Mitchell Hadley's Blog: It's About TV!, page 25

This week in TV Guide: September 10, 1966

For this year's Fall Preview, I thought I'd treat you to what many of you feel is a very special issue: a look at the 1966-67 season.
Over the years, I've written about a number of these Fall Previews, and they're always a bit of a challenge. I mean, there's so much content, where do you even begin? They're also gteat fun to read (again), with the result that it's hard to decide what to leave in and what to take out. Some years, I've tried to write about everything; other years, I've concentrated on more specific areas: the new shows, the hits, the bombs. 
This year, the focus is on lists. Very long lists. And not just of new shows, but returning ones as well. And from these lists of new and old favorites, we have what many critics have called the greatest single season in the history of television. (If you don't believe me, ask Thom Shubilla—he wrote  an entire book  about that single season, and there aren't many seasons that can make that boast.) Let's make our way through, and at the end we'll see what we think.
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The first show out of the gate in the "New Series" sectdion is Mission: Impossible, and that's a good sign, a portent of some very familiar titles that have warmed people for years: The Monkees, Family Affair, The Rat Patrol, That Girl, The Time Tunnel. There's also one of the most legendary debuts we've seen, that of Star Trek. We're only considering it a legend retroactively, of course; at the time, it built a loyal cult following, but in its three seasons it was never the ratings blockbuster you might have thought from all the hubbub that followed. Tarzan, with Ron Ely in the starring role, makes it to two seasons but isn't exactly a hit 
There are shows that have their following, but didn't make it for a second season; The Green Hornet, which never could decide if it was going to be a spoof like Batman or if it would play it more straight, and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., which discovered too late that the U.N.C.L.E. camp phenomenon was already starting to die out. Hawk, Burt Reynolds' first solo starring role in a television series, only ran for seventeen episodes on ABC, but it was resuscitated by NBC in 1976 to capitalize on Reynolds' growing popularity. Love on a Rooftop and Occasional Wife both have their fans, but they didn't have enough of them to come back for a second season. Pistols 'n' Petticoats, a half-hour Western starring Ann Sheridan as a gun-tottin' mamma, was cut short after Sheridan died of cancer. Jericho, the code name of a WWII commando unit, was a lot of fun to watch, but not fun enough to make it to a second go-round. 
There are series that somebody believed in enough to give them midseason retools in hopes they'd be revived: The Pruitts of Southampton became The Phyllis Diller Show, but people didn't watch it under either title. It's About Time actually resolved its original premise, rescuing its astronaut heroes after they were thrown back to the stone age, but the new format, in which they made it back to their own time, along with a couple of stowaways, didn't cut it either. It is available on DVD, though.
Some series just disappeared into the ether. The Man Who Never Was, a spy drama with Robert Lansing and Dana Wynter, was good, but not as good as it should have been (or needed to be). The Rounders and Shane both proved that sequels to classic movies ought not to be encouraged (however, David Carradine was much more successful in his next Western, Kung Fu). The Road West and The Monroes had great Western vistas, but, like the previous two, didn't signal a revival of the Western genre. The Hero was a funny idea with a good cast, including Richard Mulligan and Mariette Hartley; perhaps it was jsut a little ahead of its time. Hey Landlord! was Garry Marshall's first go at a sitcom; it wouldn't be his last. The Roger Miller Show wasted a singer at his peak, who didn't really want to star in his own series. 
And that's not all; you'll read about some of the rest in the paragraphs to come. And you can see them all in this terrific YouTube video from one of my favorite channels, RwDt09; he has other great videos from that season, and many others, as well.
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The real magic, though, lies in the list of returning series, a list of favorites that's as familiar as any television has ever seen. CBS alone boasts Andy Griffith and Gomer Pyle; The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction; Daktari; Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton, and Danny Kaye; Gilligan's Island; What's My Line?, I've Got a Secret, and To Tell the Truth; The Lucy Show, Gunsmoke; Hogan's Heroes; Lassie; Lost in Space; My Three Sons; The Wild Wild West; and the Thursday night movie
Over at NBC, the lineup is similiarly stellar: Andy Williams and Dean Martin; The Kraft Music Hall; Bonanza; Daniel Boone; Flipper; I Dream of Jeannie; I Spy; The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; Run for Your Life; The Virginian; Walt Disney's Wonderful World; Get Smart; Bob Hope's Chrysler Theatre; The Bell Telephone Hour; Laredo; and the Saturday and Tuesday night movies.
Even ABC, long the back-marker, has series that today are considered classics at best, and at least fondly remembered: 12 O'clock High; The Avengers; Batman; Bewitched; The Big Valley; The Dating Game; Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea; Peyton Place; The Fugitive; The FBI; Combat!; F Troop; The Hollywood Palace, Lawrence Welk, and The King Family; and the Sunday night movie.
That's an astonishing list of series, the boomer equivalent of a television hall of fame. More than thirty of them have been released on DVD; even many of the variety shows have best-of compilations, and many others are on YouTube or floating around in the grey market. (And that doesn't include the new series, at least a dozen of which have their own DVD releases!) 
Fall 1967 also marked the first time that all three networks would be broadcasting their weekly prime time lineups in color; from now on, only movies, daytime programs, and location news specials would be in black-and-white. While this is no problem for new series, there are several existing series that make the transition to color, including The Wild Wild West, Twelve O'clock High, I Dream of Jeannie, Combat!, The Fugitive, and Bewitched. Some of them thrive in the new environment; Jeannie and The Wild Wild West are more vivid, more fantastic, with great use of the color pallet. On the other hand, I don't think many can argue that the noirish Fugitive and the gritty Combat! both suffer from the change, particularly the backlot sets that are much harder to disguise in color. It's also the final season for each, and while this can't be directly attributed to the change (David Janssen was exhausted from then strain of carrying The Fugitive, and it's hard to see how the network could have squeezed another season out of World War II), it certainly didn't help.
Danger is his businessAnd I don't want to overlook the Saturday morning lineup, either. New to NBC is Super 6, Space Kidettes, and Cool McCool, joining Atom Ant, Secret Squirrel, and The Jetsons. CBS adds Frankenstein Jr., Space Ghost, The Road Runner, The Beagles, and animated versions of Superman and The Lone Ranger to a lineup with Captain Kangaroo, Underdog, Mighty Mouse, and Tom & Jerry. The only new toon on ABC is King Kong, but he joins a lineup with The Beatles, Magilla Gorilla, Bugs Bunny, Milton the Monster, Hoppity Hooper, and (The New) Amerian Bandstand. I'd be surprised if you didn't recognize some of them.
Taken as a whole, this combination of new classics and established favorites certainly demonstrates why the 1966-67 season stands out. In fact, if you were to have the time, the money, and the resources, you'd probably be able to recreate entire days, if not weeks, of prime time programming, including many of the movies. I daresay it would be a lot more satisfying than what you'll be seeing with this season's shows.
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During the 60s, the Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace were the premiere variety shows on television. Whenever they appear in TV Guide together, we'll match them up and see who has the best lineup..
Sullivan: Beginning his 19th season, Ed welcomes Red Skelton, who pantomimes a father giving his son castor oil and offers a monolog on Texas; singer Robert Goulet; comedienne Joan Rivers; and the rockin' Rolling Stones. Also: highlights of "Holiday on Ice."
Palace: Host Fred Astaire welcomes Ethel Merman and Jack Jones; Marcel Marceau, who pantomimes "Bip the Lion Tamer" and "The Butterfly Collector"; comedian Pat Morita; the Roggé Sisters, balancing act; and the Hardy Family, tumbling acrobats. Fred dances to "Bugle Call Rag" and learns how to belt out a song in the Merman manner.
You didn't think, just because of the emphasis on the new, that we'd forget about our old friends, did you? Nonsense! Now, on the face of it this wouldn't seem to be an apples-to-apples comparison, given that it's the season premiere for Ed and you'd expect him to pull out all the stops. And you certainly can't argue with Red Skelton, Robert Goulet, Joan Rivers and the Stones, right? (The online episode guide also includes Louis Armstong.) But look at the Palace lineup: Fred Astaire, Ethel Merman, Jack Jones, Pat Morita, and Marcel Marceau! With all that talent on display, I don't see how you can be fair other than to call it a Push. 
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The NFL kicks off its regular season with a rare Saturday night contest pitting the defending champion Green Bay Packers against their archrivals, the Baltimore Colts, from County Stadium in Milwaukee (9:30 p.m., CBS). It's a rematch of last year's dramatic tie-breaker playoff for the Western Division championship, which the Packers won in sudden-death overtime, 13-10. Despite the Saturday opening, the NFL doesn't rule television yet; I suspect the game was scheduled as counterprogramming against the Miss America pageant, which CBS lost to NBC. You'll be reading about that momentarily, but in our Nothern California edition, there is no conflict: Miss America is on live, but the Packers-Colts game is being shown on a three-hour delay for West Coast viewers, so as not to upset the regular CBS schedule. You wouldn't see that happen today! (By the way, the Packers win, 24-3.) Not to worry, though; your favorite teams will be back in action Sunday, live and in color. 
There's more than just football on the sports calendar, though. Earlier on Saturday, Cassius Clay defends his world heavyweight champtionship against West German Karl Mildenberger live from Frankfurt, West Germany, on ABC's Wide World of Sports. (11:30 a.m.) It's his sixth title defense, and the fourth on a"world tour," that started after he refused military induction and was denied permission to fight in Illinois. The tour has taken him so far to fights in Toronto (March) and London (May and August), and this is his second title defense in five weeks. Incidentelly, he's already changed his name to Muhammad Ali, but many publications and media sources, including TV Guide, continue to refer to him as Clay. He'll return to the U.S. to fight in November.
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The start of the fall season was always something to look forward to, not only because of new hits and returning favorites, but also because of the big events that networks typically unleash. We'll see plenty of those in this issue, starting right away!
As we noted earlier, the Miss America Pageant takes place Saturday night in Atlantic City, carried for the first time on NBC; it's also the first time the pageant has been broadcast in color (7:00 p.m.), with Bert Parks as the emcee and former Miss America Bess Myerson doing the TV honors. Bert has the honor singing "Here She Comes" to Miss Oklahoma, Jane Anne Jayroe. NBC also has a variety special, Class of '67, which serves as a lead-in to Miss America in most of the country, but on the West Coast is seen following the pageant, at 9:00 p.m. George Hamilton is the host of this "song-and-dance review of the American college scene," with Don Adams, Nancy Sinatra, Peter Nero, Burns and Schreiber, singer Trudy Desmond, dancer Lada Edmund Jr., and the Doodletown Pipers. Despite my frequent protestations of being old, I was nowhere near college age in 1966, so I'm curious as to just how reflective of the college scene this really was in 1966. 
More sports on Sunday, including that of the political kind; in a special edition of Meet the Press, California Governor Pat Brown faces off against his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan. (3:30 p.m., NBC; taped from a live broadcast) With two months to go before the election, polls show Reagan with a three-point lead; he'll go on to defeat Brown by 15 points. As for conventional sports, there's the men's final of the U.S. Tennis Championships, from Forest Hills, New York (noon, ABC); you'd recognize it now as the U.S. Open, but back in 1966 the field was limited to amateurs; unseeded Fred Stolle defeats John Newcombe to take the title. At 2:00 p.m. on NBC, it's the final round of the made-for-TV World Series of Golf, a 36-hole tournament that pits the winners of the year's four major tournaments; Gene Littler takes home the whopping first price of $50,000. 
In prime-time, NBC debuts the sitcom Hey Landlord! (8:30 p.m.), with Will Hutchins as the titular character, and Sandy Baron as his sidekick, followed by the season premieres of Bonanza (9:00 p.m.) and The Andy Williams Show (10:00 p.m.) Garry Moore revives his old variety series for CBS but finds that you can't go home again (9:00 p.m.); and ABC's Sunday Night Movie is a big one: a rerun of the Oscar-winning The Hustler (9:00 p.m.), with Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, and George C. Scott. 
NBC shows it's not just monkeying around on Monday nights with the premiere of The Monkees (7:30 p.m.), and according to TV Guide, "it’s a series which, at least, is different." Freely adapted from the Beatles' movies, The Monkees was never a huge ratings hit, but it developed a devoted audience, and today it remains a much-loved show, along with its stars. (And, as someone who grew up with the show, it's impossible to believe that Mickey is the only one left.) 
It's a big night for debuts, in fact; NBC also premieres The Roger Miller Show (8:30 p.m.) and The Road West (9:00 p.m.), an "all-family adventure series" set in 1860s Kansas starring Barry Sullivan, Andrew Prine, and Glenn Corbett. Not to be outdone, ABC presents Iron Horse (7:30 p.m.), Dale Robertson's return to series television as a gambler who wins a railroad in a poker game; The Rat Patrol (8:30 p.m.), with Christopher George leading a team of jeep-riding desert commandos against Nazis; and The Felony Squad (9:00 p.m.), a very good police drama (it ran for three seasons) starring Howard Duff, Dennis Cole, and Ben Alexander as big-city detectives. Meanwhile, CBS unveils Run, Buddy, Run (8:00 p.m.), a comedy "that's part Fugitive, part Untouchables, part Mack Sennett — and all spoof," with Jack Sheldon as a meek accountant on the run from the underworld boss Devere (Bruce Gordon, spoofing his own role as Frank Nitti from The Untouchables); Family Affair (9:30 p.m.), another much-loved series of the time, with Brian Keith as a bachelor who suddenly finds himself father to three orphans; and The Jean Arthur Show (10:00 p.m.), described as a sort-of comic version of The Defenders, with Arthur as a high-octane lawyer and Ron Harper as her son and partner in the firm. 
Tuesday night, the CBS news special Young Mr. Eisenhower (10:00 p.m.) takes us on a trip down memory lane as the former president talks with Harry Reasoner about his early years, first at the former family home in Abilene, Kansas, and then to West Point, New York, where the two talk about Ike's years as a cadet and how it helped shape his character. Throughout, the general talks about "his small-town upbringing and how it helped foster the values he holds important: industriousness, self-control, acceptance of responsibility and love of country." Perhaps the disappearance of small-town America has something to do with the problems we're in today. 
Wednesday sees the debut of ABC Stage 67 (10:00 p.m.), what the network calls "one of the most exciting and challenging programs ever presented by a national television network." It's a showcase for original dramas, comedies, musicals, variety shows and documentaries—in other words, programs that might ordinarily have been shown as specials, but instead will be seen as regular, weekly productions. The best-known of the 26 episodes that were aired were probably Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory" and "A Time For Laughter: A Look at Negro Humor in America"; tonight's premiere is "The Love Song of Barney Kempinski," starring Alan Arkin, Lee Grant, John Gielgud, and Alan King. One of its problems: it's up against NBC's I Spy and CBS's The Danny Kaye Show; when it's moved to Thursdays, it finds itself opposite The Dean Martin Show.
Thursday, CBS kicks off its new movie season with the television premiere of The Music Man (9:00 p.m.), with Robert Preston unforgettable as Professor Harold Hill, the conman who winds up getting his foot caught in Shirley Jones's door. Buddy Hackett, Pert Kelton, Paul Ford, Hermione Gingold, and Ronny Howard also star; the two-part presentation, which concludes Friday at the same time, is one of the finest adaptations of a stage musical to film. It's on up against the second season premiere of The Dean Martin Show (10:00 p.m., NBC), with Peggy Lee, the aforementioned Buddy Hackett, Guy Marks, Dorothy Provine, and Rowan and Martin. Whatevet else you do, though, make sure you catch episode number two of The Tammy Grimes Show (8:30 p.m., ABC), because after this, you'll only have two more chances before the show becomes one of the quickest cancellations in TV history; I wrote about the disaster a few years ago.
"Wherever Tony and Doug are, at least they're
not with Britt and Kato"I've mentioned before that one of television's saddest sights was Milton Berle hosting Jackpot Bowling back at the start of the decade; this time, Uncle Miltie is back for one last hurrah with The Milton Berle Show. (Friday, 9:00 p.m., ABC) It comes from the people who brought you The Hollywood Palace, and in fact, it plays like an episode of Palace with Berle hosting. It reminds me of an aging athlete past his prime who insists he can still deliver in the big game, even when it's obvious to everyone else that he ought to just hang it up. Even a lineup like tonight's, with Phyllis Diller, Adam West, Van Williams and Bruce Lee, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Donna Loren, and Joe Pyne, can't help; he'll be off the air just after the new year begins, replaced by Tim Conway's Rango. Another single-season show that deserved a better fate is T.H.E. Cat (9:30 p.m., NBC), with Robbert Logga as a smooth, dangerous cat burgler turned bodyguard. Fortunately, you'll have time to watch The Green Hornet (7:30 p.m.) and The Time Tunnel (8:00 p.m.) first. 
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ABC wants to know what you think! Throughout this issue, ads for ABC's new shows have invited readers to "be a television critic," and now comes the payoff. In a four-page color ad that appears at the end of the programming section, the network asks for your "your honest, candid opinion of our shows," both new and returning. After you've had a chance to check them all out during the "Seven Nights to Remember," fill in the attached entry form and send it in.
But, you may be asking yourself, why should I act as an unpaid TV critic for your network?" That's where ABC sweetens the pot: "By way of encouragement and thanks, we’re offering 25 General Electric 19-inch color television sets and 2,000 General Electric transistor radios as prizes." They promise that your chances of winning won't be affected by giving negative reviews; "We just want to know what you honestly think." What could be more fair?
For what )it's worth, ABC did not do well in the 1966-67 ratings. The network placed only two shows in the top 20, Bewitched and The Lawrence Welk Show. The hightest rated new show was The Rat Patrol, which finished tied for 23rd (with Petticoat Junction!), and eleven of the network's seventeen fall offerings were cancelled after a single season. (The survivors were Felony Squad, Iron Horse, The Newlywed Game, The Rat Patrol, That Girl, and The Wednesday Night Movie.) Several of the network's returning shows also bit the dust, including 12 O'Clock High, Combat!, F Troop and The Fugitive.
I wonder how many replies the network received? More important, and perhaps more interesting, I wonder what the results of the poll were? Did they have any influence on the network's programming decisions? And were the results ever shared with the public? I'll admit I haven't done an exhaustive search, but I haven't been able to find any press releases or stories that suggest it was publicized. Considering what the ratings indicated, though, perhaps the public's opinions were better left unsaid. TV  

Around the dial

Xt Comfort TV, David addresses a topic near and dear to my heart: the 15 best classic TV shows still not available on DVD . People who depend on streaming for their classic TV may be sorry when those programs suddenly disappear, but your DVDs are your own. And not only The Defenders: where are the second seasons of Burke's Law and The Eleventh Hour? 
Gill is back at Reelweegiemidget with another edition of recommended TV movies  from the last month. The viewing list from August includes flicks starring William Shatner, James Brolin, Mike Farrell, Cheryl Ladd, and more; be sure to look for your favorites. 
At bare-bones e-zine, Jack's Hitchcock Project looks at the ninth-season episode " A Nice Touch ," by Mann Rubin. Anne Baxter and George Segal star in a murder mystery that has a nice touch, indeed. By the way, I remember how nice it was to find out that Mann Rubin was an actual person and not a pseudonym; it always sounded like one of those names WB would come up with during a writers' strike.
John starts a new series at Cult TV Blog in which he focuses not on the shows, but on the stars who appear in them. First up on his list is the British actor Denis Shaw , and John looks at his performance in The Prisoner episode "Checkmate." Looking forward to this.
At Classic Film and TV Corner, Maddy has a charming story of the time her mother met Roy Rogers and Trigger . Roy was one of the most accessible of stars, and it's nice to see others sharing their stories of meeting him!
Peter Marshall's recent death brings to mind Bob Quigley , the producer of The Hollywood Squares and, coincidentelly, the head writer on Kay Kyser's College of Musical Knowledge. And that is what brings us to The Lucky Strike Papers, for Andrew's mother, Sue Bennett, was a singer on Kyser's show. Read all about it.
SerlingFest 2024 is next weekend in Binghamton, New York, and Paul has all the details at Shadow & Substance, including a stimulating lineup of guest speakers, video presentations, and, on Sunday, the dedication of the Rod Serling statue. We'll have to visit this fest some year! A Shroud of Thoughts and Travalanche both have tributes to the late James Darren, who died earlier this week at the age of 88. From Gidget to The Time Tunnel, from singing to acting, his was an impressive career; he was also, from what I hear, a great guy as well. Terence's piece is here , while you can read what Trav has to say here .
Finally, A View from the Junkyard gives us our weekly Avengers fix, with an excellent episode from the Steed/Tara season: " Requiem ." Or is it excellent? See what Roger and Mike have to say; better yet, watch it for yourself and make up your own mind. TV  

24 for 2024: the best political movies and TV shows

If you've made a habit of reading this website through the years, first of all, you need some better habits. Be that as it may, you've probably become accustomed to my quadrennial presentation of  favorite political movies and TV episodes, and who am I to deny you that pleasure one more time? 
This list has now doubled from its original compilation in 2012, but the content remains as dark and cynical as ever. If you're looking for movies that are inspiring or uplifting—Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, for example, or The West Wing—you won't find it here, friend. These stories deal with politics as it is: seamy, disturbing, and often deeply discouraging. As I wrote in this space four years ago, the main characters often exemplify greed, corruption, murder, dishonesty, brute force, and irredeemable qualities. In other words, it's everything we've come to expect about politics and politicians.
You also won't find movies like All the President's Men and The American President, or series like Spin City and All's Fair, on this list. That's partly a matter of personal taste—they star or feature actors I don't like—and partly a reflection of my own political sensibilities. These tend to be written and directed by people who just can't resist injecting their idological and political biases into the story, and have no problem distorting the facts to prove their point. (If, for example, you think All the President's Men comes anywhere close to telling the true story of Watergate, then I'd also like your help in transferring a few million dollars of foreign money into my bank account.) I've made a couple of exceptions here and there, but not many.
Hopefully, I've compensated for these omissions by listing some movies that you aren't familiar with, or might be surprised to find listed here. The Man, for instance, doesn't show up on many lists of this kind, and it's far from being a classic of the genre, but it does deal with a provocative subject—a black American president—long before it happened in real life, and James Earl Jones is always worth watching. And if any of you discover a movie like The Great McGinty because of this, than it's been worth it.
This is probably the earliest the list has ever appeared here; partly, that's a reflection of how it keeps getting longer and longer—if you want to see them all, you won't be able to use lack of time as an excuse—and partly an indication of how campaigns, especially at the highest level, have become a year-round event. 
As in the past, I present these in no particular order, with the exception of the film that's number one on the list. 

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Director: John Frankenheimer
Stars: Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansbury, Janet Leigh

There’s not much to add to the classic thriller about an assassin brainwashed to infiltrate the American political scene. It was a movie ahead of its time, boasting terrific performances by Sinatra and Lansbury, who makes you forget all about Jessica Fletcher. If you haven’t seen it, get it. And, yes, this happens to be the number one film on my list.  Frankenheimer was a veteran of Golden Age anthologies such as Playhouse 90 (directing well over 100 in total), and won four Emmys in his return to TV movies in the 90s.  You can see his experience with live TV in the way he used a TV camera and monitor during a scene where James Gregory's bumptious Joe McCarthy knock-off confronts a general.  It's a small touch, but light-years ahead of how it would have been done by other directors of the time.
What to watch for:  Most people would choose the hallucinatory brainwashing/tea party scene, which is memorable—but look for the scene late in the movie when Sinatra scans Madison Square Garden in search of Harvey's agonized Raymond. Even during the National Anthem, when protocol demands that Sinatra’s Colonel Marco stands at attention, his eyes are everywhere, darting back and forth in search of any kind of a clue.


Seven Days in May (1964)

Director: John Frankenheimer
Stars: Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas Fredric March, Ava Gardner

Another Frankenheimer political potboiler, this time concerning a plot by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to overthrow the U.S. government and replace a weak president (March) whom they fear is unable to stand up to the Communists in Russia and China. While not as good as the best-seller that inspired it, Rod Serling’s screenplay incorporates large chunks of the book’s dialogue verbatim, to the movie's benefit. The heavyweight matchup is between Lancaster, as the strong-willed JCS Chairman, and Douglas, not only trying to save the American system of government but also to preserve the integrity of the armed forces and the American tradition of civilian control of the military.  The plot has been borrowed for various mediocre TV movies, but the original still packs a wallop.
What to watch for:  For techno-geeks, look for Frankenheimer’s use of closed-circuit cameras throughout the JCS offices. As a TV veteran, it must have been old hat for him.


Fail Safe (1964)

Director: Sidney Lumet
Stars: Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau, Dan O'Herlihy, Larry Hagman

A computer malfunction results in an American bomber group being given an accidental attack order against the Soviet Union. Fonda’s president—almost too virtuous, as is often the case with Fonda roles—is stuck in a no-win situation: unable to recall the group, forced to help the Soviets try to shoot them down in order to convince them of his sincerity (and avoid a retaliatory strike), and having to deal with an Ivy League professor (Matthau, channeling Henry Kissinger) trying to convince him that an all-out strike against the Russians is the only way to go. Since this is a TV site, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention George Clooney's surprisingly good  2000 live version , shot in black-and-white and introduced by Walter Cronkite.  No, Richard Dreyfuss is no Henry Fonda, and you can ask yourself whether or not the plot should have been updated - but why quibble with success?
What to watch for:  No music. O’Herlihy’s affecting performance as a world-weary general. Hagman’s underrated turn as Fonda’s interpreter during the hotline talks with the Soviet premier (vastly superior to Noah Wyle's performance in the TV remake).


Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Stars: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Slim Pickens

Make sure you watch Fail Safe prior to Dr. Strangelove; otherwise, you'll never be able to watch the former with a straight face. Sellers is brilliant in three roles: Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, who tries to prevent the nuclear attack from being triggered; U.S. President Merkin Muffley, a suggestive inpression of Adlai Stevenson; and the titular Dr. Strangelove, who (like Mattheu's character) insists the U.S. can win a nuclear confrontation. Scott is wonderfully manic as General Buck Turgidson, representing every warmongering general you can imagine, and Sterling Hayden shines as the paranoid General Jack D. Ripper, obsessed with communists and fluroidated water. The movie is based on Peter George's novel Red Alert; George sued the authors of the novel Fail-Safe, charging plagiarism due to the striking similarities between the two stories. Kubrick, who feared Fail Safe's heavyweight cast and director would damage his movie, used the lawsuit to keep Columbia from releasing Fail Safe until after Dr. Strangelove.
What to watch for:  Muffley's hot-line conversation with the Russian premier is hilarious, but the honors go to Group Captain Mandrake's confrontation with American Colonel Bat Guano (Keenan Wynn), which begins with one of film's immortal lines: "Now look, Colonel Bat Guano, if that really is your name."

Suddenly (1954)

Director: Lewis Allen
Stars: Frank Sinatra, Sterling Hayden, James Gleason

The idea behind this sinister little movie must have been very disturbing for 1954—a plot to assassinate the president (obviously Eisenhower, although his name is never mentioned) as his train makes a stop in the small California town of Suddenly, a "town where nothing much ever happens." The hit is financed by an unseen group (whose motive is never explained, which makes it even more sinister) and is to be carried out by mercenary gangsters. Sinatra, so good in The Manchurian Candidate, is brilliantly nasty here as the psychotic hired gun, holding a family hostage while using their house as staging ground for the assassination attempt.
What to watch for: There's a certain nobility to Sinatra's fellow gang members. There isn't much they wouldn't do for cold, hard cash—but assassinating the president? Instinctively it makes them uneasy: what they're doing is not only illegal, it's unpatriotic, and that violates the criminal code.


The Best Man (1964)

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner
Stars: Henry Fonda, Cliff Robertson, Lee Tracy

A showdown between two candidates for a party’s presidential nomination: Fonda, once again the noble candidate you’re meant to identify with, and Robertson, the ruthless, win-at-all-costs bad guy. Gore Vidal’s darkly comic play becomes a bit more serious on the big screen, and poses a thought-provoking question: is it more important to be virtuous and weak, or cunning and strong? At the time the candidates appeared to be thinly disguised versions of Adlai Stevenson (Fonda) and Richard Nixon (Robertson), but ask yourself if you don’t see more than a bit of JFK (or at least RFK) in Robertson’s heavy-handed tactics. (Vidal, in 1960, was a first-hand witness to the kind of campaign the Kennedy boys ran.)  Schaffner (Patton), like Frankenheimer, cut his teeth in the Golden Age, winning three Emmys for directing such classics as the Studio One version of Twelve Angry Men.
What to watch for:  Tracy, as the former president, is courted for his endorsement by both Fonda and Robertson. Watch him quiz each man about their belief in God, and see if you can figure out what Tracy himself believes. Is he telling either man the truth about how he feels, or merely manipulating them to see what their own answer is? Also according to Wikipedia, Ronald Reagan (still then an actor) was considered for a role but rejected because he didn't look presidential enough.


The Great McGinty (1940)

Director: Preston Sturges
Stars: Brian Donlevy, Muriel Angelus, Akim Tamiroff, William Demarest

This spot-on satire, written and directd by the brilliant Sturges, tells the story of a bum (Donlevy) who in hilarious circumstances rises through the crooked party ranks to become governor, before gaining a conscience, thanks to the love of a good woman (his wife, through a marriage arranged to improve his image), with the result that everything collapses around him. Would that more corrupt politicians reacted the way he does—by escaping from jail and fleeing the country.  
What to watch for:  Besides Demarest’s very funny performance, McGinty and his cronies bring a Three Stooges-like element to politics; appropriate since, again according to Wikipedia, Tamiroff's malaprop-laced performance was the inspiration for Boris Badenov.


A Face in the Crowd (1957)

Director: Elia Kazan
Stars: Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Walter Matthau

Sheriff Andy Taylor was never like this! I’ve written about A Face in the Crowd before, but couldn’t pass up the chance to talk about it again. It's no wonder Griffith was frustrated by his stereotyping as the easygoing Sheriff Andy; his meglomaniacial Lonesome Rhodes, a popular entertainer brought in to increase the appeal of a presiential candidate, is an unforgettable portrait of runaway power. Griffith never again played a role that approched its sheer magnetism.
What to watch for:  This is Matthau’s second appearance in this list, and watching his performances in these two movies reminds you of what an underrated dramatic actor he was. If you know Matthau only from The Odd Couple and Grumpy Old Men, don’t miss him here.


All the King's Men (1949)

Director: Robert Rossen
Stars: Broderick Crawford, John Ireland, Joanne Dru, Mercedes McCambridge
Another repeat appearance.  I discussed the Pulitzer-winning novel here , but while the movie lacks much of the book’s depth and subtlety, it makes up with dominant (and Oscar-winning) performances by Crawford as Willie Stark, who truly was an honest man at one time; and McCambridge as Sadie Burke, Stark’s right-hand woman. I think you could make a case for this as the great American tragedy.
What to watch for:  You know you’ll end up hating Crawford by the end of the movie, which makes the actions of the honest Stark at the movie’s beginning even more painful to watch. Jack Burden (Ireland), about whom the book really revolves, is much less prominent here.


The Missiles of October (1974)

Director: Anthony Page
Stars: William Devane, Martin Sheen, Howard DaSilva, Ralph Bellamy

Sheen, who would later play JFK in a TV-movie, here plays RFK in this riveting drama about the Cuban Missile Crisis, originally shown only a dozen years after the showdown that cast everyone in the shadow of nuclear war. Terry Teachout’s  excellent look back in the Wall Street Journal  explains much about why this docudrama is so good, from its dedication to historical accuracy to the minimalist sets that give the production a Golden Age immediacy. This was “event” television when it was shown in a three-hour timeslot on ABC Theatre, and it’s just as powerful today. In fact, it might be the most optimistic movie on this list. 
What to watch for : As the generals apprise JFK of the possible damage a Soviet attack on American bases might inflict, I’ve always thought Devane (wonderful performance) betrays just a hint of creeping hysteria as he talks about wanting to make sure American planes aren’t lined up wingtip to wingtip—as they were at Pearl Harbor.


Wag the Dog (1997)

Director: Barry Levinson
Stars: Dustin Hoffman, Robert DeNiro, Anne Heche

Politics can be played for comedy, tragedy or satire; this one manages to incorporate all three, in this viciously delightful story of a movie producer (Hoffman, who might well be doing an impression of Levinson) hired to invent a fake war in order to save a corrupt President’s sorry ass. It’s a very smart, funny and well-acted movie (Willie Nelson’s star-studded “We Are the World”-type song is worth the price alone) , but its real impact comes from what we all know but are afraid to admit, and that’s one reason why we laugh—because it’s too painful to cry.
What to watch for:  I’d never been a big Hoffman fan prior to this movie, but I thought he was just terrific (and well-deserving of his Oscar nomination) with his sardonic portrayal of the movie producer for whom each potential disaster simply reminds him of a past movie-making experience. His answer is the same every time: “This is nothing!” I've used that line many times myself, with about equal success.


Columbo: "Candidate for Crime" (1973)

Director: Boris Sagal
Stars: Peter Falk, Jackie Cooper, Joanne Linville, Tisha Sterling

What would any "best-of" list be without an episode of Columbo?  Cooper plays a U.S. Senate candidate carrying on an affair with a member of his staff. When his campaign manager finds out and orders him to end the affair, Cooper murders him and tries to make it look as if he, Cooper, was actually the intended target. He may fool his wife, his lover, the press, and even the voters—but not Lieutenant Columbo.
What to watch for:  Cooper, like most of Columbo’s adversaries, takes the Lieutenant far too lightly. Watch him trying to film a sound bite for television, all the while being distracted by Columbo’s poking around his house. By the time he realizes that Columbo’s no fool, it’s too late.


Winter Kills (1979)

Director: William Richert
Stars: Jeff Bridges, John Huston, Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Richard Boone

Like The Manchurian Candidate, Winter Kills was based on a novel by Richard Condon, but unlike Candidate, it’s far less well known. Condon’s dark comedy tells the story of a man (Bridges) trying to discover the truth behind the conspiracy that took the life of his half-brother, an American president who was supposedly killed by a lone gunman. Any similarities to JFK, including gangsters, nightclub owners, and a domineering father (Huston, in a performance right out of Chinatown), are purely intentional.
What to watch for:  I won’t give away the ending, but suffice it to say that it involves a surreal scene with Bridges, Huston and an enormous American flag.


House of Cards (1990, plus sequels)

Created by: Andrew Davies; Director: Paul Seed
Stars: Ian Richardson, Susannah Harker, David Lyon, Diane Fletcher

Not the American version starring Kevin Spacey, but the far-superior UK version, which came to the United States via Masterpiece Theatre. Ian Richardson is brilliant as Francis Urquart (initials FU), who schemes to become Prime Minister after being snubbed by the current PM. As Urquart methodically sets about sabotaging his rivals, he finds that in most cases, they provide him with more than enough rope to do the job. Throw in the most scheming wife since Lady Macbeth (Fletcher) and an impressionable, pliable young journalist (Harker), and the stage is more than set. Be sure to check out the series' two sequels, To Play the King and  The Final Cut .
What to watch for: Urquart constantly breaks the fourth wall, talking directly to the viewers, making us all parties to his plot. He's evil, but hard to root against. His catch phrase, which I've used many times: "You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment."


Yes Minister / Yes, Prime Minister (1980-88)

Created by: Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn
Stars: Paul Eddington, Nigel Hawthorne, Derek Fowlds

Much as Barney Miller was to police series, Yes Minister and its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister is probably the most accurate political series ever made, far more so than a program such as The West Wing. There is no idealization in this brutal, hilarious satire of British politics, featuring Jim Hacker (Eddington) as the newly-named Minister of Administrative Affairs, his permanent secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby (Hawthorne) and his personal secretary, the well-meaning Bernard (Fowlds). We quickly learn that the aptly named Hacker is far from the brightest bulb on the tree, but we root for him against the smug, obfuscating Sir Humphrey, who's determined to hang on to his power (as a civil servant, he maintains his position regardless of which party is in power). Hacker is full of surprises though, and while he might not be Humphrey's intellectual equal, he more than holds his own as a politician, not always the boob he might seem to be.
What to watch for: After listening to Sir Humphrey's tangled, tortured explanation as to why the Department of Administrative Affairs couldn't possibly do what its minister wants, Hacker often is left with a blank, glassy-eyed stare.


Advise and Consent (1962)

Director: Otto Preminger
Stars: Henry Fonda, Walter Pidgeon, Don Murray, Charles Laughton, Gene Tierney

Based on Allen Drury's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Advise and Consent presents the story of a bruising battle over the confirmation of a nominee for Secretary of State, with Fonda as Secretary of State nominee Robert Leffingwell, who may at one time have been a member of the Communist party (a thinly disguised version of Alger Hiss), and Charles Laughton (who disliked Fonda in real life) as Senator Seab Cooley, one of his opponents. It's a spicy story that features blackmail and homosexuality in addition to political ambition and the Red menace, yet Preminger sought to enliven the movie even more, offering roles to both Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon. Both wisely declined. You'll find some of the speechifying and plot twisting a bit over-the-top, and the movie suffers in comparison with the book, but it remains an entertaining political thriller in the neo-noir tradition, and a cynical, grown-up antidote to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
What to watch for: You'll find it hard to believe that Vice President Harley Hudson (Lew Ayers) would be at the airport, without security, flying on a commercial airliner—yet it's true. It wasn't until the mid-60s that the Vice President flew regularly on a government plane.


The Candidate (1972)

Director: Michael Ritchie
Stars: Robert Redford, Peter Boyle

Take one photogenic activist lawyer, introduce him to a savvy political operative looking for a candidate. The result: an earnest, progressive candidate for the United States Senate, fighting an uphill campaign against the incumbent Republican. The Candidate is predictable, but no less captivating, in his look at the phony, cynical world of politics. It's also prescient in its portrayal of a candidate recruited for his telegenic looks, regardless of whether or not he's qualified. Even conservatives might wind up rooting for Redford's character as he takes on the smug, establishment Republican.
What to watch for :  Without giving away the ending, Redford's final exchange with his campaign manager (Boyle) is worth the price of admission alone.

The Thick of It (2005-12)

Creator/Director: Armando Iannucci
Stars: Peter Capaldi, Chris Langham, Rebecca Front

Before he was Doctor Who, Peter Capaldi rose to fame in this BBC series as the outrageously profane Malcolm Tucker, the prime minister's chief whip, a man who probably isn't above using a real whip to keep the party's MPs in line. Frequently running afoul of Tucker is the show's protagonist, Hugh Abbott (Langham), the minister of the Department of Social Affairs (replaced after the second series by Rebecca Front as Nicola Murray). The series has often been thought of as an updated version of Yes Minister, and it's cynicism is as breathtaking as its ability to predict British political trends. The series spawned a big-screen spinoff,  In the Loop , and a failed pilot for an American adaptation. Creator Armando Iannucci instead went on to create the HBO series Veep.
What to watch for: Or in this case, "listen for": the show reportedly employed a "swearing consultant" to enhane the dialogue, and the attention to detail shows. You'll never quite look at The Doctor in the same away again.

The Man (1972)

Director: Joseph Sargent
Stars: James Earl Jones, Martin Balsam, Burgess Meredith, Georg Stanford Brown

This ABC teleflick was based on the novel of the same name by Irving Wallace;  not surprisingly, there was far more in the book that could ever be worked into a 93-minute running time. The focus of the story is Douglass Dilman (Jones) who, thanks to the 1947 Presidential Succession Act and following an improbable series of circumstances, finds himself as the first black president of the United States. Both verisons deal with the racism, both overt and subtle, that Dilman faces, but whereas the book climaxes with a spectacular impeachment trial, the movie builds toward Dilman's efforts to win his party's nomination for a full term as president. The title has a double meaning; "The Man" is Beltway-speak for the president, but Wallace also intends it as a counter to racist ideas that blacks were less than human.
W hat to watch for: The movie features cameos from several real-life media figures such as ABC's Howard K. Smith and Bill Lawrence, which lends a realistic note to a movie which should have been much better than it is. Arguably, the highlight is a wonderful appearance by Jack Benny as himself, entertaining a star-studded group at a White House gala.

The Death of Stalin (2017)

Director: Armando Iannucci
Stars: Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Michael Palin, Jeffrey Tambour

Who knew persecution and genocide could be so funny? Armando Iannucci's second appearance on the list is a vicious satire that combines laugh-out loud absurdity (hint: the more absurd the scene, the more likely it is to be true) with images of ugly brutality. The resulting story underlines Hannah Arendt's writing on the banality of evil, and serves as a reminder that every political system, from the most democratic to the most despotic, will inevitably be plagued by bureaucracy. The brilliant ensemble cast shines, especially Buscemi as Khrushchev, Beale as Beria, and Tambour as Malkenov, and serves once again as a reminder of the adage that the greatest truths can often be found in comedy.
W hat to watch for: The movie's tone is set in the opening scene, in which a frantic Radio Moscow crew scrambles to recreate a concert performance after Stalin insists on having a recording of the broadcast—a demand only slightly hampered by the fact that the broadcast hadn't been recorded. The apocryphical story does more than anything else to demonstrate the absolute fear and paranoia that ran through every aspect of life in Soviet Russia.

Z (1969)

Director: Costa-Gavras
Stars: Yves Montand, Irene Papas, Jean-Louis Trintignant

Based on the real-life assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963, Z was the first movie ever nominated for both Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film by the Academy Awards; director Costa-Gavras also received nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. It's a scathing denunciation of Greek political corruption,  and the military; while Costa-Gavras clearly implicates both the right-wing Greek government and the military in the assassination and the crackdown on freedom of expression, the movie can also be seen today as an allegory of the Deep State willing to do whatever it takes to remain in power.
W hat to watch for: Does Montand's character, identified in the movie only as The Deputy, have a premonion of his assassination? Watching him work his way through the crowd on the way to his speech, and later preparing to cross the street on the way to his death, you get that sense—and yet he goes through with it, because he knows he must, that it's more important to speak out than to just stay safe.

JFK (1991)

Director: Oliver Stone
Stars: Kevin Costner, Kevin Bacon, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman

Speaking of assassinations and conspiracies, no such list would be complete without Oliver Stone's 1991 epic. It's a brilliant yet problamatic movie that blends fact and theory in a disturbingly realistic way; still, the fact that Jim Garrison's conspiracy theory involving New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw in the assassination of JFK often defies logic (don't hold Kevin Costner's often-annoying portrayal of Garrison get in the way; you can only work with what you have, and in real life, Garrison often comes across as bat-shit crazy) shouldn't hide the fact that questions about the assassination remain, and the increasingly plausible Deep State theories of the past few years make this movie, in some ways, almost seem prophetic.  
W hat to watch for: You might be tempted to think that Joe Pesci's weird portrayal of conspiracist David Ferrie is made up, but Ferrie was a real person, and whatever his role in the Kennedy assassination, he's a reminder that truth is often stranger than fiction. 

Primary (1960)

Producer: Robert DrewDocumentary

This cinéma vérité documentary look at the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey provides us with a look at retail politics at the grass-roots level, showing the candidates speaking to civic groups, meeting people in stores and on the street, and—in Humphrey's case—bemoaning the substantial monetary advantage held by JFK. Drew would later say that "Kennedy appreciated the fact that I was trying to improvise a new form of film journalism. I don’t think Sen. Humphrey did." Nobody who knows they're being filmed ever really becomes unaware of the camera; even so, this remains one of the most unguarded looks at presidential campaigning that you'll ever see.
W hat to watch for: Humphrey's speeches take on the increasingly desperate tone of a man who knows this early primary will make or break his campaign, while Kennedy remains as smooth and collected as ever. The camera really did love JFK, didn't it?

The Last Hurrah (1958)

Director: John Ford
Stars: Spencer Tracy, Jeffrey Hunter, Dianne Foster, Pat O'Brien, Basil Rathbone

An admission: I am not a big John Ford fan. (There; I've said it.) So why do I have one of his movies on this list? Two words: Spencer Tracy. This sentimental look at the last vestige of the "political boss" way of life would be almost intolerable with anyone else in the lead role, but Tracy's portrayal of Frank Skeffington, a big-city mayor in the midst of his final campaign, is both a warm remembrance of the Irish-American political machine (with more than a little cynicism thrown in) and a wary preview of the future of politics. It may fall short of Edwin O'Connor's novel of the same name, but we've learned to live with that kind of disappointment. If you have a chance to see the remake with Carroll O'Connor in the lead role, skip it and stick with the original.
W hat to watch for: On election night, as his opponents celebrate his defeat, Skeffington vows not to go gentle into the good night: instead, he plans to run for governor! TV  

What's on TV? Monday, September 1, 1969

Happy Labor Day! It's Labor Day in today's Northern California listings as well, although there's not a lot to show for it. Baseball, maybe; NBC's Monday night special pits the Reds and Cubs, and it's no surprise the network would choose a holiday for one of their three annual summer specials. But it's all really just a tryout for Monday Night Baseball, which the network will go to on a permanent basis in 1972. There's no Jerry; although this will probably be one of the last years in which the telethon won't be a regular part of the Labor Day weekend. No, the best thing about today is simply that it's a day off, and what better way to spend it than to sit back by grilling some burgers, having some brewskis with friends, and watching some television?
  -2- KTVU (BAY AREA) (Ind.)

  MORNING

      8:00

NEWS -C-        8:15

RELIGION—Protestant -C-        8:30

JACK LA LANNE—Exercise -C-        9:00

POPEYE—Children -C-        9:30

BEVERLY HILLBILLIES—Comedy -C-      10:00

ANDY GRIFFITH -C-      10:30

BURKE’S LAW—Mystery

    11:45

ROMPER ROOM—Children -C-    AFTERNOON

    12:30

BEAT THE ODDS—Game -C-        1:00

MOVIE—Western -C-  “The Burning Hills” (1956)

      3:00

LINKLETTER SHOW -C-  Guest: Mark Bleeker

      3:30

POPEYE—Children -C-        4:00

TIMMY AND LASSIE—Adventure

      4:30

LEAVE IT TO BEAVER—Comedy

      5:00

DENNIS THE MENACE—Comedy

      5:30

PATTY DUKE—Comedy

  EVENING

      6:00

MY FAVORITE MARTIAN

      6:30

McHALE’S NAVY—Comedy

      7:00

I LOVE LUCY—Comedy

      7:30

TWO FOR TRAVEL -C-        8:00

PASSWORD—Game -C-  Guests: Jack Cassidy, Donna Douglas

      8:30

WHAT’S MY LINE?—Game -C-  Celebrities: Susan Bracken, Arlene Francis, Nipsey Russell, Soupy Sales

      9:00

DELLA REESE—Variety -C-  Guests: Rich Little, Minnie Pearl, the Watts 103rd St. Band

    10:00

NEWS—Gary Park -C-      11:00

UNTOUCHABLES—Drama

    12:00

ALFRED HITCHCOCK—Drama

    12:30

NEWS -C- 

 

 

  -3- KCRA (SACRAMENTO) (NBC)

  MORNING

      6:00

RHYME AND REASON

      7:00

TODAY -C-  Guests: Leif Erickson and his family, Bruce Yarnell, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sanche De Gramont

      9:00

IT TAKES TWO -C-  Guests: Roger Williams, James Darren, Annette Funicello, and their spouses

      9:25

NEWS—Nancy Dickerson -C-        9:30

CONCENTRATION -C-      10:00

PERSONALITY -C-  Celebrities: Jack Cassidy, Jack E. Leonard, Joan Rivers. On-film: Robert Culp

    10:30

HOLLYWOOD SQUARES—Game -C-  Guests: Amanda Blake, Sebastian Cabot, Jack Carter, Rose Marie, Jim Backus, Susan Saint James. Regulars: Wally Cox, Paul Lynde, Charley Weaver

    11:00

JEOPARDY—Game -C-      11:30

EYE GUESS—Game -C-      11:55

NEWS—Edwin Newman -C-    AFTERNOON

    12:00

NEWS -C-      12:30

DAYS OF OUR LIVES -C-        1:00

DOCTORS—Serial -C-        1:30

ANOTHER WORLD -C-        2:00

YOU DON’T SAY!—Game -C-  Guests: Mel Torme, Jaye P. Morgan. Host: Tom Kennedy

      2:30

MOVIE—Drama

“Safe at Home” (1962)

      4:00

BATMAN—Adventure -C-  Guest villain: Cesar Romero (The Joker)

      4:30

NEWS -C-        5:00

BASEBALL -C-  Special: Chicago Cubs at Cincinnati Reds

[Alternate game: St. Louis Cardinals at Houston Astros. Pre-empts regular programming]

  EVENING

      8:00

NEWS -C-        9:00

MOVIE—Drama -C-  “The Gift of Love” (1958)

    11:00

NEWS -C-   

  11:30

JOHNNY CARSON -C-  Guests: William Holden, Tony Randall, Turley Richards

      1:00

NEWS -C- 

 

 

  -4- KRON (BAY AREA) (NBC)

  MORNING

      6:30

NEWS—Dick Doughty -C-        7:00

TODAY -C-  Guests: Leif Erickson and his family, Bruce Yarnell, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sanche De Gramont

      9:00

IT TAKES TWO -C-  Guests: Roger Williams, James Darren, Annette Funicello, and their spouses

      9:25

NEWS—Nancy Dickerson -C-        9:30

CONCENTRATION -C-      10:00

PERSONALITY -C-  Celebrities: Jack Cassidy, Jack E. Leonard, Joan Rivers. On-film: Robert Culp

    10:30

HOLLYWOOD SQUARES—Game -C-  Guests: Amanda Blake, Sebastian Cabot, Jack Carter, Rose Marie, Jim Backus, Susan Saint James. Regulars: Wally Cox, Paul Lynde, Charley Weaver

    11:00

JEOPARDY—Game -C-      11:30

EYE GUESS—Game -C-      11:55

NEWS—Edwin Newman -C-    AFTERNOON

    12:00

NEWS -C-      12:30

DAYS OF OUR LIVES -C-        1:00

DOCTORS—Serial -C-        1:30

ANOTHER WORLD -C-        2:00

YOU DON’T SAY!—Game -C-  Guests: Mel Torme, Jaye P. Morgan. Host: Tom Kennedy

      2:30

MATCH GAME -C-  Guests: Tom Kennedy, Brenda Vaccaro. Host: Gene Rayburn

      2:55

NEWS—Floyd Kalber -C-        3:00

YOU’RE PUTTING ME ON -C-  Guests: Orson Bean, Ann Meara, Robert Morse, Brenda Vaccaro

      3:30

F TROOP—Comedy

      4:00

LOST IN SPACE—Adventure -C-        5:00

BASEBALL -C-  Special: Chicago Cubs at Cincinnati Reds

[Alternate game: St. Louis Cardinals at Houston Astros. Pre-empts regular programming]

  EVENING

      8:00

NEWS—Chet Huntley, David Brinkley -C-        8:30

NEWS -C-        9:00

MOVIE—Drama

“Career” (1959)

    11:00

NEWS -C-   

  11:30

JOHNNY CARSON -C-  Guests: William Holden, Tony Randall, Turley Richards

      1:00

JOAN RIVERS -C-  Guest: Andrew Grima

 

 

  -5- KPIX (BAY AREA) (CBS)

  MORNING

      6:00

BLACK HERITAGE—History -C-        6:30

CITIES IN CONFLICT

      7:00

NEWS—Joseph Benti -C-        7:30

NEWS—Ron Magers -C-        8:00

CAPTAIN KANGAROO -C-        9:00

LUCILLE BALL -C-        9:30

HOTLINE—Discussion -C-      10:30

DICK VAN DYKE

    11:00

LOVE OF LIFE -C-      11:25

NEWS—Douglas Edwards -C-      11:30

SEARCH FOR TOMORROW—Serial -C-    AFTERNOON

    12:00

NEWS -C-      12:30

AS THE WORLD TURNS—Serial -C-        1:00

LOVE IS A MANY-SPLENDORED THING—Serial -C-        1:30

GUIDING LIGHT -C-        2:00

SECRET STORM -C-        2:30

EDGE OF NIGHT -C-        3:00

MIKE DOUGLAS—Variety -C-  Co-host: Joan Rivers. Guests include Jimmy Dean

      4:30

DAVID FROST—Variety -C-  Guests: Jimmy Breslin, Jim Moran, Jackie Kahane, the Friends of Distinction

  EVENING

      6:00

NEWS -C-        6:30

NEWS—Walter Cronkite -C-        7:00

NEWS—John Weston -C-        7:30

GUNSMOKE -C-        8:30

LUCILLE BALL -C-        9:00

MAYBERRY R.F.D. -C-        9:30

FAMILY AFFAIR -C-      10:00

JIMMIE RODGERS -C-  Guests: Roger Williams, Scoey Mitchell

    11:00

NEWS -C-   

  11:30

MERV GRIFFIN -C-  Guests: Hermoine Gingold, Bobby Sherman, George Carlin, Barbara Tai-Sing, Gwen Davis

 

 

  -6- KVIE (SACRAMENTO) (NET)

  AFTERNOON

      5:45

FRENDLY GIANT—Children

  EVENING

      6:00

MISTEROGERS—Children

      6:30

WHAT’S NEW—Children

      7:00

MISTEROGERS—Children

      8:00

WORLD PRESS—Report -C-        8:30

ETERNAL LIGHT—Drama -C-        9:00

NET JOURNAL—Documentary

“Science and Conscience”

    10:00

NET PLAYHOUSE—Drama

“The Madras House”

 

 

  -7- KGO (BAY AREA) (ABC)

  MORNING

      6:00

EXPEDITION CALIFORNIA

      6:25

A.M.—Jim Dunbar -C-        6:30

CANCER RESEARCH

      8:30

ANNIVERSARY GAME -C-        9:00

MOVIE—Drama

“Night into Morning” (1951)

    11:00

CANDID CAMERA—Allen Funt

    11:30

GALLOPING GOURMET -C-    AFTERNOON

    12:00

BEWITCHED—Comedy

    12:30

THAT GIRL—Comedy -C-        1:00

DREAM HOUSE -C-        1:30

LET’S MAKE A DEAL -C-        2:00

NEWLYWED GAME -C-        2:30

DATING GAME -C-        3:00

GENERAL HOSPITAL -C-        3:30

ONE LIFE TO LIVE -C-        4:00

DARK SHADOWS -C-        4:30

MOVIE—Adventure -C-  “City Beneath the Sea” (1953)

  EVENING

      6:00

NEWS -C-        7:00

NEWS—Frank Reynolds/Howard K. Smith -C-        7:30

AVENGERS—Adventure -C-        8:30

GUNS OF WILL SONNETT -C-        9:00

OUTCASTS—Western -C-      10:00

DICK CAVETT—Variety -C-  Guests: Sal Mineo, B.B. King, I.F. Stone

    11:00

NEWS -C-   

  11:30

JOEY BISHOP -C-  Guests: Robert Goulet, Polly Bergen

 

 

  7W KRCR (REDDING) (ABC, NBC)

  MORNING

      7:00

TODAY -C-  Guests: Leif Erickson and his family, Bruce Yarnell, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sanche De Gramont

      9:00

IT TAKES TWO -C-  Guests: Roger Williams, James Darren, Annette Funicello, and their spouses

      9:25

NEWS—Nancy Dickerson -C-        9:30

CONCENTRATION -C-      10:00

PERSONALITY -C-  Celebrities: Jack Cassidy, Jack E. Leonard, Joan Rivers. On-film: Robert Culp

    10:30

HOLLYWOOD SQUARES—Game -C-  Guests: Amanda Blake, Sebastian Cabot, Jack Carter, Rose Marie, Jim Backus, Susan Saint James. Regulars: Wally Cox, Paul Lynde, Charley Weaver

    11:00

JEOPARDY—Game -C-      11:30

EYE GUESS—Game -C-      11:55

NEWS—Reeter -C-    AFTERNOON

    12:00

YOU’RE PUTTING ME ON -C-  Guests: Orson Bean, Ann Meara, Robert Morse, Brenda Vaccaro

    12:30

DAYS OF OUR LIVES -C-        1:00

DREAM HOUSE -C-        1:30

ANOTHER WORLD -C-        2:00

NEWLYWED GAME -C-        2:30

DATING GAME -C-        3:00

GENERAL HOSPITAL -C-        3:30

ONE LIFE TO LIVE -C-        4:00

DARK SHADOWS -C-        4:30

LET’S MAKE A DEAL—Game

      5:00

BASEBALL -C-  Special: Chicago Cubs at Cincinnati Reds

[Alternate game: St. Louis Cardinals at Houston Astros. Pre-empts regular programming]

  EVENING

      8:00

NEWS—Chet Huntley, David Brinkley -C-        8:30

NEWS -C-        9:00

MOVIE—Drama

“The Sound and the Fury” (1959)

    11:00

NEWS -C-   

  11:30

JOHNNY CARSON -C-  Guests: William Holden, Tony Randall, Turley Richards

      1:00

NEWS -C- 

 

 

  9W KIXE (REDDING) (NET)

  AFTERNOON

      5:30

WHAT’S NEW—Children

  EVENING

      6:00

MISTEROGERS—Children

      6:30

DISCOVERY—Science

      7:00

AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE

      7:30

SUZUI STRINGS—Music

      8:00

WORLD PRESS—Report -C-        9:00

NET JOURNAL—Documentary

“Science and Conscience”

    10:00

TEEN-AGERS AND SEX

    10:30

MYTHOLOGY—Greek

“The Promethean Legend”

 

 

  10 KXTV (SACRAMENTO) (CBS)

  MORNING

      6:00

LIVING WORD—Religion -C-        6:15

INDUSTRY ON PARADE

      6:30

BLACK HERITAGE—History -C-        7:00

NEWS—Joseph Benti -C-        8:00

CAPTAIN KANGAROO -C-        9:00

LUCILLE BALL -C-        9:30

BEVERLY HILLBILLIES—Comedy -C-      10:00

ANDY GRIFFITH -C-      10:30

DICK VAN DYKE

    11:00

LOVE OF LIFE -C-      11:25

NEWS—Chris Harris -C-      11:30

SEARCH FOR TOMORROW—Serial -C-    AFTERNOON

    12:00

NEWS -C-      12:30

AS THE WORLD TURNS—Serial -C-        1:00

LOVE IS A MANY-SPLENDORED THING—Serial -C-        1:30

GUIDING LIGHT -C-        2:00

SECRET STORM -C-        2:30

EDGE OF NIGHT -C-        3:00

LINKLETTER SHOW -C-  Guest: Mark Bleeker

      3:30

PASSWORD—Game -C-  Celebrities: Jerry Lewis, Audrey Meadows

      4:00

MIKE DOUGLAS—Variety -C-  Co-host: Joan Rivers. Guests include Jimmy Dean

      5:30

NEWS—Walter Cronkite -C-    EVENING

      6:00

NEWS -C-        7:00

WHAT’S MY LINE?—Game -C-  Celebrities: Bert Convy, Arlene Francis, Soupy Sales, Joanna Simon

      7:30

GUNSMOKE -C-        8:30

LUCILLE BALL -C-        9:00

MAYBERRY R.F.D. -C-        9:30

FAMILY AFFAIR -C-      10:00

JIMMIE RODGERS -C-  Guests: Roger Williams, Scoey Mitchell

    11:00

NEWS -C-   

  11:30

MOVIE—Mystery

“Man in the Dark” (English; 1964)

 

 

  12 KHSL (CHICO) (ABC, CBS)

  MORNING

      6:30

FILM -C-        7:00

NEWS—Joseph Benti -C-        8:00

CAPTAIN KANGAROO -C-        9:00

LUCILLE BALL -C-        9:30

BEVERLY HILLBILLIES—Comedy -C-      10:00

ANDY GRIFFITH -C-      10:30

DICK VAN DYKE

    11:00

LOVE OF LIFE -C-      11:25

NEWS—Douglas Edwards -C-      11:30

SEARCH FOR TOMORROW—Serial -C-    AFTERNOON

    12:00

PDQ—Game -C-  Celebrities: Michael Landon, Dick Patterson

    12:30

AS THE WORLD TURNS—Serial -C-        1:00

LOVE IS A MANY-SPLENDORED THING—Serial -C-        1:30

GUIDING LIGHT -C-        2:00

SECRET STORM -C-        2:30

EDGE OF NIGHT -C-        3:00

LINKLETTER SHOW -C-  Guest: Mark Bleeker

      3:30

ZANE GREY—Drama

      4:00

TO BE ANNOUNCED

      5:30

NEWS -C-    EVENING

      6:30

NEWS—Walter Cronkite -C-        7:00

GET SMART—Comedy -C-        7:30

GUNSMOKE -C-        8:30

LUCILLE BALL -C-        9:00

MAYBERRY R.F.D. -C-        9:30

FAMILY AFFAIR -C-      10:00

JIMMIE RODGERS -C-  Guests: Roger Williams, Scoey Mitchell

    11:00

NEWS -C-   

  11:30

MERV GRIFFIN -C-  Guests: Hermoine Gingold, Bobby Sherman, George Carlin, Barbara Tai-Sing, Gwen Davis

 

 

  13 KOVR (SACRAMENTO) (ABC)

  MORNING

      6:25

NEWS -C-        6:30

JACK LA LANNE—Exercise -C-        7:00

AGRICULTURE TODAY -C-        7:15

NEWS—Chuck Rossie -C-        7:20

CARTOONLAND

      8:20

CASPER—Children

      8:50

JACK LA LANNE—Exercise -C-        9:20

FASHIONS IN SEWING

      9:30

STEVE ALLEN—Variety -C-  Guests: George Burns, Earl Grant, Robert Klein

    11:00

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES -C-      11:30

GALLOPING GOURMET -C-    AFTERNOON

    12:00

BEWITCHED—Comedy

    12:30

THAT GIRL—Comedy -C-        1:00

DREAM HOUSE -C-        1:30

LET’S MAKE A DEAL -C-        2:00

NEWLYWED GAME -C-        2:30

DIVORCE COURT—Drama -C-        3:00

GENERAL HOSPITAL -C-        3:30

ONE LIFE TO LIVE -C-        4:00

DARK SHADOWS -C-        4:30

GILLIGAN’S ISLAND -C-        5:00

I LOVE LUCY—Comedy

      5:30

NEWS—Frank Reynolds/Howard K. Smith -C-    EVENING

      6:00

NEWS -C-        6:30

PERRY MASON—Mystery

      7:30

AVENGERS—Adventure -C-        8:30

GUNS OF WILL SONNETT -C-        9:00

OUTCASTS—Western -C-      10:00

DICK CAVETT—Variety -C-  Guests: Sal Mineo, B.B. King, I.F. Stone

    11:00

NEWS -C-   

  11:30

JOEY BISHOP -C-  Guests: Robert Goulet, Polly Bergen

      1:00

NEWS -C- 

 

 

  19 KLOC (MODESTO) (Ind.)

  AFTERNOON

      5:00

BIG PICTURE—Army

      5:30

HOKEY POKEY—Children

  EVENING

      6:00

CHESTER SMITH—Variety

      7:00

KLOC AUCTION—Warren Stone

      8:00

FILM FEATURE

      8:30

MOVIE—Drama

“Mildred Pierce” (1945)

 

 

  40 KTXL (SACRAMENTO) (Ind.)

  MORNING

    11:00

ROMPER ROOM—Children -C-    AFTERNOON

    12:00

YOU’RE PUTTING ME ON -C-  Guests: Orson Bean, Ann Meara, Robert Morse, Brenda Vaccaro

    12:30

MOVIE—Western

“The Man from Texas” (1948)

      2:00

PATTY DUKE—Comedy

      2:30

MATCH GAME -C-  Guests: Tom Kennedy, Brenda Vaccaro. Host: Gene Rayburn

      2:55

NEWS—Floyd Kalber -C-        3:00

CAP’N LOCKER—Children -C-        4:00

LITTLE RASCALS—Children

      4:30

MUNSTERS—Comedy

      5:00

MY FAVORITE MARTIAN -C-        5:30

I SPY—Drama -C-  Debut

  EVENING

      6:30

MOVIE—Science Fiction

“The 27th Day” (1957)

      8:00

OUTER LIMITS—Drama

      9:00

MOVIE—Comedy

“Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” (1936)

    11:00

HONEYMOONERS—Comedy

 

  11:30

MERV GRIFFIN -C-  Guests: Hermoine Gingold, Bobby Sherman, George Carlin, Barbara Tai-Sing, Gwen Davis

 

TV  

This week in TV Guide: August 30, 1969

His name, he reminds you at the start of every show, is Johnny Cash. He's been around since 1955, and he's recognized as one of the biggest names in American country music, the successor to JImmie Rodgers and Hank Williams. But, as Neil Hickey writes in this week's cover story, it's only been in the last year that he's become a major figure in non-country America; first, with his epic live album from Folsom Prison in California, and now with his ABC summer series, The Johnny Cash Show. He is, in fact, well on the way to becoming not just a music superstar, but an American legend. 
Hickey calls him "television's roughest diamond," and it's no surprise, considering that he sings about lost loves and jail time, poverty and homecoming and Bible stories offering redemption. A child of the depression, he began writing and recording songs after a sting in the Air Force; in 1955, Sun Records finally took a chance on him with "Hey, Porter" and "Cry! Cry! Cry!" He'd become a major star by the next year ("with deceptive ease"), performing with the Grand Ole Opry and doing one-night-stands throughout the South; his hit "I Walk the Line" was high on the charts. 
His success hid a darker side, though. His first marriage was crumbling, and combined with the stress and strain of his constant touring, he soon was on "a psysiological roller-coaster ride," taking as many as 100 pep pills a day to get him through his work, followed by fistfulls of tranquilizers to calm him down. Even as recently as two years ago, he was known as the "biggest no-show" in the business, either missing concerts completely or showing up missing his voice. He was arrested for drug possession in 1965 (and given a suspended sentence), he'd lost 100 pounds, and his family had decided to commit him at one point to save him from himself. 
That he has come back from all this, unlike Rodgers and Williams, both of whom succumbed to their darker demons, is a testament to the love of family and friends, and particularly his second wife, June Carter, herself from a legendary country music family. He got off the pills and settled down to a life of hard work, crowned by a successful 1967 concert to a sold-out audience at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Says actor Dale Robertson, "He's to country music what John Wayne is to Westerns." Whereas he once picked cotton and hauled water for work ganges, he's now a millionaire from his recordings and concerts, Says Cash, "I’m happy to be alive—lucky to be alive. I know damn well I'm a good man."
The Johnny Cash Show runs from 1969 to 1971, hosting some of the biggest names in the country music world, not to mention stars such as Louis Armstrong, Jose Feliciano, Liza Minnelli, and Joni Mitchell; surely, on a per-show basis it has to be considered one of the most star-studded variety series ever seen on television, hosted by one of the biggest stars to ever host a series while still in his prime. It fell victim to the double-barrelled challenge of the Prime-Time Access rule, eliminating a half-hour per night of network programming, and the Rural Purge. For Johnny Cash, though, the star continued to shine, adding some acclaimed acting roles to his portfolio, working with U2, and covering songs by Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode. His troubles did not end; he went through additional stints of drug addiction and rehab. He remained, in many ways, a rough diamond, as I suspect he'd have been the first to admit, and I don't think he'd have been embarrased to admit it.
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This week, the Doan Report updates us on what is now a three-way battle for late-night supremacy, what with Merv Griffin's August 18 debut on CBS. Insiders agree that it's "much too early to tell" how this race is going to end (it is, after all, a marathon, not a sprint), but the early returns auger well for Johnny holding on to his crown. CBS boasted that the Griffin show won opening night, with a 31 percent share compared to Carson's 25 and Bishop's 8; NBC, however, was equally quick to throw cold water on that boast, pointing out that "while Griffin opened with a big lead, by the end fo the 90-minute heat Carson had the larger audience." Said one NBC vice president, "I guess a lot of people sampled Griffin, then when back to their old favorite." 
One factor that might have contributed to the early ratings: the quality of guest lineups. Griffin was plagued by no-shows, including New York Major John Lindsay and New York Jets star quarterback Joe Namath; meanwhile, Carson, broadcasting that week from Hollywood, countered with "TV's biggest draw," Bob Hope. (Interestingly enough, Bishop's lineup that night included the Smothers Brothers, to no ratings avail; fame is fleeting, isn't it?)
Which leads us to this week's feature. Back in the day, I used to enjoy going through TV Guide, looking at the lineups for the talk shows and seeing who had the best guests, even though I couldn't stay up and watch them. What with this being Merv's third week on the job, it and having seen the importance of booking big-name guests when it comes to ratings, it seemed like it might be kind of interesting to resume the practice, at least for one week. Let's see who's got the strongest lineup, and whether Johnny really has become the King of Late Night, or if he's just a comfortable habit.
Now, the guest list in TV Guide has always been full of caveats, with clauses like "tentatively scheduled guests," and the like. And we know how Merv was victimized by no-shows on his opening night. So, in the interests of providing you, the loyal reader, with the most accurate information possible, I've augmented the guest list found in this week's issue with info from sources ranging from the IMDb to the TV listings of various newspapers. In addition, since a lot of you may not recognize the names here, I've linked to their bios on Wikipedia and other places. (Rather than running the risk of insulting your intelligence, I've just gone ahead and linked all of them, even though you probably know who Tony Randall and William Holden are.) So have a go at it, and see what you think.

 

 

JOHNNY

MERV

JOEY

 

MONDAY    

• Tony Randall• William Holden• Pat Morita• Marilyn Maye• Turley Richards • Hermione Gingold• Bobby Sherman• George Carlin• Barbara Tai-Sing• The Free Design• Gwen Davis • Polly Bergen (guest host)• Laurindo Almeida• Arlene Golonka• Robert Goulet• Nick Ullett

 

TUESDAY

• Jaye P. Morgan• John Byner• Orson Bean• Adela Rogers St. Johns • David Susskind• Hugh O'Brian• Polly Bergen• Lily Tomlin• Dr. Roger O. Egeberg• Eloise Haws• Slappy White and Steve Rossi• Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Armstrong • Art Linkletter• Dino, Desi & Billy• Jeannie C. Riley

 

WEDNESDAY

• Phyllis Newman• Corbett Monica• Mel Tormé• The People Tree • Tommy Smothers• Theodore H. White• Phil Ford and Mimi Hines• Katie Drew-Wllkinson• Virginia Graham• Rip Taylor• The Checkmates • Merle Haggard and the Strangers• Bobbi Martin

 

THURSDAY

•  Dana Valery •  The Youngbloods •  Jimmie Rodgers • Soupy Sales• Phil Leeds• Dr. James Brussel• Eddy Arnold• • Children's fashion show featuring Merv's son • Charo• Hedgemon Lewis• Ryan O'Neal• Smokey Robinson• Leigh Taylor-Young

 

FRIDAY

• David Frye• • Gary Lewis & the Playboys • Zsa Zsa Gabor• Madeline Kahn• Robert Klein• Hubert Humphrey• Harry Hershfield• Oliver • Abbe Lane• Norm Crosby• Pierre Salinger• Chris and Peter Allen

In the meantime, Dick Cavett has yet to become part of the late-night troika; having started out with a five-day-a-week daytime show on ABC, he's now been moved to prime time for the summer, where he airs each Monday, Tuesday, and Friday at 10:00 p.m. (He'll be in the Joey Bishop timeslot before the end of the year, though.) Nonetheless, he might have the best guest lineup of the week: Monday, it's actor Sal Mineo, B.B. King, and journalist I.F. Stone; Tuesday features William Holden, Eartha Kitt, and Nero Wolfe author Rex Stout; and Friday he spends the entire hour with Groucho Marx. Yes, I'd call that lineup a winner.
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But as we all know, television does not live by late-night alone. Amid the reruns that populate the waning weeks of summer, Saturday's Get Smart repeat bears watching (8:00 p.m. PT, NBC). It's a spoof of Rear Window, with Max taking on the Jimmy Stewart role (and who had that phrase on their TV Guide bingo card?), watching through binoculars as 99 takes on KAOS. I suspect she'll be able to handle herself, don't you? If you're looking for the real Jimmy Stewart though, you'll find him in brilliant form in Anatomy of a Murder (midnight, KPIX in San Francisco), with George C. Scott, Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick, Eve Arden, and Arthur O'Connell all in equally top form. It's an adult movie in the classic sense of the word, in that it deals with mature themes in a serious manner, but it was also controversial in its time for the sexual frankness of the dialog; it's said to be the first movie in which the words ""contraceptive," "climax," and "spermatogenesis" were used. I wonder if they made it on TV in 1969?
Culture, both highbrow and middlebrow, is on display Sunday; with no Hollywood Palace to go up against, Ed Sullivan has the field to himself (8:00 p.m., CBS), and he comes through in style, with Metropolitan Opera soprano Anna Moffo, singers Sandler and Young, Sam and Dave, and Roslyn Kind; the Ballet America; comics Jackie Mason and Pat Cooper; and clown Charlie Cairoli. At the same time, NET's Sounds of Summer presents the farewell concert of legendary conductor Erich Leinsdorf , retiring from the Boston Symphony. A star-studded lineup, including Beverly Sills and Justino Diaz, is on hand for the finale from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. At the intermission, Leinsdorf is interviewed by host Steve Allen.
Vivian Vance returns to The Lucy Show on Monday (8:30 p.m., CBS), in a flashback-filled show that has the two recalling past adventures while Lucy recovers from a broken leg. Meanwhile, Jimmie Rodgers finishes up his stint as summer replacement for Carol Burnett with a show featuring pianist Roger Williams and comic Scoey Mitchell, along with two of Carol's regulars, Vicki Lawrence and Lyle Waggoner. 
You remember a few paragraphs ago, when we learned that Ryan O'Neal and his wife, Leigh Taylor-Young, were guests on The Joey Bishop Show? There's probably a good reason for that; on Tuesday, the couple stars in an unsold pilot, Under the Yum Yum Tree (Tuesday, 9:00 p.m., ABC), based on the 1963 movie of the same name, which starred Jack Lemmon and Carol Lynley. It's no criticism of O'Neal to note that he's no Jack Lemmon.
Helen Hayes makes a rare television appearance on Wednesday's episode of Tarzan (7:30 p.m., CBS), along with her son, James MacArthur, whom we all know and love as Danno on Hawaii Five-O. For those of you who thought Tarzan was an NBC series, you're right; its original run was from 1966-68, and CBS aired reruns during the 1969 summer. And Darren McGavin's unjustly-forgotten private detective series The Outsider comes to an end with an episode involvung a millionaire "who has never been photographed." (10:00 p.m., NBC) The reclusive Howard Hughes, anyone? 
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was cancelled after a single season on NBC, but it's been picked up by ABC for the coming season, and to celebrate, the show's stars, Hope Lange and Edward Mulhare, host an hour-long special previewing the network's Super Saturday morning cartoon lineup. (Thursday, 7:30 p.m.) Not everyone will agree with me on this—it depends a lot on your childhood memories—but the new Saturday schedule is far from the glory days of cartoons, with a scheule that includes "Smokey the Bear, a cartoon with a conservation message; The Cattanooga Cats, an hour hosted by five soft-rock felines; Hot Wheels, the adventures of a car club; The Hardy Boys, based on the mystery-book series; and Sky Hawks, the saga of a flying family." Jonathan Frid is along for the ride, along with the regulars from Ghost.
The John Davidson Show ends its summer run on Friday, and his final show features a fine cast, including the Moody Blues, Rich Little (impersonating W.C. Fields), the Committee, and Mireille Mathieu. (8:00 p.m., ABC) To be perfectly frank, the weakest link in the show is the host himself. Opposite this is a Bell Telephone Hour special on the life and art of the legendary pianist Arthur Rubinstein (8:30 p.m. NBC). And Dick Powell gives the definitive interpretation of Raymond Chandler's fabled private detective Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (9:00 p.m., KTXL in Sacramento). A good way to close out the week.
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Judith Crist, TV Guide's movie critic, has a thing or two to say about TV-movies. Movies on television, as we know, have been big business for some time, and ever since the studios loosened their grip and began to allow newer films to grace the small screen, the "sad truth" has been that "the worst of the Hollywood product would pull in more viewers than the best of creative television could." Lesson learned, network executives determined that "anything that Hollywood could do badly for itself, it could do worse for television, and in color yet."
It's long been accepted that Hollywood's backlog of movies has been drying up, and that there aren't enough movies being made to fill the insatiable demand from television. It's now been three years, and 31 telemovies, since the first "world premiere" movie made its appearance. And, says Crist, the "cold fact" is that "for the most part, and emphasize the 'most' part, the public’s been offered a series of pilot and pseudo-pilot films, the vast majority of which wouldn’t have earned a B rating on any theatrical movie meter bill." They stand out from their theatrical bretheren in that they generally feature cheap production values, stars "who have not quite retained their place at the top or not quite found it," and plots that are clearly shaped around the needs for commercials at set times. But people watch them—their ratings have been very close to those of theatrical premieres—and so we can count on more of them.
A major selling point to TV-movies, one that makes the positive ratings even more attractive, is that they're relatively cheap to make. The costs run anywhere between $800,000 and $1.3 million, for which the network gets to show the movie twice during the season, sell it off in a syndicated package with other movies, and then sell it again for foreign theatrical release. At that rate, she says, the expenditures have not only been recouped, but doubled. And that doesn't even begin to include the benefits if the movie is made into a successful series. It is, therefore, profitable junk 
Not all of it is junk; stars of the calibur of Henry Fonda and Anne Baxter can give telemovies a veneer of quality. Still, Crist can point to "perhaps three our four" of the past season's movies had a claim to special interest: Something for a Lonely Man , a Western starring Dan Blocker, and two courtroom dramas that would become the basis for "The Lawyers" segment of The Bold Ones, "The Sound of Anger" and "The Whole World is Watching." Interestingly enough, Crist is unimpressed by Prescription: Murder, the first movie to feature Peter Falk's Lieutenant Columbo, calling it "one of those how-to-kill-your-wife" bores." (She notes that NBC speculates that "The Falk character could return annually"; in truth, it was the second Columbo movie, Ransom for a Dead Man, that sold the concept as part of the Mystery Movie wheel. 
One observation is that many TV-movies have the feel of a regular series episode that's been padded out to fill a larger timeslot; the answer to that lies in shorter movies (ABC's Movie of the Week famously runs for 75 minutes plus commercials) or movies with multiple, distinct stories (such as NBC's Night Gallery pilot). In the long run, Crist feels, TV-movies will improve with experience, but much depends on the industry's ability to attract good writers, which itself will depend on whether television goes the route of "factory productions" (think of the Warner Bros. assembly line method) or the "workshop" way of thinking, in which writers are invited to write about whatever interests them. 
Today, despite Crist's criticisms, many people have fond memories from this era of TV-movies, particularly the ABC Movie of the Week, which wasn't afraid to tackle controversial issues as well as making frequent foray into horror movies. I don't think it's the case that these movies have improve in retrospect, either; many of them were highly-rated and critically reviewed at the time. It's likely that Crist's standards were high, as they were for theatrical movies, and that she was inherently inclined to look down at these movies. What she's right about, though, is that eventually the quality of the TV-movie would improve in time; by the time of prestige television, many of them surpass theatrical movies in quality.
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MST3K alert: 12 to the Moon  (1960) Moon beings fear that earthmen are bringing greed and destruction to their world. Ken Clark, Michi Kobi. (Wednesday, 6:30 p.m., KTXL) This is one of those MST3K occasions where the short is actually more disturbing than the feature. In the musical short "Design for Living," "a woman dreams of a mysterious masked man who takes her to see the future." It's actuallySa an ad for the 1956 General Motors Motorama, but to borrrow a phrase from Tom Servo, "This has all the markings of a Clay Shaw party!" TV  

Around the dial

You're probably all familiar by now with the Hitchcock Project that Jack posts every other week at bare•bones e-zine; it's a don't-miss feature for me. Jack's not quite done covering every episode of the Hitchcock series, but he's getting close, and this week he provides his annual list of all the episodes he's reviewed so far . Click to your heart's content.
At Cult TV Blog, John returns to Barlow at Large, a British police procedural that ran from 1971 to 1975, starring Stratford Johns as Detective Chief Superintendent Charlie Barlow, a role he'd previously played in three other series. This week's episode, " Sect ," involves an investigation of a cult, and makes a strong case for being a series worth following.
David's always-interesting series at Comfort TV, in which he journeys through prime time TV of the 1970s, and he's now reached Thursday nights in 1974 . What was on the dial? Some familiar faces, to be sure: The Waltons, Harry O, The Streets of San Francisco, The Odd Couple, Ironside, Movin' On, and more. Find out what David has to say about them.
Few things strike us as being more disturbing than the idea that someone else could be controlling your mind. It's a popular trope for television shows, and at The View from the Junkyard, Roger and Mike investigate the Avengers episode " My Wildest Dream ," with Steed and Tara, to see how well the series handles it. 
Do you remember Charles Rocket? Or, more specifically, do you remember the moment Charles Rocket launched the F-bomb on Saturday Night Live? I do; I can honestly say that I saw the event as it happened, live on national TV. It was truly one of those "did I just hear what I think I heard?" events, and not surprisingly it features big time in Travalanche's look at Rocket's not-so-gleaming career .
Does the new fall TV season do anything for you? If it does (and sadly, for me it does not), then you're in luck, because both CBS and Fox have produced half-hour specials touting their new shows. This was a staple of the schedule when I was growing up, and even though I'm not interested in them, I'm glad they still do it. Television Obscurities has the 411 on their availability.
Garry Berman looks back on the book that launched his career as a professional writer 25 years ago: Best of the Britcoms - From Fawlty Towers to Absolutely Fabulous. It would later receive an update to take it through The Office, but no matter which version you look at, it's an informative—and highly entertaining—look at one of the most endearingly quirky generes on TV. TV  

Labor Day and the Jerry Lewis Telethon

Labor Day is coming up this weekend, in case you hadn't noticed, and for me the unofficial end to summer always meant two things: it was time to go back to school (something I found profoundly depressing at the time, and which still triggers PTSD in me today; you should see me twitch when the first Back to School sales start); and it was time for the Jerry Lewis Telethon.
I first saw the telethon back in 1971 (it was also the first time it had been shown in the Twin Cities), and it quickly became something to whch I'd look forward each year, even if it did mean going back to school. It also became a personal challenge, as I tried each year to make it through the 20+ hours of the show. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't. Now, in my doddering old age, I probably wouldn't be able to make it to midnight, but b ack then I was always good to go at least to 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, even in the years when I didn't watch the whole thing. 
I had to look it up; it's been 14 years since the last time Jerry hosted the telethon. After he was ousted, I not only quit watching it, I stopped donating to MDA altogether. (There was more to it than that, but that's for another day.) Even in those last years, though, it had changed from when I'd first started watching. There weren't as many big stars anymore; the variety show was a thing of the past, the big names in the music industry were mostly rock acts that didn't do television, and more and more of the guests seemed to be of the lounge lizard variety. As the big names began to fade from the scene, and as more stations went to 24-hour broadcasting, the magic that made the telethon dimmed, even if it never went out completely.
I say all this as a preface to some video that I think you'll find interesting, even if you've already seen it. It's the opening 16 minutes from 1967, only the second year of the telethon, back when the show still originated from the Americana Hotel in New York City. It's the second year for the telethon, and you'll notice that the toteboard only registers seven figures; the final total for that year was $1,126,846. (Since I know you were going to ask, the record amount, set in 2008, was over $65 million.) This is in no way meant as a criticism—after all, the more money raised, the better—but from a purely dramatic standpoint, there was real tension, almost desperation, in that fight to raise just one more dollar. The first million often didn't come until sometime overnight, and the last hour was especially dramatic, when it seemed as if everyone was in a mad rush to contribute before the show ended. Things were less polished then, less sophisticated, and was all quite exciting, especially for an impressionable kid like me. 
Anyway, here's to simpler times; I hope you enjoy this blast from the past, and that it brings back some pleasant memories!

TV  

What's on TV? Wednesday, August 28, 1968

The one thing of which you can be absolutely certain regarding today's listings is that even after looking at it, you'll still have no idea what was actually on TV that day. Not all of that is this Northern California edition's fault; the convention's most anticipated moment, the debate and vote on the platform's Vietnam plank, was originally scheduled for primetime on Tueday but was rescheduled to noon CT Wednesday when Tuesday's session ran past 1 a.m. That would wipe out all late morning and early afternoon programming on the networks, or at least CBS and NBC. That evening, the presidential balloting takes place, interspersed with footage of the rioting in downtown Chicago, and the live coverage runs well past the scheduled end time, pre-empting more programming. Speaking of which, you'll notice I haven't mentioned ABC; their magazine-style summary of the evening's events, offered on tape-delay to West Coast affiliates, isn't scheduled to begin until 9:00 p.m. I wonder if any of those affiliates decided to take the live feed, or stick with things on a tape-delay basis. It's questions like this that keep me awake nights.
  -2- KTVU (BAY AREA) (IND.)   Morning

      8:15

RELIGION—Lutheran

      8:30

JACK LA LANNE   COLOR        9:00

POPEYE—Cartoons   COLOR        9:30

ROMPER ROOM—Children   COLOR      10:30

DR. KILDARE—Drama

  Afternoon     12:00

SCIENCE FICTION THEATRE

    12:30

PASSWORD—Game   COLOR  Guests: Nancy Ames, Jack Cassidy. Host: Allen Ludden

      1:00

MOVIE—Drama

“Stromboli” (Italian; 1950)

      3:00

SUPERMAN—Adventure

      3:30

CAPTAIN SATELLITE   COLOR        4:30

CISCO KID—Western   COLOR        5:00

LEAVE IT TO BEAVER—Comedy

     5:30

DENNIS THE MENACE—Comedy

  Evening

      6:00

PATTY DUKE—Comedy

      6:30

McHALE’S NAVY—Comedy

      7:00

I LOVE LUCY—Comedy

      7:30

WANDERLUST—Travel   COLOR        8:00

SECRET AGENT—Drama

      9:00

SOMETHING SPECIAL—Abbe Lane   COLOR  Guests: Jose Greco and his dancers, Sandler and Young

    10:00

NEWS   COLOR      10:30

PAT MICHAELS—Discussion   COLOR      11:00

MOVIE—Drama

“Golden Boy” (1939)

 

 

  -3- KCRA (SACRAMENTO) (NBC)   Morning       5:55

FARM NEWS   COLOR        6:00

RHYME AND REASON

      7:00

TODAY   COLOR        9:00

SNAP JUDGMENT   COLOR  Guests: Gordon and Meredith MacRae

      9:25

NEWS—Nancy Dickerson   COLOR        9:30

CONCENTRATION   COLOR  Substitute host: Bob Clayton

    10:00

PERSONALITY   COLOR  Celebrities: Marty Allen, Joan Fontaine, Michele Lee. On-film: Rod Serling

    10:30

HOLLYWOOD SQUARES—Game   COLOR  Celebrities: Kaye Ballard, Wally Cox, Abby Dalton, Nanette Fabray, Zsa Zsa Gabor, George Hamilton, Arte Johnson, Paul Lynde, Charley Weaver

    11:00

JEOPARDY   COLOR      11:30

EYE GUESS   COLOR      11:55

NEWS—Edwin Newman   COLOR    Afternoon     12:00

NEWS   COLOR      12:30

MERV GRIFFIN—Variety   COLOR  Guests: Billy Graham, Tony Sandler and Ralph Young, Clair and McMahon, Genevieve, Susan Batson

      1:30

MOVIE—Drama

“Umberto D” (Italian; 1952)

      3:30

FLINTSTONES   COLOR        4:00

NEWS—Chet Huntley, David Brinkley   COLOR        4:30

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION   SPECIAL    COLOR  Anchors: Chet Huntley and David Brinkley

Regular programming is pre-empted

  Evening       6:00

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION CONT’D   COLOR        7:00

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION CONT’D   COLOR        8:00

NEWS—Whitten, Jervis   COLOR        9:00

TRAVENTURE THEATRE   COLOR        9:30

MOVIE—Adventure   COLOR  “The Desert Hawk” (1950)

    11:00

NEWS   COLOR      11:30

TONIGHT—Variety   COLOR  Guest host: Bob Newhart

 

 

  -4- KRON (BAY AREA) (NBC)   Morning       6:25

FARM NEWS

      6:30

MICHIGAN—Education   COLOR        7:00

TODAY   COLOR        9:00

SNAP JUDGMENT   COLOR  Guests: Gordon and Meredith MacRae

      9:25

NEWS—Nancy Dickerson   COLOR        9:30

CONCENTRATION   COLOR  Substitute host: Bob Clayton

    10:00

PERSONALITY   COLOR  Celebrities: Marty Allen, Joan Fontaine, Michele Lee. On-film: Rod Serling

    10:30

HOLLYWOOD SQUARES—Game   COLOR  Celebrities: Kaye Ballard, Wally Cox, Abby Dalton, Nanette Fabray, Zsa Zsa Gabor, George Hamilton, Arte Johnson, Paul Lynde, Charley Weaver

    11:00

JEOPARDY   COLOR      11:30

EYE GUESS   COLOR      11:45

NEWS—Edwin Newman   COLOR    Afternoon     12:00

LET’S MAKE A DEAL—Game   COLOR      12:30

DAYS OF OUR LIVES   COLOR        1:00

DOCTORS—Serial   COLOR        1:30

ANOTHER WORLD   COLOR        2:00

YOU DON’T SAY!—Game   COLOR  Guests: Mickey Manners, Joanie Sommers

      2:30

MATCH GAME   COLOR  Guests: Cliff Robertson, Joanne Carson

      2:55

NEWS—Floyd Kalber   COLOR        3:00

ROUTE 66—Drama

      4:00

NEWS—Chet Huntley, David Brinkley   COLOR        4:30

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION   SPECIAL    COLOR  Anchors: Chet Huntley and David Brinkley

Regular programming is pre-empted

  Evening       6:00

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION CONT’D   COLOR        7:00

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION CONT’D   COLOR        8:00

TO BE ANNOUNCED

      9:00

TO BE ANNOUNCED

    10:00

TO BE ANNOUNCED

    11:00

NEWS   COLOR      11:30

TONIGHT—Variety   COLOR  Guest host: Bob Newhart

      1:00

MOVIE—Drama

“Moonrise” (1948)

      2:50

CHEATERS—Drama

Time approximate

      3:20

NEWS   COLOR 

 

 

  -5- KPIX (BAY AREA) (CBS)

  Morning       6:00

SUMMER SEMESTER—Education   COLOR  Education: “International Education”

      6:30

SEA POWER—History

      7:00

NEWS—Ron Magers

      7:05

NEWS—Joseph Benti   COLOR        7:30

NEWS—Ron Magers

      8:00

CAPTAIN KANGAROO   COLOR        9:00

HOTLINE—Discussion   COLOR      10:00

ANDY GRIFFITH—Comedy

    10:30

DICK VAN DYKE—Comedy

    11:00

LOVE OF LIFE—Serial   COLOR      11:25

NEWS—Joseph Benti   COLOR      11:30

SEARCH FOR TOMORROW—Serial   COLOR      11:45

GUIDING LIGHT   COLOR    Afternoon     12:00

NEWS   COLOR      12:30

AS THE WORLD TURNS—Serial   COLOR        1:00

LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING—Serial   COLOR        1:30

HOUSE PARTY   COLOR  Guest: Larry Lippincott

      2:00

TO TELL THE TRUTH—Game   COLOR        2:25

NEWS—Douglas Edwards   COLOR        2:30

EDGE OF NIGHT—Serial   COLOR        3:00

MIKE DOUGLAS—Variety   COLOR  Guests: Jan Peerce,  Jane Morgan, Marty Allen, Charles Kramer

      3:55

NEWS   COLOR        4:00

NEWS—Walter Cronkite   COLOR        4:30

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION   SPECIAL    COLOR  Anchor: Walter Cronkite

Regular programming is pre-empted

  Evening       6:00

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION CONT’D   COLOR        7:00

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION CONT’D   COLOR        8:00

BRANDED—Western

      8:30

HAVE GUN—WILL TRAVEL

      9:00

MERV GRIFFIN—Variety   COLOR  Guests: Billy Graham, Tony Sandler and Ralph Young, Clair and McMahon, Genevieve, Susan Batson

    10:30

TWILIGHT ZONE—Drama

    11:00

NEWS   COLOR      11:30

MOVIE—Drama

“A Yank in the RAF” (1941)

 

 

  -6- KVIE (SACRAMENTO) (NET)

  Evening       6:00

MISTEROGERS—Children

      6:30

TIME FOR JOHN—Children

      6:45

FRIENDLY GIANT—Children

      7:00

WHAT’S NEW—Children

      7:30

SACRAMENTO FILE—Lee Nichols

      8:00

INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE—News Analysis

      9:00

BLACKS, BLUES, BLACK!

    10:00

NET FESTIVAL—Biography

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

 

 

  -7- KGO (BAY AREA) (ABC)

  Morning       6:00

A.M.—Jim Dunbar

      8:00

VIRGINIA GRAHAM—Interviewd   COLOR  Guests: Eleanor Haimi, Jinx Falkenburg

      8:30

MOVIE—Musical Comedy

“The Pirate” (1948)

    10:30

DICK CAVETT—Variety   COLOR  Guests: Bob and Ray

  Afternoon     12:00

BEWITCHED—Comedy

    12:30

TREASURE ISLE   COLOR        1:00

DREAM HOUSE   COLOR        1:30

IT’S HAPPENING—Variety   COLOR  Guests: Chris Monrez, the Blossoms. Hosts: Paul Revere, Mark Lindsay

      1:55

CHILDREN’S DOCTOR—Dr. Lendon Smith   COLOR        2:00

NEWLYWED GAME   COLOR        2:30

DATING GAME   COLOR        3:00

GENERAL HOSPITAL—Serial   COLOR        3:30

ONE LIFE TO LIVE—Serial   COLOR        4:00

DARK SHADOWS—Serial   COLOR        4:30

MOVIE—Drama

“Crash Landing” (1958)

  Evening       6:00

NEWS—Tannehill   COLOR        6:55

OPINION 7—Sacks   COLOR        7:00

NEWS—Frank Reynolds   COLOR        7:30

MOVIE—Musical   COLOR  “Blue Hawaii” (1961)

      9:30

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION—Report   SPECIAL    COLOR  Anchor: Frank Reynolds

    11:00

NEWS   COLOR      11:25

OPINION 7—Sacks   COLOR      11:30

JOEY BISHOP—Variety   COLOR  Guests: Barry Sullivan, Gypsy Rose Lee, Johnny Tillotson, Talya Ferro

 

 

  -7- KRCR (REDDING) (ABC, NBC)

  Morning       7:00

TODAY   COLOR        9:00

JACK LA LANNE—Exercise

      9:30

CONCENTRATION   COLOR  Substitute host: Bob Clayton

    10:00

PERSONALITY   COLOR  Celebrities: Marty Allen, Joan Fontaine, Michele Lee. On-film: Rod Serling

    10:30

HOLLYWOOD SQUARES—Game   COLOR  Celebrities: Kaye Ballard, Wally Cox, Abby Dalton, Nanette Fabray, Zsa Zsa Gabor, George Hamilton, Arte Johnson, Paul Lynde, Charley Weaver

    11:00

JEOPARDY   COLOR      11:30

EYE GUESS   COLOR      11:55

NEWS—Edwin Newman   COLOR    Afternoon     12:00

LET’S MAKE A DEAL—Game   COLOR      12:30

TREASURE ISLE   COLOR        1:00

DREAM HOUSE   COLOR        1:30

IT’S HAPPENING—Variety   COLOR  Guests: Chris Monrez, the Blossoms. Hosts: Paul Revere, Mark Lindsay

      1:55

CHILDREN’S DOCTOR—Dr. Lendon Smith   COLOR        2:00

NEWLYWED GAME   COLOR        2:30

DATING GAME   COLOR        3:00

GENERAL HOSPITAL—Serial   COLOR        3:30

ONE LIFE TO LIVE—Serial   COLOR        4:00

NEWS—Chet Huntley, David Brinkley   COLOR        4:30

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION   SPECIAL    COLOR  Anchors: Chet Huntley and David Brinkley

Regular programming is pre-empted

  Evening       6:00

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION CONT’D   COLOR        7:00

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION CONT’D   COLOR        8:30

NEWS   COLOR        9:00

TO BE ANNOUNCED

      9:30

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION—Report   SPECIAL    COLOR  Anchor: Frank Reynolds

    11:00

NEWS   COLOR      11:30

TONIGHT—Variety   COLOR  Guest host: Bob Newhart

 

 

  -8- KSBW (SALINAS) (CBS, NBC)

  Morning       7:00

TODAY   COLOR        9:00

SNAP JUDGMENT   COLOR  Guests: Gordon and Meredith MacRae

      9:25

NEWS—Nancy Dickerson   COLOR        9:30

CONCENTRATION   COLOR  Substitute host: Bob Clayton

    10:00

PERSONALITY   COLOR  Celebrities: Marty Allen, Joan Fontaine, Michele Lee. On-film: Rod Serling

    10:30

HOLLYWOOD SQUARES—Game   COLOR  Celebrities: Kaye Ballard, Wally Cox, Abby Dalton, Nanette Fabray, Zsa Zsa Gabor, George Hamilton, Arte Johnson, Paul Lynde, Charley Weaver

    11:00

LOVE OF LIFE—Serial   COLOR      11:30

EYE GUESS   COLOR      11:55

NEWS—Bud Walling   COLOR    Afternoon     12:00

LET’S MAKE A DEAL—Game   COLOR      12:30

AS THE WORLD TURNS—Serial   COLOR        1:00

LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING—Serial   COLOR        1:30

HOUSE PARTY   COLOR  Guest: Larry Lippincott

      2:00

TO TELL THE TRUTH—Game   COLOR        2:25

NEWS—Douglas Edwards   COLOR        2:30

EDGE OF NIGHT—Serial   COLOR        3:00

SECRET STORM   COLOR        3:30

MUNSTERS—Comedy

      4:00

NEWS—Chet Huntley, David Brinkley   COLOR        4:30

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION   SPECIAL    COLOR  Anchors: Chet Huntley and David Brinkley

Regular programming is pre-empted

  Evening       6:00

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION CONT’D   COLOR        7:00

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION CONT’D   COLOR        8:00

NEWS—Frank Tracy

      8:30

MOVIE—Comedy   COLOR  “Gidget Goes to Rome” (1962)

    11:00

NEWS

    11:30

TONIGHT—Variety   COLOR  Guest host: Bob Newhart

 

 

  -9- KQED (BAY AREA) (NET)

  Afternoon       4:30

NET FESTIVAL—Opera

“L’Ajo neli’Imbarazzo”

Repeated Sun. 7 P.M.

      5:30

PORTRAIT IN MUSIC   COLOR        5:45

FRIENDLY GIANT—Children

  Evening       6:00

MISTEROGERS—Children

      6:30

WHAT’S NEW—Children

      7:00

FRENCH CHEF—Cooking

Mousse, bombe, parfait deserts

      7:30

FIRES OF CREATION

      8:00

INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE—News Analysis

Repeated Thurs. 11 P.M.

      9:00

ACTORS COMPANY—Drama

“Twelfth Night”

    11:00

YOGA FOR HEALTH

 

 

  -9- KIXE (REDDING) (NET)

  Evening       6:00

MISTEROGERS—Children

      6:30

MERLIN THE MAGICIAN

      6:45

SING HI—SING LO—Music

      7:00

WHAT’S NEW—Children

      7:30

INSIGHT—Religion

      8:00

INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE—News Analysis

    10:00

NET FESTIVAL—Biography

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

 

 

  10 KXTV (SACRAMENTO) (CBS)

  Morning       6:30

SUMMER SEMESTER—Education   COLOR  Education: “International Education”

      7:00

FOCUS ON FARMING   COLOR        7:05

NEWS—Joseph Benti   COLOR        7:30

SUN-UP—Interviews   COLOR        8:00

CAPTAIN KANGAROO   COLOR        9:00

CANDID CAMERA—Comedy

      9:30

BEVERLY HILLBILLIES   COLOR      10:00

ANDY GRIFFITH—Comedy

    10:30

DICK VAN DYKE—Comedy

    11:00

LOVE OF LIFE—Serial   COLOR      11:25

NEWS—Joseph Benti   COLOR      11:30

SEARCH FOR TOMORROW—Serial   COLOR      11:45

GUIDING LIGHT   COLOR    Afternoon     12:00

NEWS   COLOR      12:30

AS THE WORLD TURNS—Serial   COLOR        1:00

LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING—Serial   COLOR        1:30

HOUSE PARTY   COLOR  Guest: Larry Lippincott

      2:00

TO TELL THE TRUTH—Game   COLOR        2:25

NEWS—Mary Jean Kay   COLOR        2:30

EDGE OF NIGHT—Serial   COLOR        3:00

SECRET STORM   COLOR        3:30

NEWS   COLOR        4:00

NEWS—Walter Cronkite   COLOR        4:30

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION   SPECIAL    COLOR  Anchor: Walter Cronkite

Regular programming is pre-empted

  Evening       6:00

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION CONT’D   COLOR        7:00

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION CONT’D   COLOR        8:00

TO BE ANNOUNCED

      9:00

TO BE ANNOUNCED

      9:30

NEWS—Rowe, Sanders   COLOR      10:30

RIFLEMAN—Western

    11:00

MOVIE—Drama

“City Without Men” (1943)

 

 

  11 KNTV (SAN JOSE) (ABC)

  Morning       7:30

FILM FEATURE   COLOR        8:00

LADIES DAY

      8:30

HOCUS POCUS—Cartoons

      9:00

HOCUS POCUS CLUBHOUSE

      9:30

JACK LA LANNE   COLOR      10:00

TREASURE ISLE—Game

    10:00

NET FESTIVAL—Biography

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

    10:30

DICK CAVETT—Variety   COLOR  Guests: Bob and Ray

  Afternoon     12:00

BEWITCHED—Comedy

    12:30

LU RYDEN—Variety

      1:00

DREAM HOUSE   COLOR        1:30

IT’S HAPPENING—Variety   COLOR  Guests: Chris Monrez, the Blossoms. Hosts: Paul Revere, Mark Lindsay

      1:55

CHILDREN’S DOCTOR—Dr. Lendon Smith   COLOR        2:00

NEWLYWED GAME   COLOR        2:30

DATING GAME   COLOR        3:00

GENERAL HOSPITAL—Serial   COLOR        3:30

ONE LIFE TO LIVE—Serial   COLOR        4:00

DARK SHADOWS—Serial   COLOR        4:30

PERRY MASON—Mystery

      5:30

MIKE DOUGLAS—Variety   COLOR  Guests: Jan Peerce,  Jane Morgan, Marty Allen, Charles Kramer

  Evening       7:00

MOVIE—Bob Ulrich

      7:30

MOVIE—Musical   COLOR  “Blue Hawaii” (1961)

      9:30

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION—Report   SPECIAL    COLOR  Anchor: Frank Reynolds

    11:00

NEWS

    11:30

SPORTS HIGHLIGHTS   COLOR      11:40

MOVIE—Western

“Tall Man Riding” (1955)

 

 

  12 KHSL (CHICO) (ABC, CBS)

  Morning       7:00

EXISTENCE—Agriculture   COLOR        7:30

NEWS—Joseph Benti   COLOR        7:55

ROGER RAMJET   COLOR        8:00

CAPTAIN KANGAROO   COLOR        9:00

CANDID CAMERA—Comedy

      9:30

BEVERLY HILLBILLIES   COLOR      10:00

ANDY GRIFFITH—Comedy

    10:30

DICK VAN DYKE—Comedy

    11:00

LOVE OF LIFE—Serial   COLOR      11:25

NEWS—Joseph Benti   COLOR      11:30

SEARCH FOR TOMORROW—Serial   COLOR      11:45

GUIDING LIGHT   COLOR    Afternoon     12:00

DIVORCE COURT—Drama   COLOR      12:30

AS THE WORLD TURNS—Serial   COLOR        1:00

LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING—Serial   COLOR        1:30

HOUSE PARTY   COLOR  Guest: Larry Lippincott

      2:00

TO TELL THE TRUTH—Game   COLOR        2:25

NEWS—Douglas Edwards   COLOR        2:30

EDGE OF NIGHT—Serial   COLOR        3:00

SECRET STORM   COLOR        3:30

DATING GAME   COLOR        4:00

NEWS—Walter Cronkite   COLOR        4:30

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION   SPECIAL    COLOR  Anchor: Walter Cronkite

Regular programming is pre-empted

  Evening       6:00

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION CONT’D   COLOR        7:00

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION CONT’D   COLOR        8:00

TO BE ANNOUNCED

      9:00

TO BE ANNOUNCED

      9:30

FELONY SQUAD—Drama   COLOR      10:00

TO BE ANNOUNCED

    11:00

NEWS   COLOR      11:30

JOEY BISHOP—Variety   COLOR  Guests: Barry Sullivan, Gypsy Rose Lee, Johnny Tillotson, Talya Ferro

              

 

  13 KOVR (SACRAMENTO) (ABC)

  Morning       6:00

NEWS   COLOR        6:30

ED ALLEN—Exercise

      7:00

AGRICULTURE TODAY   COLOR        7:15

CARTOONLAND   COLOR        8:20

SPIDER-MAN—Cartoon

      8:50

CARTOONLAND   COLOR        9:00

DATING GAME

      9:30

DREAM HOUSE—Game

    10:00

IT’S HAPPENING—Variety

Guests: Spanky and Our Gang

    10:25

NEWS   COLOR      10:30

DICK CAVETT—Variety   COLOR  Guests: Bob and Ray

  Afternoon     12:00

BEWITCHED—Comedy

    12:30

MOVIE—Comedy

“Blondie in Society” (1941)

      2:00

NEWLYWED GAME   COLOR        2:30

DIVORCE COURT—Drama   COLOR        3:00

GENERAL HOSPITAL—Serial   COLOR        3:30

ONE LIFE TO LIVE—Serial   COLOR        4:00

DARK SHADOWS—Serial   COLOR        4:30

CAP’N DELTA—Cartoons   COLOR        5:00

NEWS—Rashleigh   COLOR        5:30

NEWS—Frnak Reynolds   COLOR    Evening       6:00

MOVIE—Comedy

“The Good Humor Man” (1950)

      7:30

MOVIE—Musical   COLOR  “Kismet” (1955)

      9:30

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION—Report   SPECIAL    COLOR  Anchor: Frank Reynolds

    11:00

NEWS   COLOR      11:30

JOEY BISHOP—Variety   COLOR  Guests: Barry Sullivan, Gypsy Rose Lee, Johnny Tillotson, Talya Ferro

 

 

  19 KLOC (MODESTO) (IND.)

  Afternoon       5:30

CARTOON FUN HOUSE

  Evening       6:30

NEWS—Charles McEwen

      6:45

CHESTER SMITH CONT’D

      7:00

MOVIE—Drama

“The Legend of Tom Dooley” (1959)

      9:00

JOAQUIN ESTEVES—Variety

 

 

  20 KEMO (BAY AREA) (IND)

  Afternoon       3:15

DAVEY AND GOLIATH—Religion   COLOR        3:30

STAN WILSON—Children   COLOR        4:00

JOHNNY CPYPER   COLOR        4:30

SPEED RACER—Cartoon   COLOR        5:00

EIGHTH MAN—Cartoon

      5:30

ROCKET ROBIN HOOD   COLOR    Evening       6:00

GILLIGAN’S ISLAND—Comedy   COLOR        6:30

OF LANDS AND SEAS—Travel   COLOR        7:00

MOVIE—Drama

“Rebel Flight to Cuba” (West German; 1960)

      9:00

MOVIE—Comedy

“Junior Miss” (1945)

    11:00

MOVIE—Drama   COLOR  “Guerillas in Pink Lace” (1964)

 

 

  32 KNEW (BAY AREA) (IND.)

  Afternoon       3:30

DAPHNE’S CASTLE   COLOR        5:00

ROCKY AND HIS FRIENDS—Cartoons   COLOR        5:30

WINCHELL-MAHONEY TIME—Chlidren   COLOR    Evening       6:30

PERFECT MATCH—Game   COLOR        7:00

PDQ—Game   COLOR  Celebrities: Nick Adams, Marilyn Maxwell, Paul Lynde

      7:30

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES—Game   COLOR        8:00

WOODY WOODBURY—Variety   COLOR  Guests: Victor Buono, Coleen Gray, Buddy Greco, Ketty Lester, Monty Landis

      9:30

LES CRANE—Discussion   COLOR  Topic: Pornography

 

 

  36 KGSC (SAN JOSE) (IND.)

  Afternoon       3:00

FILM FEATURE

      3:30

FACTS AND FUN

      4:00

ADELE HALL—Variety

      5:00

CISCO KID—Western   COLOR        5:30

WELLS FARGO—Western

  Evening       6:00

REAL McCOYS—Comedy

      6:30

COW TOWN JAMBOREE—Music

      7:00

MOVIE—Comedy

“Miss Susie Slagle’s” (1945)

      8:30

MERV GRIFFIN—Variety   COLOR  Guests: Arlene Francis, Jackie Mason, Charlie Callas, Gilbert Price, Julie Budd, Cathy McCauley

    10:00

JOE PYNE—Discussion   COLOR  Guests: Col. Water Cronk, Paul De Sainte Colombe, Eugene Trope

 

 

  44 KBHK (BAY AREA) (IND.)

  Afternoon

    12:00

CARTOONS—Children   COLOR        1:00

PAT BOONE—Variety 

  COLOR  Guests: Tommy Smothers, Peter Falk, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Fran Jeffries, the Pair Extraordinaire

      2:30

FATHER KNOWS BEST—Comedy

      3:00

MY FRIEND FLICKA—Drama   COLOR        3:30

CAPT. SAN FRANCISCO   COLOR        4:00

POPEYE—Cartoons

      4:30

MARINE BOY—Cartoon   COLOR        5:00

THREE STOOGES—Comedy

      5:30

ASTROBOY—Cartoon

  Evening       6:00

LITTLE RASCALS—Comedy

      6:30

MISTER ED—Comedy

      7:00

DOBIE GILLIS—Comedy

      7:30

HONEYMOONERS—Comedy

      8:00

HAZEL—Comedy   COLOR        8:30

STEVE ALLEN—Variety   COLOR  Guests: James Brown, Rudy Vallee, Jackie Mason, Leigh French, Clay Tyson

    10:00

NEWS   COLOR      10:30

JOE DOLAN!—Discussion 

  COLOR      11:15

MOVIE—Western   COLOR  “At Gunpoint” (1955)

TV  

This week in TV Guide: August 24, 1968

This week we've got a miniseries filled with just about everything television has to offer, a star-studded event featuring high drama and low comedy, tragedy and pathos, suspense, violence, and even theater of the absurd. It runs for four consecutive nights, Monday through Thursday, and it's while two networks will be showing it unabridged, a third plans to present a condensed, Cliff's Notes version. It's the water-cooler show of the year, guaranteed to leave viewers shocked and breathless. 
Welcome to Chicago, and the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
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It's not as if the chaos of the convention just snuck up on people. You can see it right there in the full-page add for KCRA's convention coverage; referring to the location of the convention, at the International Amphitheatre near the Union Stock Yards, the headline shouts, "Tempest Near the Stockyards," with the body of the ad containing either a promise or a warning: "The Democrats are facing what may be the stormiest convention fight of the century." 
We probably don't need to rehash it all: police on the convention floor; reporters being assulted; delegates taken into custody; a telecommunications strike that hampered media efforts to provide coverage of protests devolving into riots in Grant Park; contentious debates about delegate selection and the Vietnam War plank in the party platform; and more. Media coverage of the convention, and the public's response to that coverage, would be hashed and rehashed in TV Guide (and other publications) in the ensuing weeks and months, and continues to be analyzed to this day. But why wait for that? There's already a lot of second-guessing regarding network coverage of last month's Republican Convention, if the Letters section is any indication.
NBC was the big winner in the ratings race, and so it's no surprise that many of the letters, both positive and negative, refer to the Peacock Network's coverage in Miami Beach. Jean Ward of Kimberton, Pennsylvania, chastises NBC as "saboteurs for the Democratic Party," and says their editorial remarks, "presented as news, were highly improper and, to me, highly objectionable." Tim Johnson, writing from Los Angeles, and D. Sherwood, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, both single out Sander Vanocur; the former calls his reporting "sophomoric cynicism," and the latter found him "highly biased and generally unprofessional." Mr. Johnson adds that, thanks to Vanocur, "I have discovered what a truly remarkable reporting team the CBS Network has." [Nonetheless, I always enjoyed Sander Vanocur myself.] Not everyone was so negative, however; Helene Shalotsky of Parsippany, New Jersey, praises coverage that "vividly uncovered to the American people the hoopla and ludicrous expenditure involved in selecting a Presidential candidate," and James Kusiak, of Wildwood, New Jersey, thanks the networks "for their devoted service to the nation in their coverage of issues as important as the respective conventions."
And then there's ABC, which eschewed the traditional gavel-to-gavel convention coverage in Miami Beach (and the estimated $5 million that CBS and NBC each spent) in favor of a 90-minute nightly summary of each night's session at less than half the cost, while still retaining much of their nightly entertainment revenue. Pam Hornung, of St. Louis, found that this suited her just fine, writing that "I have never enjoyed a convention more or felt more well-informed as to what had happened during the day." Mrs. Cal Heathman, from Champaign, Illinois, extends "My compliments to ABC News. They needed only an hour and a half to tell us what had happened at the Republican Convention; it took CBS and NBC all evening long." She also takes a moment to mention "Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley [who] added a great deal of interest and, in most cases, understanding."
Buckley on the left, Vidal on the right: 
the only time you'd identify them that way.For coverage of both the Republican and Democratic conventions, ABC signed Buckley and Vidal to provide their own take on things, from, respectively, the conservative and liberal points of view. Their contentious clashes became so famous that, years later, they would become the subject of a documentary. The highlight of their interactions (or lowlight, if you prefer) unquestionably comes on Wednesday, August 28, an infamous night that saw Hubert Humphrey's nomination for president, interspersed with tape-delayed coverage of the clashes between police and protestors in Grant Park. 
Anchorman Howard K. Smith, referring to a clip they had just viewed, had suggested that the raising of the Vietcong flag by antiwar protestors, an act which triggered a violent response from police, could be considered akin to raising a Nazi flag during World War II; Buckley nodded his agreement with Smith. Addressing Buckley, Vidal replied that "As far as I’m concerned, the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that, I will only say that if we can’t have the right of assembly –" at which point Buckley interrupted, "Now listen, you queer—stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered!" A decade later, New York magazine would rank the debates as one of the greatest moments in the history of television to date, right up there with the moon landing and the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show; august company indeed. 
That's all in the future, though. For the present, the Doan Report wonders if ABC's limited coverage may be the wave of the future. Looking back to last month, Doan notes that, on average, "nearly 13 million Americans" chose ABC's alternative programming (including reruns of The Rat Patrol and The Flying Nun and an old Jerry Lews movie) instead of watching convention coverage on NBC and CBS. Were they, Doan wonders, "mostly distinterested Democrats? Or were they, regardless of political persuasion, simply switched off by the tedium of 90 percent of the Miami Beach proceedings?" Even worse was the possibility that "a great swatch of the public" has become "so disenchanted with the Old Politics . . .that many people are permanently turned-off to this sort of televised razzmatazz?" The Democrats are taking last-minute steps to streamline some of their proceedings in hopes viewers will find it all less boring; ironically, "TV’s millions may be switching en masse to CBS and NBC if trouble breaks out outside Chicago’s International Amphitheatre. Huge protest demonstrations are in the making." In Miami, NBC and ABC were the clear ratings winners, with CBS finishing in third place for the first time in history. What Chicago has in store, nobody knows for sure. 
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It may be an odd thing to say, given how countercultural 1968 was, but there's a certain innocence to it all at the same time, particularly the idea that a political party was willing to debate important issues and air out its differences right there in front of everyone on live television. You look at those poor suckers on the convention floor, thinking that what they're doing really makes a difference, and yet somewhere in the back of your mind you envy their naïvety, their commitment to something that matters. You look at the motto emblazoned in the convention hall, "Promises Made, Promises Kept," and you wonder how anyone could ever believe such hoke, let alone something like, "Make America Great Again." It may have been the worst of times, but there was somethiung eminently human about it all, something that we've lost in the deIt cades since. 
The Democrats didn't plan it that way, but it happened nonetheless, and the idea that anything like it could happen again today is laughable. As we read a couple of weeks ago, by 1980 conventions were being scripted down to the minute, and today they scan more like cheap infomercials, except those infomercials usually have more substance to them. It's hard to shake the feeling sometimes that we're all just going through the motions, playing the roles that have been assigned to us, while we wait to see what happens next. We wait, and we wonder. l  l  l
That innocence isn't on display only in the convention hall. You can see it on the Elysian fields of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where the championship game of the Little League World Series is being contested Saturday afternoon on ABC's Wide World of Sports (5:00 p.m., tape-delayed). It used to be that the only other time you'd see a Little League game was if you walked down to a local playground, and in that way it's more of a slice of Americana, something you'd see in a picture book along with parades and church socials, than an actual sporting event. Today, the entire tournament is televised; even the regional rounds wind up on ESPN (in primetime, no less!), and Little League baseball seems more of a commodity, another source of programming for a machine. Even the between-innings segments featured in 1968, with all-stars Carl Yastrzemski, Sam McDowell, and Dave Giusti offering "tips for the youngsters," would seem corny today; the only tips they're interested in are the best home run celebrations for the cameras. 
Apropos of a convention week, some of the best alternative programming comes from exhibition football, where the hitting is only slightly harder than it is in Chicago. On Saturday, two of the oldest and fiercest rivals in the AFL, the Oakland Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs, face off in KC (5:30 p.m., KNEW), while the teams in the last two NFL championship games, the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys, go at it in Big D (6:30 p.m., CBS). The AFL season begins in earnest on September 6, the NFL follows suit on September 15.
Even non-political programming has its tangentially-political side; on Sunday morning, Discovery '68, which Cleveland Amory praised last week, presents a poignant rerun from last November featuring the late Robert F. Kennedy in a program that explores ways to preserve and enjoy "The Vanishing Wilderness." (11:30 a.m.) Among a montage of Americans enjoying hiking, fishing, and camping, Kennedy and his family are seen shooting the rapids on the Colorado River, and RFK later discusses government projects designed to protect these areas. It is an interesting choice by the netw, Aork to replay this particular episode on the eve of the Democratic Convention (just as it was to telecast it last November, a year out from the election); although Discovery is primarily a children's show, I'd imagine this one might have produced a tear or two from grown-up viewers. 
Also on Sunday, Glen Campbell's summer replacement series airs its final episode. (Don't worry; thanks to the dispute between CBS and the Smothers Brothers, he'll be back soon enough.) For the finale (9:00 p.m., CBS), Glen presents a country-music concert with Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three, the Stoneman Family, and regulars Leigh French and John Hartford; Pat Paulsen features in his mock-presidential campaign, advocating for increased gun-control laws. 
Monday illustrates the challenges faced by West Coast stations when it comes to covering live events. CBS and NBC both begin their live, gavel-to-gavel convention coverage at 4:30 p.m.; if things go as planned (which they never do), their affiliates should have an hour or two to fill before their late local news (and, in the case of NBC, The Tonight Show, with Bob Newhart as guest host for the week). It's pretty much business as usual for ABC, though, with the Chuck Connors series Cowboy in Africa (7:30 p.m., The Rat Patrol (8:30 p.m.), and Howard Duff and Dennis Cole in Felony Squad (9:00 p.m.), followed by their nightly convention wrap-up at 9:30 p.m. (about three hours after its live broadcast).
On Tuesday, ABC continues its counter-programming offensive with Garrison's Gorillas (7:30 p.m., although with all the explosions and whatnot, viewers might have been forgiven for thinking the network was interrupting things for live footage from downtown Chicago), followed by It Takes a Thief, with guest star Susan Saint James. Tonight the convention runs late, ending after 10:00 p.m. in the West, so weary viewers might have opted for a special Merv Griffin broadcast from the streets of Harlem, in support of New York's "Give a Damn" program to benefit ghetto youth (8:30 p.m., Channel 36). Following opening remarks from NYC's mayor John Lindsay, Merv presents performances by James Brown, Joe Tex, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Spanky and Our Gang, Willie Tyler and Lester, the Pied Piper Drummers and Dancers (doing a tribal dance), and a fashion show of African-style clothes. There are also appearances by former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali and actor Burt Lancaster, who grew up in the neighborhood. 
Wednesday, ABC's alternate reality reaches its peak, when the network puts Elvis up against the politicians; Blue Hawaii (7:30 p.m.) is, says Judith Crist, "bearable to the non-[Elvis] fans as well," with "pretty views of Hawaii, has the usual quota of pretty girls on hand, has a couple of tidy tunes in its repertoire and even has Angela Lansbury to brighten the screen as Elvis's mother." Of course, Angela Lansbury also played the evil mother in The Manchurian Candidate, one of the great political thrillers of all time, so she's got you covered either way. Keep in mind, though, that the presidential balloting takes place on Wednesday, which also features rough stuff inside the convention hall and rioting outside it, so the network may have decided to go live earlier in the night.
If ABC continues its minimalist convention coverage, its Thursday night lineup is made up of comedies (make of that what you will): The Second Hundred Years (7:30 p.m.), The Flying Nun (8:00 p.m.), Bewitched (8:30 p.m.), and That Girl (9:00 p.m.) However, Channel 2 has Portrait: James Mason (9:00 p.m.), which includes clips from The Seventh Veil, Odd Man Out, I Met a Murderer, A Star Is Born, and Georgy Girl; his career is discussed by those who have worked with him, including Stephen Boyd, Sue Lyon, Omar Sharif and director Sidney Lumet. Following that, NET Playhouse (10:00 p.m.) presents an adaptation of Georges Simenon's "The Suspect," a dark, non-Maigret story of terrorism and revolutionary fervor.
We're finally back to normal on Friday, and tonight's choice is the very funny Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action" (8:30 p.m., NBC), featuring Kirk and Spock as a couple of Chicagoland gangsters, and introducing to the world the game whose rules never end, Fizbin. And this leads us to the week's unbylined cover story, a profile of DeForest Kelley, the erstwhile Dr. Bones McCoy. Kelley comes across, to me at least, as a man of contradictions: a minister's son who eschews religion in favor of the New Age-y Science of Mind; a quiet, droll man who nonetheless has become something of a "teen-age sex symbol," serenated by Sunset Strip hippies who offer him love beads; one of the three stars of a successful TV series who still has to "fight for everything I've gotten at Star Trek, from a parking space at the studio to an unshared dressing room," and once found himself left out of an episode entirely. 
He's immensely popular with the crew and his fellow actors; "De really cares about people," says Leonard Nimoy, who also calls him "truly the most human of all the actors I've ever known," while William Shatner cites "a simple, unassuming niceness about this man that's rare in any business." He doesn't deny the disappointments of his career, the stardom that seemed close but always remained just out of reach, but of course he attains an immortality that few actors ever reach. And not only that—earlier this year he found himself, for the first time, part of a TV Guide crossword puzzle, which hs wife clipped out and framed. "It's not an Oscar or an Emmy," he says, "but to an actor it's something."
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It was just a couple of weeks ago that we were discussing, in this very space, how frequently TV Guide looks at children's programming. And so what do we have this week? Another article on children's programming! And, somewhat appropriately, this, too, has a tangental relationship to the week's festivities in Chicago, as Dr. Joyce Brothers asks the question: "Are the seeds of violence nurtured through the public's airwaves?" 
She starts out with a sobering statistic: "Without changing the dial, a child of our electronic age can watch some 50 near or actual violent 'deaths' on his television set in a day’s time." He's also going to spend as many hours in front of the TV over the course of a year as they do in front of a schoolteacher. No wonder that mothers "worry more about the effect of tele-violence on their children's souls than they do abou tthe effect of television on their eyes and posture." And, "in the wake of Sen. Robert Kennedy's assassination, everybody has been worrying with them."
Following Kennedy's assassination, there was a wave of self-censorship on television, with networks pulling the more violent episodes of various series (only to air them later, after things had died down), but Dr. Brothers is skeptical of such moves, viewing them more as a quest to find a scapegoat. "History,' she quotes William James, "is a bath of blood. To hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living."
Not surprisingly, there's no real consensus on the topic among those who study such things. "There are as many opinions as there are experts," says Brothers, "and their disagreement is often as violent as our television fare. Not all the opinions are based on facts, for there are very few of these. Research on television’s influence on our lives has barely begun. And many of the findings are contradictory." 
For example, one expert says there's no such thing as something too violent for kids, that violent television serves the same purpose as Grimm's Fairy Tales; "Children still need these hair-raising stories that end happily if they are not to be terrified by their own unresolved and frightening fantasies." Another replies that television is "a school for violence that most of our children attend regularly," and that kids wind up learning that "violence is the great adventure and the sure solution, and he who is best at it wins. We are training not only a peace corps but also a violence corps." 
Brothers cites the results of a questionnaire completed by over 300 psychiatrists at a recent American Psychiatric Association meeting; 30 percent beleved fictional violence (TV shows, movies, comic books) teaches actual violence to children, while 24 percent believe it helps dissipate aggression. "The rest were undecided." Studies run on children produce results that differ dramatically. 
If there's any clarity at all, it might come from a Stanford University study that found that "children are less affected by the violence they witness on their TV screens than they are by their parents’ attitudes toward violence." In other words, happy children with loving parents tend to focus more on the struggle between good and evil, between hero and villain, while those who have been neglected, mistreated, or underprivileged often bring their existing frustrations to their viewing, where what they see on TV adds fuel to the fire. 
Marshall McLuhan, one of the most influential of media watchers, offers some interesting observations of his own. According to McLuhan, children actually look at the faces of actors much more than they do the weapons or the action. What they really fear, he says, is the unknown. Children (and most adults) don't watch Westerns or detective stories for their violent content; rather, it's "for the pleasure of participating in the solution of a crime or in building a frontier town." Violence in that detective show or Western is familiar to them, and less upsetting than stories like 1984 or Jane Eyre. Which, to me, suggests that something like, say, the Three Stooges, or the Road Runner cartoons, is so formulaic, so predictable, that the violent content would have little effect on children watching them. 
Perhaps most interesting, and most sobering, is a finding that juvenile viewers are far more disturbed by verbal aggression on TV than by physical violence. "They were least upset by shooting, more upset by knives and most upset 'when grownups are angry with one another and shout.'" And maybe that's the lesson we take from all this: that what's important is not what children see on television, but what they see in their own households, from their own parents. Television, Joyce Brothers says, is not a chief motivating force; rather, it's "a mirror in which we see the reflections of ourselves and the world in which we live." And changing the mirror image doesn't change the world. 
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I think we could all do with something a little lighthearted to round things out, and that comes to us courtesy of Joseph Finnigan's article on those "long-gone TV luminaries" who've found their fame—and fortune—working in Europe. Stars like George Nader, Ty Hardin, Edd Byrnes, Ray Danton, and others, who may have disappeared from American televisions but now grace the marquees of foreign theaters. 
    George Nader, king of the
    sauerkraut spy circuit.Their role model, of course, is Clint Eastwood, who headed to Italy after the cancellation of Rawhide to make a spaghetti-Western called A Fistfull of Dollars. Two more movies followed—For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—and Eastwood emerged a bona fide movie star, one whose fame and acclaim have grown exponentially larger in the decades since this issue of TV Guide was published. George Nader, who starred in the forgettable single-season series Shannon among other series, is no Clint Eastwood. However, he's the star of a series of secret-agent movies in Germany, where he's now a celebrity. "I make my living in Europe now," he tells Finnigan. Even after years in Hollywood, "I hadn't had any offers." But now, "I look at my counterparts in Hollywood and they’re playing guest roles. In my pictures, I’m the leading man."*
*He also starred, with Richard Kiel in a sci-fi flick called The Human Duplicators, which aired on MST3K. Maybe we'll see that here someday.
Edd Byrnes, who captured the hearts and minds of viewers as Kookie on 77 Sunset Strip, travelled to Europe to keep things rolling after they stopped on the Strip. He calls Europe "a gold mine, It bought me a Rolls-Royce, a big house in Hollywood—and I still keep my apartment in Rome." He cautions though, that in the shady world of European movie-making, it's best to get paid up-front, "before yu shoot the last week of the picture." He was paid $100,000 for one Western; the going rate for most Hollywood émigrés is about $25,000 per picture.
Adam West is another veteran of the spaghetti-Western circuit, declaiming there after the end of the Robert Taylor series The Detectives, in which he played one of the titular characters. "I was offered five more pictures over there," he says, "but I didn't want to get involved in Italian film. Then Batman came along." He, too, says there are drawbacks to working in Italy or Spain. "We filmed our picture in the desert outside of Almeria, Spain, where Lawrence of Arabia was made. It was so hot that after a few hours your horse would lie down and roll over in slow motion." European actors, reluctant to be upstaged by the big American star, didn't pull their punches, either. "Ali of those villains wanted to be the hero, wouldn’t settle for being the bad guy," he recalls, remembering one who "put his spur through my left shin in a fight one day."
The American expats acknowledge that their European stardom might not be quite the same as if it were Hollywood. But, as one Hollywood agent puts it, "they can make three or four pictures a year abroad at $25,000 a shot. In what other industry can a guy make $100,000 a year and still be called a failure?" And, as George Nader said, be called the star of the movie?
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MST3K alert: Invasion of the Neptune Men (Japanese; 1962) A group of youngsters have difficulty convincing anyone they were attacked by a spaceship. Shinichi Chiba, Kappel Matsumoto. (Friday, 9:00 p.m., KEMO in San Francisco) There are really only two recommendations for this movie: a very early appearance by famed Japanese martial arts actor Sonny Chiba; and the return of Phantom of Krankor (Bill Corbett), the villain of a similar (and much better) MST3K flick, Prince of Space. For the SOL crew, it's a rare bright spot in one of the worst movies they've had to endure. TV  

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On Wednesday, you saw my contribution to the Aaron Spellingverse Blogathon hosted by Gill at Realweegiemidget; well, now that it's all done, head over there to see all of the entries, including those by blogs I'd ordinarily be mentioning here, such as The Last Drive In . By the end, you'll know more about Aaron Spelling than you ever thought possible!
Last week I mentioned the death of Peter Marshall, and that we'd likely be reading about him in this space this week. As promised, Terence has a look at the great man's career at A Shroud of Thoughts. Continue reading, and you'll also read his fine appreciation of the late Phil Donahue , who died earlier this week.
This week, Jack's Hitchcock Project at bare-bones e-zine shines the spotlight on one Evan Hunter, who under that name wrote Blackboard Jungle, while under the pen name Ed McBain he wrote the long series of 87th Precinct novels, several of which are on my bookshelf. Here, we're concerned with his only Hitchcock contribution, " Appointment at Eleven ," a terrific adaptation of Robert Turner's short story.

At Cult TV Blog, John has spent the past few weeks reviewing the dystopian series The Guardians, and this week he comes to the conclusing episode, after which he offers some of his own conclusions as to the provocative series. Thanks to you, John, I've had to add this series to the lengthy list of programs I have to watch if I live long enough.
Guess what came from Amazon last week? The complete series of F Troop! We'd always enjoyed this series when it was originally on, but I'd be lying if I didn't give some of the credit for my renewed interest to Hal at The Horn Section and his F Troop Fridays. This week, he returns with a look at "Reunion for O'Rourke," celebrating the Sergeant's 25th anniversary in the service.
At Comfort TV, David muses on what he calls his " least favorite sitcom plot ," as seen in the Doris Day Show episode "The Matchmakers," and how an annoying cliche can nonetheless teach a valuable life lesson for those open to it. I probably ought to take a page or two from these episodes myself.
Next to the annual Christmas catalogs from Sears and Penneys, one of the most exciting days of the year, for me at least, was when the TV Guide Fall Preview issue came out. Somewhat to my surprise, they still publish one, although I've not paid any attention to broadcast television for years. At Television Obscurities, reliable Robert reminds us that it's out there, if you can find it.
I'm not sure that a week goes by when I don't see character actor Jay Novello appearing in one classic TV episode or another; sometimes I might see him twice in one night. Travalanche looks back at Novello's long career, and even if you don't recognize the name, he'll tell you what to watch so you can recognize the face. TV