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Another week, another treasure trove of pieces from the classic TV blogosphere. Here's what you ought to be reading this week:

Inner Toob presents us with a great premise, the kind of alternate reality I love: what if the famed Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (you know, the one where Shatner sees the gremlin on the wing of the plane) and "Odyssey of Flight 33" occurred in the same universe. In other words, what if Shatner sees that gremlin on a previous trip of Flight 33?

At The Horn Section, Hal posts on what he says is his favorite B&W episode of F Troop: "The Day the Indians Won." And no, it has nothing to do with the World Series - otherwise, it would have been on Twilight Zone instead.

Joanna is back at Christmas TV History with another installment of Christmas Books, and once again we're faced with "who knew?" books such as an adaptation of B.C.: A Christmas Special, a comic book on The Honeymooners Christmas Special, a kids' version of It's a Wonderful Life, and more. Seeing as how we're sitting in the middle of nearly a foot of snow here in Minnesota, Christmas books seem right at home.

David's latest version of Comfort TV nights takes us to ABC's lineup for Saturday nights, 1983: T.J. Hooker, The Love Boat, and Fantasy Island. That's a powerhouse lineup, and a far cry from today, when the network regularly broadcasts college football and NBA basketball on Saturday nights in order to avoid scheduling any series.

Some Polish American Guy presents episode 42 of the podcast Eventually Supertrain. I highly recommend you listen to this immensely entertaining podcast, which features recaps of single-season series, featuring commentary by Dan and guests. Also, in the near future yours truly will be one of those guests!

At Cult TV Blog, Paul recaps the rare Avengers season one episode "The Frighteners," with Patrick Macnee and Ian Hendry. Even without the invariably beautiful companion of the later years, The Avengers is still a kick - as it always will be whenever Patrick Macnee is in it.

For some time, Jack has been going through Francis and Marian Cockrell's episodes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents at bare-bones e-zine, and this week he presents a summary of their contributions to the series. I've said this often enough that you'll think I'm getting a kickback from Jack, but reading these recaps is often as entertaining as the episodes themselves.

Television Obscurities notes the 65th anniversary of TV Guide with a few interesting statistics: the current circulation of the magazine is 1.3 million nationally (down from 1.8 million at the end of 2014). When the magazine first started in 1953, its circulation - for 10 cities - was 1.5 million. At its peak, the number was 20 million. I know that the proliferation of TV channels makes it impractical as a station guide, but do you think some better articles might just help?

In addition to her Wednesday guest essay, Jodie appears this week at her own blog, Garroway at Large, with a rest-of-the-story look at Dave Garroway's famous sign-off, "Peace."

All in all, a great week, and nice to be back with the regular Friday feature. Come back tomorrow and we'll read another TV Guide - as Mel Allen would say, how about that?  TV  

TV Guide: The First 25 Years

This week we welcome back guest essayist Jodie Peeler, who looks back at the book that not only documented TV's most formative years as seen in TV's most influential magazine, but started her own lifelong love of television history. As you can imagine, it's a topic near and dear to me as well!

 with a look at the book that reviews the milestones of aIn 1978, to mark TV Guide's 25th year as a national publication, Simon & Schuster published TV Guide: The First 25 Years. Editor Jay S. Harris combed through a quarter-century's articles, features and listings to compile a cross-section of the big moments, rising stars, controversies, fads, cultural changes and big questions that represented television since 1953. It was a huge job, and Harris admits to it in his preface. “I wanted to cover everything but, naturally, that proved impossible,” he writes, so the book instead included what Harris hoped would be the best - “the most important, the most interesting, the most memorable and the most provocative” in order to provide “a twenty-five year portrait in words and pictures of the story of television as seen through the pages of TV Guide.” (Another hint of the size of the job is in Harris’s acknowledgments, where he thanks one associate for “a cheerful yet grueling week printing thousands of pages from the microfilm machine.”)

The book delivers on its promise. An introduction by TV Guide editorial director Merrill Panitt looks back at the magazine’s origins, starting with the night Walter Annenberg, annoyed that TV Digest had bought an ad (reproduced in the essay) in the Philadelphia Bulletin instead of his Philadelphia Inquirer, first discussed with Panitt the idea of starting a television magazine: “How would it be if we were to print a color section with national articles in our Philadelphia rotogravure plant, ship that section around the country, and in each city we’d print the local listings and bind them inside the national color section?” Panitt remembers how he paused before replying, “Sounds possible.” And from that was born the magazine that, for so many years, was a mirror of the medium, frequent critic of what television was and frequent champion of what it could become. Near the end of the essay Panitt talks of the close watch Annenberg still kept on the magazine after all those years, with Annenberg and his sisters the only individuals holding stock in Triangle Publications, counseled by a few trusted advisers. Panitt writes that though Annenberg would sometimes see things he didn’t like, he’d often comment, “But don’t worry about it. Babe Ruth struck out on occasion too.” (Can you imagine any of TV Guide’s future owners having the same philosophical view, especially these days?)

TV Guide: The First 25 Years divides the magazine’s history into five five-year sections, each with a selection of full-length articles, most of them illustrated. In the first, you chart the development of the young medium from its first hits (Dragnet, Howdy Doody), get a glimpse of program styles that would fall by the wayside (Kraft Television Theater, Playhouse 90), see fads rise and fizzle (roller derby; the quiz shows) and a national story that played out before the cameras (the Army-McCarthy hearings). There are glimpses at the great names: a nice profile of Edward R. Murrow, a heartbreaking interview with Red Skelton as he discusses his son’s battle with leukemia, a two-part examination of Arthur Godfrey’s checkered relationship with the press. There are also glimpses of what’s to come (a brief 1953 piece about the young producer of Ask the Camera, Barbara Walters). And even the young medium gets nostalgic; in 1957, as television observes its tenth year as a full-fledged medium, TV Guide takes a look back at those ten years in words and pictures, to a time “when some stars started to bloom (and others quickly wilted) under the TV sun.”

As the 1950s give way to the 1960s, you watch TV Guide’s offerings change into a longer-form examination of the medium and its effects on society. There are profile and program pieces aplenty, but mixed in with them is an emerging point of view. For instance, a 1961 open letter to FCC Chairman Newton Minow asks for reforms to address program quality, “a cumulative impression of violence for the sake of violence” in programs on television, the reluctance of local stations to carry informational programs, the misuse of production ownership practices to get programs on network television, the emphasis on ratings over quality in making programming decisions, and the “almost dictatorial control” some talent agencies had over network programming. Minow’s lengthy reply is also published; in it, he urges the further use of the UHF band and also urges concerned citizens to make their voices heard – and invites TV Guide, “as a distinguished and influential voice in broadcasting affairs,” to help the FCC reinforce the concept that television has a responsibility to the viewing public. In another piece, social critic Martin Mayer looks at the effect television had on other media, declaring that it has “battered its rivals out of shape.” Betty Friedan offers a two-part reflection on two weeks spent watching the portrayal of women on television (to put it mildly, she wasn’t impressed), and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. contributes an analysis of how television has changed American politics.

Along the way, profiles by Richard Gehman, Edith Efron and other familiar names seek to peel back familiar images to find what’s within. Gehman puts a troubled Sid Caesar on an analyst’s couch; Samuel Grafton takes apart Jack Paar to see what’s inside and where he’s headed next. Efron portrays a young Carol Burnett, having just signed her first million-dollar contract, as a walking collection of complexities and insecurities; later, in a profile of Barbara Walters titled “How To Manufacture A Celebrity,” Efron casts her rise as the result of a process that “sucks people in – it processes them uniformly – it ships them briskly along a mechanical assembly line – and it pops them out at the other end, stuffed tight into a shiny casing stamped ‘U.S. Celebrity.’”

The upheavals of the 1960s do not escape Harris’s view. The chronicle of those four days in November 1963, “America’s Long Vigil,” lets readers follow along with what viewers watched as the horrible weekend unfolded. There’s also “What The Negro Wants From TV,” and a post-mortem from NBC News executive Reuven Frank on how television covered the chaos at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. But there’s also a moment of triumph, with Neil Hickey’s preview of the July 1969 lunar landing of Apollo 11 (“the most expensive TV special in history”). There’s an examination of what television is doing to children and what it can do to help them; another piece looks at public television, asking if it is reaching the viewers it needs to reach.

Other signs of changing times are in these pages. We bid farewell to What’s My Line? and visit Ed Sullivan as his program enters its nineteenth year, while the Smothers Brothers and Laugh-In warm up for a new generation. A 1971 look at All In The Family and its producer Norman Lear examines a network program as it smashes taboos, and a look at Monday Night Football announcer Howard Cosell (“The Voice You Love To Hate”) signals the emergence of sports commentator as celebrity. An article on television’s relationship with the American Football League is another sign of the juggernaut televised sports was becoming. The “Close-Up” about the 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King is also there, in its own way another sign that times are changing. Neil Hickey and Edith Efron debate the effect televised violence has on society (Hickey says it does have an effect; Efron, no). Pay television is just around the corner, as a 1975 piece discusses what could happen if big events like the World Series became exclusive to premium channels.

There’s the occasional look back - a 1972 piece about the birth of You Bet Your Life, written by an adman who worked on the DeSoto account, is an enjoyable reminiscence about working with the often grumpy, always funny Groucho Marx. To coincide with the 1975 dramatization of Fear On Trial, Louis Nizer writes about the blacklist in general and the trial of John Henry Faulk in particular. And longtime television critic John Crosby looks back on the brief history of the medium, remembering 1950s television by saying, “It was new and we were very innocent.” He laments that a writer like Rod Serling could not generate the excitement in 1973 that a figure like Mark Spitz does, and pronounces himself “dumbfounded” when he first watched Laugh-In making jokes about Spiro Agnew and about homosexuality. He draws a contrast between the live drama of the 1950s, which acknowledged that life was seldom neat, and an episode of Mission: Impossible, where the heroes overcome insurmountable odds and come to a tidy conclusion at the end of each episode. “Television was always best when you didn’t know the ending,” Crosby writes, expressing hope that the medium would return to presenting what it did best: presenting actuality.

And there are big names weighing in on unexpected subjects. Gilbert Seldes reviews The Beverly Hillbillies. William Saroyan writes about Mannix. And Isaac Asimov – yes, that Isaac Asimov - offers an analysis of the Miss America pageant, calling it “the drama of the universal marketplace of sexual success, with the contestants representing the most choice offerings one can find.”

The book concludes with a three-part examination by Merrill Panitt on the then-current state of television. Panitt finds that although “on the surface, television is doing beautifully” and is recording record ratings and profits, the medium is “a nervous, defensive, ambivalent medium” with executives “fearful of change,” its programming under criticism, and its relationship with government “schizophrenic.” Although Panitt warns that new options, such as pay television, will offer competition, he concludes that despite commercial television’s failings, people will not switch offer their sets: “We will continue to watch the medium that informs and entertains us just about as well as we deserve.”

In the middle of the book is a real treat: a full-color, 16-page section of 400 TV Guide covers from the magazine’s first 25 years. As with the articles, you can trace a culture’s fascinations: from the famous first cover with Desi Arnaz Jr., to Bishop Sheen and Caesar and Carney and Godfrey and Berle, to Edd Byrnes and Pat Boone and Jack Paar and Jacqueline Kennedy, to Walter Cronkite and Sally Field and Carol Burnett and Cookie Monster, occasional historic moments (the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II; the Moon landing; Nixon’s visit to China), and the occasional side trip to the unexpected (Mason Reese, anyone?). It’s also a great look at the visual evolution of a magazine as it grew more sophisticated, artistic and occasionally beautiful, with Al Hirschfeld, Leroy Neiman, Richard Amsel, and even Andy Warhol contributing cover artwork. And closing out the book is a series of grids showing the networks’ prime-time schedules for each year of TV Guide’s history.

It’s interesting to look back on TV Guide as it celebrated itself in 1978 and think of the magazine it was then, especially as reflected in the articles Harris selected for his book. Nobody could know it at the time, but some of the very forces examined in articles contained in The First 25 Years would soon reshape the magazine. The growing reach of cable television and premium networks would prompt an expansion of the program listings. Changing tastes would bring about an “Insider” section, with short items on the big names in television, and the publication that once seemed so serious (and, on occasion, disenchanted with the medium it covered) seemed a little more like a fan magazine. There were still serious examinations of television in TV Guide, but they were becoming a harder sell in an era of People and Us. Even the criticism of the medium gave way to some snark, with the year’s worst moments chronicled in the annual “J. Fred Muggs Awards.”

Ten years after The First 25 Years was published, the transformation from watchdog to fan magazine accelerated when Triangle Publications was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which phased out harder features in favor of softer profiles, gimmick covers (remember the doctored Oprah Winfrey/Ann-Margret artwork?) and horoscopes. Even the program listings became redundant as cable companies incorporated channel guides into their systems, newspapers published their own listings, and the wide array of channels and programs outstripped a magazine’s ability to keep up. When the Internet came along, it became easier than ever to find current program information.  TV Guide found itself a publication in search of a purpose, its brand more valuable than the magazine itself, passed from owner to owner and mission to mission.

It’s easy to mourn what became of TV Guide, though it was perhaps inevitable with the march of technology. But if you want a glimpse of what the magazine once was, and why it mattered, find a copy of The First 25 Years. Perhaps it will inspire you to seek out old issues of the magazine and perform your own interpretations of the sort Mitchell has given us for so long. (By the way, can you imagine what a treat it would be if the current owners of TV Guide did what Life and Sports Illustrated have done, and make the complete run available in an online archive? It would be so much better than having to find a library that may or may not have grainy, hard-to-read microfilm on hand. Besides, old TV Guide issues are so much fun to browse, and there are few better ways to get a feel for a particular moment in popular culture.)

On a personal note, it was a copy of The First 25 Years I received when I was a first-grader (yes, you read that right – and it was a book I asked for, no less, because I have always been a nerd) that helped send me down the path of being a television historian. If this book was potent enough to influence a six-year-old, imagine what it could do for you. Find yourself a copy. You’ll enjoy it, marvel at what we once had, mourn a little at what’s happened since, and you’ll never look at TV Guide the same way again. TV  


Jodie Peeler documents the life and career of legendary television pioneer and personality Dave Garroway at Garroway at Large. 

What's on TV? Wednesday, April 6, 1960

Happy day-after Easter to you all! This week we're looking at the Nebraska edition, which includes a healthy helping of stations from Iowa and South Dakota, including KELO in Sioux Falls. I have great affection for the Keloland stations, which include KDLO in Garden City and KPLO in Reliance - when we lived in The World's Worst Town™, we could pick up Keloland when the weather was decent. Being able to see anything on CBS, or have local programming that was superior to that on KCMT, was more than a treat; it was like a lifeline to sanity, to the outside world. Now, if decent television is all you have to worry about when you're a kid, you've got a pretty good life, so I'm not pretending television was all that was wrong with living there. It was just the bitter icing on a really bad cake. Just put your bad thoughts away and enjoy the week, with a number of dual-network stations to keep track of.

This week in TV Guide: April 2, 1960

For some of you, what I'm about to say might be hard to believe, but there was a time when the Academy Awards honored movies that people had actually seen. In movie theaters. They were called "popular" movies. And not just people with degrees in film studies who hang out at art house theaters, either. These were people who simply enjoyed going to the movies; for them, the 1960 Oscars were like old-home week.

Once again, Bob Hope does the honors as emcee for the broadcast, which NBC carries at 9:30 p.m. (CT) live from the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. There's a 30-minute pre-awards show beforehand, with Tony Randall, Betsy Palmer and Edith Head at the famed Brown Derby restaurant to interview luminaries dining prior to heading for the show. The Oscarcast only runs an hour and 40 minutes, which means that Jack Paar isn't even preempted - it just starts a little later. When all's said and done, Ben-Hur is the big winner, taking home a then-record 11 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Charlton Heston, Best Supporting Actor for Hugh Griffith, Best Director for William Wyler, and a host of other awards.

And what are those "Oscar Headaches" referred to on this week's cover? The biggest one is ending the show on time. (Even at 1:40, this year's show actually clocks in ten minutes over budget.) It rubs both ways, though; memories of last year's debacle are still fresh, when through a horrible miscalculation the show actually ended 20 minutes early, leaving host Jerry Lewis to vamp in a desperate attempt to fill the time until NBC mercifully pulled the plug. Neither Lewis nor last year's producer, Jerry Wald, will be returning this year; their schedules just didn't permit it, they said.

This year the job as producer will fall to Arthur Freed, who produced last year's Best Picture winner, Gigi. His challenge, among other things, is to tread the fine line between, as he says, "dignity and entertainment." Too far in the dignity direction and it gets stuffy; go too far the other way and it turns into "a vaudeville show." (I wonder if the producer of this year's broadcast knows that?) There are temperamental celebrities who need to be cajoled through delicate diplomacy to do what they're supposed to do and be where they're supposed to be. Freed, a lifelong baseball fan, has added Vincente Minelli and John Houseman to his staff; "I am the manager," he says, and "Minelli and Houseman are my pitchers."

One big change that Freed is planning to introduce: in the past, the show has been staged for the audience in the theater, but this time, "we are going to stage it for the TV audience." There are, after all, 60 million or so tuning in, and that's a little bigger than the 2,500 at the Pantages. Fortunately, no such accommodations were necessary for the 2018 Oscars; they managed to bore everybody.

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Tennessee Ernie Ford makes an interesting observation about the kinds of specials we've frequently seen in the pages of TV Guide, even if we haven't talked about them a great deal. They're called "two-man" specials, with Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, or Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, or Perry Como and Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, or Bing Crosby. They're super-casual, laid back, with a couple of rocking chairs as a set. Even if you haven't read about one of these lately, I'm sure you know what I mean.

The point is that Ernie, a man who's been on television about as much as anyone since the medium began, isn't sure this is the right approach to take. "Television's still in its infancy, as far as entertaining a live audience is concerned. There is a lack of knowledge on how to entertain in the home. A great huge blare and 10 top names and about 50 dancers leapin' across the stage don't do it. But neither do two rockin' chairs." Later, he adds, "You just can't have too far-out ideas of what entertains int he American living room. You gotta sorta make 'em feel - well, that they don't have to put on their best duds just 'cause you're occupying the living room."

This reinforces something I've mentioned in the past, something that early television stars were very aware of, which is the intimacy of television, the idea that TV is a guest in the home. There are certain ways to behave when you're a guest, and this is something that is still being experimented with, whether you're Ernie Ford with a guest star, or the producer of the Academy Awards. I remember Jack Paar discussing this in an interview once; he talked of always reminding guests that they were on at 11:30 in the evening, that people were staying up very late to watch them, and that you wanted to take that into consideration. Keep your voice lower, don't be as manic, It's an interesting observation, one that's lost in today's culture. I don't know, it's kind of as if we've opened all the doors and windows, and TV isn't so much a guest as it is a part of the woodwork. We've opened ourselves so much to various forms of social media that it's as if we've merged with these various implements, all part of the same living organism. Or something like that.

This gets back around to what Ernie considers the secret to his success. "I've got the kind of personality people don't mind havin' around. I don't shove anything down their throats. People get kinda used to thinkin', "Well, tonight's the night ol' Ernie will be here." He carries this philosophy over to the way he does commercials, which he considers a privilege rather than a chore. "I always do the middle commercial myself and it's real Ernie. And I consider it a great compliment that what I say they believe. It's a big responsibility."

As proof of the importance of knowing the audience, Ford points to the most popular segment of his show, the hymns he sings. The TV folks were against it, he recalls. "They told me I couldn't sing hymns because it 'brings people down.' That's ridiculous. I don't think the good Lord cares for a bunch of deadheads. I mean, you don't have to put on sackcloth and sit in a pile of ashes to sing a hymn. Some of the most beautiful music is in hymns. Well, sir, I won, and now the hymns are the biggest think we have on the show."

Certainly Tennessee Ernie Ford seems to have figured out this television thing, don't you think?

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Some interesting programs on this week, as always.

Saturday, NBC presents the first of back-to-back games in the NBA finals, as the Boston Celtics take on the St. Louis Hawks for the championship. Boston takes Saturday's Game 3 102-86, but the Hawks rebound the next day to win 106-96. Eventually, the series goes seven games, with the Celtics winning their second consecutive title, and third in the past four years. And yes, this year the NBA regular season won't even be done by April 2.

On Sunday's Playhouse 90 (7:00 p.m., CBS), Dana Andrews, Don Murray, Kim Hunter and Barbara Rush star in "Alas, Babylon." "It looks like the beginning of an ordinary day in the small Florida town of Fort Repose. But Randy Bragg receives a horrifying warning from his brother: a nuclear war is hours away." I wonder how well it translated to the small screen?

There's not much on Monday, it being Oscar Night and all; by the way, the Oscars preempt Steve Allen this week, which is why we don't have a "Sullivan vs. Allen" feature for you. At any rate, if you're looking for something, there's The Kate Smith Show on CBS at 6:30 p.m., followed by Rory Calhoun in The Texan at 7:00, Father Knows Best at 7:30, The Danny Thomas Show at 8:00, The Ann Sothern Show at 8:30 (with future Medical Center co-star James Daly as private detective Johnny Danger), Jackie Cooper's Hennesey at 9:00, and The June Allyson Show at 9:30. Imagine this - an entire evening of half-hour shows. You wouldn't see that today.

Tuesday's Ford Startime (7:30 p.m., NBC) presents a puzzling mystery in "Incident at a Corner." "Someone wants an elderly crossing guard fired, and a vicious note to school officials does the trick. When members of his family search for the note's anonymous author, they run into unexpected opposition." Paul Hartman, Vera Miles and George Peppard star, but what likely makes this worth watching - and what suggests that not all is as it seems - is that it's directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with a script by mystery writer Charlotte Armstrong adapted from her own book

Wednesday features an episode of Men Into Space (right), one of the first "realistic" space dramas (as opposed to, say, Space Cadet). The series, which airs at 7:30 p.m. on NBC, stars William Lundigan, who admits in an interview that he really doesn't get this space business. "It's all I can do to drive a car," he says, and he's frankly embarrassed when meeting with "packs of nine-year-old boys" who pepper their TV hero with questions about space travel. "I can't answer their questions," he says. "I excuse myself and pretend to answer the phone. Or else I wind up asking the questions - and sure enough, the boys know the answers." It's refreshing that Lundigan often makes changes to the script to make his character, Colonel Edward McCauley, less heroic than the writers want. "I'm no hero," he tells them, "so take me off the hook."

I like the sound of this show on Thursday night (9:00 p.m., CBS) - it's Night Clubs, New York, starring Bob and Ray as two "big spenders" touring New York night spots, including performances by Peggy Lee and Felicia Sanders, and Spanish dancer Jose Greco. Mike Wallace narrates their adventures, broadcast live.

Friday brings a reminder that if you only remember Art Carney from The Honeymooners, you're overlooking the fact that he was a fine, fine dramatic actor. In another of his occasional live specials for NBC, "Victory" (7:30 p.m.), Carney plays Axel Heist, a man living in isolation on an East Indian island, who meets an female entertainer (Lois Smith) during one of his trips to the mainland and asks her to return to the island with him. It's adapted from the novel by Joseph Conrad, and costars Eric Portman, Oscar Homolka and a very young Richard Harris.

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How different things used to be: in this week's Letters to the Editor, Mrs. Thomas Hudson of Tacoma, Washington, wants everyone to know that "Bob Hope has lost a fan! I, for one, am disgusted and not amused by his frequent quips about a man of such stature, character and high principles as President Eisenhower. He is entitled to sound like a Democrat, but he should make his point at the polls instead of on TV." (Jimmy Kimmel, are you listening?) Aside from the fact that Hope poked fun at all the presidents (not to mention that Bob and Dolores Hope donated the land that the Eisenhower Medical Center was built on), I don't think that Hope was ever less than respectful when critiquing the presidents. And, as long as it's done in that spirit, do we really want to live in a country in which you can't make fun of its leaders? I don't think so. TV  

"The Easter Gift"

From April 1, 1956, General Electric Theater presents "The Easter Gift," the story of a family coming together at Easter, starring Macdonald Carey. Pretty common for G.E. to show a program like this for a religious holiday.


This year, ABC's annual showing of The Ten Commandments is Saturday night rather than Sunday; I've always been curious as to why an Old Testament story is shown at Easter, but we'll let it go for now. NBC's showing "Jesus Christ Superstar" live this Sunday evening, and I have an opinion on that, but not having seen the musical in any format, it's probably a good idea that I don't share it. TCM has their traditional movie marathon over the week, including Ben-Hur, King of Kings, and Easter Parade. At any rate, at least television is doing something to acknowledge the day    TV