The Week in Review

For TV, summer is a time of hard-boiled stocktaking, half-baked promises and raw replacements. Last week there were fewer replacements, grander promises --and an unexpected twist to the season's stocktaking.

Boom in the West. Hollywood, the "enemy" movie capital, was having a TV boom, and New York, TV capital of the U.S., was worried. Hollywood actors alone have upped their collective annual income by more than a third, from $29 to $39 million, according to the New York Times'-- Jack Gould. Jumping from a one-to a two-industry city, Hollywood is now home territory to about 250 companies which are in the $100-million-a-year business of producing TV films. In 1956, Hollywood will produce more than 3,000 hours of TV entertainment, both live and on film. What this means is clear from a comparison with the motion picture companies' expected production for the nation's movie screens: at most 300 hours of entertainment.

Eight of the nine major movie studios have decided to go into TV in one way or another. The three major TV networks (NBC, CBS, ABC) have established--or have plans for--large plants and are developing increasing facilities for live and TV film production in Hollywood. Concerned over the trend away from New York toward the coast, New York's Governor Averell Harriman, backed by New York City's Mayor Robert Wagner, met with TV network officials to persuade them to build the same kind of large, permanent studios in New York that they are building in Hollywood.

The loudest promises of TV wonders to come were heard from NBC. The network promised more than 75 Spectacular-sized shows, almost twice the number of Spectaculars (39) that it produced during the past season. Among the wonders: a repeat of last season's successful Peter Pan; a two-hour telecast of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, starring Mary Martin and Helen Hayes; a musical version of the Pulitzer Prize play Our Town, starring Frank Sinatra; a series of one-and-a-half-hour Sunday afternoon productions of Shakespeare's plays, starring Maurice Evans; a series of 90-minute original TV plays by the best TV playwrights NBC can lay hands on.

Slump in the Summer. Meanwhile, summer replacement shows were working on the theory that entertainment should be as much fun in hot weather as in cold (TIME, June 27). Unhappily, not a single summer show, including two NBC one-shot Spectaculars (Remember--1938 and Allen in Homeland), has yet risen above a depressingly low level of mediocrity.

The most promising and engaging personality on the summer replacement circuit is Johnny Carson, 29-year-old comic of CBS's The Johnny Carson Show (Thurs. 10 p.m., E.D.T.). With a droll sense of humor. Carson never raises his voice, but has an effective way of raising an eyebrow, and he combines a slow double-take with a quick smile. Given good material, he could be irresistibly funny.

Apart from Carson, comics were not doing so well, except perhaps financially. Three of them, Jackie Gleason, Sid Caesar and George Gobel, were keeping their names on TV all summer by producing the replacements for their own comedy hours. In the Gleason spot was CBS's America's Greatest Bands (Sat. 8 p.m., E.D.T.), which presents four different jazz bands each week and thus far has seemed intent on proving how unimaginatively popular music can be presented in a visual medium. In Sid Caesar's NBC spot was Caesar Presents (Mon. 8 p.m., E.D.T.), a catastrophically unfunny comedy show. Said the trade sheet Variety: "Originally, it was Caesar's intent to base the summer series on the misadventures of a traveling band ... but somewhere along the line, the whole idea misfired and they settled for a revue format. On the basis of Monday's [program], this show should have got lost too."

The most disappointing of the new summer shows was last week's U.S. Steel Hour (Wed. 10 p.m., E.D.T.), which switched from ABC to CBS and began a new dramatic series with The Meanest Man in the World. It was a farce about a kind young man with a mean old father who demanded that the mortgage be foreclosed on a defenseless old widow and a deserted orphan on Christmas Eve. Much of the writing was pretty good, particularly when the father was teaching his son the first principles of meanness: "Nice guys don't win ball games . . . The road to failure is paved with kind hearts . . . The good die young . . . You've got to be mean, merciless and mercenary to get ahead in the world." Unfortunately, the director and the actors botched the farce by trying to play it realistically.

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