The Season

For very different reasons, the two names that may lastingly identify the 1959-60 TV season are Charles Van Doren and David Susskind. With his now-famed, melodramatic confession ("I was deeply involved in a deception"). Van Doren exposed not only the quiz fakes but the underlying shoddiness of the TV industry, started an ostentatious if temporary move toward purity. Susskind, who emerged again as the season's most prolific producer, demonstrated that the most important problem-- more important than quizzes, payola and canned laughter--is good programing.

Susskind has had a hand in close to 100 shows--not all good by any means, but at least suggesting effort--including New Jersey-WNTA's excellent Play of the Week and the weekly Susskind symposium. Open End. He also produced miscellaneous specials (notably NBC's Moon and Sixpence with Laurence Olivier), the CBS Du Pont Show of the Month, and helped turn out a series of NBC dramatic programs that established Art Carney, once known only as Jackie Gleason's second banana, as the season's outstanding TV actor. The Susskind influence had its drawbacks: too many of his shows were $200,000 reproductions of old movies, books and plays, further threatening TV's almost lost hope of becoming a source of original drama.

Midas Touch. For the rest, it was the season of the unspectacular spectaculars. There were about 400 shows advertised as "specials" amid loud fanfare. With some notable exceptions--such as Leland Hayward's superbly imaginative The Fabulous Fifties on CBS--most of them fizzled, by the standards of taste as well as ratings. The two major dramatic shows, CBS Playhouse 90 and NBC Sunday Showcase, are being crossed off the schedule for next season, as well as the muchballyhooed $15 million NBC Ford Star-time, which did some good drama (e.g., Ingrid Bergman in The Turn of the Screw, Alec Guinness in The Wicked Scheme of Jebal Deekes), but otherwise ran up an awesome string of flops. Many of the less ambitious series fared no better. A total of 55 shows will not return to the air next season, ranging from Love and Marriage to Bat Masterson, from Desilu Playhouse to the John Gunther show. The only new series in 1959-60 that really clicked in the ratings was Dennis the Menace, based on Hank Ketcham's comic strip about a sort of Public Enemy No. 1/2.

Next season the familiar Midas-touch system will be in force more firmly than ever--oaters, private eyes and twice the number of situation comedies. A new one on ABC threatened to be the ultimate development in its field: an animated-cartoon series called Flintstone, about a family living in the Stone Age.

Equally incredible is a new NBC series called The Barbarians, about a Celtic prince named Ravic (Jack Palance) who lived 2,100 years ago, but was able to get around with modern speed: in the first one-hour episode alone he is captured by the Carthaginians, made a galley slave, sees his beloved sister commit suicide to avoid dishonor, leads a revolt, is recaptured and sentenced to be crucified, is saved by a voluptuous Carthaginian princess, escapes in a trireme, and becomes a pirate.

Over the Martini. Among the more serious plans for 1960-61: ABC is scheduling a series based on Winston Churchill's Memoirs, CBS has all but blocked out half a dozen hour shows--collectively called Tomorrow--that will cover new developments in science and technology. Ed Murrow will bring back his eight-packs-a-day intensity to the excellent CBS Reports, which plans shows on Artists Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Marc Chagall. Elsewhere in the CBS culture corner, Orson Welles plans a modern-dress Julius Caesar, Gian Carlo Menotti has been commissioned by the network to do a new opera, and Igor Stravinsky is busy composing his first work for television.

Leading a general stampede toward Civil War themes, Dore Schary will probably do several shows on NBC, including a study of slavery written by Negro Playwright Lorraine (A Raisin in the Sun) Hansberry. NBC is negotiating to send a mobile unit to Europe this summer, bring back in color tape a rich swatch of material collected at the Oberammergau Passion Play, the Salzburg and Edinburgh festivals, and the Shakespeare Memorial Theater at Stratford-upon-Avon.

All this might sound fairly impressive over the third martini at executive lunch tables, but it is easier to talk a good schedule than produce one. Just in case things turn out even duller than last season, canned laughter--briefly ostracized at CBS--is back full force.

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