Review of the Week

NBC and CBS last week had the unhappy look of rejected lovers. Both networks went all out this season to woo the TV audience. NBC splurged on "spectaculars," starting off with Satins and Spurs, starring Betty Hutton. CBS countered with Best of Broadway, featuring Helen Hayes, Fredric March and Claudette Colbert in the 1927 comedy, The Royal Family. But the viewers dialed away in droves from these extravaganzas and tuned in, instead, to old, familiar programs.

Nails & Coffins. NBC suffered the cruelest blow. Satins and Spurs got a Trendex rating of only 16.5 against a whopping 34.6 for the veteran CBS variety show Toast of the Town. What went wrong? One TVman thought that Satins was overpromoted: "NBC kept crowing about how much money they were spending, and that leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. They have mixed reactions to a network that can spend that much." Some viewers, curiously, seemed to resent the fact that the show was televised in color. Said a Long Island housewife: "I can't get color on my set, so why should I waste time watching a show when the best thing about it is its color?" The makers of Hazel Bishop cosmetics, one of the sponsors of Satins and Spurs, were saddest of all. Groaned a Bishop adman: "We're calling that show Nails and Coffins. We were afraid the rating would be low, but we never dreamed it would be that low. The whole idea of spectaculars just isn't going to go--it's the most unfortunate name ever coined." NBC President Pat Weaver, creator and coiner of TV spectaculars, blamed the failure on timing: "It's hard to get word to the public about a one-shot show, particularly before the season really gets going. The great, lethargic American masses have lots of other things on their minds." Weaver was not disturbed by the poor reviews: "Today was almost laughed out of existence when it started--now it's a tremendous, wealth-producing operation. Home got off to a bad start too. We'll find ways of promoting the spectaculars and getting people to watch them."

According to Trendex, CBS's big show, Best of Broadway, outscored its competition, NBC's This Is Your Life, 23.9 to 19.9. But it was a Pyrrhic victory, for This Is Your Life was showing--for the third time--its year-old episode dealing with Singer Lillian Roth's recovery from alcoholism. Hubbell Robinson, CBS vice president in charge of TV programming, conceded the rating was "not as overpoweringly high as we had hoped." He added: "It seems to me that we're going to find out whether the public will buy these things. I hope they do, because they lend a quality of excitement to TV."

Unloved Girls. On the drama front last week, TV was well-served by three young actresses and a dozen men. The actresses were all love-starved: on Robert Montgomery Presents, Janice Rule proved movingly simple as an adolescent who found death as well as love with a hoodlum; on Philco TV Playhouse, Eva Marie Saint was convincing as another tortured girl who finally married a man old enough to be her father; on Lux Video Theater, Marilyn Erskine brought surprising authority to the role of self-conscious Catherine Sloper in The Heiress. The dozen male actors had a fine time on Studio One's Twelve Angry Men. The play, by Reginald Rose, started out with an old idea (what happens in a jury room) but turned it into a crisp and exciting melodrama. Franchot Tone got a baleful malevolence into his part as a juryman determined on hanging the defendant, while Robert Cummings was bland and believable as the juror who changes everyone's mind. Among the others, Walter Abel, Edward Arnold, John Beal and Paul Hartman played interesting variations on the theme of guilt or innocence.

The comics came back, too, Milton Berle continued to subject his brash bounciness to the restrictions of a story line. Jackie Gleason returned with even more beautiful girls (36) and, with the expert help of Art Carney and Audrey Meadows, reeled off another good slapstick episode of The Honeymooners.

Second Spec. At week's end, NBC gamely presented its second spectacular, a TV version of the 1941 Moss Hart musical, Lady in the Dark, starring Ann Sothern. Just like the first spectacular, it was big, beautiful and contained too many production numbers. There was such a quantity of large-scale scenes that the camera could take only a few closeups during the 1 1/2-hour show and many viewers may have felt that they were watching the entire production through the wrong end of a telescope.

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