Prime-Time Rainbow

This season NBC is programming 70% of its nighttime shows in color. But it turns out that this is a mere drop on the palette. Proud as its peacock, NBC announced that next September it will become the "Full-Color Network."

That was boasting a bit. Actually it will be the "96% Prime-Time Color Network," but who's counting? Next fall, from 7:30 to 11, seven nights a week, NBC will be kaleidoscopically ablaze with 14 old shows and 13 new. Then the only off-color notes will be sounded by I Dream of Jeannie for a half-hour, Convoy for an hour, and an occasional feature film. Jeannie will have light grey hair, because Jeannie is a genie, and getting her out of a bottle is a ponderous camera trick in color; Convoy will be deflowered because it incorporates black-and-white wartime film clips. Otherwise the prime-time rainbow will be unblemished. And off prime time, NBC will continue to colorcast the Johnny Carson Show and at least 18 daytime hours each week. When it all started in 1954, NBC managed to grind out only a pale 68 color hours for the year. For the 1965-66 schedule, that total will be 3,000.

The color explosion has hit the opposition too. ABC has been colorcasting three series, as well as some movies and specials. Next season, although one will be dropped, three new series, Gidget, The FBI Story and Big Valley, will join the color lineup. At CBS-TV President John Schneider, in his premiere pronouncement at his new post, took his network into the wonderful world of color for the first time on a series basis. Red Skelton and Danny Kaye will both be tinted in the fall. And having caved in to prime-time movies, CBS will color the ones Hollywood colored.

As for NBC's parent company, the Radio Corporation of America, color it green. Under the prod of Board Chairman David Sarnoff, 74, the company sank $130 million into color TV before getting a penny out. Now RCA manufactures most color-television tubes, licenses the rest. With an estimated 3,000,000 color sets (which start at about $380) now in use in the U.S., and with the new NBC schedule as a come-on, the number is expected to jump to 5,000,000 by 1966.

Color TV is RCA's leading consumer product in volume of sales, and the clutch of future orders has already backlogged. What's more, the American Research Bureau reports that in color-equipped homes, NBC flays the opposition with every tinted offering. All of which, of course, explains the ecstatic cry over hue at NBC.

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