The Week in Review

In defiance of gravity, most successful TV shows have a way of going in two directions at once--up and down. They push themselves up in popularity by dishing out the kind of entertainment the customers have been led to expect, and then dig themselves into a rut by shoveling out scheduled helpings of the predictable. Sooner or later the customers get the idea, and suddenly a very popular TV show starts going in one direction only. "What we need," say the TV brass-hats, "is something different--but not too different." Last week they offered viewers something tried, something true, something different and even something new.

Love & History. The public has been fed situation comedy until it is almost fed up (TIME, June 27), but viewers still love I Love Lucy. How long the love affair will continue depends on how much comic inventiveness Desi and Lucy can put into their formula of a young couple getting in and out of slapstick situations with a well-shaken mixture of low-class cunning and high-class ineptitude. Last week the re-run of an old Lucy was neither comic nor inventive. Lucy's idea of fun was to return repeatedly to a nightclub, got up in a series of outlandish disguises, and leave indignantly each time on being told that Desi no longer entertained there. This stratagem was supposed to convince the boss that Desi was so popular that he should be rehired at double his pay. The boss was convinced, but so was Desi: he refused the job, under the illusion that his great popularity allowed him to write his own ticket anywhere. With this tired old comedy situation, the studio audience's roars of glee (stepped up to full volume by sound engineers) were received in many a living room in baffled silence.

But CBS redeemed itself in the fact field. On See It Now (Tues. 10:30 p.m. E.D.T.), Reporter Ed Murrow turned the TV camera on Dr. Ralph Bunche, Under Secretary of the United Nations. The camera focused on a schoolroom in Abilene, Kans. Dr. Bunche was at the head of the class. He spoke simply and earnestly to his youthful listeners, as he would to intellectual equals, and made out an eloquent case for the U.N., in whose halls "every man of whatever race, color or religion holds his head equally high." Dr. Bunche was a credit to the U.N., to the U.S. and to his race.

Imagination & Morals. Winding up a successful run on Broadway, 3 for Tonight breezed onto Front Row Center (Wed. 10 p.m. E.D.T., CBS-TV) like a breath of spring. On an empty stage with no sets and few props, Narrator Hiram Sherman asked his viewers to contribute imagination to the show. He held up a pencil and said it was a sprig of lilac. Just then a girl walked by. "You're late," said , Sherman. She hung her head. "Here," he said, and handed her the pencil. Immediately the girl was aglow. "Oh!" she exclaimed, cupping the pencil, "what lovely lilacs!"

The rest of the show was no sprig of lilac, but much of it was engagingly different. As coordinated as a precision instrument, Walter Schumann's choral group managed to sound now like an entire circus, again like the string section of a symphony orchestra. Harry Belafonte, singing blues, calypso and spirituals, turned out to be a topnotch TV personality. Best of all were witty Dancers Marge and Gower Champion, who can make their sophisticated routines look joyously impromptu. All in all, 3 for Tonight proved that skill and imagination can be more fun than a lot of expensive scenery.

Just as refreshing in its easygoing way was Red Gulch, a U.S. Steel Hour (Tues. 9:30 p.m. E.D.T., ABC-TV) adaptation of the Bret Harte short story. Franchot Tone and Teresa Wright starred in this tale of a hard-drinking newspaper editor and a high-minded Philadelphia schoolmarm who meet in a frontier town in 1885. The editor has a carefree habit of lying around drunk in the gutter a good bit of the time, and the schoolmarm, a fairly stuffy type, is tempted to go back to Philadelphia, especially when she is told that her editor friend has fathered an illegitimate child. The happy ending--which came as a mild shock to viewers who have been brought up on the strait-laced morality of Hollywood's Production Code: the schoolteacher finally remains in Red Gulch when she realizes that it is a little silly to be too primly disapproving of drunkenness and bastardy.

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