Forgotten TV Shows - Gang Busters

I got a lot of good response from the first of these so I’ve decided to stick with it. Yes I should be reviewing some modern shows, and I think I’ll get around to it, but I have to confess that I’ve been kind of busy the past few weeks. And just maybe I’ve become a bit too set in my viewing habits. Doing these pieces is at least letting me keep my toe in until I get motivated to do more.




Title: Gangbusters
Dates: March 20, 1952 to December 25, 1952 (12 Episodes)
Starring: Philips H. Lord (Narrator) Otherwise it was an anthology show.
Surprising Fact: According to The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows 1946-Present it may be the highest rated TV show ever to be cancelled.
Why Forgotten?: It only ran for 12 episodes. As an anthology show it had no big name stars. It shared – quite literally – the time slot with Dragnet.

The story of Gang Busters might be described as a complicated one. The show debuted on radio in July 1935 on NBC before moving to CBS from January 1936 to June 1940. In October of that year it moved to NBC’s Blue Network until the end of December 1948. In January 1949 it returned CBS and ran until June 1955. It was heard on the Mutual Broadcasting System from October 1955 to November 1957. It was in fact one of the last two half-hour dramatic series on Mutual. In the end it assembled an impressive radio run of 22 years. Few radio shows could claim a run that long. The show also spawned a movie serial in the 1940s and a DC comic book series that ran for 67 issues between 1947 and 1958.

The radio show was controversial in its time and for the usual reason that shows and media are controversial – the supposed impact on children. Parent-Teacher groups placed the responsibility for juvenile delinquency on children and teenagers listening to the exploits of the criminals depicted on Gang Busters. In 1940 Time Magazine was able to find a parole officer in the juvenile justice system who claimed that he learned about techniques that the young criminals of his town were using by listening to the show. He also said that he learned how to respond to the slang being used by the juvenile delinquents he was dealing with. When the show temporarily left the air in June 1940 – the time when it shifted from CBS to the NBC Blue Network – the writer for Time seemed positively triumphant about the end of the show because it couldn’t sell toothpaste: “But last week Gang Busters faced a foe that got them down.Convinced that Gang Busters might be catching crooks but were not selling Cue, the liquid dentifrice, the sponsors decided not to renew their contract. Still shooting, still with their boots on, Gang Busters vacated the airwaves.” Somehow Time didn’t pay much attention to the show’s return to the air later that year, on a different network, with a different sponsor.

The television version of Gang Busters doesn’t seem to have excited that same hatred that the radio version did during the 1930s. Of course by 1952, everyone “knew” that juvenile delinquency was caused by comic books thanks to Dr. Frederic Wertham. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Gang Busters came from radio to television; according to The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows 1946-Present over 200 radio shows made the transition to the new medium. No, it was the circumstances of Gang Busters coming to TV that were a bit different, and it has to do with another radio show transitioning to TV, Dragnet.

Dragnet debuted on TV in January 1952 after two and a half years on radio (where it would continue until 1957). Apparently Webb had a problem delivering a complete half-hour episode to NBC every week so in March 1952 it was decided to alternate another program with Dragnet. That show was Gang Busters. One week would feature an episode of Dragnet and the next week an episode of Gang Busters. Again, while not common this was certainly not unheard of in network TV in this period. For most of his time on TV (the 1954-1960 period) Jack Benny was only on every other week, alternating first with Private Secretary (starring Anne Southern), then with Bachelor Father, and in the final year of the arrangement with The George Gobel Show.

The television version of Gang Busters jettisoned one of the main components of the radio version of the show. The radio show was hosted by a member – or former member – of a law enforcement body: Colonel H. Norman Schwartzkopf (Sr.) who had been in charge of the New Jersey State Police at the time of the Lindbergh Kidnapping in 1932 hosted Gang Busters on radio for a while. This host would interview a police official directly tied to the original case. And you could tell they were the real deal because quite frankly most of them were awful in front of a microphone. In the TV version of the series, the show host was dispensed with and the “cops” who told the story were a lot more professional in front of the microphone…mostly because they were the actors who played the real life cops in the dramatic portion of the episode. But except for this change, and the addition of a bumper at the end of the episode featuring Jack Webb telling about next week’s episode of Dragnet, the format of the series stayed pretty much the same as it had been in radio, right down to alerting viewers as to a different criminal on the loose every episode.

The team of Dragnet and Gang Busters hit television like a storm. In the 1951-52 season ratings which ran from October 1951 to April 1952, Gang Busters aGangctually had a higher rating than Dragnet – 38.7 for Gang Busters to 36.3 for Dragnet. Of course, since Gang Busters only began in March 1952, just a few weeks before the end of the rating period while Dragnet debuted in January 1952, this isn’t an entirely fair comparison. The 1952-53 ratings are more significant. Dragnet finished fourth with a rating of 46.8, which made it the highest rated NBC show for the season. Gang Busters finished in eighth place with a rating of 42.4. What you must remember too is that until 1960 the ratings represented the percentage of all homes that had TV sets that were watching a particular show. In other words, 42.4% of all homes with TVs were watching Gang Busters. The other 57.8% of homes with TVs were either tuned to one of the other three networks – ABC, CBS and Dumont – or they weren’t turned on. The situation was such that Dumont, CBS and ABC aired public affairs programs in the time slot until after the Presidential elections in November and then what must be described as “sacrificial lamb shows” for the rest of the year.

And yet Gang Busters was cancelled in January 1952, and the authors of The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows 1946-Present suggest that the cancellation might all have been according to plan. They write, “The reason for the cancellation appears to be that Gangbusters was never intended to be a full-time TV series , but merely a stopgap provided by the sponsor to fill in the weeks when Dragnet wasn’t on. Jack Webb even appeared at the end of each telecast to plug the next week’s Dragnet episode. Webb could not at first provide a new Dragnet film every week, but when he could, Dragnet (which was even more popular than Gangbusters) went weekly and Gangbusters had to make way.” It is nearly impossible to think of a modern network executive (particularly one at NBC) willingly dropping a show with this degree of popularity. They would find a spot for the show, possibly even have tried to find a way to have it follow Dragnet. In short it would be a property too valuable to waste. Which leads me to wonder what other influences were at play around this decision both at NBC and at whatever advertiser was the direct sponsor of the series.

In the end, Dragnet is highly regarded as one of the landmarks of 1950s television and in some ways as the predecessor of the procedural series that fill the airwaves today. Meanwhile Gang Busters is a little known series with a small cult of fans. The one and only reviewer that the series had at IMDB wrote: “Yet, what worked so well on radio just didn't jell on the small screen. Despite series creator Phillips H. Lord's total involvement in the production, it all looked so disjointed and cheap, judging from the four episodes I have on DVD. NBC obviously knew this as well, for despite very high ratings, they regarded this show as a stop gap filler for the equally successful "Dragnet" during its early years as a bi-weekly show. When Jack Webb filmed enough episodes for a weekly slot, "Gang Busters", one of the highest rated series of the 1952 season, had to go. So, what could have been a potential landmark in television history, as it was on radio, was merely a low-budget bench-hitter during the early days of TV.” I think it may be a rather poor and inaccurate assessment of the show. Based on some early episodes of Dragnet that I’ve seen on DVD it could seem “low-budget” and “disjointed and cheap” itself at times. Moreover, as I’ve said both the network and the advertisers should have jumped at the chance to have a show that drew as high a percentage of homes with TVs as Gang Busters did on the air, selling their products. Some episodes are apparently available on DVD but be aware that the image that they show on the IMDB page for the show is actually of the DVD for the 1942 Gang Busters serial not the TV series. I’ve only seen the first episode of the series in its entirety (I’m including it below) but except for the hokiness of the Hugh Sanders’s speech at the end of the dramatic part of the episode, I can honestly say that I’ve seen worse, and of far more recent vintage. Judge for yourself.

Forgotten TV Shows–The Life Of Riley (1949)

Yeah, I’m back… sort of. I think that in the past two months I’ve started three or four different articles but so far nothing has germinated into being good enough to post.I’m not second guessing myself, I have just been quite busy and as a result quite tired. And besides, I bought one of the cheap Kindles, and I’m reading quite a bit.

Still I’ve been wanting to get back in harness and putting something together on “forgotten” TV shows on a weekly basis – well an approximately weekly basis – seems like a direction to take. After all my blogging buddy Bill Crider features postings about “Forgotten Films” or “Forgotten Books” on an almost daily basis in his blog Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine, and frequent commenter her and elsewhere Todd Mason regularly collects links about overlooked film and other A/V material in his blog Sweet Freedom, so I figured I might as well join the trend. After all, if you`re going to steal an idea, steal a good one. And since my blogging buddy Ivan G. Shreve Jr. is just ending a contest to give away a box set of Radio Spirits’ Life Of Riley CDs (the program guide for which was coincidentally(?) written by that distinguished radio historian Ivan G. Shreve Jr.) at HIS blog Thrilling Days Of Yesterday, well the choice for the first show to profiled is pretty obvious.

Title: The Life Of Riley
Dates: October 4, 1949 to March 28, 1950 (26 episodes)
Starring: Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Lanny Rees, Gloria Winters, Sidney Tomack, John Brown.
Surprising Fact: The show won an Emmy in 1950 as “Best Film Made for and Viewed on Television in 1949,” the first situation comedy to win an Emmy (it beat out The Lone Ranger and Silver Theater).
Why Forgotten?: Several reasons: First the star: Jackie Gleason (in his first TV series) instead of William Bendix who played the part on radio and in a movie that debuted the same year that the TV series did. Second, the show lasted less than a full season.Third, it was 1949. Fourth, both the show and the star went on to better things.

Now let’s go into the situation in depth. The Life Of Riley began as a radio show in January 1944 on the NBC Blue Network which was in the process of becoming ABC. It shifted to NBC in September 1945. The radio show starred William Bendix as Chester A. Riley,  Paula Winslowe as his wife Peg, and John Brown as both Riley’s best friend Jim Gillis and most famously as Digby “Digger” O’Dell “the friendly undertaker” (he also played a third character named Waldo Binny) The told the story of Riley, a Brooklyn born riveter at a California aircraft plant, his wife two kids and their friends. Riley is a sentimental guy whose attempts at taking a tough line or do something he thinks is right – usually on advice from Gillis – he ends up getting into trouble. With some good advice from Digger and a lot of help from the level-headed Peg he manages to survive the situations he finds himself in. As an interesting side note, one of the developers of the radio series was theatrical  Milton Marx – known to Marx Brothers fans as Gummo, the brother who never appeared in the movies.

In 1949 a Life of Riley movie was made starring Bendix, Rosemary DeCamp as Peg, Meg Randall and Lanny Rees as Riley’s kids, Babs and Junior, Brown as “Digger” O’Dell and James Gleason as Gillis. With TV beginning to gain ground and the movie further building awareness of the visual possibilities of the show, It seemed like a great idea to put The Life of Riley on TV, with Bendix recreating his radio role. The problem was that Bendix was under contract to RKO Radio Pictures as a movie actor, and like a lot of movie stars his contract prevented him from doing TV. So, the role of Riley had to be recast. Sometime movie actor and nightclub comedian Jackie Gleason was tapped for the role. Rosemary Decamp and Lanny Rees came over from the movie as did Brown. Gloria Winters – who is much more famous for her later role on Sky King as his niece – played Babs. Gillis, who was played by John Brown on the radio show, was played by Sid Tomack. The problem was of course that the radio show was still on the air and would stay on the air until 1951. There were obvious comparisons between the TV Riley and the radio version – who had also been seen in the movie – and Gleason, with his popping eyes didn’t fit people’s vision of Riley. Plus, Gleason was 33 when he got the role as Riley, a man with a teenaged daughter and a son who either was a teenager or was about to become one.

And yet, it does not appear that the show was cancelled for poor ratings. The show ran for 26 episodes which today seems like a full season or even more than a full season at a time when the typical series runs between 22 and 24 episodes. However in 1949-50 the typical season was 39 episodes. So what happened? Apparently the show’s producer Irving Brecher, got into a dispute with the show’s sponsor Pabst Brewing over extending the show to a full 39 episode season. In those days shows were effectively controlled by sponsors and their advertising agencies, with the networks having far less power.

Another reason why the show is largely forgotten today is that it was being made in 1949. There were only about 125 TV stations in the entire country. Many TV shows, and most comedies were shot and broadcast live from New York for much of the country. Stations in the Pacific and Mountain time zones were provided with kinescopes; the episodes were filmed off of the TV monitor which were then flown to California to air on NBC regional network based there. Kinescopes were inevitably poorer quality than would be seen either when the shows aired live or once the three camera set-up became the standard for producing TV series. The net result is that while a considerable amount of Gleason’s version of The Life Of Riley apparently survives, not many people saw it at the time, and the whole idea of syndicating reruns wouldn’t really be thought of until I Love Lucy came on the scene a few years later.

Maybe the biggest reason why the show qualifies as “forgotten” is that both the show and its star went on to bigger and better things. Gleason would get his own variety show, The Cavalcade of Stars, on the Dumont Network in 1951. The show was a hit for Dumont, and so was promptly poached by CBS which could promise the advertisers a much bigger audience than Dumont could deliver. The show then became The Jackie Gleason Show which spawned a number of character driven sketches including The Honeymooners, which ran as a stand-alone series in the 1955-56 season. Gleason himself would continue to work with CBS on a number of series until 1970. The Gleason show for much of he 1960s – initially known as American Scene Magazine and later as The Jackie Gleason Show would feature Honeymooner episodes, many in colour.

As for The Life of Riley, in January 1953 William Bendix – apparently freed from the restrictions of his RKO contract – appeared in a revival of The Life of Riley. Marjorie Reynolds played Peg, Wesley Morgan was Junior, Lugene Sanders played Babs and Tom d’Andrea was Jim Gillis. Joan Blondell’s sister Gloria Blondell appeared as Gillis’s wife Honeybee for most of the show’s six seasons, and Groucho Marx had a writer’s credit for “story”. The show ran until 1958 with various neighbours coming and going. Even the Riley kids eventually left the show; Babs got married and Junior went off to college. They would however make frequent appearances on the show. One character who did not make the transition from the radio version – and the first TV version – of the show was Digger O’Dell. John Brown, who played Digger was blacklisted as a result of accusations made in the pamphlet Red Channels. Although Brown lived until 1957, dying a few weeks after his 53rd birthday, he career ended in 1952. For whatever reason however it was decided not to try to find someone else to play the O’Dell character. The show did fine without him, spending four of its six seasons in the top 30 in the ratings and entering syndication after production on the 217 episodes was completed.

The 1949 version of The Life Of Riley is apparently in public domain. Several releases of the Gleason version of the show are available. Depending on the version these can be expensive. Some episodes are also on YouTube. What follows is the complete second episode of the show. Note that there is no laughter, and that the theme is whistled. The former is because the show was filmed and before the three camera system was developed that meant that there wasn't a studio audience to react to the jokes. The latter is because the musicians union was on strike when the show was being made.

The Dick Van Dyke Show Blogathon: In Praise Of Laura Petrie’s Ass

I have a confession to make. I am in love with Laura Petrie. And her ass. So maybe not love, maybe just lust.

Now there are a few reasons why this couldn’t possibly work out. For one thing, Laura Petrie is a fictional character. For another thing while I am in love (or lust) with Laura Petrie, I have no particular feelings of either love or lust for the actress who portrayed her, Mary Tyler Moore. I never had a “reaction” to Mary Richards or almost any other character that Mary Tyler Moore has played in her long career. Well maybe the woman she played opposite Robert Wagner in a little known farce called Don’t Just Stand There. But Change of Habit did nothing for me, and she played a hot nun in that, which usually tickles a certain pervy side of me. Certainly I never wanted to sleep with Mary Richards. Finally, even if she were real, Laura Petrie is old enough to be my mother. I know that because her son Little Richie is a year older than I am; well at least Larry Matthews, the actor who played Richie Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show is one year older than me, to the day (August 15th; Rose Marie, who also starred on the show was also born on August 15th, but over thirty years before Larry and I). Never the less, had the term MILF existed in 1961 when the Dick Van Dyke Show began airing, Laura Petrie would have been one.

I pretty much discovered The Dick Van Dyke Show while I was an adolescent. Oh sure, I was around when the show was in its first run. In fact it was even shown on the one TV station that we had in Saskatoon in the 1960s. But I didn’t see it at that time. It was on relatively late in the evening, and my family had a rather absurd idea of when a five year old should go to bed. So I saw the show as an adolescent and we all know how adolescent boys are. It might have made a difference if I had seen the show as a child…but probably not.

Now lest you think that I was (and remain) a horndog with the mind of a sex obsessed fifteen year old, I would like to inform you of two things. The first is that I was and remain fully cognizant of the brilliance of this series. While many shows fixate on either the work environment or the home as the center of the action, with the other locale relegated to a secondary position if it’s shown at all (that’s one of my huge complaints about most modern procedurals – the protagonists seem to live entirely at and for work). The Dick Van Dyke Show mixed domestic stories in which the work cast would barely appear, and work based stories in which Laura and maybe (but not always) Richie would show up but you’d never see Jerry and Millie. And then of course there were the “neither fish nor fowl” flashback episodes most of which took place during Rob and Laura’s courtship and first year or so of marriage at Camp Crowder.

The second is that it took me a while to fully realize just how hot Laura Petrie (and Mary Tyler Moore) was. It is a testament to how brilliantly cast this show was that Moore was placed amongst a brilliant and experienced comedy and entertainment ensemble cast and she keeps up with the others as a comedic actor in spite of her age and her lack of experience in doing comedy. In fact she really hadn’t done much acting at all – one movie (X-15), Sam on Richard Diamond, Private Detective, a “role” that was almost entirely dependent on pure sex appeal – we usually only saw her legs and heard her voice. She’d also done a variety of guest appearances on dramatic shows of the period. The Dick Van Dyke Show was her apprenticeship as a comedic actress and she took to it like a duck to water. It is a testament to her abilities that I at least really noticed her as a comedic actress, with a comedic cry second only to Lucille Ball’s (“O-o-o-oh Ro-o-o-ob!” versus “Bwaaaa!”) before I really became aware of how sexy she was.
I think I have to date my realization of how damned sexy Laura Petrie was to the episode “It May Look Like A Walnut” and in particular the scene in which Laura slides – nay surfs – prone on the tidal wave of walnuts that issues from the Petrie closet, not unlike Fibber McGee’s closet…if Fibber had filled his closet with walnuts. I have to confess however that having managed to find the scene on YouTube, it isn’t quite what I remember thanks to the way that they shot the seen. In my memory I was convinced that they shot the scene with the camera facing the door, so that Laura would be seen emerging in profile. Instead they shot it with the camera facing the junction of the interior wall and the exterior wall, so that we saw her emerge in a three quarter view. It’s not quite as sexy – I was sure that we saw her ass in that scene more than we did – but it does get the job done, particularly when she props her head up and starts talking to Rob. The sight of her there is something to behold.

There are a lot of things at the root of Laura Petrie’s sexual attractiveness. At the time she started the show Mary Tyler Moore was 23 though she lied about her age to get the part. She’s playing a slightly older woman of about 27 or 28 when she started in the role. (In preparing for this I tried to figure out Laura’s age using Larry Matthew's’s actual birth year of 1955 as the year of Richie’s birth; by my calculations 17 year-old Laura – claiming to be 19 – met and married Rob in 1952 or ‘53 making her about 27 in 1961 though claiming to be 29. It’s not really exact though.) She was a professional dancer as was Laura. Here I have to admit my fondness for dancers; my two big Star Trek crushes are Gates McFadden and Nana Visitor, both dancers who became actresses. Dancers generally have lithe taut bodies. Much of Laura’s wardrobe accentuates these features. The famous Capri Pants, which were supposedly used because Mary Tyler Moore insisted that the women that she knew didn’t wear dresses or skirts around the house, accentuated her body shape, particularly her butt. No wonder an adolescent Rob Reiner found it impossible to resist the desire to grab her ass (a deplorable act of course, but at least a little bit understandable). Laura’s wardrobe has a certain elegance to it. The Capri Pants were usually matched to a plain white blouse or a pull-over sweater. When she was out of the house and wearing a skirt or a dress it was usually simple and unadorned; the simple black dress or something not particularly flashy. (Mary Richards didn’t have that but then she was a creature of the 1970s when no one could manage elegance; Mary was a victim or fashion, fashion and polyester.) And then there are those rare occasions when she wears a dancers tights. Wow! As for her hair, there is something irresistible about that short but feminine cut that Laura has. It’s eminently practical for a young housewife of course, but it works with her face in a way that Mary Richards’s “big hair” really doesn’t.

Of course once you start thinking of Laura Petrie as sexy, you can’t help but see it everywhere, and a lot of questions emerge. Why the twin beds? If I were married to a woman like Laura there is no way that I’d want to sleep separated by a nightstand. In fact I’m pretty sure that I’d be like Reverend Brooks in Dick Van Dyke’s 1971 film Cold Turkey (and if you’ve seen that movie you know exactly what I mean!). And then of course there’s the question of why Richie was an only child, given the nature of 1961 birth control technology.

Well, I think we all know the answers to these questions. The TV industry was busy pretending the sex didn’t exist in 1961. The only onscreen married couple with a double bed were Ozzie and Harriet and that’s because they were married in real life too. It wasn’t until Dick York bedded down with Elizabeth Montgomery in the same double bed on Bewitched that an actor and an actress who weren’t married to each other were seen in a double bed. That was the 1965-66 season, the year after The Dick Van Dyke Show ended. And adding a baby to the cast – the natural consequence of married life and double beds, was pretty much unthinkable too. I’m pretty much convinced that shows in this period only added babies when forced to by the actress getting pregnant. After all, Tabitha and Adam Stevens coincided with Elizabeth Montgomery’s two real life pregnancies. Of course, given the lack of continuity on the show – and indeed most shows of period – had Laura gotten pregnant the baby would most likely have been born and then all evidence of his or her existence would have vanished from the show like Rob’s political career (he beat Wally Cox in an election for city council in New Rochelle), Richie’s dog, the family goldfish (who actually had a speaking part in one episode) the rock in the basement that kept Rob from having a pool table until they needed a basement pool table for an episode, or Jerry and Millie’s kid… or was it kids.

I think that it may be in the first season of Mad Men that one of the characters says that women are either Marilyn or Jackie, referring to Marilyn Monroe or Jacqueline Kennedy. Set in 1960, the first season of Mad Men is almost contemporary with The Dick Van Dyke Show in terms of period although of course Mad Men is a modern recreation and the attitudes expressed may be a reflection of modern attitudes with modern knowledge of John F. Kennedy’s relationships. Nevertheless there’s a nugget of truth there. Laura Petrie is clearly modelled on Jackie Kennedy in terms of her hair and clothing sense (but done on a comedy writer’s budget). I think that there’s an extra element to Laura Petrie that I can’t really put my finger on that appeals to me.

And in truth it isn’t just her ass.

James Arness - 1923-2011

He was a big man. He stood 6’7” tall…on his left leg. His right leg was 5/8ths of an inch shorter, a result of his military service in Italy a few days after the landings at Anzio. He wore a lift in his right shoe to balance him out. James Arness was a big man, and the role he played in the early days of television was fittingly a big part.

James Arness was born James Aurness in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1923. Never a good student – he often skipped classes – he managed to graduate from high school in 1942. Rejected by the Army Air Force – he had wanted to be a fighter pilot but was five inches too tall – he worked at various menial jobs until being drafted in 1943 as an infantryman. Serving with the 3rd Infantry Division he was the first man off his landing craft during the Anzio landings because of his height; his commander thought that how high the water came on him would be a good gauge of the depth for the rest of the men – it came up to Arness’s waist. A few days later he was shot while serving as point man on a night patrol. He spent over a year in Army hospitals and was honorably discharged in January 1945. At the suggestion of his brother Peter (who would later act under the name Peter Graves) he enrolled in a radio announcing school and got a job as a disc jockey at a Minneapolis radio station. A few months later he quit that job and joined a friend on a trip to California.

In California, Arness made a variety of show business contacts and decided to use his GI Bill benefits to study acting at the Bliss-Hayden Theater’s little theater school. His first screen role was in the Lorretta Young film The Farmer’s Daughter as one of Young’s brothers. Other small film roles followed in such films as Battleground (directed by William Wellman and starring Van Johnson) and Wagon Master (directed by John Ford and starring Ward Bond, Harry Carey Jr. and Ben Johnson). He also appeared as the title character in The Thing From Another World, and as an FBI agent in Them. His big break came when he signed with John Wayne’s production company Batjac. They developed a close friendship and Arness co-starred with Wayne in four films – Big Jim McLain, Hondo, Island In The Sky, and The Sea Chase. And it was through John Wayne that Arness got the role that made him a legend – Matt Dillon.

While there is apparently no truth to the story that Wayne was approached to play the role of Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, he was a vocal advocate for his protégé James Arness to get the part. Initially Arness was uncertain about taking the role. Like many actors of the time he worried that doing television would stall his film career. Nevertheless he took the part, and after getting an enthusiastic endorsement from Wayne, who filmed an introduction to the first episode of the show, he stayed with the show for twenty years, as well as five made for TV movies. Including the movies, he played the character of Matt Dillon in five decades; the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s for the series, and the 1980s and ‘90s for the movies. After Gunsmoke was cancelled in 1975 Arness appeared as Zeb Macahan on the ABC series How The West Was Won from 1976-78. His last series was McClain’s Law. The drama was something of a departure for Arness in that he was playing a modern role rather than appearing in a period piece. The series ran on NBC for sixteen episodes and was criticized for its violent content.

James Arness didn’t create the character of Matt Dillon. Beyond the shows creators, the elements of Mister Dillion’s character were really put into place by William Conrad who played the part on the radio show. Conrad had a tremendous voice that fit our collective image of the Western lawman. If you ever have the chance to hear Conrad playing Dillon on one of the radio episodes – and heaven knows there are a ton of podcasts that play episodes of the radio Gunsmoke on a regular or occasional basis – do it, setting aside what you know of how Conrad and Arness looked, and you’ll understand how perfect Conrad was for the part…on radio. The trouble is that Conrad, who had been a fighter pilot during World War II, was a big man who got bigger over the years. Although my good friend Ivan Shreve points out that Conrad looked a lot like real western lawmen of the period looked, his body type was not what we the audience expected out western heroes to look like. We wanted John Wayne in Stagecoach or Fort Apache rather than John Wayne as he would appear in True Grit. We wanted someone big and powerful who radiated power and masculinity. In other words we wanted James Arness. Arness created the visual image of Matt Dillon and in so doing created a visual template for the way that Western lawmen should appear, at least if they were the lead character in their shows.

And because Arness played the role of Matt Dillon for so long, he had the opportunity to get better with age in terms of fitting the role. It used to be a feminist talking point the while women got wrinkles, men got “character,” but in James Arness’s case it was true. As James Arness grew older he face grew craggier and became more interesting. He increasingly became the wind-blown and dried plainsman, tough as rawhide but with a kindly side that you saw in his eyes. I suppose that if anyone remembered the radio shows with Conrad’s voice they might say that as he aged, Arness looked more and more like Conrad sounded.

By most accounts Arness was a generous actor in terms of letting his co-stars carry episodes from time to time. While Gunsmoke had a very strong primary supporting cast for Arness – including Milburn Stone, Amanda Blake, Dennis Weaver, and Ken Curtis, as well as Burt Reynolds and Buck Taylor for shorter terms – the show could hardly be described as an ensemble show. Marshal Dillon was very much the most important character on the show, and there were indeed episodes where the supporting characters were seen only in cameo appearances. For Arness to allow himself to be put himself into that sort of situation, particularly early in the show’s existence, shows something about the man’s self-confidence and his willingness to let others have their time in the sun. Later these absences had a practical aspect to them. As he got older Arness’s war wounds were becoming increasingly stressed by the physical aspects of playing Marshal Dillon. By the end of the series Arness was having considerable difficulty mounting a horse, which is a definite liability when doing a Western series. Thus you had episodes that focused almost entirely on characters like Festus, Doc Adams, Miss Kitty or even Newly O’Brien (Buck Taylor), where Dillon would only appear sitting at table having a cup of coffee with other characters on the show.

In the wake of James Arness’s death there have been numerous comments in various blogs and in response to newspaper articles that spoke quite glowingly about him, and Gunsmoke, particularly the early seasons of the show which in the opinion of most commenters were the show’s best seasons. I won’t dispute that. I would however point out that Gunsmoke was a show that lasted twenty years on network television at a time when network TV was the only game in town and there were only three networks playing the game. It survived that long by adapting to the changing trends in the medium, and by responding to actions like the protests about violence in the media. The show evolved over time. But Matt Dillon didn’t evolve; he didn’t have to. The ideals that he stood for, upholding the law and making sure that the the weak were defended from the strong were valid throughout the show’s run. They may have been black & white concepts that wouldn’t necessarily be in keeping with the whole notion that things have to be looked at in a nearly infinite number of shades of grey, but for this show and this character they were the right ideals. In the end James Arness’s portrayal of Matt Dillon embodied these ideals.

In the end, James Arness and Matt Dillon were lucky to have found each other. It is impossible to imagine anyone else – including John Wayne – being able to fit into the role of Matt Dillon, and it is just as had to imagine Arness having the success that he did without being Matt Dillon. It was the perfect confluence of actor and part. James Arness was meant to be Matt Dillon and Matt Dillon wouldn’t have worked if he hadn’t been played by James Arness.

I’m including two clips of opening sequences from Gunsmoke here. The first is from 1964 (based on the clip for the next episode), and the second is from the period after the show was cancelled in 1967. The first title sequence is the classic “the bad guy shot first but Matt shot best” opening, while the second version is the only one that I could find of the “Matt racing his horse across the prairie” opening that turns into the insets of the actors along the Main Street of Dodge City. The riding sequence was reportedly shot on the day that the cast found out that the show had been cancelled. Reportedly they were shooting a scene where Matt was riding across the prairie and he just let go in and rode his horse hard as a sort of catharsis and the director decided to keep the cameras rolling.

Weekend Videos–Nicholas Courtney and Doctor Who

Nicholas Courtney passed away on February 22at the age of 81, following a long illness, reported by his former Doctor Who cast mate Tom Baker to have been cancer. Courtney was a well-regarded character actor who worked extensively in the theatre and on television. He was a regular on the comedy French Fields and appeared opposite Frankie Howerd on Then Churchill Said To Me, a series that was made in 1982 but was shelved because of the Falklands War. However it is for Doctor Who, and in particular the character of The Brigadier – Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart – that he is best known. Courtney appeared with every actor to play The Doctor in the first incarnation of the show except one – Colin Baker – and that includes Richard Hurndall who played the First Doctor in The Five Doctors. In addition he appeared in Doctor Who audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions with Colin Baker, and Paul McGann playing their respective versions of The Doctor, and with David Tennant, who played a character named Colonel Ross Brimmicombe-Wood.

Courtney’s first appearance on Doctor Who was not as the iconic character of Lethbridge-Stewart but rather as Space Security Agent Brett Vyon in the third season serial The Dalek Masterplan. Among other people to appear in this series was Jean Marsh, who had previously appeared in the The Crusades arc of Doctor Who (she kills Vyon who, as it turns out, was her brother). Most of The Dalek Master Plan is lost. However among the episodes to survive is the one in which Nicholas Courtney first appears.

Courtney’s next appearance in the series was as Lethbridge-Stewart, but not quite the Lethbridge-Stewart we know. In Web of Fear Lethbridge-Stewart was a Colonel, and UNIT had yet to be formed. Based on his hat he was in a Scottish regiment, which fits with what we later discover about Lethbridge-Stewart. He appears opposite Patrick Toughton as The Doctor, Fraiser Hines as Jamie and Deborah Watling as Victoria. Courtney was originally cast as Captain Knight while David Langton (who later played Richard Bellamy on Upstair Downstairs) was to play Lethbridge-Stewart. Fortunately – given what happens to Knight – Langton was took another job and Courtney was recast as Lethbridge-Stewart. Unfortunately most of Web Of Fear after the first episode is lost and we have to depend on is fan recreations using photos taken while the show was being made, and Courtney doesn’t make his first appearance until the second or third episode. What I have is the last part of the last episode of one of these recreations.

Significantly more exists of Lethbridge-Stewart’s next appearance (although not enough to air as a “complete” episode) and in it the major aspects of his participation in Doctor Who were set. In Invasion we learn that four years have passed since the Yeti incident (for everyone except the occupants of the TARDIS) and Lethbridge-Stewart has been promoted to the rank of Brigadier. He now commanding an element of a new United Nations organization known as UNIT. Also introduced is the ever faithful Benton (John Levene) who at this point was still a corporal. This particular pair of clips are a bit of a mixed bag. It begins with an animated recreation of the end of the missing first episode and at about the 3:50 mark transitions into the complete second episode, which features Benton and two other soldier in mufti grabbing the Doctor and Jamie and taking them to their leader whose headquarters are aboard an RAF Hercules transport. The leader is of course Lethbridge-Stewart.

It is the Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee, that Lethbridge-Stewart is most closely associated with. In this clip, the Brigadier and UNIT’s new Science Advisor, Liz Shaw, encounter a problem that people who met previous versions of The Doctor should comment on more regularly, namely that he doesn’t look the same as he did when he knew them. In this case the change from Patrick Troughton to Jon Pertwee is just a little more than the Brigadier can absorb at the moment, though the man who (to Lethbridge-Stewart’s mind at least) is pretending to be The Doctor does seem well informed.

Perhaps the Brigadier’s most famous line in the series was from the last episode of The Daemons. “Chap with the wings. Five rounds rapid.” In fact Courtney used the line as the title for his 1999 autobiography Five Rounds Rapid (he wrote a second autobiography in 2005 called Still Getting Away With It)

The Brigadier and UNIT were pretty much fixtures of Doctor Who for the first two seasons of Pertwee’s run on the series. They became less so during the last two seasons, after The Doctor was freed from his exile on Earth by the Time Lords. About half of the serials after that featured UNIT. The final Pertwee episode had a relatively minor involvement of UNIT, with The Doctor returning to UNIT to regenerate. In this set of clips the Brigadier,and Sarah Jane witness the Doctor regenerating. This time around The Brigadier takes the whole thing entirely in stride, mentioning the first time that it happened. Of course Tom Baker’s Doctor could be a bit eccentric at the best of times, but newly regenerated he was more than a handful (as you might be able to tell I preferred Pertwee’s Doctor).

Robot, the first Tom Baker episode was the penultimate appearance of Nicholas Courtney in the Tom Baker series of Doctor Who. He’d appear one more time in Terror of the Zygons in the show’s thirteenth season, while UNIT itself would disappear a couple of serials later in the serial The Android Invasion. In that episode The Doctor goes to an office with Lethbridge-Stewart’s name on it but he’s absent. Still, you can’t keep a good character down and the Brigadier kept popping up from time to time. In Mawdryn Undead we get two versions of the Brigadier – now retired and working as a maths teacher in a British Public (which means Private) school – separated in time. One has a definite memory problem. Unfortunately, while this serial very much exists, the BBC seems to have cracked down on people posting full episodes. What we have in this clip is Peter Davison’s Doctor reviving the memory of the older, moustache-less, version of the Brigadier in a sequence which includes brief excerpts from various episodes in which the Brigadier featured. Interestingly the episode wasn’t meant to feature The Brigadier at all. It was written for William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton in the very first Doctor Who episodes. However, the actor (whose real name is Russell William Enoch) was unavailable to appear on the show and after some consideration was given to using Ian Marter and his character Harry Sullivan, Courtney was picked for the role.

Later the same year, Lethbridge-Stewart appeared in The Five Doctors special, commemorating the series’ twentieth anniversary. In this clip the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) drops in on The Brigadier at a UNIT reunion where he meets Colonel Crichton, Lethbridge-Stewart’s replacement, who doesn’t really impress the Doctor. Continuity obsessed fans were able to determine that this episode took place after Mawdryn Undead because The Brigadier recognises Tegan and the Fifth Doctor.

The Brigadier’s final appearance in Doctor Who proper was in the twenty-sixth and final season of the show’s original run. The episode was very much an old home week for Courtney as it featured Jean March as Morgaine. Marsh had appeared in the very Doctor Who story that Courtney did, The Dalek Master Plan. In that episode Marsh’s character, Sara Kingdom, kills Courtney’s Brett Vyon. In Battlefield she tries to kill him, but fortunately doesn’t succeed. In these two sequences we find The Brigadier, recalled to duty with the return of The Doctor, encountering Morgaine, and then in the second clip reuniting with The Doctor – who else could it be indeed.

Nicholas Courtney’s final appearance in the Doctor Who universe was in the spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures episode Enemy Of The Bane from the sho’s second season. The episode aired almost exactly twenty-five years after the last time Elizabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney had appeared together, in The Five Doctors. In the episode Sarah Jane needs access to some material that only Sir Alistair, now a special envoy for UNIT, is able to provide her with. Amazingly the entire episode has been posted on YouTube (though for how long I don’t know).

That was Nicholas Courtney’s last episode as Lethbridge-Stewart. Reportedly Courtney was supposed to appear again in The Sarah Jane Adventures episode The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith but had suffered a stroke and was unable to appear. It is also said that Courtney wanted to make one final appearance on Doctor Who in an episode that would kill the character off. Unfortunately this wasn’t to be.

Nicholas Courtney was an integral part of the original Doctor Who series, a first rate actor who took what could have been a throwaway role and became an iconic figure to the point where the word Brigadier has become a “TV Trope” (a convention or device found within creative works) for “any senior military person in a sci-fi drama who is a good guy.” And it seems to me that both Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and Nicholas Courtney were pretty good guys. 

Weekend Videos – Top Rated Series 1970-1974

It’s been a while since I’ve done a video posting, so I thought I’d do another one featuring top-rated series. This time around we enter one of the great transitional periods of American TV, the 1970-1974 period.

To remind you again about the “rules” of this project, as imposed by me on myself., 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.

1970-71

1. Marcus Welby M.D. 29.6, 2. The Flip Wilson Show 27.9, 3. Here’s Lucy 26.1

Marcus Welby M.D. was a big shift from the way that medical shows had been done up to this point in time, and indeed from the way that such shows are done today. Virtually all medical shows up to that time and since have focused on big city hospitals and cutting edge medical solutions. Contemporary with Marcus Welby M.D. were shows like The Bold Ones: The New Doctors which debuted the season before Welby and Medical Center which debuted in the same season. The medical episodes of The Bold Ones focused on cutting edge medical science, or what was cutting edge at the time, while Medical Center dealt with a large university hospital. Marcus Welby M.D. was about a pair of general practitioners working out of what looked like a private home in a California suburb. What Marcus Welby M.D. had in common with Medical Center was that you had an older doctor working alongside a younger hipper doctor. In Welby you had the eponymous doctor played by Robert Young while his partner Dr. Steven Kiley was played by a young James Brolin (before he became Mr. Barbra Streisand). You could tell that Welby was the older supposedly conservative doctor even in the title sequence because he drove a big pile of Detroit Iron, while the hip Kiley got around on a Japanese motorcycle. The pilot episode of the series made the two men uneasy allies – Kiley was “discontented” with the idea of working as a General Practitioner; he was going to be a neurologist and made it clear that as soon as he could, he’d be gone. However as the series developed, the relationship between Welby and Kiley became a strong mentoring partnership. Welby tended to be the more unorthodox doctor, treating the whole patient and being concerned not only with their ailment but also their temperament, fears and family environment. Kiley tended to take a more textbook oriented approach to medicine. The only other character to be on the show for its entire seven year run (up to that time the longest run for a medical drama) was Welby’s dedicated nurse, Consuelo Lopez, played by Elena Verdugo. This 1974 episode guest stars Lois Nettleton, and Sharon Gless is also in the episode in a recurring role, but isn’t seen in this clip.
 

1971-72

1. All In The Family 34.0, 2. The Flip Wilson Show 28.2, 3. Marcus Welby M.D. 27.8

They say that William S. Paley hated All In The Family…right up to the time when he saw the show’s ratings. It’s probably true. Paley has a reputation as an ace programmer who had a “nose” for what the public wanted but All In The Family, based on the British series ‘Til Death Do Us Part can’t have been easy for any programmer to see the appeal of. The concept for the show had been at ABC since 1968 without being picked up because of the controversial nature of the material. Mickey Rooney was considered for the role of Archie Bunker but reportedly rejected the role when he read the script. It is a fact that Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton were in all three of the pilots developed for the show while the actors playing the younger characters changed. Eventually Producer Norman Lear settled on Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers to play the younger generation of the family. O’Connor’s Archie Bunker was a loud, opinionated, bigoted conservative working stiff who loved his country and didn’t like what was happening to it. This made him the perfect target for his brand new son-in-law Michael Stivic who was equally loud and opinionated but on the other side who didn’t like the way his country was behaving. Caught in the middle were Archie’s wife Edith and their daughter Gloria, who was married to Mike. While it was expected that the audience would usually be supportive of Michael over Archie, what happened was that Archie became the breakout character of the show. I think there are a lot of reasons for this. For one thing, there really were a lot of Americans who, if they weren’t as bigoted as Archie was, still had a lot of the same beliefs that he carried with him, including a strong patriotism and a concern with the direction that the country was going in in terms of riots, and “youth rebellion.” At the same time Mike could come across as obnoxious, and he had his own preconceived notions which were in their own way as wrong-headed and prejudiced as Archie’s own. The show debuted in January of 1970 and became a national sensation by its first full season, even being discussed by Nixon on the Watergate tapes (Nixon didn’t exactly understand it, and the nature of the show had to be explained to him). This episode from Season One doesn’t introduce Lionel Jefferson, but it does bring the Jefferson family into the neighbourhood and into conflict with Archie.

1972-73

1. All In The Family 33.3, 2. Sanford And Son 27.6, 3 Hawaii Five-0 25.2

A year after All In the Family debuted on CBS, Norman Lear brought another British property to the American market. The British series Steptoe And Son was transformed into Sanford And Son in the United States. The story, about a widowed inner city junk man and his son who yearns for something better. What made the American version of the series was the casting of comedian Redd Foxx as junk man Fred Sanford. Foxx, at the time known mainly for his nightclub act and the comedy records that he did of his act (mostly not suitable for radio). Foxx played Sanford as being greedy and lazy, definitely the boss of the business that he co-owned with his son who he frequently fought with and manipulated. Fred’s son Lamont was played by Demond Wilson, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who was a comparative novice at acting (his first TV role was in Lear’s All In The Family). The dynamic between Fred and his son was more complicated than the Archie and Mike relationship in All In The Family; Fred frequently called Lamont “Big Dummy” while Lamont sometimes called Fred “Old Fool”, but the two legitimately loved each other despite their conflict (unlike the British series Wilson and Foxx were close off the set). The show had a large supporting cast, some of whom friends of Foxx’s from his night club work. One of these was LaWanda Page who played Fred’s sister-in-law and biggest nemesis Aunt Esther (Page had worked with Foxx’s wife at the time). The other major supporting character was Grady Wilson, played Whitman Mayo. When Foxx left the show for a season in a contract dispute Mayo, who was probably the most experienced actor in the cast, took over the position of the older lead. The show ran from January 1972 to 1977, and was only out of the top ten in its last season. The show ended primarily because Foxx left the show, this time for keeps. This clip is from late in the show’s run and includes a scene with the great Frank Nelson: “Yeeessss?”

1973-74

1. All In The Family 31.2, 2. The Waltons 28.1, 3. Sanford and Son 27.5

Just two years after CBS cancelled “everything with a tree in it” (to use Pat Butram’s famous reaction to the network’s “rural purge”) a rural show came back to the network with a vengeance. The Waltons was a show that seemed unlikely to be popular: it was based in the country rather than the city; the focus was on a family rather than the TV triumvirate – doctors, lawyers, and cops – and the family weren’t dysfunctional and funny; and it was a period piece set in the 1930s. A show like that wouldn’t even get to the pilot stage these days, and when the show debuted in 1973 it was generally expected that it would be blasted off the air in short order by the popular Flip Wilson Show. Instead The Waltons basically killed off Wilson’s variety series. The Waltons was introduces with a highly successful holiday movie called The Homecoming: A Christmas Story. Written by Earl Hamner Jr. The Waltons is a semi-autobiographical series based on Hamner’s life in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia in the 1930s (Hamner had previously fictionalized his family life in the book and 1963 theatrical movie Spencer’s Mountain). While most of the actors from The Homecoming were kept for the series, there were three important changes: Ralph Waite replaced Andrew Duggan as John Walton Sr., Michael Learned took over the role of Olivia from Patricia Neal (Hamner and the producers were concerned about Neal’s health), and Edgar Bergen gave up the role of Gandpa Zeb Walton to Will Geer. The only adult character not to be recast was Grandma Esther Walton, played by Ellen Corby. The focus of the show was on the oldest Walton son, John Jr. but universally known as John-Boy played by Richard Thomas. An adult John-Boy (voiced by Hamner) was the narrator of the show, and most episodes center around his life and ambition to become a writer. When Richard Thomas left the show – he was said to have gone to New York to become a professional writer – the focus moved to the other members of the family, brothers Jason, Ben, and Jim-Bob and sisters Mary-Ellen, Erin and Elizabeth. One of the show’s most memorable episodes concerned the return of Grandma to the Mountain – Ellen Corby had suffered a stroke and was written out of the series but her health recovered enough to be able to return to the series. Will Geer died in the hiatus between the sixth and seventh season and the character was stated as having suffered a heart attack at the beginning of the seventh season. The clip that follows is from the show’s first season (identifiable because the title sequence is filmed rather than using sepia toned photos).

1974-75

1. All In The Family 30.2, 2. Sanford And Son 29.6, 3. Chico And The Man 28.5

Chico And The Man, created by James Komack, was an instant sensation when it debuted in 1974. Oscar winner Jack Albertson took a back seat to stand-up comedian and novice actor Freddie Prinze. Albertson played Ed, the owner of a broken down garage in an ethnically diverse neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Ed, refused to acknowledge the changes in the neighbourhood and had few friends left. When a young Hispanic man named Chico Rodriguez comes looking for a job, Ed throws him out. Chico does come back to clean up the garage and eventually moves into an old van that Ed keeps in the garage. The relationship between Ed and Chico grows increasingly close. While Ed can still be acerbic towards Chico the bond between the becomes almost like father and son. The show had a good supporting cast, most notably Scatman Crothers as one of Ed’s few friends, Louie the Garbage Man (“Bring out your can’s because here comes the garbage man.”) The show also had a number of high profile guest stars. In fact I had hoped to be able to find the third season episode “Old is Gold” for a reason that my friend Ivan G. Shreve would readily understand; it was the last on-screen appearance of Jim Jordan, Fibber McGee from the radio series Fibber McGee and Molly. Unfortunately Chico And The Man is one of those series where no episodes have been posted onto YouTube. Like Sanford And Son, Chico And The Man was based on the relationship between the two leads; because of that the show was unable to survive Freddie Prinze’s suicide at age 22. The producers did try to keep the series going, replacing Prinze’s character with a 12 year-old Mexican orphan name Raul, adding Raull’s aunt (played by Charo) and finally added Julie Hill as Ed’s 18 year-old niece who moved into Chico’s old van. None of it worked and the series was cancelled after its fourth, Chico-less, episode. As no episodes have been posted on YouTube, what I’ve got for this show is the title sequence for the show featuring Jose Feliciano’s great theme song, and as a special bonus, clips from Feliciano’s appearance on the show where he sings “Light My Fire,” and the series theme.

Saturday Nights 1959-60

It's been a while since I've done one of these, in no small part because I was kind of short on inspiration in terms of finding a day and a year for one. But Christmas is on a Saturday this year, and the abiding image on this blog is my profile photo. The picture, as I think I explained at some point, dates back to a Christmas in either 1959 or 1960. For the purpose of this I'm going with 1959, for no reason except that I'm pretty sure that it was 1959, and even if it wasn't there was some pretty good TV on Saturday night in 1959. At least there was on one of the American networks.

Today we think of Saturday nights as the biggest wasteland on TV. FOX is the only network that puts any new shows on the night, and that's COPS and America's Most Wanted. Some networks put movies on the night; others relegate "encore" performances of episodes of shows – and not always the same show from week to week. And of course when a network has a show that died and they want to burn off the episodes they do it on Saturday night. About the only thing that really draws an audience – besides COPS and America's Most Wanted – are sports events, particularly big college football games. In Canada things are getting to be almost as bad, but to a large degree that's because of our broadcast regulations and the desire of Canadian private networks to get the greatest ad coverage possible. Because the American networks aren't airing new shows on Saturdays, Canadian networks – which normally have the cable companies substitute their shows and commercials over American shows that air at the same time ("Simsub" in Canadian broadcast speak) they don't program "big" shows on Saturdays. Of course the fact that CBC is showing Hockey Night In Canada on Saturday night doesn't encourage putting big shows on that night either.

It wasn't always that way of course (well except for the part about Hockey Night in Canada). I've often cited the CBS Saturday line-up for the 1973-74 season as being the greatest line-up for any American network ever, and I stand by that, but that doesn't mean that there haven't been other great Saturday nights in the history of TV. The 1959-60 season was one of those.

Let's start with ABC, which was the smallest and brokest (most broke?) of the three networks. For them this was pretty much a music and variety night with only one scripted program in the mix. Still, it wasn`t a bad night of TV for them. Starting off the night was Dick Clark`s Saturday Night Beechnut Show, although it was also known as The Dick Clark Show. The half-hour series, produced out of the Little Theater in New York ran for two and a half years, from February 1958 to September 1960. In the show`s 136 episodes (it ran continually for those two and a half years – there were no real "seasons") nearly 100 different acts appeared on the show, which blurred the definitions of genre. Among the performers were Jackie Wilson, Bobby Rydell (the two most frequent guests – 14 shows each) Frankie Avalon, Bobby Darrin, Dion & the Belmonts, Neil Sedaka, Anita Bryant, Conway Twitty, Johnny Cash, Litle Anthony & The Imperials, Frankie Lymon, Sam Cooke, Johnny Horton, and Andy Williams, just to name a few. The clip I have for this show features The Crests, singing Six Nights A Week. Following Dick Clark was John Gunther's High Road, a series of travelogues hosted by John Gunther, an American journalist and writer whose work focused on international politics and leaders. (This is the only one of the ABC shows that I can't find a clip for). Gunther's show was followed by the only scripted series that ABC had on the night, a little offering known as Leave It To Beaver about the misadventures of a young boy and his friends, family, and Eddie Haskell. I mean how else can you describe that show, one of the most fondly remembered of the family comedies of the 1950s. Following "The Beav" was The Lawrence Welk Show sponsored (if you can't tell) by Sinclair Oil. While we tend to think of Lawrence Welk in connection with the accordion, and his show as somewhat corny (certainly we did at the time), I think it might be time to re-evaluate Welk and his orchestra and certainly the pre-syndication version of his show. He certainly seems to have had at least some contemporary music on. This clip, from 1961 features guitarist Neil Levang, who was with Welk from 1959 to the end of the syndicated TV show, playing Ghost Riders In The Sky, with vocal back-up from the Lennon Sisters. Rounding out the night was Jubilee USA which was originally known as Ozark Jubilee. Hosted by Red Foley (who my good friend Ivan Shreve will probably point out was the original host of the radio show Avalon Time which was the big launching pad for Red Skelton), the series was one of the first country music shows on national TV. Broadcast from Springfield Missouri, the show had a regular musical cast that included Porter Waggoner, Sonny James, Webb Pierce, and Leroy van Dyke, while virtually every country music act of the time made an appearance on the show. Carl Perkins debuted Blue Suede Shoes on Ozark Jubilee before the song was recorded by Elvis Presley. Perhaps the greatest discovery the show made was an eleven year-old singer from Georgia named Brenda Lee. In this clip from 1958, guitar god Chet Atkins is introduced by Red Foley.

The NBC line-up has given me a bit of a problem. Two of the five shows on the night have no episodes posted on YouTube... or anywhere else as far as I can tell. Nevertheless it was not a bad night of TV. Leading off the night was the saga of a wealthy ranch family headed by a tough patriarchal figure...in Nevada in the 1860s. The show was Bonanza, and along with Gunsmoke was one of the iconic shows of the late 1950s to the early 1970s, and still has one of the best remembered theme songs. Canadian Lorne Greene (he was known as "The Voice Of Doom" during his time as the news reader for CBC Radio News during World War II), played Ben Cartwright, while his sons were played by Pernell Roberts, Dan Blocker and (then) teen heart-throb Michael Landon (I Was A Teen Aged Werewolf). Bonanza was one of the essential parts of my childhood. It aired here on Sunday night after Ed Sullivan, and my routine as a child was to have my bath then watch Sullivan and Bonanza. One thing that I didn't notice until seeing the show in reruns years later was just how funny many of the episodes were. Not every episode was filled with high drama, and the episode that I have a clip from here is prrof of that. Following Bonanza was something called The Man And The Challenge starring George Nader as a research scientist working for the US government, testing people and equipment in extreme situations. The show was produced by Ivan Tors who is (justly) more famous for series like Flipper, Daktari, and Cowboy In Africa. That was followed by The Deputy which starred Henry Fonda – some of the time – and Allen Case. Fonda played Marshall Simon Fry while Case played his deputy, Clay McCord, a shopkeeper who was reluctant to to use a gun. Fonda's schedule provided a problem for series creator Norman Lear. His scenes for an entire season were shot all at one so that he would be available for films. It was the same routine that Fred McMurray used when he was doing My Three Sons, but in this show it apparently led to some problems as there was a definite difference between episodes where Fonda appeared and those where Case was on his own. Following The Deputy was Five Fingers, another show that I have been unable to find a clip of. The series, which starred David Hedison, Luciana Paluzzi and Paul Burke, was loosely based on the 1952 movie of the same name. In this case "loosely based" translates to "taking the name and the most basic premise." The movie was set during World War II and dramatized the story of the German spy Cicero, who while working as the valet to the British ambassador in Turkey was able to take secret documents from the ambassador's private safe. In the series Hedison was a Cold War American agent who worked as a theatrical booking agent in Europe and posed as a Communist to gain information on party activities. The series ran for sixteen episodes before being cancelled (while they were shooting the seventeenth episode), and several well known names appeared in the show, including Eva Gabor, Edgar Bergen, Jack Warden, Peter Lorre and Alan Young (together in one episode) and Martin Balsam. The final show in NBC's line-up for the night was It Could Be You. This game show ran primarily in the daytime on NBC between 1956 and 1961, but also had a night time version on several occasions, notably in the 1958-59 and 1959-60 seasons. The show usually focussed on the embarrassing moments in the selected contestants' (most of them women, at least in the daytime show) lives. The prizes awarded were often humorous, related to the embarrassing incidents. I have no idea of whether the clip seen here came from the daytime or the night time show.

While CBS's Saturday night during the 1973-74 was probably the best night of television that the broadcast networks every put together, they didn't do too bad a job with the 1959-60 season. CBS had three of the top five shows, for of the top ten shows and five of the top twenty-five shows on that particular Saturday night. From just about any perspective that's pretty impressive. The network led off the night with the tenth highest rated show of the season, Perry Mason. Starring Raymond Burr as the lawyer who never lost a case (well almost never) the show had an outstanding support team that included Barbara Hale as Mason's secretary (and unstated love interest; there was definitely unresolved sexual tension there) Della Street, and William Hopper as Mason's personal investigator Paul Drake. On the other side were William Tallman as Hamilton Burger (and to this day I'm surprised that no one to my knowledge ever called him "Ham Burger") and Ray Collins as crusty and dedicated police Lieutenant Tragg. Burr, an experienced radio and film actor who usually played the villain in movies (notably in Hitchcock's Rear Window) was the perfect pick to play Mason. He had a commanding but cultured voice that convinced viewers that he knew what he was talking about. His size also made him convincing in physical scenes. Burr became Mason in the minds of just about anyone who ever saw the series and it may explain why a later attempt to revive the show failed. Monte Markham was no Raymond Burr. Following Perry Mason was the first season of Wanted: Dead Or Alive which finished ninth in the ratings that year. Starring a young (28 year old) Steve McQueen in his breakout role, the series followed bounty hunter Josh Randall on his adventures. McQueen's Randall was a Confederate veteran who was usually well liked by the peace officers he dealt with. He was well spoken and is described in some references as having a soft heart, sometimes giving his reward money to the needy or helping those that he was tracking down if he was convinced that they were wrongly accused, all done with the aid of his "Mare's Leg," a specially cut down Winchester Model 1892. McQueen would say of the series, "Three hard mother-grabbin' years, but I learned my trade and it gave me discipline." The clip here is from the pilot for the show and includes Michael Landon in the sort of role he had before he found Bonanza – a very angry young man. Following Wanted: Dead Or Alive was Mr. Lucky, a loose adaptation of the Cary Grant movie of the same name. John Vivyan starred as the title character who rwhile Ross Martin played his friend Andamo. "Mr. Lucky" (the only name he was given in the series although in the movie the character was named Joe Adams) and Andamo ran floating casino (the Fortuna II) off the coast of an American city, after being forced to leave Andamo's home country with just the shirts on their backs. The series was directed by Blake Edwards – indeed the character of Andamo was supposedly spun off from his other big series Peter Gunn – and the theme was done by his longtime collaborator Henry Mancini. The show finished tied for 21st in the ratings... and was cancelled. Unfortunately the show was sponsored in its only season by Lever Brothers, which objected to gambling as a main point of the show. The show ceased to be about a gambling ship and instead the Fortuna II became a floating restaurant. At the end of the season Lever Brothers and the show's alternate sponsor, Brown & Williamson Tobacco, pulled their sponsorship of the show and the network was unable to find replacement sponsors and so cancelled the show. Following Mr. Lucky was Have Gun Will Travel starring Richard Boone as the hired gun known as Paladin. Paladin was a study in contrasts. He was erudite and urbane – one might even call him something of a dandy – in the part of his life that he spent at San Francisco's Carlton Hotel. However, when someone contacted him for a job outside of the city he became tough as nails and able to trade blows, or bullets with whatever he came up against. The urbanity wasn't skin-deep, it was simply pushed into the background when he was working. Have Gun Will Travel ran for six years, and had a remarkably small cast, just Boone and Kam Tong, playing the hotel bellhop known to Paladin and the other patrons of the hotel as Hey Boy (though his real name was revealed at one point to be Kim Chan). Each episode was populated by a cast of guest characters – for example this clip features Werner Klemperer. Following Have Gun Will Travel was another Western, although calling Gunsmoke "another Western" is damning it with very faint praise. Probably the greatest show of the genre – certainly the longest lasting at twenty seasons and a total of 635 episodes (233 half-hours and 402 hour long episodes) – Gunsmoke was a series that showed remarkable stability while at the same time changing significantly. And I'm not just talking about the cast here, although there was truly remarkable stability where the cast was concerned. Of the four principal cast members in 1955 when the show debuted, two were gone when the show wrapped its final episode in 1975; Dennis Weaver, who left in 1964 and Amanda Blake who left the year before the show ended. While the streets of Dodge City didn't change much, the sort of stories that were being told did, to accommodate the changes in attitudes towards violence and social conditions over the years, and to deal with star James Arness's health issues (caused by wounds suffered during World War II). The final CBS show on Saturday nights in 1959 was a detective show, Markham, starring Ray Milland. Milland played Roy Markham, a successful attorney who became a private detective. Because he had been a successful lawyer he was able to pick and choose cases at his discretion, and was able to tailor his fees to suit the client, ranging from large sums for wealthy and corporate clients to nothing for those of limited means. When the show began Markham had an assistant, John Riggs (Simon Scott), but the character was quickly written out. The show lasted one season. In fact none of the shows that occupied the last half hour of the schedule in the 1959-60 season returned in the 1960-61 season.

These days Saturday night is regarded as a great wasteland by the broadcast networks; a desert where they dare not tread with any new shows because, of course, people will not watch them there. It is difficult to believe that there was a time when networks actively programmed the night. The last hold-out – besides FOX – pulled out of the night in 2004 when CBS replaced the revived Star Search, Hack and The District with reruns and 48 Hours Mysteries, and in Television six years is regarded as ancient history. That there was a time when the top shows on all of TV were broadcast on Saturday nights must be regarded by programmers today as a combination of heresy and apocrypha. But for most of the medium's existence Saturday nights were a vital and important night of TV when great shows – shows that we remember fifty years after they aired – were staples of the night. Maybe it's because those days were a time when networks weren't fixated with the concept of demographics, or maybe it was that people didn't go out as much then. All I know is that there was a time when great TV on Saturday nights wasn't an oxymoron, it was expected.