The Week in Review

One hour dominated the television week. On Sunday night at 8, Comedian Steve (Tonight) Allen opened the latest phase of NBC's attack against CBS's The Ed Sullivan Show (TIME, June 25). NBC's ambitious objective: to grab Sullivan's audience, consistently rated the biggest or second biggest audience of any TV show.

With so much at stake and so redoubtable a personality as Allen's thrown against him, Sullivan reacted with an astute application of high strategy. By announcing that 43 Hollywood stars would appear on his show, he made good use of the well-established principle that the more Hollywood stars promised on a TV show, the more viewers the show will draw. He made even better use of the principle's incontrovertible corollary -viz., the quality of a TV show varies inversely with the number of Hollywood stars on it and the time they stay around. Sullivan's solution of the problem (how to get his viewers tuned in with the magic of a lot of big names and not let the big names hang around to drive the viewers away) had an iridescent beauty of its own. He lined the names up and let them give him a 43-gun salute to celebrate his show's eighth anniversary on the air. Then the names disappeared and the show went on.

The Comfortable Lead. It was the usual Sullivan variety show with everything thrown in from bears riding bicycles to Harry Belafonte singing spirituals and with something to appeal to every member of the family. Against this onslaught Steve Allen was forced to do a little of the same kind of thing. Allen offered some big names of his own "to get the customers to walk into the store." Sammy Davis Jr. sang too long and too loud, and Kim Novak fluffed her way through a skit that strained too hard for its laughs. The best part of the Steve Allen show is Steve Allen, an intelligent comedian who has a satiric air, some amusing ideas, a rapid-fire delivery, and a quiet way of being funny that is like nobody else's. Unlike many TV comedians, he is likely to get better as he goes along, and NBC has proved its faith in him by giving him a three-year contract in the Sunday-at-8 spot.

Meanwhile, though Sullivan kept a comfortable lead, Allen did rather well in the audience he drew to his opening show. Against Sullivan's score of 24.6 with 59% of the audience in a 15-city Trendex rating, Allen won a rating of 13.3 with 33% of the audience, more than double the usual NBC rating against Sullivan.

Two Dramas. The only other interesting things in a generally dull TV week were two plays, one a drama of life, the other a drama of death. Anita Loos's Happy Birthday on NBC's Producers' Showcase (Mon. 8 p.m., E.D.T.) starred Betty Field in the role made famous on Broadway by Helen Hayes. It is the bittersweet tale of how a spinster librarian goes into a bar in pursuit of happiness and finds life and liberty there as well. Betty Field did a creditable job as the librarian in a long and unlikely drunk scene, but was hardly good enough to save a play that was sicklied o'er with the pale cast of sentimentality.

Mr. Arcularis on CBS's Studio One (Mon. 10 p.m., E.D.T.) was an adaption by the show's talented producer, Robert Herridge (TIME, Feb. 6), of Conrad Aiken's metaphysical short story. Somewhat attenuated for a one-hour show, it is the story of a man on an operating table who icily dreams his way to a nightmarish death at sea before he really dies under the surgeon's knife. Though thin and a bit arty, Mr. Arcularis was different and fascinating television fare. It handled its eerie tale uncompromisingly, often in the heightened language of poetry, and some of its scenes were charged with the pain and wonder of life that seemed all the more intense for emerging in the shadow of tragedy.

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