This week in TV Guide: December 21, 1957

Isn't this a great cover? Colorful and joyful and just a bit goofy. That's how Christmas seems when you're a kid, and even though I won't be born for another 2½ years, things won't be a whole lot different then, or for a few years afterward.

As Merrill Panitt notes in this week's editorial, it is a paradox of the human species that peace on earth, good will to men—a sentiment as joyous as any that humans can desire—is, by those same humans, relegated to "one small fraction of the year." And though Christmastime is always welcome, it seems even more welcome in 1957, in a world that is "tense, suspicious, strife-torn"—in other words, a time not unlike our own today.

The way in which man has symbolized this message through the ages, Panitt points out, is through the giving of gifts. And in that spirit he offers the following gifts which TV Guide wishes for all. For the sponsors of today's hits, that gift would be responsibility in the way they recognize their "tremendous influence over the American mind," and patience "to give the aspiring new show an honest chance to find its audience." For producers and writers, it's the courage to put on new, imaginative programming. For inventors and technicians, a thanks for having made the last ten years of entertainment and information possible. And for viewers—the indispensable factor—a lifetime of "peaceful viewing in a peaceful world."

The question is whether or not today's television is capable of fulfilling Panitt's wish. The history of violence on television is no secret, and the programming of 1957 is unremarkable in that respect. But there seems, at least to me, a different kind of violence today; call it psychic, emotional, spiritual, even though there there is seldom anything actually spiritual on television today. The so-called new Golden Age is praised as edgy, gritty, realistic, and to the extent that it reflects today's world, it probably is.* Is it peaceful, though? I know I'm not saying anything I haven't said countless times in the past, but it is the kind of thing one tends to dwell on at this time of the year. It's hard to even imagine someone seeing television as an instrument of peace today, although the programs are there if you look hard enough for them. Indeed, the programs most likely to bring about such peace are the ones that have been most certainly banished from the airwaves. We can't bring them back by living in the past, but by taking an occasional vacation there, we can rediscover the color and joy of this joyful season. Well, what does the song say, just like the ones we used to know? At least when we were kids, right?

*It is, after all, an electronic mirror.