TV & Radio: The New Shows

The networks were so busy this week preening themselves for their big fall showings that they all but forgot about the dreary ruins of summer. From a distance, the 1957-58 schedule promised TV’s most Special Spectacular season.

ABC, with some of the top crooners in show business under contract, also plans to tame the wild frontier with some likely-looking cowpokes from the stables of Warner Bros. Biggest and most expensive property is tantrum-prone Frank Sinatra, who will headline two live hour-long spectaculars, 13 half-hour musicals on film and 23 filmed dramatic shows. Frankie’s three-year contract will bring him about $4,500,000. Soprano Patrice Munsel will become the first star on the Metropolitan Opera roster to have her own TV series, and both bouncy Guy Mitchell and bland Pat Boone will head up their own variety shows. Warner is busy grinding out reels for a new “adult” horse opera called Sugar-foot to alternate with Cheyenne, and another called Maverick (with new Cowboy James Garner) to oppose the Allen-Sullivan powerhouse Sunday nights. Reliable old Character Actor Walter Brennan stars in a folksy situation comedy called The Real McCoys, and OSS will chronicle the World War II cloak-and-dagger exploits of General “Wild Bill” Donovan’s men. ABC will offer top pro golfers—Gary Middlecoff, Sam Snead, et al.—up to $52,000 to tee off on its new All-Star Golf series, TV’s first stroke-by-stroke view of the links. Shakespeare Scholar Frank Baxter will bring his relentless cheer to a new cycle of Telephone Time playlets, and Voice of Firestone will enter its 30th year on the air. Most of the hardy favorites will stay on: Mickey Mouse Club, Wyatt Earp, Ozzie & Harriet, Lawrence Welk, Mike Wallace, Disneyland. To help pull out all these new stops, fledgling ABC has sunk $30 million into a new Hollywood TV center. By the beginning of 1958 the chain will have added ten new affiliates, thus strongly affecting the season’s rating picture.

CBS has amassed the biggest schedule of one-shot shows in its history: 25 specials for the nighttime slate, at least 48 news and documentary specials for Sunday afternoons. The CBS schedule is so tight that the four Frank Capra-produced Bell Telephone science shows had to move over to NBC. Splashiest of all will probably be The Du Pont Show of the Month, offering ten 90-minute spectaculars: Paul Gregory’s Crescendo, a mishmash of American music with Ethel Merman, Rex Harrison, Louis Armstrong, Carol Channing and Peggy Lee; Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper; a musical edition of Junior Miss; and a Cole PorterS. J. Perelman musicollaboration on Alladin. To plug the Ford Motor Co.’s new Edsel, Crooners Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra will team up for the first time on TV. And Producer John Houseman’s new Omnibus-type show, The Seven Lively Arts, will kick off in November with Perelman’s treatment of The Changing Ways of Love over the past 30 years. Arts will also tackle: Ernest Hemingway, Evangelism, the Ray Bradbury stories and The Nutcracker Suite. Critic John Crosby, currently on leave from his TV syndicated column to polish up on his broadcast manners, will host. The Twentieth Century has made one of TV’s most extensive film searches to document great events and personalities: Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur, the German V-2 rocket, the Nürnberg trials, the love story of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Don Whitehead’s version of the FBI story. Globetrotter Lowell Thomas brings seven color adventure films back from New Guinea, Nepal, the Arctic, South Seas and Yucatan: and Conquest will showcase “breakthroughs” in science. After six years on TV, Lucy and Desi are taking refuge in five hour-long musical comedies, and Studio One begins its ninth year with a report on Orson Welles’s 1938 Martian “invasion,” with Ed Murrow narrating. Murrow’s See It Now will include reports on Marian Anderson’s upcoming tour of the Orient, the statehood problem of Alaska and Hawaii, and the rebirth of German industry. Songbird Patti Page will be involved in “a new TV concept” called The Big Record, a guest-laden paean to the recording industry. CBS will ride the range with Have Gun, Will Travel, bring over England’s top-seeded commercial show, Assignment Foreign Legion, with Merle Oberon, and cast Eve Arden in a series based on Emily Kimbrough’s autobiography, It Gives Me Great Pleasure. TV’s most ambitious drama mill, Playhouse 90, reopens this month with Jack Palance and Fashion Model Suzy Parker in Barnaby Conrad’s Death of Manolete, followed by Rod Serling’s study of the Hungarian revolt, The Dark Side of the Earth, with Van Heflin, and Marcel Pagnol’s Topaze, with Ernie Kovacs.

NBC will unleash cascades of color and a record-breaking 100 “specials” (the new regime’s replacement for Pat Weaver’s word “spectacular”), an increase of 15% over last year. The special shows, at least 26 of which will be in color, account for about 117 hours of programing and a whopping $40 million in gross billings. John (Pajama Game) Raitt will join Mary Martin in Annie Get Your Gun; Van Johnson is set to play The Pied Piper of Hamelin; and Mickey Rooney brings his cultivated ham to Pinocchio. Maurice Evans will produce and star in Twelfth Night and Dial M for Murder for Hallmark Hall of Fame. Ex-Cinemoppet Shirley Temple acts as hostess and sometimes star of a new fairy-tale series, and NBC Opera Company will do Rigoletto, Die Meistersinger and Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites. Ed Wynn will get the first star-studded salute from Texaco Command Appearance, an hour-long series spotlighting big-time performers. Henry Saloman’s Project 20 will do The Innocent Years (1900-14) and Back in the Thirties; James Michener will produce a one-shot on Southeast Asia, and a new series called Wisdom will present filmed portraits of Dr. Vannevar Bush, Jacques Maritain, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso and David Ben-Gurion. Wide Wide World returns Sundays to alternate with Omnibus, which promises to bring back Joseph Welch, Leonard Bernstein, and “some bright new faces.” Crooner Eddie Fisher will team up with George Gobel in a new variety series, Giselle MacKenzie gets her own show, Jill Corey takes the spotlight on Your Hit Parade. In addition to his Tegular CBS chores, Alfred Hitchcock will produce and direct ten films for NBC’s Suspicion; Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis return with six specials each; and Dean Martin plans to alternate with Polly Bergen. General Motors celebrates its 50th anniversary with Jubilee of American Music, and Standard Oil will hire Cyril Ritchard, Jimmy Durante, June Allyson, Bert Lahr, Jane Powell, Kay Thompson, Marge and Gower Champion for its 75th birthday party. NBC will also spotlight the National Tennis singles, the World Series (in color), the Rose Bowl game, and Queen Elizabeth’s U.S. visit. Such old perennials as Perry, Dinah, Groucho and Tennessee Ernie will also return to duty—refreshed, relaxed and pickin’ peas.