up the rose garden so many times," he laughs. "Then either you get bored or the roses die." He'd rejected several movie and television projects, but when executive producer David Victor pitched Welby to him, he was sold. "I liked the character; thought it was right for me. And, after all, I've spent 40 years preparing for this kind of work. To me it isn't even really work—aside from golf, I don't have any other hobbies."

Friends say that Young looks younger, rejuvenated, and he agrees; "I feel younger, stronger, better in every way than I've ever felt in my life." In what Diehl calls "an amazing and moving thing," Young says, "I've changed so recently that I feel like I can still go back to the terror in my mind and touch it. It's like visiting an old haunted house. It's as if I live now in the beautiful house on the hill, and I only wander back to the old one occasionally out of curiosity. . . there really is no point in thinking about that, because you've got to live in the here and now. If you concentrate on guilt about the past, all you end up with is fear about the future."

Like Diehl, I found the entire article tremendously moving. Perhaps it's because I can identify with so much of what he says about fear and how it can cripple you, or because of the praise he gives his wife, which mirrors how I feel about my own. It is a remarkably candid and insightful Robert Young that we encounter here. I've always liked him, and after this I find myself admiring him as well.

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Here's a sign of how times have changed: Thursday's Today Show (7:00 a.m. CT, NBC), as baseball writer Leonard Koppett discusses one of the most controversial aspects of the game: the reserve clause.

The reserve clause was a standard part of the player contract, and its very simplicity belied its contentiousness. It stated that once a player's contract with his team expired, the team continued to retain the rights to that player. Although he could not play for them unless he was under an active contract, the team could still trade him, send him to the minor leagues, sell him to another team, or release him. Only in the last case, if he was released, would he be free to sign with the team of his choice. In all other aspects his ability to earn a livelihood was entirely at the whim of the team holding his contract.

The clause was always controversial; for owners, it was the principal means by which salaries were held under control and teams held together. For players, it meant being locked into service with a club until and unless they decided otherwise. If the player did change clubs, he had little if any say in where he would wind up unless he'd been given his unconditional release. If that were to happen, he would become what was known as a "free agent," and it didn't happen very often. The reserve clause was often the target of reformers; when the Branch Rickey and the Continental League made noises about challenging the two existing major leagues, the abolition of the reserve clause was a fundamental part of their plan.

Koppett's appearance on Today is likely tied to the ongoing court case of Flood v. Kuhn. Following the 1969 season, Curt Flood, a star center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies, one of the worst teams in baseball. Flood refused to report to the Phillies, and sat out the entire 1970 season. In addition, he brought suit against Major League Baseball and its Commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, challenging the constitutionality of the clause. The case, supported by the newly empowered Major League Baseball Players Association and its dynamic leader Martin Miller, went to trial in May 1970, and it continued through June and the time of this issue. Flood lost at the trial level, and the case eventually made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where the reserve clause was upheld in 1972 by a 5-3 vote, with an incomprehensible opinion authored by Justice Harry Blackmun, based on baseball's exemption from federal antitrust laws.*

*Blackmun also authored the equally incomprehensible opinion in Roe v. Wade, for what it's worth.

It would not be until 1975 that the reserve clause was essentially abolished, when an arbitrator ruled that any player who played without a contract for one season became a free agent. The players and owners would later agree to the terms of free agency in a future collective bargaining agreement.

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This week's letters section is dominated by responses to an article in the May 16 issue written by Vice President Spiro Agnew*.  The article, entitled "Another Challenge to the Television Industry," continues Agnew's attack on the objectivity of television news, which he describes as "manufactured news: revolutionary theater brought into millions of living rooms by the networks." "How much disorder, how many of these illegal demonstrations which pockmark the country would ever take place if the ever-present television camera were not there?"  Agnew holds out hope that the networks will eventually understand their implicit obligations to the welfare of American society, that "most of the leaders of this great industry are willing to accept the responsibility of citizenship along with its benefits.

*It's the cover story, with the cover illustration painted by Norman Rockwell, no less.

Surveys throughout the period show a constant level of support for Agnew's media attacks, as in this letter from S. Richmond of Manitowoc, Wisconsin: "It's about time people realize that violence and depressing news is contagious and spreads (especially in young minds).  It's about time the networks stop trying for the largest audiences and start thinking about improving the outlook of our great country before it's too late!"  Rheba Wellborn of Decatur, Georgia agrees, saying "I hope television will do something soon to help reverse the situation of deterioration and corruption that has evolved within our Nation as a result of ill-directed program planning."  On the other hand, B.J. Butler of Los Angeles, while acknowledging that "TV has room for improvement just as Mr. Agnew has room for improvement," adds that TV shouldn't get all the blame.  "TV is not God, TV is not Congress, TV is not a substitute parent or teacher.  TV can only reflect human nature.  It has yet to make it."*

*An argument similar to some of mine, in which I've cautioned that television is neither good nor bad, but morally neutral.  However, I diverge from Butler, who writes that TV "has yet to make" human nature.  True, but it has an immense power to shape it.

William H. Race of Palo Alto, California (home of Stanford University) takes issue with Agnew's accusation that television encourages demonstrations: "How then does he account for the past two decades of demonstrations in Latin America and Europe, where TV played little or no role?  With that reasoning, one might as well blame television for the war it is covering in every news broadcast." Michael Woodhouse of Ewa Beach, Hawaii agrees, writing that Agnew ignores "the real cause for demonstrations: an immoral war or a polluted environment."  Sally Ann Yater of Easton, Maryland counters that her family is living proof of Agnew's argument. "I wholeheartedly agree with the Vice President", she says, and adds that "my family goes for days, sometimes weeks, without finding anything worth-while on TV."

The letters section is usually a representative sampling of the correspondence TV Guide receives, which indicates how divided the country is on the issue and, by extension, illustrates the social turmoil enveloping the nation.  Not unlike what we're going through today, perhaps, although the letter writers were a lot more civil about it back then.

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Enough with all this!  Let's find something a little less controversial: the Emmy Awards, maybe.  It continues our theme of the '60s transitioning to the '70s, albeit not quite as contentiously.

As we know, the Emmys used to be presented at the conclusion of the first-run television season, rather than prior to the beginning of the new season.  Therefore, we're not surprised to find the 1969-70 awards scheduled for Sunday, June 7 on ABC.  For the last time, the show is bi-coastal, with awards presented both in Hollywood (hosted by Bill Cosby) and New York (Dick Cavett), and it's a most intriguing lineup of nominations.  Once again, the categories are Drama, Comedy and Variety series, joined by Best New Series, Best Single Dramatic Program and Best Single Music/Variety Program (the later two comprised of special programs and regular episodes of a series).

Here are the nominees in various categories; I'll give you the winners at the end.

Best New Series:

The Bill Cosby Show (NBC)

The Forsyte Saga (NET)

Marcus Welby, M.D. (ABC)

Room 222 (ABC)

Sesame Street (NET)

Best Drama Series:

The Forsyte Saga (NET)

Ironside (NBC)

Marcus Welby, M.D. (ABC)

The Mod Squad (ABC)

The Name of the Game (NBC)

NET Playhouse (NET)

Best Comedy Series:

The Bill Cosby Show (NBC)

The Courtship of Eddie's Father (ABC)

Love, American Style (ABC)

My World and Welcome to It (NBC)

Room 222 (ABC)

Best Dramatic Actor:

Raymond Burr, Ironside (NBC)

Mike Connors, Mannix (CBS)

Robert Wagner, It Takes a Thief (ABC)

Robert Young, Marcus Welby, M.D. (ABC)

Best Dramatic Actress:

Joan Blondell, Here Come the Brides (ABC)

Susan Hampshire, The Forsyte Saga (NET)

Peggy Lipton, The Mod Squad (ABC)

Best Comedy Actor:

Bill Cosby, The Bill Cosby Show (NBC)

Lloyd Haynes, Room 222 (ABC)

William Windom, My World and Welcome to It (NBC)

Best Comedy Actress:

Hope Lange, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (NBC)

Elizabeth Montgomery, Bewitched (ABC)

Marlo Thomas, That Girl (ABC)

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I've always remembered something my 10th grade social studies teacher said.  It was before class, on a day when us students were talking about what we wanted to do with our lives - what colleges we hoped to be attending, what jobs we wanted to have.  "You know," he said, "a few years ago you wouldn't have been having this conversation.  You'd have been wondering when you'd be drafted, and whether or not you'd wind up in Vietnam."

He was right; the military draft had ended less than four years before, and although we'd wind up having to sign up for selective service before we were out of college, by 1976 the idea of being drafted to fight in a foreign war was the furthest thing from our own plans. But in June 1970 the draft was a very real thing and, as the listing for the ABC News Special "The Draft: Who Serves?" (Saturday, 8:30 p.m.) notes, men of draft age have four choices: "consent to induction, hope for deferments, refuse to report (and risk imprisonment) or leave the country."

The military draft was one of the stormiest parts of the antiwar movement, and I think the main reason protests over the Gulf Wars have never reached a critical level is that there is no draft to spread the threat around, to make the prospects of fighting more immediate for every young man and woman of a particular age.  That's what having an all-volunteer army has done for us, and as early as 1970 the prospects of such an army were under discussion in this special, as well as various inequities already existing in the draft, and the possibilities of increased future deferments.  Roger Peterson, the veteran ABC correspondent who was a native of the Twin Cities and started his television career at KSTP, is the primary reporter for a special that, as much as anything, shows us how much American culture has changed in the intervening 45 years.

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It doesn't seem as if we've discussed much actual TV this week, does it?  In addition to the heavy issues we're looking at, it's because we've entered rerun season; almost every series has started showing repeats, while the summer replacement series haven't yet made their debut.  Nonetheless, there are still some things to look at with our quick hits.

There are some summer specials: NET presents a "relevant" version of Hamlet, videotaped in Nashville, that attempts to capture both the Elizabethan flavor and the difficulty of taking action in a world that is full of corruption (Friday, 9:00 p.m.) while CBS presents a repeat showing of the latest "Peanuts" special, You're in Love, Charlie Brown (Wednesday, 7:30 p.m., brought to you by the people in your town who bottle Coca-Cola), and ABC gives us the latest in their series of specials on The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau (Monday, 6:30 p.m.).

Of course, we rely on the sitcoms to deal with the issues of the day: The Brady Bunch (Friday, 7:00 p.m., ABC) debates what to do with 94 books of trading stamps, The Governor and J.J. (Tuesday, 8:30 p.m., CBS) investigates dirty books, That Girl (Thursday, 7:00 p.m., ABC) wants to get to the bottom of Don's Las Vegas marriage, and Tom tries to master the art of finger sandwiches on The Courtship of Eddie's Father (Wednesday, 7:00 p.m., ABC). Not to be outdone, dramas get their moment in the sun: Ed gets blamed for a fatal beating on Ironside (Thursday, 7:30 p.m., NBC), Welby deals with a young leukemia patient on Marcus Welby, M.D. (Tuesday, 9:00 p.m., ABC), Vietnamese war victims are treated by Gannon on Medical Center (Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., CBS), and the primetime soap Harold Robbins' The Survivors (Thursday, 9:00 p.m., ABC) returns for summer reruns, giving us all a chance to see if it's as big a bomb as it was in first-run.

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And now the answers to our Emmy quiz. If you're reading this on a laptop or tablet, just turn it upside down. If it's a desktop, turn yourself upside down.

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MST3K alert: The Leech Woman (1959). A woman discovers that she is to be the guinea pig for her husband's weird experiments. Coleen Gray, Grant Williams, Gloria Talbot, Phillip Terry, John Van Dreelan, Kim Hamilton (Friday, 4:00 p.m., WLAC). A really distasteful and sordid little story, and I suppose the only really good thing about it is that all the bad guys get it in the end. I don't think this one is in circulation at the present, and for that you might consider yourself grateful. 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

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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  

My new book Darkness in Primetime is coming this August! Sign up at https://bit.ly/DarknessSignup for updates!

This week in TV Guide: June 20, 1959

When last we heard from Robert Young, the year was 1958 and Young was riding high as America's Father Figure, the star of the popular Father Knows Best. Back then, Young was in great demand, as writer Dan Jenkins noted:

[T]he 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.

Well, come a year later, little has changed for Young, who has just returned from a trip to Toronto, where he addressed the Canadian Highway Safety Conference on the media's role in traffic safety. It's one of the effects of television's ability to bring stars right into the living room, where they're virtually a part of the family. "There is a tremendous difference in the public's attitude," Young says. "In the movies they were either overawed and silent, or they wanted to claw you. In TV they regard you as a known friend and are not hesitant in stepping right up to engage in conversation." Young is up to around 1,000 requests a year from bona fide organizations, most of which he has to decline - if he accepted even a fraction of them, there's be no time for the television show.

And this brings up something else that Young has noticed, something that's taken a bit of getting used to. "At first, when I began to realize how seriously people took me in Father Knows Best, I was badly frightened. Understandably perhaps, I began to think the character was me. My wife finally brought things into focus. She advised me to know who I was and who Jim Anderson was and not to confuse the two." Added to this, Young is by nature an introvert, who is now finding himself pushed into all kinds of situations outside of acting, situations that nobody could have foreseen. "They may be suited to extroverted Jim Anderson but they are not necessarily suited to me. I am inherently shy. I don't move easily in a crown. So I had to do some serious work on myself in order to meet the requirements of what was expected."

Reading this can cause one to ponder how the stars of today react to such attention. Some of them, of course, will loudly proclaim that they are not role models and shouldn't be taken as such. Some will become mysterious recluses, seldom seen in public and somewhat surly about it when they are. Others will use their celebrity in order to pursue political agendas, going even so far as to appear in front of Congressional committees to testify as "expert witnesses," based either on their familiarity in general or on authority derived from the television roles they've played. Raymond Burr did a lot of the latter, addressing bar association conventions because of his familiarity to the public as Perry Mason.

However, if there is a difference between then and now, it may be because Burr's appearances, for example, were often designed to communicate to groups of attorneys how they were perceived by the public, the kinds of responsibilities inherent in being a lawyer and maintaining the public trust, things like that. I may be wrong, but I don't know that Burr ever went to a group and lobbied for the Miranda warning. Have times changed as much as they would seem - have movie and television stars entered a different dimension when it comes to how they exploit their celebrity? And do we see them in the same light? I know that fanmags, with their constant references to stars by their first names or nicknames, add to the delusion that we actually know these people, but in general do we still find stars as approachable, as much a part of the family as they were when they first entered our living rooms? Or have we become too cynical for that nowadays?

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On Friday, President Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth II are in Montreal for the ceremonies commemorating the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, a joint venture between the United States and Canada that started in 1954. CBS and ABC are on hand to present live coverage beginning at 9:00 am CT, while NBC has taped coverage later in the day. The Canadian Broadcasting Company provides the video for all three networks.

The Seaway runs from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, on the Atlantic Ocean, all the way through the Great Lakes and to Duluth. As I recall from my grade school history, the early explorers searched for an opening that would run the length of the continent, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific, but of course they never found it, and eventually they'd have to settle for the Panama Canal.

I've no doubt a project like this would garner a fair share of attention from the news channels today, but the networks? Someone once asked me why I was interested in the '50s and '60s; I gave several reasons, but one of them was that it was a time when we still had the capacity to be awed by technology and human achievement.* The Empire State Building. Boulder Dam. The Houston Astrodome. The 1964 World's Fair. Today? Meh. That's what cynicism does to you.

*From anyone other than Apple, that is.

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Saturday night it's the 21st Mrs. America Pageant, coming to us from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. This article details the colorful history of the pageant, including its journey from a "cheesecake" contest (Miss America for married women) to its current status as an event "celebrating the homemaker." The customary trappings of a beauty pageant would be replaced by "contests of household skills like ironing, cooking, baking, sewing, and cleaning," Now, I'm sure that these qualities are vital when it comes to homemaking, but I don't know that contests like this make for the most riveting television.

Mrs. Clark Priebe, Mrs. America 1960

The pageant, which began in 1938, petered out in the late '60s, only to be revived in the late '70s, with its purpose “to recognize the single most discriminated against person in the history of international beauty competition: the married woman.” However, what with the need for marketing and promotion and whatnot, the pageant has returned to something more like a conventional beauty contest; as a spokesman once pointed out, "you can be beautiful and still be married," and a look at previous winners indeed confirms no shortage of pulchritude. The pageant continues happily to this day from its home in Las Vegas (natch), with this year's show scheduled for August 27.

The winner of the June 20, 1959 pageant - Mrs. America for 1960 - is Margaret Priebe of Iowa. Here's a story on the trials and tribulations of being Mrs. America.

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In a somewhat related note, on Wednesday The Donna Reed Show (9:00 CT, ABC) portrays the difficulty a mother has when she tries to do it all. Here's Donna's dilemma: "Dr. Stone is scheduled to read a paper before the medical society and says it's important that Donna be present. But on the same night Jeff wants his mother to watch him play basketball and Mary is about to be initiated into a girl's club." I have no doubt Donna makes the right decisions, but in these days when the debate continues about whether or not a woman can "have it all," can you imagine how much more complicated Donna's situation would have been if she had to satisfy an outside boss as well? I wonder if Margaret Priebe ever had to deal with situations like this?

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The television tube is joining the ranks of the squares. It's the first change in the basic tube size for almost 10 years, and it's such a big deal some manufacturers are even scrapping their plans for next year's models in order to conform to the new shape.

If you're familiar with the changing shapes of the TV Guide logo over the years, you'll know what this looks like - "square corners, straighter sides and top, flatter screen surface, much closer to a perfect rectangle." In the case of a 21-inch tube, this amounts to an extra 20-square inches of viewing surface. Because of the change, this will now be known as a 23-inch tube.

And yet, even though it's billed as close to a "perfect rectangle," anyone who's watched classic TV from the '60s and '70s on DVD knows this isn't quite the case, for on occasion you can still see a little bit of black creep into the corners on a given shot - not at all visible on TV sets of the era, but a charming reminder today of the advancements that have been made since then.

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In the front of the programming section (the "News and Notes" part of the issue), a couple of reminders that we still live in an era where ad agencies call many of the programming shots. For one thing, the job of Head of Programming for CBS is up for grabs. The pay is $70,000 per year, more than what I make today, and I'd guess there are probably a few fringe benefits in addition. And yet, no luck filling it so far, even though the job has been offered to top TV execs at three ad agencies. Why? "Although the CBS spot pays well in prestige the salary plus possible stock options are considerably under what the ad agencies can afford to pay in salary and bonus." The position has also been offered to the legendary Pat Weaver, former president of NBC and currently a consultant to several sponsors. He'll turn it down as well, probably for the same reason.

If I seem to mention the Quiz Show Scandals frequently, it's only because they pop up so frequently in the TV Guides of this era. Right now, a grand jury is looking into the matter, and the presiding judge, Mitchell D. Schweitzer, has ordered it impounded, saying the jury has gone into areas they're not allowed to pursue. Specifically, "they have inquired into so-called fraud, but no crimes have been found to be committed and there are no public officials involved." As it stands, Judge Schweitzer won't make the report public so as not to smear the reputations of those mentioned in it, and challenges the district attorney "to show legal reason why I cannot do what I have done."

Also, we have another piece of evidence as to how television has changed from its early days. The amount of prime-time programming devoted to filmed shows, as opposed to those broadcast live, now nears 70%, with about $170 million worth of programming to be filmed between now and next May.

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Finally, we have a pictorial (sadly, not in color) of the painfully young-looking Inger Stevens, all of 24 years old, spending some time at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in preparation for her role as a nurse in an episode of Playhouse 90. This type of research by actors isn't unheard-of, but some of these pictures make me wonder just how much of her work was genuine, and how much was merely for the camera. I rather doubt that the photo to the left, in which nurse Stevens is "ignoring the approving stares of two passing doctors," is a candid one, though I have no doubt things like that actually happen.

However, the atmosphere of the picture below encourages me to think it was taken in an unguarded moment. I realize this might be a pipe dream, but it captures Inger in a moment of reflection, when her youth is most winsome and vulnerable - she could indeed be a student nurse - as well as the beauty that is said to be most apparent when a woman is not aware she is being looked at.

Seems to me this is as good a note as any to end on, don't you think? TV