This week in TV Guide: July 30, 1960

Usually, we don't think of a tightrope as being particularly violent. Dangerous, yes, but when someone falls off one while working without a net, we call it tragic, horrible, many other words; but violent isn't generally one of them. And then there's the series Tightrope!, which appears to have fallen victim to precisely that—violence.

For those who aren't familiar with it, Tightrope! was a series that ran on CBS during the 1959-60 season, starring Mike Connors as an undercover agent who, each week, would infiltrate a criminal organization in order to get the goods on their leaders. He was assigned to a different case in a different city each week, assuming an identity appropriate to the situation, but nobody—not even the local police departments—knew his true identity, thus putting him in jeopardy from both the criminals and the cops while carrying out his assignment. So secret was his assignment, even viewers didn't know his real name; he was referred to in the credits as "Nick," but I think I heard I heard his boss refer to him by that name only once. I ran across Tightrope! while perusing the TV Guides of the era (it was syndicated for several years after its initial run), and, the last time I looked, almost every episode was available on YouTube or the Internet Archive. (I reviewed it here a few years ago.)

So far, so good. It wasn't the greatest show on television, but it was far from being the worst, either. The premise was different, the stories were decent, and Mike Connors is always a watchable personality; even the weakest Mannix episodes benefit from his presence. The sponsor, Pharmaceuticals, Inc., liked Tightrope!, complimenting the show's creators, Clarence Greene and Russell Rouse, with doing a "magnificent job." The show's ratings were good: going head-to-head with the successful Western The Rifleman, it had succeeded in knocking that show down from #3 to #9 in the national ratings. While the episodes consistently ran over budget, Greene and Rouse were more than willing to put aside any chance of the show making a profit in order to keep the show's standards high. In April, Pharmaceuticals, Inc. told them to go ahead and get started on the new season, causing Greene and Rouse to give up several other projects, including a "lucrative movie deal." 

However, as Dwight Whitney recounts in this week's cover story, and as so often happens in the slimy world of network television, things changed. On April 15, without any warning, Greene and Rouse "read in a trade paper that CBS had filled their time slot with The Tom Ewell Show, a new comedy." The duo got, in Greene's words, "nothing but double talk" when they talked to the network. The sponsor, while praising the show, told them that, regretfully, "network problems were such that they made continuation of our sponsorship impossible." Greene and Rouse finally went straight to the top, sending a three-page letter to CBS president Frank Stanton and television division president James Aubrey asking for an explanation. They were told that said explanation would come from Oscar Katz, VP in charge of network programming.

And those explanations, for there were very many of them forthcoming, were as follows: first, that the network "'owned a substantial financial interest in the Ewell show' and therefore gave it 'preferential treatment.'" This turned out to be more than a little B.S.; Four Star, the show's producer, claimed the network shared in less than ten percent of the show's profits, and those only when it went to reruns. A second explanation was that the network was looking to establish a comedy block on Tuesday nights, and Tightrope! was the odd man (or show) out.*

*Indeed, the 1960-61 Tuesday night schedule would be made up of comedy and variety shows: repeats of Father Knows best, followed by Dobie Gillis, the Ewell show, The Red Skelton Show, and The Garry Moore Show. However, the network chose to leave the 7:30 p.m. half-hour slot open to the affiliates. Hmm.

Whether or not either of these explanations passes the plausibility test, though, neither would preclude another network from picking up Tightrope! And that brings us to the third, and perhaps most important, factor. As Whitney recounts it, "Under the fire of Congressional investigations rising out of the quiz and payola scandals, 'violence' had become a word to be feared. And there was no denying that Tightrope! was dealing in violence. Its ratings were simply not robust enough to justify the risk." In other words, had Tightrope! been a top-10 performer for the network, its violence would have been perfectly acceptable. But the last time I checked, violence is pretty much the same wherever you go, and whatever you do. Just because it's more popular, or comes with a higher (or lower) pricetag, doesn't make it more or less acceptable. Does it?

So this seems to be the final answer. And the last word comes from someone formerly "high up in the business," who told Whitney this: "What makes a good show? This is the impossible thing to answer. So, because it's impossible, we compound the felony. You don't know what you want, but only what you don't want. Everybody looks at it from their own point of view—like the blind men and the elephant. In TV it all depends on which end you grab. You grab the tail and, if you're not careful, you end up imagining the whole elephant is a rope."

Come to think of it, that explains pretty much everything about the world we live in today, doesn't it? We don't know what we like, only what we don't like. Before you know it, the only choices you have left are bad ones, which really means no choice at all. In the end, you're left with nothing to do but complain about it. And we do a lot of complaining nowadays, don't we?

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I'd like to think that the other item on the cover this week, on how violence on television can be curbed, was meant to be ironic placement. If it wasn't, it should have been. It's a summary of an outline sent to television producers by Kenneth Adam, the controller of television for the BBC, on how said producers should deal with violence. A few highlights:

Children's Programming: The "main danger points" in which the reactions of adults and children may differ are situations "which upset a child's emotional security, arising out of adoption, desertion, cruelty in the house, unwanted children, friction between parents, especially in contemporary settings"; portrayals of injuries or illnesses; "villainous" actions that could be imitated, such as using traps and pitfalls; "bad" habits in "good" characters, such as smoking; the use of weapons that are "easily available," such as knives;* and eerie or fearful atmospheres, especially when accentuated by music. These concerns should be considered regarding any program airing prior to 9:00 p.m.

*The tool of choice for attackers in Great Britain nowadays.

Adult Programs: According to the code, violence "should arise naturally from the story, and be therefore dramatically necessary and defensible"; violence that is "extraneous and designed for depraved effect" should be rejected, and any such natural sequences should not be "unduly prolonged; as with children's programmong, dangerous instruments, other than guns, should be carefully considered to avoid imitation; sound effects should not "distort or magnify the impact of violence," and anyone engaged in fisticuffs should not use "tactics of a vicious or bestial nature"; finally, violence against women or animals "must require special scrutiny." 

Interestingly, the guidelines make a clear distinction between violence, brutality, and combat. "Brutality is not the same thing as violence. Violence is not the same thing as combat. Yet because combat, which is healthy, and brutality, which is not, both contain violence, they tend to become identified." Battle scenes can be mitigated by using long-range camera shots, and there should be no shots "which dwell upon the more gruesome and bloody physical aspects of a combat." Some of these recommendations are quite commonsensical, while others are, I think, a little spurious. I would question, however, the idea that combat is "healthy"—let's see what the soldiers involved in it have to say about it.

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And now, here's the kind of item that I search these TV Guides for. On Sunday's Chevy Mystery Show (9:00 p.m. ET, NBC), the summer replacement for The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, the episode is "Enough Rope," starring Richard Carlson and Bert Freed, and written by William Link and Richard Levinson. The description: "Psychiatrist Roy Flemming has one too many women in his life. He has a wife, Claire, and a girl friend, Susan. The solution is a simple one: murder the wife and live happily ever after with the girl friend." Carlson is the adulterous doctor, while Freed, who often plays the heavy, portrays the detective investigating the crime. The play not only airs in color, it's also broadcast live.

Now, I don't know if this description sounds vaguely familiar to you, but it should. It's based on a play, "Prescription: Murder," written by Link and Levinson. In 1968, it was remade as a TV-movie, again on NBC. This time, Gene Barry took on the role of the suave Dr. Flemming, while the detective, named Lieutenant Columbo, was played by Peter Falk. Well, you can probably figure out the rest. Technically, the movie Prescription: Murder was not the pilot for Columbo; it wasn't until another Columbo movie, Ransom for a Dead Man, aired in 1971 that the network decided to turn the concept into a series later that year. But while there are differences between Freed's portrayal of Columbo, Falk's first time in the role, and the way the character is played in the subsequent series, there's no doubt that the good Lieutenant is displaying the primary characteristics that we all know and love.

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What else? I'll admit, sometimes it seems like a chore trying to find interesting programs to watch each night. I look at them and think that if I'm not interested, being the biggest nerd around, will anyone else be interested? And then I think maybe it will be better in the fall, when we're flooded with new series, specials, big movies, and the like. We'll see about that. But in the meantime, we'll turn over to NBC on Saturday at 9:30 p.m., where Herb Shriner hosts World Wide 60's look at the Boy Scouts of America's 50th Anniversary Jamboree from Colorado Springs. I have some thoughts about the Boy Scouts, what they were and what they are, and I'll not share them at the moment, but with the Blue Angels, the Army's K-9 corps, and trained falcons from the nearby Air Force Academy, I'm sure it's a colorful pageant—or would be, at least, if the show was in color.

A show that is in color is Music on Ice (Sunday, 8:00 p.m., NBC), the summer replacement for Sunday Showcase, hosted by Johnny Desmond; and if you remember those Ice Capades specials that I've highlighted here from time to time, this weekly series will look somewhat familiar. This week's non-skating guest is singer June Valli, and she's joined by skaters Jo Ann McGowan, Peter Firstbrook, and Willie Kali; and Steve Gibson's Redcaps vocal group. At the same time on CBS, Ed Sullivan's headliners are Gordon and Sheila MacRae, Harry James and his orchestra, comics Wayne and Shuster, and singer Jane Morgan. Your choice. 

You remember Arthur Godfrey, surely; I just wrote about him last week. When Godfrey was at his peak, one of the multiple shows he hosted was called Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. Well, the idea, if not the host, returns on Monday, with Celebrity Talent Scouts (9:00 p.m., CBS), hosted by the genial comedian Sam Levenson. The premise is simple: each week, three celebrities present their "discoveries" for our entertainment. Tonight's celebrities are Ann Sheridan, Audrey Meadows, and Phil Silvers (who introduces something of a ringer, Mickey Freeman, who played Zimmerman on the Bilko series). Another summer entry is the return of the anarchic Spike Jones and his band (9:30 p.m., CBS). Spike swears he's off the slapstick schtick for this series, although Bill Dana is on hand as one of the regulars, playing his Jose Jiminez character.

Tuesday's Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, starring Hugh O'Brian (8:30 p.m., ABC) is often credited with being the first adult Western, and rightly so. Something that's not generally recognized, though, is that it is one of the few series of the time that came to a natural end. The series did progress chronologically—perhaps it wasn't a serial in the way we think of them today, but it followed Earp from Ellsworth to Dodge City to Tombstone; in two months, it begins its sixth and final season, building up inexorably to the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral with a multi-part story that brings the series to a conclusion. If that's not a great way to go out, I don't know what is. Later on CBS, catch Ernie Kovacs in 'I Was a Bloodhound," a great private detective spoof originally seen on G.E. Theater last year, on Comedy Spot. (9:30 p.m.)

Bette Davis makes a rare television dramatic appearance on Wednesday's Wagon Train (7:30 p.m., NBC), as Elizabeth McQueeny, taking her group of girls out West to start a finishing school. Johnny Carson, not yet the Tonight host, is the guest on I've Got a Secret (9:30 p.m,. CBS), trying to stump the panel with his "secret," which is that he's answering their questions while hooked up to a lie detector. And Armstrong Circle Theater (10:00 p.m. CBS) tells the story of police narcotics squad members who go undercover in Greenwich Village to bust a drug ring on "Raid in Beatnik Village." Douglas Edwards, anchorman of the CBS evening news, narrates.

Thursday night sees the debut of Wranger (9:30 p.m., NBC), a new half-hour Western starring Jason Evers as a wandering cowpoke named Pitcairn. Tonight, he runs into a ranch owner named McQueen; alas, the perfect crossover promotion is missed, as it's not Steve McQueen from Wanted—Dead or Alive, but a character named McQueen, a "gorgeous blonde" played by Susan Oliver, who is, indeed, both. The series is the first to be created by Gene Roddenberry, who had a long history with Westerns; it runs for only six episodes as a summer replacement for Tennessee Ernie Ford, but never made it beyond that. Perhaps the other McQueen would have helped.

On Friday, a Project 20 repeat from 1956 takes a look at "The Jazz Age," in a documentary narrated by the late Fred Allen (10:00 p.m., NBC). The special chronicles "America and Americans" from the end of World War I to the 1929 stock market crash. A lot happened during that decade-plus, from the Treaty of Versailles to Prohibition to the KKK to Lindbergh's flight. I've read that the documentary was edited down from 23 hours of film; Ken Burns probably would have used it all, and it would have taken two months to tell the same story.

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Finally, you may recall a 1962 feature on Tuesday Weld that appeared last month. There's a similar article about Tuesday this week, relevant in that she's currently appearing as one of the Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. I won't recount the details, as most of it is already covered in the 1962 article. However, I would be remiss if I didn't share this rather, uh, entertaining photo spread of Tuesday, in her words, "becoming a teen-ager!" as she dances along to an Elvis record. (Funny, I don't recall knowing any teens quite like that back in the day; I clearly went to the wrong high school.)

I don't think you even try to follow that, do you? TV  

What I've been watching: July, 2022

Shows I’ve Watched:	Shows Next on the List:
The Bold Ones: The Lawyers (abandoned)	Maverick
Tightrope	Looking at the Masterpieces Unknown hour-long drama

Xs you've by no doubt realized if you read this site on a regular basis, I've long had a thing for TV courtroom dramas. (See Perry Mason and Judd for the Defense as Exhibits 1 and 2, but not programs like L.A. Law and Boston Legal, because I'm not interested in soap operas—even though, as I'm sure someone out there will point out, the Perry Mason radio series eventually morphed to television as The Edge of Night.) 

If you're still with me after that tediously long digression, what I like the most about courtroom dramas, besides the whodunnit part of it, is the idea of the lawyer as Single Combat Warrior, prepared to go into battle on behalf of his client. If you think it would be hard to stake your life on the performance of one man, imagine what it's like for that man to know that your life is in his hands. So when we had an hour or so of prime time to kill the other night, a lawyer series sounded like a good idea.

Back in the late 1960's NBC introduced a series called The Bold Ones, comprised of three separate stories—The New Doctors, The Lawyers, and The Protectors. I watched the show when it was originally on, though the one I remember best is The New Doctors, with E.G. Marshall, David Hartman, and John Saxon. I also recall The Senator, the second-season replacement for The Protectors, with Hal Holbrook in the title role, and even then, I was irritated by its liberal politics. But since none of those shows feature courtroom theatrics on a regular basis, I must be here to talk about The Lawyers, and if it seems as if once again I'm having trouble getting to the point, there's probably a good reason for it.

The Lawyers stars Burl Ives as Walter Nichols, a nationally renowned defense attorney from California, along with Joseph Campanella and James Farentino as Brian and Neil Darrell, a pair of lawyer-brothers whom Nichols has taken on as partners, and it has to be said that Ives doesn’t just lend his name to the show, as do so many big stars do when surrounded by younger, more virile co-stars. In the episode in question, "The Shattered Image," he fairly dominates the story, to the point that he doesn't even allow Neil to act as his co-council when Nichols is put on trial himself for jury tampering.

But we're getting ahead of the story at this point, which starts out as a fairly routine murder, with Nichols's client accused of having murdered a popular former jock who'd supposedly attempted to rape the client's wife at a party. There's some reason to think that not everything is the way it appears, and it probably would have been a better story had that been the subtext, but in fact Nichols gets his client off on temporary insanity by bringing to light the checkered past of the former jock, who apparently had a past history of sex crimes. 

This was a great blow to the jock's benefactor, Ralph Turner (Will Geer), a respected member of the community who had taken the young man under his wing at an early age and thought of him as a surrogate son. With his protegee’s image thus tarnished, he contrives with a woman member of the jury (Audrey Totter, in a great cameo) to make it look as if Ives bribed her to come in with a not-guilty verdict, setting up the trial in which Ives defends himself. (It’s only at the end, when he realizes that it was his vanity that caused him to rely on his own skills, that he realizes the truth that a lawyer who defends himself does indeed have a fool for a client.)

Now, every actor has his own method of trying a case. Whereas Perry Mason is stentorian and intimidating, and Clinton Judd forceful and righteous, Walter Nichols is folksy and reasonable, right up until you take the bait and he throws the trap on you. There is a thing, though, as we know there always is: when Ives is speaking in that calm, folksy voice, he sounds remarkably like Sam the Snowman, the character he voiced in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. At times the similarities were so distinct that I expected Nichols to call Rudolph as a surprise witness for the defense, an action that would have triggered great excitement in the courtroom except that the gallery isn't comprised of seven- and eight-year-olds. 

That wasn’t my problem with the episode, though, the thing that caused me to abandon the effort to go further with future episodes. (In fact, if Rudolph had turned up as a defense witness, I might have been encouraged to watch it every hour, waiting to see who else might show up—Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as the jury, for instance.) No, it was how the story was resolved—or, rather, how it wasn’t resolved. 

In the first place, Nichols doesn't do a very good job of it; he’s obviously too close to the situation to be objective, and he dismisses Neil's suggestions that he try the case instead (the aforementioned “fool for a client” syndrome), but in the end Nichols realizes that it was all an act of vanity on his part. That becomes his defense; he offers himself as his only witness, a tactic which allows him to make a statement to the jury in lieu of direct examination, and during this statement he gives an impassioned argument for his innocence, coupled with a mea culpa that he’d done a lousy job of defending himself. The reasoning behind this, I suppose, is that the jurors, impressed by the brutal honesty with which he excoriates himself, will also believe he’s being honest when he says he did not tamper with the juror. They accept this, and he’s found not guilty. 

Except.

In the meantime, Neil has found a witness who will testify that Turner did, in fact, conspire with the juror, to frame Nichols. Furthermore, Nichols knows that Neil has this witness. Why Nichols doesn’t call this witness to clear his name, rather than depend on the kindness of strangers (in this case, the jurors), is a mystery to me. Your guess is as good as mine.

There’s only one logical reason for it, and there’s one logical problem with that reason. Perhaps Nichols has a kind of compassion for Turner, an old man who sees himself tarnished as his protege was tarnished, and thus he decides to spare him the humiliation of being exposed in court as a perjurer. If that’s as far as it went, I might be able to buy it. It’s not a good reason, but it’s a reason. But here’s the problem: Turner is guilty of jury tampering himself, and in the zero-sum game that is often the law, both he and the juror are going to stand trial anyway. So Nichols isn’t sparing Turner anything. If that’s the case, why even introduce the witness who Nichols doesn’t use, unless it’s to reassure the viewers that Nichols really is innocent. And if your viewers need that kind of reassurance, then maybe you don’t have a very good hero.

I spent the better part of a half-hour following the episode trying to figure all this out, but in the end I had to give up, partly so I could watch another program, but also because I couldn’t come up with any explanation. Perhaps one of you can, in which case I’d be indebted. Maybe, like Nichols, I’m just too close to it to make sense of it. And maybe I’ll return to The Lawyers someday, but for now I think I’ll let Mason and Judd do my defending for me. 

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Whatever your preference in attorneys-at-law, it's a fact that there would be no courtroom drama without criminals and policemen, both of which television has an endless supply. One of the more unique police dramas is Tightrope, which ran for one season on CBS in 1959-60 and stars a pre-Mannix Mike Connors as "Nick," an undercover agent who assumes a different name and identity each week as he infiltrates various criminal gangs, and unless I've missed something along the way, this may be the first case of a television show featuring a lead character who's never referred to at any point by name.  

Tightrope is yet another of the half-hour dramas so prevalent at the time, and while this makes a nice fit with The Felony Squad on Thursdays, I'm not sure that it always works plot-wise. Nick provides a voiceover during each episode, which helps tie the ends together and keep the story moving; even so, though, things seem to happen a little too fast or a little too superficially. On the other hand, since Nick has no personal life of his own, you don't have that angle to encumber things, so maybe you do only need 30 minutes.

Connors is very good in a role that is not unlike playing in an anthology series each week. He has to present himself as a real tough (and occasionally a heel) in order to ingratiate himself with the bad guys; once he's in the inside, he has to figure out ways to avoid getting caught up in things like murder, which can be tough in the instances where he's playing the head crook's enforcer. And since even the local police don't know his identity, only that there's an undercover man working from the inside, he risks getting captured, or worse, by the cops. Walking the tightrope, indeed.

Connors, who always showed an unusual degree of warmth and understanding in Mannix, displays a similar humanity here. He feels empathy for the victims of crime, but isn't allowed to let them in on the secret. He's often ruthless with women, even when they show feelings for him. On occasion, such as when one of his fellow crooks saves his life, he forms a genuine bond with them, but there's no room for softness here.

Speaking of which, frequently he has to rely on a fellow undercover agent to deliver his information to the police, and often it's a race to the finish to see if they'll show up in time, before the bad guys spring their plan. (Spoiler alert: they do show up in time. Every week.) One of the treats in these episodes is to try and pick out the bit character, a barfly or hussy, who at the end is revealed to have been Nick's contact to the law. 

Each episode ends with Nick, wandering the streets of the city at night, destined to be alone for as long as he works both sides of the tightrope, and Connors does a good job of conveying the ambivalence of a man who has to disappear each week into another identity, working both sides of the law, doing a dirty job that he nonetheless realizes has to be done. There's really something noble about that kind of self-sacrifice—and, as Ken Wahl would show many years later in Wiseguy, it's not easy to stay on the tightrope without falling.

Was there more on the TV menu this month? Of course, but I don't always form a conclusion about a show as quickly as I did with The Lawyers. That was a bold move, indeed. TV