The 732 Steps

The 200th birthday of the United States is still two years away, but already television networks are starting to celebrate. Among the shows planned for the fall are NBC's series based on Carl Sandburg's biography of Lincoln, and another by the Public Broadcasting System on the Adams family from 1750 to 1900. CBS, however, has decided to go to extremes with the longest-running, shortest commemorative of them all. Beginning on July 4, it will offer a prime-time TV series called Bicentennial Minutes, which will run every night of every week until B-day, July 4, 1976. Each segment is exactly one minute long.

Dreamed up by Executive Producer Lewis Freedman, the series will describe bits of American history, data and errata, the momentous and the obscure. The 732 minutes--of the newspaper filler "on this day 200 years ago" variety --will be narrated, says the network, by "everyone from movie stars to Supreme Court Justices." Sample Minutes: Actor Barry Sullivan recounting the career of Tom Paine, Charlton Heston describing George Washington's reaction to the Boston Tea Party, Richard Crenna explaining the impact of the fuel crisis in Boston in the year 1774, and Jean Stapleton revealing Martha Washington's secret recipe to prevent cherries from spoiling.

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