For the People is an American Legal drama that aired Sundays from January 31st until May 9th, 1965 on CBS.
This one season, thirteen episode drama had William Shatner playing an assistant district attorney in New York City. The show’s cancellation left Shatner free to accept the role of Captain James T. Kirk on Star Trek.
Climax!, later known as Climax Mystery Theater is an American anthology series that aired on CBS from 1954 to 1958.
The series was hosted by William Lundigan and later co-hosted by Mary Costa. It was one of the few CBS programs of that era to be broadcast in color (using the massive TK-40A color cameras pioneered and manufactured by RCA, and used primarily by CBS’ arch-rival network, NBC). Many of the episodes were performed and broadcast live, and although the series was transmitted in color, only black-and-white kinescope copies of some episodes survive to the present day.
In 1954, an episode of Climax! featured Ian Fleming’s secret agent James Bond in a television adaptation of Casino Royale. It starred Barry Nelson as American secret agent “Jimmy Bond” and Peter Lorre as the villain Le Chiffre. This was the first screen adaptation of a James Bond novel, made before Eon Productions acquired the Bond film rights.
Shower of Stars (also known as Chrysler Shower of Stars) is an American variety television series broadcast live in the United States from 1954 to 1958 by CBS. The series was broadcast in color which was a departure from the usual programming broadcast by CBS.
Shower of Stars is typically composed of musical comedy revues with an occasional straight play. It was shown on approximately a monthly basis during its run (1954-1958), and was designed to contrast with the heavy dramatic content of the program with which it shared its time slot, Climax! Both programs were sponsored by Chrysler Corporation, and both were hosted by William Lundigan.
Famous entertainers of the era who appeared multiple times on Shower of Stars included Jack Benny, Bob Crosby, Betty Grable, Van Johnson, Shirley MacLaine, Fredric March, Frankie Laine, Ethel Merman, Basil Rathbone, Red Skelton, Mario Lanza and Ed Wynn. March and Rathbone were starred as Ebenezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley, respectively, in a 1954 musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, with songs by Bernard Herrmann and Maxwell Anderson. This was the first musical version of the story to be televised, and the first in color. Rathbone would go on to play Scrooge himself, in another TV musical adaptation of the story, the 1956 version of The Stingiest Man in Town. The most frequently-appearing artist, however, was Jack Benny, who appeared in one role or another in a majority of the program’s broadcasts.
The Ugliest Girl in Town is a short-lived American sitcom produced by Screen Gems for ABC. It ran from September 26th, 1968 to January 30th, 1969.
Timothy Blair is a Hollywood talent agent. He falls in love with Julie Renfield, a British actress who is visiting the United States to do a movie. After that movie is finished, she returns to England. To assist his brother Gene complete a photography assignment, Timothy dresses as a hippie and poses for a photo shoot. The photos are sent to a modeling agent in England who assumes that they are of a woman. He offers “her” a job.
Knowing that this would be the only chance to go to Great Britain and be with Julie, Tim accepts and dubs himself “Timmie”. Tim has two weeks of vacation to spend as much time with Julie as he can, but when as he is about to leave with his brother, Gene loses £11,000 gambling. Unless he pays him back, Tim has to continue being Timmie for a while longer.
The Johnny Cash Show was an American television music variety show hosted by Johnny Cash. The Screen Gems 58-episode series ran from June 7th, 1969 to March 31st, 1971 on ABC; it was taped at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee. The show reached No. 17 in the Nielsen ratings in 1970.
Cash opened each show, and its regulars included members of his touring troupe, June Carter Cash (his wife) and the Carter Family, The Statler Brothers, Carl Perkins, and The Tennessee Three, with Australian-born musical director-arranger-conductor Bill Walker. The Statler Brothers performed brief comic interludes.
It featured many folk-country musicians, such as Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury, Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Merle Haggard, James Taylor and Tammy Wynette. It also featured other musicians such as jazz great Louis Armstrong, who died eight months after appearing on the show.
The show started with an hour-long tryout offered by ABC as “a summer replacement for their Saturday night variety extravaganza The Hollywood Palace. While Cash had a large degree of freedom, he had to accept some compromises by hosting showbiz royalty like Bob Hope, George Gobel, Kirk Douglas, Burl Ives, Peggy Lee and Lorne Greene. They gave the show gravitas that satisfied both advertisers and the network”.
The show was recorded at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, then home of the Grand Ole Opry. The show was conceived by Bill Carruthers, who also served as executive producer and director for the first season. Stan Jacobson was also a producer on the show. Myles Harmon was the program executive for ABC Television. The first show featured Joni Mitchell, Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw, Fannie Flagg as a comic, and Bob Dylan.
The show included a “Country Gold” segment which featured legends rarely or never seen on network TV such as Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. Author Rich Kienzle suggests that as well as providing entertainment, the show operated as a “Country Music 101”.
Cash persisted in the face of ABC “network anxieties” on several occasions. He refused to cut the word “stoned” from Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down”, he stood by his Christian faith “despite network anxieties”, and persisted in bringing on Pete Seeger whose anti-Vietnam War song on another network had “caused a firestorm”. He premiered his “Man in Black” song on an episode taped at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University campus.
The show was canceled in 1971 as part of ABC’s involvement in the so-called “rural purge” in which all three major broadcast networks eliminated rural and older skewing programs. The purge also affected ABC’s The Lawrence Welk Show.
The Tycoon is a 32-episode American situation comedy television series broadcast by ABC. It starred Walter Brennan as the fictitious businessman Walter Andrews, similar to his birth name of Walter Andrew Brennan. The series aired with new episodes at 9 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday from September 15th, 1964, until April 27th, 1965. It continued in […]
The Bing Crosby Show is a 28-episode situation comedy television program starring crooner, film star, iconic phenomenon, and businessman Bing Crosby and actress Beverly Garland as a middle-aged couple, Bing and Ellie Collins, rearing two teenaged daughters during the early 1960s. In this format, Crosby portrayed a former entertainer turned architectural designer with a penchant […]
Wendy and Me is an American sitcom that aired on ABC during the 1964–1965 television season, primarily sponsored by Consolidated Cigar’s “El Producto.” Principally starring George Burns and Connie Stevens, the series was Burns’ first major work following the death of his wife and professional partner, Gracie Allen, who had died of a heart attack […]
No Time for Sergeants came to the small screen in the fall of 1964. It starred Sammy Jackson who had had one line in the film version. When Jackson read that Warner Brothers was going to produce a television sitcom version of No Time for Sergeants for ABC he wrote directly to Jack Warner saying […]
Father Knows Best was an American radio and television comedy series which portrayed a middle class family life in the Midwest. It was created by writer Ed James in the 1940s, and ran on radio from 1949 to 1954 and on television from 1954 to 1960. The May 27th, 1954 episode of The Ford Television Theatre show was called “Keep It in the […]
Truth or Consequences is an American television game show originally hosted on NBC radio by Ralph Edwards (1940–1957) and later on television by Edwards (1950–1954), Jack Bailey (1954–1955), and Bob Barker (1956–1975). The television show ran on CBS, NBC and also in syndication. The premise of the show was to mix the original quiz element of game shows with wacky stunts.
On the show, contestants received roughly two seconds to answer a trivia question correctly (usually an off-the-wall question that no one would be able to answer correctly, or a bad joke) before “Beulah the Buzzer” sounded (in the rare occasion that the contestant answered the question correctly before Beulah was heard, the question inevitably had two or even three parts). If the contestant could not complete the “Truth” portion, there would be “Consequences,” usually a zany and embarrassing stunt. From the start, most contestants preferred to answer the question wrong in order to perform the stunt. Said Edwards, “Most of the American people are darned good sports.”
In many broadcasts, the stunts on Truth or Consequences included a popular, but emotional, heart-rending surprise for a contestant, that being the reunion with a long-lost relative or with an enlisted son or daughter returning from military duty overseas, particularly Vietnam. Sometimes, if that military person was based in California, his or her spouse or parents were flown in for that reunion.
During Barker’s run as host, a side game, “Barker’s Box”, was played at the end of the show. Barker’s Box was a box with four drawers, and if a contestant picked all three drawers with money in it, they won a bonus prize; however, if a contestant chose a pop-up “surprise” before choosing all three cash drawers, the game ended and the contestant left with the cash won at that point. Barker also ended each episode with the phrase, “Hoping all your consequences are happy ones.”
Truth or Consequences was the first game show to air on broadcast television, airing as a one-time experiment on the first day of New York station WNBT’s commercial program schedule on July 1st, 1941. Truth or Consequences did not appear on TV again until 1950, when the medium had caught on commercially. On January 22nd, 1957, the show, which was produced in Hollywood, became the first program to be broadcast in all time zones from a prerecorded videotape; this technology, which had only been introduced the previous year, had previously been used only for time-delayed broadcasts to the West Coast. In 1966, Truth or Consequences became the first successful daily game show in first-run syndication (as opposed to reruns) to not air on a network, having ended its NBC run one year earlier. This version continued through 1974.
The town of Hot Springs, New Mexico, was renamed Truth or Consequences after the game show in 1950, when Ralph Edwards announced that he would host the program from the first town so renamed. Edwards himself continued to make appearances at the town’s annual fiesta every May until his death.