Weekend Videos – Top Rated Shows 1965-1969

After too many weeks of not being on a regular schedule with this stuff I'm finally back with clips from the top shows of each year (okay so this is a couple of days late for the weekend – I got caught up with a couple of things that kept delaying this). This is the fourth of these articles. In the first I covered the 1950-51 to 1954-55 seasons; in the second I did the 1955-56 to 1959-60 seasons and in the third I took on the 1960-61-1964-65 seasons. This time around I cover the 1965-66 to 1969-70 seasons.

Just to remind you of the rules I have imposed on myself are these: I will list the top three shows for each season along with the percentage of the nation's televisions that were tuned to that show during the season. These figures are drawn from the Complete Directory To Prime Time Network And Cable TV Shows 1946-Present. If the season's top rated show has already been featured either in this post or in the previous post in this series I'll find a clip from the second highest rated show, provided that it also hasn't been featured before, or the third highest rated show if the first and second place shows have been featured, and so on. The same procedure holds true if there are no clips of the show available online. I will be including the overall rating for the show. Previously I've expressed these in percentages however in 1960 the way that A.C. Nielsen calculated ratings changed and I'm not sure that percentages is a precisely accurate manner in which to describe these numbers. Finally I will be including my own comments about the shows.

1965-66:

1. Bonanza 31.8, 2. Gomer Pyle USMC 27.8, 3. The Lucy Show 27.7

I have very fond memories of Gomer Pyle. While it was a spin-off of The Andy Griffith Show, taking one of the most popular supporting characters off of the original series and making him the biggest "fish out of water" by putting him in the Marine Corps, I didn't know that at the time. I don't recall seeing The Andy Griffith Show during the period when Jim Nabors – or even Don Knotts – were regulars on the show. As a result the misadventures of the naive country boy in the Marines (the Marine Corps that didn't go to Vietnam) were totally stand-alone for me, and it works quite well as a stand-alone. Nabors is great as Gomer, who isn't book smart but has a native goodness and way to come out on top despite all of the objects strewn in his way. However the best part of the show was always watching Frank Sutton as Sergeant Carter. Sutton, a character actor who had been an Army sergeant during World War II (ironically he failed the physical for the Marine Corps), was ideal as the gruff, cynical and easily exasperated Sergeant Carter, Sutton, who graduated cum laude from Columbia University's Dramatic Arts program, had one of the best slow-burns in the business. As the year's passed Carter became increasingly friendly and even protective of his naive charge. The episode that I have here is one of my favourite first season episodes in which Carter is teamed with Gomer on a survival test... and finds himself the fish out of water in Gomer's world. Be sure to try to watch the second half of this one.

1966-67:

1. Bonanza 29.1, 2. The Red Skelton Hour 28.2, 3. The Andy Griffith Show 27.4

I'm going to take the name of my good friend Ivan Shreve in vain a couple of times in this piece and here is the first. I know that Ivan has stated in the past that he prefers Red Skelton's radio work to his TV series, and having heard some – but not nearly enough – of the great man's radio work, I can see the point. On the radio Skelton could integrate his characters more smoothly than he could on the TV show. He could switch from Junior the Mean Little Kid to Willie Lumplump in seconds. That meant that the radio show could flow far more than any TV show ever could. And of course it was easier to believe Harriet Hilliard (later Harriet Nelson of course) as Junior's exasperated mother if you couldn't see that the two had only a four year age difference. For my part, I am a huge fan of Skelton's TV work. It lacked the flow of the radio show. Skelton was reduced to the typical comedian hosted variety show, with a monologues, dancers, and sketches, but he made it work. More to the point it allowed him to do things that were impossible for him to do on the radio. On the hour-long show there were long sketches that would span commercials, and of course there were Skelton's pantomime bits that were separate, silent sketches. Most importantly for me is that Television allowed you to see an extra dimension to Skelton's performance, his facial reactions; very visible and inevitably funny but totally lost on a radio audience. Growing up in the 1960s Skelton was my second favourite comedian on TV (the other was, of course, the immortal Jack Benny).

1967-68:

1. The Andy Griffith Show 27.6, 2. The Lucy Show 27.0, 3. Gomer Pyle USMC 25.6

The Lucy Show was a favourite of mine growing up, but I don't think it holds up nearly as well as that show she did in the 1950s. Created, interestingly enough, by Lucy's ex Desi Arnaz (he seems to have wanted to "get the band back together" to the point where he was angry reported to have been angry at Bill Frawley for taking the role of Bub on My Three Sons) and forced on CBS by pressure from Desilu Productions, it became a hit. People were used to watching Lucy and it didn't seem to matter if there was no Desi (CBS feared that Lucy couldn't carry a show without Desi as her co-star) and with Vivian Vance taking her leave. Lucy surrounded herself with friends. Gale Gordon came on in the second season after he completed his contractual obligations on Dennis The Menace. Their relationship went back to the late 1930s when they were both on a variety show with Jack Haley. Mary Jane Croft took on Vance's role as Lucy's best friend. Croft had been a regular on the last season of I Love Lucy (and was married to Elliott Lewis, who had been the Executive Producer of The Lucy Show for two years after Desi left), but their friendship went back to Lucy's radio show My Favorite Husband where she was a frequent guest star. The 1967-68 season was the last for The Lucy Show, mostly because the sale of Desilu Studios to Paramount was completed in that year, and Lucy was not interested in appearing on a show that she did not own. Instead she formed her own production company, Lucille Ball Productions, and created Here's Lucy, which featured much of the same cast (Gordon, Croft, and occasionally Vance) with the addition of Lucy's teenaged children Lucie and Desi Arnaz Jr. This clip features the notorious episode with Joan Crawford. Joan said of Lucy, "Lucy can out-bitch me ANY day of the week!" while Lucy complained that Joan was constantly drunk and unable to remember her lines, and repeatedly asked if she could be replaced with Gloria Swanson.

1968-69:

1. Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In 31.8, 2. Gomer Pyle USMC 27.2, 3. Bonanza 26.6

It always seemed to me that Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In flashed across the TV firmament like a comet that was gone too soon. In fact, the show lasted six seasons, which surprises me. Of course only about half of those seasons were actually good, and the show suffered from cast defections which were part of what killed it. The show was little more than a series of blackout sketches that normally didn't last more than a couple of minutes at that. This was surrounded by various extended bits, like "Laugh-In Looks At the News," but the pace was like a machine gun so that even if a bit failed you might not really notice. Every episode of the show was star studded in a very real way; in the clip that I'm using here we have Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, Guy Lombardo and this guy with a fiddle – and I haven't even watched the full clip. In fact I'm using this clip rather than the "first" clip in this episode (which really wasn't the first part of the show) because of that guy with the fiddle. There are a couple of problems with this show. It was extremely topical, more so than the obviously political Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. It's rooted in the culture of the late 1960s and is probably only watchable today as an historical relic. Nevertheless in its time it was brilliant and, as various producers who tried to replicate its success discovered, unique. We'll never see its like again.

1969-70:

1. Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In 26.3, 2. Gunsmoke 25.9, 3. Bonanza 24.8, 4. Mayberry RFD 24.4

This is my other nod to my friend Ivan. Because the first three shows in the 1969-70 Top Ten have already been done, I have to work with the fourth place show, which is Mayberry RFD. That's a big problem for me because I have never (EVER) seen the show! The one local station here in Saskatoon didn't take the show, and I don't think it has ever rerun on a station that I've had access to. So I can't tell you a damned thing about this show. Fortunately I don't have to. Ivan, over at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear has been running his continuing Mayberry Mondays articles in which he, in his own inimitably sarcastic fashion, examines the goings on of Sam the poor dirt farmer and city council head, the Maybery Brain Trust Goober the town idiot (but forgets to remind people that he's the cousin of Gomer), Howard and Emmett, and of course Mike the idiot boy (who was played by Jodie Foster's brother... and after the book he wrote about her a few years ago I'm betting "Idiot Boy" is one of the nicer things she has to say about him). If you want to find out more about the show I encourage you to read Ivan's take on the show. The clip I have for this is quite obviously a copy digitized from a video tape, but it's the best that I can find online.

Belated Weekend Videos – Composer Of The Month Johnny Williams

I took a break from the Weekend Videos concept for a while, first because of the Emmy Polls and then out of lack of inspiration. However I'm not feeling that well right now and that gives one plenty of time to explore the Internet... when my head doesn't feel like it's bursting. Something I saw a while ago inspired this new theme for the Weekend Videos, and since it's the Thanksgiving long weekend (here in Canada; in the US it's the Columbus Day weekend and only Federal employees are sure to get the day off) I thought it might be time to star singling out the composers of theme music, starting with one who may come as a surprise to you, John Williams.

About the only TV theme that a lot of people would credit John Williams, composer of the scores for Star Wars, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark and a host of movies might be this.

That, of course is the NBC News theme. Or maybe you remember this theme from frequent collaborator Steven Spielberg's 1985-87 series Amazing Stories. (This is not the original opening sequence. While there are episodes of Amazing Stories available on YouTube, including the one of my favourite episodes, The Mission, they all seem to have clipped off the theme music, and no one has posted

Both of these themes have all the qualities that we usually associate with John Williams's movie music: lots of brass mixed with strings, and a certain heroic quality with – dare I say it – a side order of bombast. That's what we think of when we think of John Williams and his music. What a difference the years make. Maybe. Because back in the late 1950s and early '60s John Williams, or as he was known at the time Johnny Williams was doing TV themes. Pretty good TV themes in fact; some of them quite memorable. And there was one theme that could have become very memorable except for the fact that it was totally unsuited to the show. Let's start off with the earliest Johnny Williams theme that I can find, for a childhood favourite of mine, Checkmate starring Sebastian Cabot, Doug McClure, and Anthony George. In this case I'm going with the end credits, not only because they offer a glimpse of John Williams's onscreen credit but because it offers a more complete version of the theme.

There is a certain recognizable Williams quality in this piece, a little brassy and heroic although it doesn't reach the level of bombast in my opinion. Still I think it fits the swirling fog of the title sequence and indeed the show which, when you come right down to it, was a essentially a clone of such Warner Brothers private detective series as 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye.

The next theme that Williams composed for a TV show was this one for the Kraft Suspense Theater (I think this is the second version of the theme).

The Kraft Suspense Theater theme does have the brassy quality that we've come to expect from Williams but from there all bets are off. The theme has an eerie, haunted quality about it that is perfect for a suspense series. Coupled with the starkly angular and modernistic "stick figures" in the titles it becomes almost a minor masterpiece in terms of title credits.

We tend to remember John Williams's long, ongoing collaboration with Steven Spielberg, and through him with George Lucas, but before that he had a long association with Irwin Allen. Williams did the scores for two of Allen's disaster movies – The Poseidon Adventure and Towering Inferno – but he also did the highly memorable themes for three of Allen's TV series. The first Allen series that he created the theme for was Lost In Space. Unfortunately it is impossible to find the actual opening credits sequences for most of the Irwin Allen series on YouTube. You can find it on Hulu...unless of course you aren't an American.

This wasn't the original Lost In Space theme that was used in the unsold pilot. That theme had a much more serious tone to it, and reflected the serious tone of the series itself. However the producers discovered that they couldn't sell the series to CBS unless it was played less seriously, hence the addition of Dr. Smith and the big role for The Robot. And a show with a less serious tone needed a theme with a less serious tone. Williams uses the combination of flutes and string basses (I initially thought a tuba, and there might be one in there, but repeated listening says string basses) as major elements in the score to imply that light tone of the series.

Williams did his next score for Allen for the more serious science fiction series The Time Tunnel (also my personal favourite of his series, though none of them hold up that well).

It has a bit more of what we think of as the typical Williams style, but he uses the ticking clock motif to immediately signal to us that the show is about Time. He leaves it to us to discover what Time is of such importance to the show, besides of course the fact that the show is called The Time Tunnel. At the same time you have the driving, vaguely exotic beat competing with an exciting, adventurous but more conventional beat. It's a nice blend that works in all of the elements of the concept.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of John Williams final score for an Allen TV project, which was for Land Of The Giants. I've never seen the show, and I'm not sure that I really want to, to be absolutely honest with you. I mean the year that Land Of The Giants started was the same year that Allen did The Great Vegetable Rebellion episode of Lost In Space, so I'm not sure I could handle another Allen series at this late date. I've managed to find a copy of the opening of the episode with the music. Unfortunately it appears to have been taken off a Brazilian station, and while the English language credits are intact and the music can be heard, there is a Portuguese speaking announcer jumping in with a translation of every credit, and in a very loud voice, obviously stepping all over the music. Still even this is better than nothing which is what I would have had if I hadn't found this.

I'm really not sure what to make of that theme. It is certainly the most bombastic of his TV themes and it seems to have a certain light-hearted nature to it, particularly with the Season Two theme (note the addition of the "cat sound effect," I suppose representing one of the dangers the little people faced), but as I say I really don't have a sense of how it really fits with the series.

John Williams received his first Oscar nomination for the score for Valley Of The Dolls in 1968, the same year that he did the Land Of The Giants theme, and it pretty much marked the end of his TV series work. His music was sometimes used in TV shows after that, most importantly his music for the John Wayne movie The Cowboys which was used in the TV series of the same name which was a continuation of the story, and just about anything Star Wars related, and he has done commission work, like the music for NBC's Olympics broadcasts. Some of his music was apparently used on Jack & Bobby but I suspect it was music that he had done for something else. However, there is one other TV theme that he did. Quite honestly I think that all of us can be quite grateful that the pilot for this show was reshot and a new theme used. Keep an eye on the end credits.

Yes, John(ny) Williams did write that. Well all except for the little bit over the end credits, which was the closing from the show's we're familiar with. My guess is that they didn't have the music for the credits on the unaired pilot. As for the song, what can I say? Totally unsuitable for a three hour tour out of Hawaii (where the pilot was shot) or even out of San Pedro, but the fact is that Calypso style music was hot in 1963.

Finally a real treat, the man himself in a situation totally unlike what one might expect from the composer of Star Wars and Superman and the former conductor of the Boston Pops. According to IMDB this is one of only two appearances John Williams made as an "actor." And while we all know how reliable IMDB is about cast appearance. This is the end of the first episode The Naked Truth. Keep an eye on the piano player that John Cassavetes as Staccato is jamming with and who takes over on the piano when he leaves. A similar scene is also seen at the beginning of the episode when Staccato leaves the piano and the same guy takes over for him.

That guy is John Williams. Red Norvo was on vibes (him I recognize thanks to the face fungus) while Shelley Mann is probably on drums. Also probable are Pete Candoli on trumpet. Barney Kessel and Red Mitchell but my ability to identify them is limited. According to the Complete Directory To Primetime Network And Cable TV Shows 1946-Present entry for Johnny Staccato: "Working at the club, and often featured in musical numbers, was the jazz combo of Pete Candoli, which included Barney Kessel, Shelly Mann, Red Mitchell, Red Norvo and Johnny Williams." (emphasis mine obviously). Apparently Johnny Staccato will be coming out on DVD. In fact, according to TV Shows on DVD it is supposed to be coming out on October 12 (ie the day that most of you will be seeing this because I couldn't get it finished on time). I think I might have to find a way of getting a copy. The first episode looked so hot it was cool man.

I used to listen to a CBC radio show host who didn't like John Williams. The kindest thing he could find to say about Williams was that he was a thief, who had stolen most of his "ideas" from the likes of Eric Korngold and Franz Waxman. I'm not sure he would have said that if he could have heard some of the TV work that John Williams did, and if anything a lot of what he was to do  later is apparent in this work.

I Was A TV Addict

In lieu of a full Weekend Videos segment, which I've put on hold while I'm doing the Emmy polling, I thought that I might give you this, which I stumbled upon while looking at something else; a classic Wayne & Shuster bit from 1959: "I Was A TV Addict."

This piece is an audio piece only from an album (maybe their only album) they apparently did around 1960 which features four of their greatest routines, including, "Shakespearean Baseball," "Rinse the Blood Off My Toga," "Frontier Psychiatrist," and this one. I distinctly remember seeing this bit on a series of black & white Wayne & Shuster retrospective shows that Frank Shuster had on CBC shortly after Johnny Wayne's death. Pretty funny stuff, but unlike the other three routines on this album it's probably not something that could be updated over the years as necessary.

And trust me, if they could've they would've. Wayne & Shuster were into recycling long before blue box programs. I don't know how many versions of "Shakespearean Baseball" I've seen. Details might change, like the ultimate destination of Wayne's destination after he's hit on the head, but the basic script remained the same. If all they ever did was recycle the same material they'd have been tired and unsuccessful, but for the most part they interleaved the recycled material with new stuff.

It isn't easy to find too much Wayne & Shuster material online or for sale for that matter. Between their estates and the CBC there isn't much out there outside of a little bit of material they did in the 1970s and '80s, which wasn't their best era. There's one retrospective DVD out there and that's it. A lot of this has to do with the contract that ACTRA forced on the CBC years ago which makes it prohibitively expensive in terms of royalties to be paid to the actors and their estates to actually air old radio and TV shows. This pretty much explains why there is precious little in terms of Canadian Old Time Radio or TV on the air anywhere.

Anyway, for your entertainment and elucidation, I Was A TV Addict."

Wayne and Shuster - I Was a TV Addict
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Weekend Videos – Top Rated Shows 1960-1964

Based on the schedule I set up for myself, I should have put these videos up last week when I didn't post any videos. The problem had a lot to do with my getting sick the weekend before last, which in turn led me to have certain problems with my right leg: extreme pain tends to keep me from getting stuff done. Feeling a lot better now, and in fact I felt a lot better earlier this week when I wrote my feelings about that atrocious game show Downfall.

Just to reiterate what is going on here, about two months ago I started posting clips from the highest rated shows overall for each year, done in five year increments. The first part of this dealt with the 1950-51 to the 1954-55 season while the second part dealt with the 1955-56 to 1959-60 season. The "rules" that I am forcing onto myself are these: I will list the top three shows for each season along with the percentage of the nation's televisions that were tuned to that show during the season. These figures are drawn from the Complete Directory To Prime Time Network And Cable TV Shows 1946-Present. If the season's top rated show has already been featured either in this post or in the previous post in this series I'll find a clip from the second highest rated show, provided that it also hasn't been featured before, or the third highest rated show if the first and second place shows have been featured, and so on. The same procedure holds true if there are no clips of the show available online. I will be including the overall rating for the show. Previously I've expressed these in percentages however in 1960 the way that A.C. Nielsen calculated ratings changed and I'm not sure that percentages is a precisely accurate manner in which to describe these numbers. Finally as before I will be including my own comments about the shows.

1960-61:

Gunsmoke 37.3, Wagon Train 34.2, Have Gun Will Travel 30.9, The Andy Griffith Show 27.8

This is the first, and maybe the only, time that I have to go to the fourth place show. This was the fourth (and final) season in a row that Gunsmoke was in first place and the third season in a row that Wagon Train and Have Gun Will Travel were in second and third place respectively. But that's fine because it gives us the chance to look at one of the greatest family situation comedies ever made, The Andy Griffith Show. Created as a backdoor pilot out of Make Room For Daddy (aka The Danny Thomas Show) the series combined small-town charm and eccentricity in the form of Mayberry and it's residents (I almost said denizens) with the heartwarming family relationship between Sheriff Andy Taylor, his son Opie, his Aunt Bee, and cousin Barney Fife. A big part of the show in this early period was the relationship between Griffith's Andy Taylor and Don Knotts's Barney Fife. The show reunited Griffith and Knotts who had appeared together on Broadway and in the movie version of No Room For Sergeants. One interesting thing that people interested in trivia like my blogging buddy Ivan G. Shreve Jr. will be aware of is that the show featured Doc Adams and Chester from Gunsmoke... the radio version, Howard McNear and Parley Baer respectively. This Season Three clip features Parley Baer as Mayor Stoner.

1961-62

Wagon Train 32.1, Bonanza 30.0, Gunsmoke 28.3

Bonanza debuted in 1959 but didn't even crack the top ten – let alone the top three – until the 1961-62 season. This coincided with the show's move from Saturday night to Sunday. The show was an immediate hit in its new time slot, opposite GE Theater and The Jack Benny Show on CBS. The elements of the show success were all in place; the family relationship between Lorne Greene's Ben Cartwright and his three adult sons Adam (Pernell Roberts), "Hoss" (Dan Blocker), and "Little" Joe (Michael Landon), all of them the children of different mothers. What set Bonanza apart from most westerns and probably accounted for its long life was that it was primarily interested in relationships – between the Cartwrights and with other people – rather than focused on the sort of shoot'em up action that was the major aspect of most westerns. The show didn't shy away from comedic episodes either. This clip tends to support that contention

1962-63

Beverly Hillbillies 36.0, Candid Camera 31.1, The Red Skelton Show 31.1, Bonanza 29.8, The Lucy Show 29.8

The dominance of the Western was finally broken by a silly little comedy that probably inaugurated the era that I like to describe as the "gimmick" sitcom. Instead of being about "happy" but normal middle clase families dealing with each other, the "gimmick" sitcoms all had, well a gimmick. The "gimmick" for The Beverly Hillbillies was a pretty simple one, the classic "fish out of water." No fish were as far out of their own patch of water as the Clampetts from the Ozark country – I don't think it's really established where the Clampetts originated from although Granny frequently mentions Tennessee and there are later indicators that they were living in southern Missouri – suffice it to say that they were from so far back of beyond that the results of many Presidential elections hadn't reached them. The contrasts were obvious, between the sophisticated city people, personified by banker Milburn Drysdale, his highly educated (and therefore grossly overqualified) secretary Jane Hathaway, and the snooty social climbing Mrs. Drysdale, and the backwoods Clampetts. The show maintained its popularity even as the Clampetts became increasingly more sophisticated (relatively – they did learn about large appliances, dial telephones, and many of the other aspects of modern life) by emphasising the caricature characters; Jethro's stupidity all while thinking he's the most sophisticated member of the family, Milburn Dyrsdale's insatiable greed, and Granny's ongoing feud against anything modern and in particular her neighbour Margaret Drysdale. The show was becoming increasingly tired, and was losing audience when it was cancelled in CBS's 1971 "rural purge" (it finished 18^th in the 1970-71 season), but would probably have survived until the end of 1973 and the death of Irene Ryan. The clip I have here includes one of my favourite minor characters, Jethro's twin sister Jethrine, as well as Sonny Drysdale, played by Louis Nye. (One final note: the original theme music performed by Flatt and Scruggs is under copyright and none of the clips I've managed to find include the original theme music.)

1963-64

Beverly Hillbillies 39.1, Bonanza 36.9, The Dick Van Dyke Show 33.3

The total opposite of The Beverly Hillbillies was The Dick Van Dyke Show. The series had no gimmick beyond the split between work and home. The show was based on Carl Reiner's experience while working with Sid Caesar, although the character of Alan Brady is less Caesar and more of a combination of Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason according to Reiner. There are two distinctive sets of characters between the work and home stories, although they often overlapped. At work, Van Dyke's character Rob Petrie was surrounded by his fellow writers Sally Rogers (Rose Marie) and Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam), the Alan Brady Show's milquetoast producer Mel Cooley (Richard Deacon) and star Alan Brady (Reiner). At home Rob was dealing with his wife Laura (Mary Tyler Moore), son Richie (Larry Matthews), and neighbours Jerry and Millie Helper (Jerry Paris and Anne Morgan Guilbert). The two sides weren't mutually exclusive of course since Rob's friends from work would often come to New Rochelle to visit, and of course Laura would often come to New York and even work on the show. There was a genuine chemistry between the various actors, the biggest being between Rob & Laura/Dick & Mary. The great puzzle today of course is how – and why – a man married to the undeniably sexy Laura Petrie (who wore those Capri Pants to far greater effect on the male libido including the young Rob Reiner – than Lucille Ball ever managed) would have twin beds. One of the great riddles of television to be sure. This office based clip features an appearance by the show's producer, Old Time Radio favourite Sheldon Leonard.

1964-65

Bonanza 36.3, Bewitched 31.0, Gomer Pyle - USMC 30.7

Bewitched took the idea of the "gimmick" comedy a step further. Samantha Stevens (Elizabeth Montgomery) seemed like an ordinary housewife, but in fact she was a witch whose mortal husband Darrin (Dick York, and later Dick Sargent) wanted to stop using her witchly powers. There are those of us who feel that making this demand showed how big a Dick Darrin really was, and certainly if the show had been created even ten or fifteen years later at the heights of feminism she would have told him where he could stick his demands, but if Samantha had been free to use her witchcraft unfettered we probably wouldn't have had a show. As it was, Samantha tried her best to fit into the normal suburban lifestyle. It wasn't easy. For one thing using witchcraft was as much a part of Samantha's life as writing ad copy was for her husband. For another thing there were Samantha's relatives from her mother Endora to her Uncle Arthur, her look-alike cousin Serena, and her Aunt Clara (the only member of Samantha's family that Darrin actually liked) none of whom really understood why Samantha was going along with this. In this clip (one of the few Black & White Season One clips I can find – most of the season one material that has been posted features colorized episodes of the show), Samantha immerses herself in local political affairs, with a politician who might just have another kind of affair on his mind.

Weekend Videos – Friday Night 1984-85

This post was delayed from before the Upfronts. When I started writing this I was concerned that the 2010-11 season would see the broadcast networks largely abandon Friday nights to no-scripted reality programming, which was the way that many of the networks have been going in the past few years. Friday was seen as the "new Saturday," and not in the sense that Saturday night was once the home of some of TV's iconic series. These days the networks have all but abandoned programming anything serious on Saturday nights except sports and FOX's combination of COPS and America's Most Wanted. In the past few years Friday nights were going in the same direction with only CBS having scripted programming in all three hours in the 2009-10 season. There are hopeful signs in the current schedule, with CBS, FOX and The CW all having scripted programming scheduled for all of their time slots – at least for a while – and the other networks having some scripted programming on the night. Still there's a sense that the networks – except for CBS – are one bad ratings period away from abandoning Fridays forever to the likes of Supernanny and Wife Swap.

It wasn't always thus of course. There has been a long history of good TV shows on Friday nights. While it was never featured the powerhouse programming that Saturdays featured for many years it was a big night for the networks for many years. The tendency was to cater to an older and a younger audience – teens and single young adults were assumed to be out on dates – but before the dominance of the 18-49 demographic in the skeevy little minds of network executives, that was enough. Consider the 1975 Friday line-up ABC had the Jack Webb produced Mobile One with Jackie Cooper and a movie – Mobile One lasted 11 episodes before being cancelled. CBS had Big Eddie, a comedy starring Sheldon Leonard as a former gangster with a heart of gold (it died after 13 weeks because of what was on NBC) followed by M*A*S*H, Hawaii Five-0 and Barnaby Jones. NBC had Sanford & Son, Chico and The Man, The Rockford Files and Police Woman. Can you imagine any network putting shows of that quality on Friday nights today? Well maybe Mobile One and Big Eddie but not the other shows.

And yet that's not the line-up I'm going look at. The 1980s saw an even better group of shows. It marked the beginnings of ABC's TGIF line-up that would really flower in the 1990s, while CBS had two of its big primetime soaps, and NBC was running dramas of varying quality. I thought I'd like to look at the 1984-85 season.

ABC opened the night with Benson, then in its last season. What I have is a truncated version of title sequence from that season. Missing from this clip are Rbert Guillaume, who played the title character Benson DuBois and James Noble who played Governor Gatling. I've chosen this version of the show's title sequence because the only other clip from Benson available on YouTube features the original cast of the series which, except for Guillaume, Noble and Inga Swenson were replaced within two season, and I happen to be a fan of the interaction between Benson and Rene Auberjonois's character Clayton Endicott III. Next up, at 8:30 Eastern was Webster, starring Emmanuel Lewis, Alex Karras and Susan Clark. The show was about a newly married couple who on returning from their honeymoon suddenly find themselves the parents of a small black child whose parents had died. This clip features Heather O'Rourke and is something of a compilation of her scenes in the episode. At 9:00 came a rather obscure show called Hawaiian Heat with Jeff McCracken and Robert Ginty playing a pair of Chicago cops who finally get tired of the cold snow and lack of women in bikinis (which was apparently a big selling point of this show) and arrange to transfer to the Honolulu PD. Given that it was up against Dallas and Hunter it isn't surprising that it only lasted 13 weeks. Finally, in the third hour ABC had the third and final season of Matt Houston, starring Lee Horsley and Pamela Hensley. Added to the cast in this season was Buddy Ebsen as the title character's Uncle Roy. Houston was a millionaire oilman who was a private detective as a hobby. Hensley played his lawyer and personal assistant. The worst thing about the addition of Buddy Ebsen – besides the image of Barnaby Jones firing an Uzi – is that it meant less Hensley...who was the main reason why I watched, given the absurd nature of most of the plots in the show.

Over at NBC the night led off with the first series version of V. Adapted from the mini-series of the previous two seasons (May 1983 and May 1984). Since the second mini-series ended with the apparent destruction of the Visitors thanks to the Red Dust and the capture of Diana, the show needed a way to bring the Visitors back, which they accomplished by having a greedy corporate type free her and then having government collapse when the Visitors came back. It was a reach and the series ran out of ideas after 19 episodes. Following V was one of NBC's genuine successes, Hunter, starring retired football player Fred Dryer and Stepfanie Kramer as a pair of detectives with something of a "Dirty Harry" attitude when it came to dealing with the criminals. The relationship between Dryer's Rick Hunter and Kramer's Dee Dee McCall was at times fractious, although by the second season this was toned down by Roy Huggins, who had been called in by series creator Stephen J. Cannell to serve as Executive Producer. Huggins emphasised the chemistry between Hunter & McCall although he never took as far as latter producers did. The series ran for seven years but fell apart in its last season after Kramer left the series. NBC round off the night with Miami Vice, also in its second season. Starring Don Johnson, Philip Michael Thomas and Edward James Olmos. The premise of the show is pretty much summarized in the title; the lead characters – Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs – are vice cops in Miami, although in this case the principal vice is the importation and sale of drugs. Since I included the Miami Vice theme a couple of weeks ago I've decided to offer a scene featuring Phil Collins's song "In The Air Tonight." The show was often accused of being essentially a music video masquerading as a TV show, and scenes like this tend to support that theory.

CBS had the powerhouse line-up of the three networks. In the first hour was Dukes Of Hazard which was in its final season with the network. "Them Dukes" were John Schneider and Tom Wopat playing cousins Bo and Luke Duke who were under the watchful eye of their Uncle Jesse (played by the great character actor Denver Pyle) and a host of supporting characters including James Best and Sorrel Booke. The show was a basic battle of Good (the Dukes and their friends) versus Evil (Boss Hogg and Sherriff Roscoe P. Coltrane) but played in an extremely light-hearted manner, with the bad guys being caricatures who were not quite lovable but somehow not hate worthy. Daisy Duke, played by Catherine Bach provided sex appeal – in a very chaste way since she was yet another Duke cousin, and therefore unavailable to the heroes and unapproachable by anyone that she one her family didn't approve of. Following The Dukes Of Hazard was Dallas which was in its seventh season. The 1984-85 season was the one in which Barbara Bel Geddes retired from the show following her heart surgery and was replaced by Donna Reed, and that is the version of the titles I've included here. Dallas was of course the iconic prime time soap about the Ewing Family. The character of J.R. Ewing, the philandering, "ethically challenged" head of Ewing Oil brought Larry Hagman, who had previously played the straight-laced and scrupulously ethical Major Anthony Nelson on I Dream Of Jeannie back to prorminence and eventually eclipsed his fame for his previous role. Finally the network had the third season of Falcon Crest a prime time soap created by Earl Hamner, who had previously created The Waltons. Starring Jane Wyman as Angela Channing the conniving matriarch of a California winery who is in conflict with just about anyone who gets in her way... which is just about everyone. There was a huge turn-over in cast over the years which meant that new characters suddenly shot to prominence, and at times the plot lines became convoluted and down-right ridiculous, but through it all the series was dominated by Wyman's presence.

I doubt that we'll ever see the networks put forward line-ups like these on Friday nights again, but I'm not entirely convinced that the night is a lost cause either if there were a network besides CBS that was willing to think outside of the 18-49 Demographic box and program the night for families with younger kids who can't go out and the right groups of older viewers who don't want to go out. Those are markets too.

Weekend Videos – Top Rated Shows 1955-1959

(This post delayed by Blogger - I still can't post directly from Word 2007 which has never been a problem until now.)

About a month ago I started posting video clips from the top rated TV shows of the year. My first postings were for the period from the 1950-51 season to the 1954-55 season. This post will feature the period between the 1955-56 season to the 1959-60 season. Here are the rules or at least the guidelines. I will list the top three shows for each season along with the percentage of the nation’s televisions that were tuned to that show during the season. These figures are drawn from the Complete Directory To Prime Time Network And Cable TV Shows 1946-Present. If the season’s top rated show has already been featured either in this post or in the previous post in this series I’ll find a clip from the second highest rated show, provided that it also hasn’t been featured before. The same procedure holds true if there are no clips of the show available online. Finally I’ll also try to make a few comments on the three top rated shows of the season.

1955-56:

The $64,000 Question 47.5%, I Love Lucy 46.1%, The Ed Sullivan Show 39.5%

The $64,000 Question was a phenomenon in its day, and the basic concept of the show – a ladder system in which players win more money as they answer tougher questions – is a major part of many modern game shows like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? The thing that was both the big gimmick and the cause of The $64,000 Question’s eventual downfall was that the players were asked questions in areas where they claimed expertise. The producers were able to select contestants, often based on the incongruity of their areas of expertise. Thus you had a shoemaker who was an expert on opera, a jockey who knew a tremendous amount about art, or an attractive young woman psychologist who knew all about boxing. However this meant that the producers could tailor the questions they asked to whether they and the audience like the contestant. While The $64,000 Question was never “rigged” in the way that other game shows of this period were by giving contestants the answers to the questions, the producers did vary the difficulty of the questions at the higher levels in an attempt to let popular contestants win more money and make less popular contestants lose. Debuting in June 1955 the show was off the air by November 1958, a victim of the game show fixing scandals, although it should be noted that the show’s ratings had begun to slip even before the scandals. The sound track on this clip is slightly out of sync with the visuals.

1956-57

I Love Lucy 43.7%, The Ed Sullivan Show 38.4%, General Electric Theater 36.9%

We’ve already seen I Love Lucy in a previous instalment of this so we have to turn to the second place series for this season, The Ed Sullivan Show. The show started in 1948 as Toast Of The Town and was renamed The Ed Sullivan Show after its host in 1956. Sullivan soon became a television institution (and a favourite of anyone who even thought of doing impressions during his lifetime – including on his own show) in spite of the fact that all he did was introduce the acts at the beginning of the show and shook hands with them at the end. What exactly did Old Stone-Face do on his “really big shoo?” Well the fact is that Sullivan, who had started as a boxer and a sports writer and became and entertainment writer (really a gossip columnist) in the competitive New York newspaper market, had an incredible eye for talent and for knowing what the public wanted. Moreover he was presiding over what was really a vaudeville show. He was able to put together a mix of established acts and newcomers, acts for kids and for adults that would attract a diverse audience. Sullivan knew the established acts and as I’ve said had a great eye for what would work as combinations. But it all needed something to hold it together. That was what Sullivan did on his really big shoo – he held the diverse acts together. This clip from 1964 features the great Frank Gorshin.

1957-58

Gunsmoke 43.1%, The Danny Thomas Show 35.3%, Tales of Wells Fargo 35.2%

Gunsmoke had debuted on TV in the 1955-56 season, although the property would have been familiar from radio where it had debuted in 1952. It failed to crack the top 30 in its first season but had finished seventh in the 1956-57 season. The arrival of Gunsmoke on the scene is responsible for the rise of the “adult” western as a genre on TV. In the 1957-58 there were five westerns in the top ten (Gunsmoke, Tales of Wells Fargo, Have Gun Will Travel, The Life And Legend Of Wyatt Earp, The Restless Gun). Gunsmoke offered viewers strong likeable characters and a definite “Good vs. Evil” motif. As the series developed – and it did run for 20 years so there was plenty of time for development and shifts in focus, which helps to explain why it lasted for 20 years – more characters and greater depth were added to the show. This episode is the first episode of the series from 1955.

1958-59

Gunsmoke 39.6%, Wagon Train 36.1%, Have Gun Will Travel 34.3%

The 1958-59 season may have been the high point of the Western’s popularity. Of the year’s top ten shows only three weren’t Westerns: The Danny Thomas Show, The Real McCoys and I’ve Got A Secret. Wagon Train was one of the great westerns. Inspired by the John Ford movie Wagon Master it starred one of Ford’s stock company, Ward Bond from 1957-1961 when Bond died. In fact Ford directed one episode with Bond that aired eighteen days after the actor’s death of a heart attack in 1961. The show had fairly small regular cast – Bond’s trail master Major Adams, (replaced by John McIntire after Bond’s death) the scout played for five seasons by Robert Horton and for three more by Robert Fuller, the assistant trail master played by Terry Wilson, and the cook played by Frank McGrath. or the most part the episodes weren’t about them, they were about the people in the wagon train and the people that the train encountered as they travelled from St. Joseph Missouri to California, making it more of an anthology series than most westerns. This clip, from 1960, features Peter Lorre and Robert Horton.

1959-60
Gunsmoke 40.3%, Wagon Train 38.4%, Have Gun Will Travel 34.7%

Have Gun Will Travel was another of the classic Westerns. Richard Boone played the man called Paladin (real name unknown), a cultured and erudite former army officer, who is also a professional gun for hire. Dressed entirely in black, Paladin would usually leave his residence at the Carlton Hotel in San Francisco to fulfill a contract – or not, since sometimes he felt more sympathy with the people that he was hired to deal with than with the people who hired him. The only other recurring character in the series was the hotel Chinese bell hop known as Hey Boy played by Kam Tong, although in the fourth season he was replaced by a new character, Hey Girl (played by Lisa Lu) because Kam Tong had taken a somewhat larger part in a different series. Because of this the series had numerous guest stars, some of whom appeared numerous times, many of whom would be instantly recognizable. One unique aspect of Have Gun Will Travel is the fact that there are themes, and that the closing theme is the one that is better known. The music that is most associated with the show, Johnny Western’s Ballad of Paladin made its first appearance after the first season, and was never the introduction to the show. The show’s actual theme was composed by Bernard Hermann. This clip features frequent guest star Charles Bronson, and Harry Carey Jr. I’m also including a clip of the closing theme done by Johnny Western.

Weekend Videos – It’s Mother’s Day

I had almost forgotten that this is Mother's Day until my brother reminded me by telling us that he's cooking supper on Sunday (which I dread because I'm better on the barbecue than he is). As usual I was planning on doing a Mother's Day tribute, but with my recent decision to do videos on the weekend I thought I'd do it a little differently this time around – instead of photos, post videos. But videos of what? What would be my inspiration?

Fortunately succour was at hand. My friend Valerie has three kids, one of whom is getting married this month. Val, whose birthday is on May 9^th – Mother's Day this year – is slightly freaking. Actually she posted on her Facebook page, "The word MOTHER IN-LAW is starting to freak me out!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" And there it was – inspiration. The supposedly dark side of mothering...The Mother-In-Law.

Mothers-in-law have, on the whole, a negative reputation. For the most part this is courtesy of stand-up comics who usually make their mothers-in law the butt of their jokes. Mothers-in-law in these jokes are inevitably antagonistic to their sons-in law (usually – in more recent shows like Everybody Loves Raymond it's the wife who is targeted by the mother-in-law venom) for not being good enough for their little baby. Mothers-in-law are inevitably seen as interfering with the lives of the next generation on the grounds that "mother knows best."

Our first example comes from this school of mothers-in-law. It's probably inevitable that Ralph Kramden would have an antagonistic relationship with his mother-in-law. Played her by Ethel Owen, Mrs. Gibson doesn't give Ralph any respect at all, not about his weight, his lack of money or his status as the head of the household. This clip, from Mrs. Gibson's second appearance in a Honeymooners piece (her first was in a story that was done on the original Jackie Gleason Show called "The Great Jewel Robbery") contains the great moment when Ralph comes into the apartment and just stares at her with undisguised antagonism. Later in this episode, in a clip that I'm not embedding, we see her entire attitude change when she thinks that Ralph has struck it rich. She not only become respectful she's downright fawning, to the point of telling her daughter to "be quiet" when Alice tries to reign in Ralph's spending. Mrs. Gibson (she's never given a first name) was played by Ethel Owen in five episodes of the original Jackie Gleason Show and The Honeymooners. Years later the character appeared in a colour Honeymooners segment of the 1960s Jackie Gleason Show. In this episode she was played by Pert Kelton in one of her final acting roles. Kelton had originally played Alice Kramden in the first seasons of the Jackie Gleason Show, when the show was seen on the Dumont network.

In a similar style to the relationship between Ralph Kramden and Alice's mother is the relationship between Fred Flintstone and his mother-in-law Mrs. Pearl Slaghoople. Their interactions are almost entirely verbal, since an animated character – particularly a character from the Hanna-Barbera stable of limited animation – can't really sell an attitude based solely on a facial expression in the way that an actor like Jackie Gleason is able to. However, like Mrs. Gibson, Mrs. Slaghoople is entirely disdainful of her son-in-law even though Fred is probably a better provider than Ralph Kramden is (of course they're living in Bedrock not metropolitan New York). Pearl Slaghoople is voiced by Verna Felton, who is probably best known to Old Time Radio fans for playing Dennis Day's mother on the various incarnations of The Jack Benny Program. She even played Dennis's mother on TV, heaping the same sort of abuse on Mr. Benny as she did on her animated son-in-law.

Of course it isn't just men who are the victims of mothers-in-laws. Consider Marie Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond. Marie rules not by insult and intimidation but by making every member of her family feel guilty for even breathing. Her biggest target is her daughter-in-law Debra who at least tries to fight back (but will never win), and her sons Raymond and Robert who just roll over and accept it. In this clip we see that Ray gets along fine with his mother-in-law, but Debra and Marie? Just watch Debra try to call Marie Mom? Marie takes shots from the moment she appears in the scene, and when Debra finally gets the word out Marie turns into the iceberg that sank the Titanic. Beautiful understanding of the character from Doris Robertrs.

Of course when it came to "troublesome" mothers-in-law, no one came close to Darrin Stevens. When he said that his mother-in-law was a witch he wasn't exaggerating. Endora almost never had a good word for her son-in-law, including his real name. In fact, according to the Wikipedia article on Bewitched, Endora only ever called Darrin by his correct name eight times. A favourite was "Dum-Dum." Like many of TV mothers-in-law she didn't think her daughter's husband was good enough for her daughter, but unlike most of them she made a significant and active effort to break up their relationship, whether by bringing in one of Samantha's old boyfriends or by some other complicated scheme. Her antipathy to Darrin ran deeper than just that he wasn't good enough for him. Put into real world terms, it was as like a wealthy woman marrying a man in the middle class, although this wasn't the only dimension to it. Samantha wasn't just a child of privilege, she was someone with a special ability that Darrin refused to allow her to use. It is so typically a 1960s situation that is seen in numerous other shows. If you were to remake Bewitched today and Darrin were to order Samantha not to use her powers, not only would she tell him where to get off, she'd probably take him there, and most of the women viewers would applaud. But in the days when the firm of McMahon & Tate was competing against Sterling Cooper, women like Samantha Stevens and Betty Draper were dutiful wives and suffered in silence.

Most mothers-in-law on TV shows were treated fairly enough. Ricky Ricardo got along well with Lucy's mother, while Lucy's biggest problem with Senora Ricardo was the language barrier. Jed Clampett's mother-in-law moved to California with him (but he was a widower), and even Tim Taylor got along famously with his wife's mother on Home Improvement. I don't think that the "harridan" mother-in-law was ever really as common on TV as we thought it was, and it's probably a thing of the past... unless it's really really funny.

Weekend Videos – TV Themes

I want this weekly segment to be rather special and so I find Inspiration where I can. In this particular case my inspiration was an interview that Media Week's Mark Berman did with Dan Schneider. Now some people might remember Schneider from the Howard Hesseman comedy Head Of The Class (or maybe not – think Welcome Back Kotter with uber-smart kids not Sweathogs). Schneider played the overweight but extremely knowledgeable Dennis Blunden. Since then, Schneider has become a well known producer of kids' shows working for Nickelodeon. Among the series he's created are iCarly, Victorious, Zoey 101 and Drake & Josh, all for Nickelodeon, as well as What I Like About You for The WB (which he did with sometimes producing partner Brian Robbins who also starred on Head Of The Class and was one of the producers of Smallville). In the article Schneider told Berman of his fondness for TV theme songs:

The big networks have virtually abandoned TV theme songs. Granted, there are exceptions like The Big Bang Theory. A theme song is like the soul of a TV show. Imagine Cheers, Friends, All in the Family, M*A*S*H, Mary Tyler Moore or Happy Days without their classic openings. Luckily, Nickelodeon gets it.

As for my favorite TV theme song of all time? Maybe The Brady Bunch, Gilligan's Island or The Beverly Hillbillies…too many great ones to decide. But if I'm forced to choose, I'm gonna go with either iCarly or Victorious.

Schneider is right; the big networks – by which I presume that he means the Broadcast Networks – have largely abandoned the theme song, and the reason seems pretty obvious: commercials. In the 1960s an hour long show had 51 minutes of actual content and 9 minutes of advertising. Today the same hour long show has 42 minutes of content and 18 minutes of advertising – in other words more than a quarter of the show's nominal running time is given over to advertising. Something has to give, particularly since I think that we can all agree that the story telling in the best Broadcast TV shows has become more complex. Something's got to give in order to accommodate the story telling and I think there are a lot of producers, directors and writers who figure that a thirty second or one minute theme song is a waste of time that they could use for plotting.

And yet you do remember shows with themes, even today. It isn't the only selling point but you do remember cues, and sound is something that you automatically associate to a show even when the music is disconnected from the images. Think of the songs that The Who played during the Superbowl halftime show. More than a few people commented that Townshend and Daltrey played "Who Are You?," "Won't Get Fooled Again," and "Baba O'Riley" on the orders of CBS because they're the theme songs of CSI, CSI: Miami, and CSI: New York. Whether or not it is true, the fact that people thought that proves that people immediately thought not of the first time that they heard these songs "in the wild" but as the themes for the shows proves that the link exists. But of course we've known that for years as anyone who, on hearing the last part of the William Tell Overture immediately recites the words "A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty heigh-ho Silver away! The Lone Ranger rides again!!"

I suppose that you could argue that the culmination of this is that TV theme songs have been in the top 60 on Billboard's Pop Singles chart in every decade except the 2000s, according to The Complete Directory To Prime Time Network And Cable TV Shows. This means of course that they had radio air play and when they had radio airplay, people inevitably thought of the TV show. In fact, TV theme songs have been in the Top Ten on the list in every decade except the 2000s. So as a starting point for looking TV show themes – and this is another of those subjects that can just go on and one and on because there are so many good original theme songs – let's take a look at the highest ranking TV themes of each decade (well, with one exception, which I'll explain when I get to it).

First up, from the 1990s we have the theme from a really obscure FOX series called The Heights. The series was about a group of young middle class adults who form a band, named The Heights.The show ran for 12 episodes in the Fall of 1992 but never gained an audience. The song, How Do You Talk To An Angel? (sung by series star Jamie Walters) on the other hand hit #1 on the Billboard Charts. In one of those amazing bits of serendipity the song hit #1 in the Billboard Charts one week after the show was cancelled

In the 1980s the theme from Miami Vice was the big hit. Jan Hammer's theme for the show hit #1 on November 2, 1985, a year after the series debuted at the end of September 1984. Hammer won two Grammy Awards for the theme in February 1986 for "Best Pop Instrumental Performance," and "Best Instrumental Composition." I have to confess that this is an absolute favourite of mine (and not just for the anonymous woman who jiggles her way across the screen at the 0:15 mark... although that didn't hurt). It just seems like the right theme for that series.

In the 1970s two themes actually reached the top of the Billboard Charts. The first was the theme from S.W.A.T. This is a bit of a cheat however since the recording, which hit the #1 spot at the end of February 1976, performed by the "disco-funk" band Rhythm Heritage is described in the Wikipedia article about the song as being "a noticeably different recording than the actual TV theme version." As it stands the theme song for the Leonard Goldenberg-Aaron Spelling police action series is pretty good.

The other song to hit the top of the Billboard charts in the 1970s was John Sebastian's theme for Welcome Back Kotter. In fact the song was the reason the show was renamed Welcome Back Kotter. Originally intended to be called simply Kotter producer Alan Sachs wanted a "Lovin' Spoonfuls-like" theme song. John Sebastien, who had been the lead vocalist for the group and also wrote many of their songs, didn't know what to do with that title and came back with Welcome Back which like some of the best theme songs told the back story of the whole show. The song reached the top of the Billboard chart for one week in Spring 1976 after five weeks on the charts.

I recently played the highest charting theme song of the 1960s when I looked at "spy shows" of the 1960s. That song was Secret Agent Man performed by Johnny Rivers. The song replaced the British theme for Danger Man (which was used over the opening for each episode). Originally consisting of one verse and a chorus but as the song became increasingly popular two more verses were added. The song eventually hit #3 in the Billboard Charts.

Instead of playing the Secret Agent theme again, I'm going to turn the song that had the second highest finish of any TV theme songs on the Billboard Charts in the 1960s. That would be the Hawaii Five-0 theme, which hit #4 on the Billboard charts in 1969. Personally I think it's a better piece of music, and extremely evocative of the show. The quick cuts of the show's opening montage, combined with the music creates an immediate sense that this is going to be a fast moving and exciting adventure. The credit sequence is a beautiful piece of work in itself, anticipating the whole idea of a music video. (I confess however that I would watch that over and over just to see that girl turn her head toward the camera. Beautiful.)

The first TV theme to make it onto the top 10 of the Billboard Charts is the theme from Dragnet, played by the Ray Anthony Orchestra, which made it to #2 in 1953. This is something of a cheat since Dragnet had begun as a radio show in 1949 two years before it came to TV in 1951. Still it was and remains one of the iconic television themes. The theme actually consists of two parts, with an interesting history. The first part of the theme (the Dum da dumdum Dum da dumdum duh) is known as "Danger Ahead" and was the subject of a suit by the publishers of Miklos Rozsa's theme for the movie The Killers. Walter Schumann, who composed the Dragnet theme had visited the sound stage where Rosza was recording the movie theme and had picked up the brief melody, which is used as a cue in the movie. Schumann composed the second part of the theme, known as "The Dragnet March" which appears at the end of the show over the credits. A deal was finally worked out to give both men a share fo the credit for the whole piece. That's why for this theme I'm showing the end of an episode of Dragnet, which contains both parts of the music.

Finally, because I don't have a representative for the 2000s I thought I'd look in at what became of the theme that Roza and Schumann composed when it was updated by Mike Post for the ill-fated Dragnet series from 2003, created by Dick Wolff and starring Ed O'Neill. It's actually not a bad theme.

This one of those topics that can (and probably will) go on for a long time because there are so many great pieces of TV theme music. I'd like to know some of my reader's favourites.

Weekend Videos – Top Rated Shows 1950-54

I started this the other day and lost my work when Works "ceased to function" when I saved the file... or thought I saved the file.

The inspiration behind this post was something that I saw in Bill Crider's most excellent blog Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine. In this particular case the blog entry directed me to an article on TV.com, called The Most Overrated Shows On Television. The article has staff members from the blog, cloaked in the protective veil of anonymity ("to protect them from your hateful comments") these people listed eight shows that they consider overrated: Lost, The Office, Weeds, American Idol, NCIS, Glee, Mad Men, and 30 Rock. I won't go into detail about the article, but the quality of the comments ranged from trivial to downright inane (just check out the comments on NCIS which seems to focus more on Pauly Perrette's wardrobe and whether or not Michael Weatherly and Mark Harmon are "hot" as reasons why the show is "overrated." That sort of "reasoning" together with the anonymous nature of the writers devalued the article in my opinion. Still it did serve as inspiration for this article, a look at the highest rated shows of each year from 1950 to today... or at least as close to today as YouTube and copyright restrictions will let me get.

Here's the way I want to work it. I will list the top three shows of each year together with the percentage of the nation's televisions that were tuned to the show. I'll try to post a comment on the shows as well as one or two clips from the show. If clips from the show are unavailable or the show has already been featured on this list then I'll find clips from the next highest show, and so on. The data is taken from The Complete Directory To Prime Time Network And Cable TV Shows.

1950-51:
Texaco Star Theater 61.6%, Fireside Theater 52.6%, Philco TV Playhouse 45.3%.

Texaco Star Theater was of course the show that made Milton Berle into Mr. TV. The show started as a variety series but became increasingly Berle's show. Eventually Berle would leave sponsor Texaco and would star in his own series, The Milton Berle Show which ran until 1956, and retained much the same format as what the Texaco Star Theater had become by the end of his time with the show. These viewership figures show that everybody watched Berle. Fireside Theater was a half-hour drama anthology. Later it would be renamed The Jane Wyman Show after its most famous host. The show ran from 1949 to 1958. Also debuting in 1948 The Philco TV Playhouse was an hour long dramatic anthology series. By 1950 the show had evolved into a mix of adapted and original plays, musicals featuring actors who either were stars or who would become major stars, including Anthony Quinn, Grace Kelly, Paul Newman, Julie Harris and, in the last episode of the series, Sidney Poitier.

1951-52:
Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts 53.8%, Texaco Star Theater 52.0%, I Love Lucy 50.9%

Arthur Godfrey was a long-time radio host who made the transition from radio to television with not one but two variety shows, Arthur Godfrey And His Friends, and this show Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. In 1951-52 both shows were in the top ten in viewership. This really wasn't an amateur show since most of the acts that appeared on the show had some professional experience but needed that "big break." Among the stars "discovered" by Godfrey's Scouts were Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Leslie Uggams, Roy Clark and Patsy Cline. Famously the show passed on a couple of acts that really went somewhere – Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. As for I Love Lucy, well wait for the next clips.

1952-53: I Love Lucy 67.3%, Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts 54.7%, Arthur Godfrey And His Friends 47.1%

What can you say about I Love Lucy? Well how about this; between 1951 when the show debuted and 1957 when the last half-hour episodes were shot it was only out of first place in the ratings twice, once in 1951 and once in 1955 when The $64,000 Question was the hottest show on TV. The show marked the debut of the three camera filming system for comedies (so Desi and Lucy wouldn't have to move to New York to do the show), and while it was not the first series to feature a star having a baby it was the first mainstream series to do so. The spike in viewership in this season is undoubtedly explained by the fact that this season marked the birth of Little Ricky. Arthur Godfrey And His Friends was Godfrey's second series, a music show which featured a variety of acts. This season was the one that featured Julius LaRosa whose firing by Godfrey was a major new story.

I'm also including an in-show performance of Babalu by Desi Arnaz because, well I like it!

1953-54: I Love Lucy 58.8%, Dragnet 53.2%, Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts 54.7%

Dragnet was in its third season and had built its audience significantly from its debut season in 1951-52. While those of us of a "certain age" remember the 1960's incarnation of the series as being unintentionally funny and certainly "square," the 1950s version of the series was the real deal, touching on subjects from gun control, juvenile delinquency and pornography to unwed mothers, child abandonment and pedophilia. The 1950s version of the show really was hard hitting (and I don't just mean the way that Joe Friday dealt with some suspects). Look for Lee Marvin in this one.

1954-55:
I Love Lucy 58.8%, The Jackie Gleason Show 42.4%, Dragnet 53.2%

When most of us think of Jackie Gleason on TV we think of The Honeymooners, but that show only ran for a single season, 1955-56. Before and after that single season of The Honeymooners was The Jackie Gleason Show, a comedy variety series with a heavy emphasis on sketch comedy. Gleason did shorter Honeymooners stories but had a huge number of characters including Reggie van Gleason III, Joe the Bartender, The Poor Soul and a host of others.

I think I'll try to run this format on a monthly basis.