This Day in TV History (‘Columbo,’ Top TV Detective, Premieres)

Sept. 15, 1971—What many of its fans regard as the greatest detective series in television history, Columbo, premiered as part of “The NBC Tuesday Mystery Movie,” along with McCloud and McMillan and Wife.

I began watching Columbo in the sixth grade and it quickly became what later programmers would call “much-watch TV.” Like many other viewers, I chuckled at the personal touches that Peter Falk used to make the rumpled detective his own: the beat-up 1959 Peugeot 403 convertible, the basset hound, the foul-smelling cigars, and, of course, that raincoat.

But two other aspects of the show also endeared it to me: First, the weighing of evidence—not just hunting for clues, but also deliberating whether they were significant or even in keeping with the context of the scene. It helped cement a research orientation that eventually led me to become, at different times, a librarian, writer and editor.

Second, the murders that Columbo investigated were seldom committed by career criminals or gang members, but instead by the crème de la crème of society—a tycoon, a football team owner, an author, a movie star, a general or a politician, to name a few. It was a seemingly unending trail of villains with not just all the power and privilege someone could have, but enough craftiness to kill a human being and dispose of the evidence or manufacture a red herring.

Yet in each episode, the audience got to root for the underdog—an unglamorous detective who used not a gun or even his fists, but a carefully concealed intelligence that made the elite submit to the same forces of justice that everyone else had to do.

McCloud and McMillan and Wife, the other two occupants of the 8:30-10 PM Tuesday timeslot, have not lingered in the popular imagination to the same extent and are not seen as much today, even on vintage TV channels like MeTV and Cozi.

But Columbo endures—partly because of the genius of its format (a cat-and-mouse game between killer and detective) and partly because of the actor who brought the character to gloriously idiosyncratic life.

During this pandemic, I have watched and rewatched many of its 69 episodes, whether on cable or DVD. Others share my addiction, including the creators of the Websites “The Columbophile,” “The Columbo Podcast,” and the modestly titled “The Ultimate Columbo Site.”

I admit that, to some extent, using the September 1971 date as the starting point for the series is a bit arbitrary. Falk first appeared in the role in the 1968 TV movie "Prescription: Murder," then reprised it, in the spring of 1971, in the pilot for the series, “Ransom for a Dead Man.”

But the show began in earnest when NBC placed it as part of a rotating “wheel” with McCloud, starring Dennis Weaver as a fish-out-of-water New Mexico marshal brought to the streets of New York, and McMillan and Wife, with Rock Hudson and Susan St. James attempting to recreate the witty repartee of the “Thin Man” movie series of the Thirties and Forties.

Being grouped with the other two series satisfied one of the concerns of Falk, who wanted to keep his hand in movies and use the extra time between episodes working on scripts. (He had already been in a weekly meat-grinder of a series in The Trials of O'Brien, which lasted only 22 episodes in the 1965-66 season before being done in by The Man From U.N.C.L.E.) Like his character, he was dogged and obsessed with details, sometimes testing the patience of series creators Richard Levinson and William Link even as he helped improve the quality of individual episodes.

Longtime writing partners who had created the long-running private-eye series Mannix, Levinson and Link were inspired to produce a far more cerebral series by their youthful reading of Fyodor Dostoyefsky’s Crime and Punishment (featuring the detective Porfiry Petrovich), G.K. Chesterton’s “Father Brown” stories, and the “Ellery Queen” short stories and novels. Columbo would blend the quirky investigator of the first two sources and the relentlessly logical reasoner in the Queen stories.

Levinson and Link first outlined the character in 1960 in the live-to-air murder mystery “Enough Rope,” part of the Chevy Mystery Show drama anthology. The lieutenant, as in his later incarnation, went by no first name and pursued his suspect with initially innocent but increasingly relentless questions. But Bert Freed was a burly actor quite different physically from the shorter Falk.

Next, the writing duo reworked their script into a play for Thomas Mitchell (perhaps most famous for playing Scarlett O’Hara’s Irish father in Gone With the Wind). But the Oscar-winning character actor died of cancer before the drama could be taken to Broadway.

A few years later, Lee J. Cobb and Bing Crosby were suggested for the role. But Cobb’s schedule was too full, and Crosby was reluctant to come out of semi-retirement to accept the rigors of a series.

Highly regarded as a dramatic actor by Levinson and Link, Crosby would have made the character much like himself: smooth, laid-back, pipe-smoking. But Falk, in addition to the personal accoutrements I mentioned earlier, made the lieutenant a figure eminently ripe for underestimation by unwary criminals: so gravelly voiced, stooped, squinting (making use of the actor's glass eye), and shambling that his character was once mistaken for a homeless man in a soup kitchen.

You can still see Falk finding his way in his first appearance in the role, in Prescription: Murder. Like Leonard Nimoy in the pilot for Star Trek, he accentuates the intense, relentless aspects of his character initially. The passage of three years led him to emphasize Columbo's more offbeat traits in Ransom for a Dead Man. 

Nevertheless, this surface “half-assed Sherlock Holmes” (as Falk called him) didn’t miss a trick, finding an unusual bit of evidence as annoying as a bit between the teeth.

In one of the show’s great comic touches, these murderers fumed when Columbo would wheel around, just before departing, and say, “Just one more thing…” (A phrase that became the title of Falk’s autobiography.) No wonder: He was so implacable that Falk likened being targeted by Columbo to “being nibbled to death by a duck.”

But the actors playing the villains were even more likely to be thrown off guard by Falk’s ad-libbed tricks: a request for a pencil, fumbling for something in his pockets, going off on trivia, talking about his wife or another relative, or, on one memorable occasion, asking a suspect, “How much did you pay for those shoes?”

I have a confession to make here. Maybe this goes back to my Sixties childhood, when I delighted in each week’s “guest villain” on Batman, but I loved Columbo’s adversaries just as much as the detective himself. I practically hissed as these chic, wealthy, famous people carried out their killings in the most cold-blooded, cocky fashion possible, only to be brought to heel by their arrogance and by the investigator who wouldn’t let go of his quarry.

I’m sure every fan has his set of favorite baddies, but most, I think, would return to the actors who came back most often: Robert Culp, Patrick McGoohan, and my favorite, Jack Cassidy. (Yes, baby boomers: the father of David and Shaun.) These repeat offenders brought different characteristics to the roles (Culp, barely controlled resentment; McGoohan, elegant malice; and Cassidy, preening egotism), but all made memorable impressions.

Three other reasons why I liked the series:

*It gave memorable roles to middle-aged and elderly actresses. At a time when Hollywood often didn’t know what to do with actresses who were beyond the ingenue stage, Columbo provided them with multi-dimensional, if sometimes brief, roles, not necessarily confined to villains. These women included Lee Grant, Anne Baxter, Ida Lupino, Myrna Loy, Kim Hunter, Gena Rowlands, Martha Scott, Vera Miles, Ruth Gordon, Faye Dunaway, and Janet Leigh.

*It boosted the careers of rising talents, in front of or behind the camera. Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue) first won wide attention with a Columbo teleplay that Falk publicly praised when the actor picked up the first of his four Emmys for the role, while Steven Spielberg and Jonathan Demme cut their teeth as directors with some of the series’ most striking episodes. Appearing on the show early in their careers were Blythe Danner, Jeff Goldblum, Martin Sheen, Kim Cattrall, Katey Sagal, and Jamie Lee Curtis.

*It blended realistic characterization and the clues of great detective stories into great scripts. The series ranks #57 on a list of “The 101 Best-Written TV Series” compiled by the Writers Guild of America West.

Just one more thing (where did I hear that before?) on this last point: The best scripts of the series were most likely to have been written in the original run of the series, from 1971 to 1978. After a decade-long hiatus, Falk revived the role in 1989, beginning a string of occasional two-hour TV movies that continued until 2003.

But be warned: the longer the series continued, the lower its quality sank. In no small part, this was because the scripts did not match the quality of the original series. (Another sign of a below-average episode: if one of the guest stars included Falk's second wife, Shera Danese.) 

By this time, Levinson had died while Link was busy with another long-running detective series, Murder She Wrote. As executive producer of the new movies, Falk was involved even more intimately with their creation than he was before. He might have taken on more than he could handle. 

One sign of it: two episodes that departed from the cat-and-mouse format of the show—meaning that any other detective could have been inserted into the space reserved for “Columbo” with no one in the audience being the wiser. Falk loved playing the character so much that he simply didn’t know when to stop.

But at its best, Columbo is virtually unrivaled among detective series. Falk enjoyed acclaim on stage and the big screen, but television gave him his greatest vehicle.

This Day in TV History (‘SNL’ Airs 1st Episode in 5 Years Produced by Lorne Michaels)

Nov. 9, 1985—Five years after Lorne Michaels (pictured) stepped away from his creation, Saturday Night Live aired its first episode back under his guiding hand, allowing the late-night staple to once again take its place among the greatest TV showcases for comic talent next to Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and The Tonight Show under Johnny Carson.

Michaels’ resumption of his duties as executive producer came after the show, under its two previous heads, had been in danger of losing its reputation for irreverent skewing of American culture and politics by improv-trained comic actors, standup comics and jaundiced writers.

Expectations were high, then, on his return—probably too high to be met immediately, even with the comparative luxury of a season premiere more than a month later than in previous seasons. 

Reviews for this episode (guest-hosted by Madonna, with musical guests Simple Minds) were rocky, with the opening skit (NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff stating that urine drug tests would be given to the new cast members) running into particular flak. In fact, the entire 11^th season is regarded by many fans as among the worst in the show’s history.

But Michaels’ reputation was high enough that he was able to buy time, and a year later he had figured out how to right the ship.

Like a new company head coming in from outside, Michaels took the reins back at SNL after being assured he would have a free hand in choosing his team. And that meant in its entirety. Not a single cast member was retained from the prior season.

And so, show fans bid goodbye to Jim Belushi, Billy Crystal, Mary Gross, Christopher Guest, Rich Hall, Gary Kroeger, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Harry Shearer, Martin Short, and Pamela Stephenson. 

They said hello to Joan Cusack, Robert Downey Jr., Nora Dunn, Anthony Michael Hall, Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller, Randy Quaid, Terry Sweeney, and Danitra Vance.

The subsequent fame of Cusack and Downey shed a retrospective glow to the 11^th season that wasn’t there at the time. The new crew did not mesh particularly well right away.

Rather than cast young relative unknowns who nevertheless had worked together previously, as with the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players, Michaels preferred several members who had already made a name for themselves onscreen, such as Randy Quaid and Anthony Michael Hall. This particular change in his methods was not successful across the board.

It was a close call, but NBC was willing to give Michaels another chance, and the executive producer felt he was not at a point where he could walk away from it. Severe difficulties had resulted back in 1980 when failure to come to terms on Michaels’ contract negotiations (along with burnout) led him led to walk away from the weekend institution.

Michaels’ follow-up venture, the prime-time comedy series The New Show, failed a year and a half after his departure. Success in reviving SNL would also revive his reputation.

NBC had had it even tougher: Jean Doumanian, the show’s head for the sixth season, was axed after only 10 months on the job (in a December 2016 Hollywood Reporter interview, she cited the handicaps she was under—the need to replace an entire cast and crew that left with Michaels, along with a lower budget than her predecessor enjoyed—while detractors pointed to the nickname “Ayatollah Doumanian” as evidence that she was not cut out for the role).

Her replacement, Dick Ebersol, retained only Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo from her cast. Though some of the new cast members succeeded, it really was Murphy’s brilliance that almost single-handedly saved the show over the next four seasons. 

By 1985, tired of the brutal schedule and of retooling the show yet again (with yet another round of recasting, along with switching to mostly prerecorded segments), Ebersol and NBC called it a day.

As mentioned earlier, Michael’s initial preference in 1985 for a more recognizable cast did not represent an advance on the Ebersol regime. And, as New York Magazine’s Brian Boone noted in 2013, the rest of that season featured so many creative misfires (e.g., Francis Ford Coppola as guest host)  that only an 11^th-hour plea by Michaels persuaded Tartikoff not to cancel the show for good.

But other changes that season, over the course of time, produced an upturn in the show’s favor:

* Lovitz and Dunn created several of the show’s more enduring characters, including Tommy Flanagan the Pathological Liar and film critic Ashley Ashley;

* Miller re-established “Weekend Update” as a focal point for the show’s political satire;

* Al Franken returned as a writer and featured player;

* Videotaped dress rehearsals furnished Michaels with multiple options: for fixing technical issues, experimenting with different line readings, or using unaired segments when a particular sketch was judged not worthy of being rerun.

Moreover, with a complete overhaul that actually worked this time—including new cast members Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, and Kevin Nealon—Michaels succeeded in bringing the show out of its Dark Ages and into its Renaissance. 

Now in its 46^th season, SNL is the longest-running weekly late-night show in the history of television, and Michaels himself has become an institution, given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, in 2016 by Barack Obama.

This Day in TV History (William S. Paley, Broadcast Titan and Philanthropist, Dies)

Oct. 26, 1990— Not merely in declining health but something worse for him—growing irrelevancy—longtime CBS chair, philanthropist and socialite William S. Paley died at age 89 of kidney failure in New York City.

For nearly six decades, this son of a Jewish cigar-maker was the broadcasting equivalent of the 19^th-century robber barons: leveraging an initially small operation into a multi-unit empire, charming when he could get his way easily and ruthless when he couldn’t, then late in life lavishing cultural institutions with sizable donations that burnished his reputation (in his case, money given to the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Broadcasting, renamed the Paley Center for Media in his honor).  

With an assist from his father, Paley assumed control of CBS in 1928. Contrary to the myth he created, he did not initially see the value of the financially ailing radio stations he was buying, but had to be persuaded to make the transaction. Two decades later, the same pattern of coming around reluctantly to a new medium repeated itself when he had to be convinced that TV would not threaten his radio interests but complement them.

In terms of vision, Paley was no match for RCA/NBC archrival David Sarnoff, who as early as 1916 had predicted in a memo that music, news, sports, and even lectures would be someday be broadcast through "radio music boxes." But NBC’s “General” inadequately defended his network against Paley’s 1950 “talent raids” that brought Jack Benny, Amos 'n' Andy, Edgar Bergen, Red Skelton, and Burns and Allen over to CBS.

Paley built his empire through charisma yet maintained it through caprice. He responded to the passionate advocacy of talented figures but could also leave them so guessing about his intentions that he alienated them. One example was newsman Edward R. Murrow, who became a CBS star with his reports from London early in WWII but left the network over its wavering commitment to the news.

Murrow’s was just case of someone who enjoyed the media mogul’s warm companionship only to see him turn cold. Another such figure was In Cold Blood writer Truman Capote, who would not only enjoy holidays abroad with Paley and his second wife, the glamorous socialite Barbara or “Babe,” but once even had them once transport his beloved bulldog to Europe on their private jet, according to an interview with Kansas FBI agent included in George Plimpton’s 1997 oral biography, Truman Capote.

That all changed in 1975, when the author retailed scandalous gossip about Paley in a notorious Esquire preview of his projected novel Answered Prayers. The CBS head’s claim that he had fallen asleep while reading the article was almost surely false, but it deprived Capote of the attention he craved—and then he followed it up by never having anything to do with the writer again.

Before Capote fell out with his friend, he colorfully put his finger on the acquisitive instinct that dominated Paley from youth to old age: “He looks like a man who has just swallowed an entire human being.” An avid modernist art aficionado, Paley collected female conquests as much as he did modernist paintings. He could be generous, even gallant (financially supporting an old love, actress Louise Brooks, when she fell on hard times), but also cold enough to drive another to suicide.

It was Capote’s revelation of another liaison by Paley (thinly fictionalized as “Sidney Dillon,” a “conglomateur, adviser to Presidents”) in a hotel room that precipitated the end of their friendship and darkened the last days of Babe Paley, who was dying of cancer at that point.

Like an aging monarch, Paley was unwilling to relinquish his power and perquisites, successively forcing out a pair of men most felt were being groomed to take the helm from him: Frank Stanton, CBS president for 27 years, then anointed successor Thomas Wyman. But the September 1986 coup against Wyman proved disastrous, as Paley’s ally, Laurence Tisch, subsequently embarked on cost-cutting measures that undercut the “Tiffany Network” aura of class it had taken the chairman years to cultivate.

By the end of his life, this once-vital corporate titan owned less than nine percent of stock in the company he had built, so he could not influence events as he once did. By then, too, Sally Bedell Smith’s biography In All His Glory had questioned his pretension to business visions while exposing his aloofness and cunning.

But, if he wasn’t what he wanted the world to think he was, Paley had managed for years to sustain a media empire that, unlike the one overseen by Rupert Murdoch, did not debase Americans’ cultural tastes or undermine their belief in verifiable fact.

This Day in TV History (‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ Premieres)

Oct. 2, 1955—When Alfred Hitchcock launched his half-hour anthology series on CBS, he found a new platform for his work in the growing medium of television and reached a level of recognition other directors of similar duration and distinction had never known.

As Peter Ackroyd observes in Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life, the English director was less personally involved in the show named for him than many viewers suspected. He did not write any of his droll intros or close-outs, for instance, and left crucial script and casting decisions to his long-time associates, executive producer Joan Harrison and associate producer Norman Lloyd. Moreover, on a regular basis, he only entered into the production process as he watched rough cuts of episodes, when his team knew how to follow up on his brief, sometimes cryptic comments (e.g., a camera-angle suggestion, or a “Well, thank you” that signified dissatisfaction).

None of this is meant to suggest, however, that his restricted role in Alfred Hitchcock Presents had no bearing on the focus of his attention: his films.

His penchant for self-promotion, already evident in the cameos that fans had come to expect from the “Master of Suspense,” now gave him additional money and clout in making movies as he wished. He could assess the work of actors he might use later for the big screen. And the 17 episodes he directed out of the series’ more than 300 enabled him to experiment cheaply and quickly with techniques and themes he would use more intensively for his larger canvasses.

In a sense, the visual that opened each show—the bald, rotund Hitchcock stepping sideways to the tune of Charles Gounod’s "Funeral March for a Marionette," until his figure formed a silhouette—could serve as a metaphor for how he shaped the series. (Unlike his work on much of the rest of the show, he worked on this sequence himself, harking back to his early days in the British film industry, when he illustrated title cards for silent movies.) In the case of the show, Hitchcock designed the outline. It was up to his collaborators to figure out how to give substance to his formidable shadow.

Several actors featured in the series would show up later in his films, including Barbara Bel-Geddes (Vertigo), John Forsythe (The Trouble With Harry, Topaz), Vera Miles (The Wrong Man, Psycho), Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern (both in Family Plot).

But, among the episodes in which he took the helm himself as director, Hitchcock delighted in the low-cost, low-risk environment of TV to try something different. In “Breakdown,” for example, he shot from the viewpoint of a callous businessman, William Callow. After Callow is paralyzed, then stripped of his clothes and left for dead following a terrible car accident, Hitchcock focuses on blank, horror-stricken eyes, much as he would with Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane sliding down in the shower in Psycho. (The tears coming down his face alert the coroner in the morgue that the body in front of him is, in fact, alive, so Callow is saved, ironically, by a show of emotion he scorned previously.)

But shooting immobility posed the danger of looking static. So, as Jack Seabrook pointed out in a post on the blog “barebonesez”, Hitchcock and editor Edward Williams used a “good variety of angles and distances that keep the shots of Callow's paralyzed form from becoming repetitive or monotonous.”

“One More Mile To Go” touches on a motif that Hitchcock would explore at greater length in Psycho and Torn Curtain: the need to clean up thoroughly after a gruesome killing. Death, he is emphasizing, is an extremely messy business. This second season episode also underscored the primacy of image in his work, as 10 minutes--one-third of its length--elapse before any character says a word.

“The Case of Mr. Pelham” is a small-scale version of the doppelganger or “double” theme that Hitchcock had employed previously in Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train (I examined the latter in this prior post), and would do so again in Psycho.

Far before the term came into common parlance, Hitchcock created a personal “brand” through the show. He drew a reported $129,000 per episode from CBS and sponsor Bristol-Myers, then, the following year, leveraged that into a deal to license his name for a new suspense publication, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (which still exists today).

That cushioned him against the inevitable flops that moviemakers sometimes experience (in his case, The Wrong Man and, at least on its original release, Vertigo). Better yet, it enabled him to self-finance Psycho when its gory subject matter made Paramount Pictures balk. (He even used the sets, camera and crew from the series.)

There really can be too much of a good thing, and so it proved with Alfred Hitchcock Presents. After six seasons, CBS decided to give the show an additional half-hour. Though the show survived another three seasons, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour did not benefit from the new length, losing much of its tightness and suspense. 

But in its most interesting early episodes, it offered useful employment to writers such as Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Henry Slesar, Ed McBain, and John D. MacDonald; opened space for a new, subversive tone on TV (Hitchcock’s close-outs were meant, in part, to circumvent censors who objected to any suggestion that a killer could get away with a crime); and helped its host achieve new levels of popularity even as it spurred his dark art.

This Day in TV History (‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ Standard-Setting Workplace Comedy, Premieres)

Sept. 19, 1970—Premiering on CBS, The Mary Tyler Moore Show not only provided its titular star with an even longer-running series than the one that propelled her to star, The Dick Van Dyke Show, but also set new standards for adult, character-driven situation comedy.

I posted previously on the 75^th birthday on the luminous Mary Tyler Moore and how she created an immensely appealing role model for the millions of “character women” thronging the American workplace as a result of the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s. 

But one aspect of her career that deserves further exploration here is her generosity in ceding significant air time to fellow cast members—and her shrewdness in understanding that the sitcom’s success could be sustained through this attention to others, even to the point of allowing them to have many of the funniest lines in episodes.

For Mary Richards, a heartbroken runaway from a broken relationship, the workplace becomes a new form of family. By necessity, the show’s scripts needed to bring out the fun and caring of these new people in her new life in Minnesota.

Far more than The Dick Van Dyke Show, then, The Mary Tyler Moore Show would depend on its ensemble cast—wider, deeper, wringing laughter more from the nuances of character than from the laugh-a-minute pace of prior comedies.

The series was as strong on its last night on the air in 1977 as its first. For that, series creators James L. Brooks and Allan Burns required sturdy script architecture rather than interior decorating—multiple quirky but realistic characters that opened up near-endless comic possibilities, while taking the burden off the group’s first among equals, Ms. Moore. 

As I mentioned in a prior post, the two were delving more deeply into a dynamic they had touched on the year before with their ABC dramedy Room 222: a middle manager who functioned as the calm eye in a storm--in this case, a fast-paced newsroom.

Amazingly, The Mary Tyler Moore Show would manage to survive the departure of significant characters like Rhoda Morgenstern and Phyllis Lindstrom (each getting a spinoff series) while slotting in others that took up the slack—notably, daffy Georgette Franklin Baxter and “Happy Homemaker” Sue Ann Nivens.

Moore and husband Grant Tinker, the co-head of their production company, MTM Enterprises, had received a commitment for 13 episodes from CBS, giving them four months to cast the show—an unusually long time. Ultimately, they would need every bit of it.

The best explanations for the course of this casting can be found in two interviews conducted by the Archive of American Television with Allan Burns and Mary Tyler Moore.

Gavin MacLeod was the first of the supporting players to be cast. Though called in to try out for the role of gruff Lou Grant, he asked if he could take a shot at Murray Slaughter. While Brooks and Burns had envisioned Murray as a comic nemesis for Mary Richards—something like a pesky mosquito, irritating her in close proximity from the adjacent newsroom desk—MacLeod’s warm conception led them to rethink Murray as an ally for Mary. 

Brooks and Burns were similarly unexpectedly impressed by Cloris Leachman as intrusive neighbor Phyllis, and quickly cast her, too.

Then, the show entered a prolonged casting void, as Brooks, Burns, Moore and Tinker tried to achieve the right alchemy of actor and character.

Silver-haired Ted Knight was different from the tall, dark and handsome anchorman—and possible Mary love interest—Ted Baxter was expected to be. But a terrific nightclub appearance by Knight led them to rethink him. (Two L.A. newscasters, George Putnam and Jerry Dunphy, along with actor Jack Cassidy, are believed to have inspired the creation of the buffoonish Baxter.)

Ed Asner was masterful in his initial audition as Mary’s bearish but lovable boss Lou Grant. But, when he performed with Ms. Moore, the magic of that earlier effort mysteriously vanished. But, just before he left, he also to try it again. This time, according to Ms. Moore, he pulled “gold from his pocket.”

Much like Ms. Moore’s casting on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Valerie Harper came aboard at the last minute. In certain ways, it was the trickiest character to deal with. Ms. Harper recalled that reading as “the easiest, most pleasant audition process I ever went through,” but the initial studio audience reaction to her brash, bandana-wearing Rhoda Morgenstern was frosty. 

It required an astute adjustment of dialogue to turn that around. Instead of leaving the audience simply with Phyllis’ characterization of “that dumb awful woman that lives upstairs,” they included the assessment of Phyllis’ precocious daughter Bess that “Aunt Rhoda's really a lot of fun--Mom hates her,” thereby considering softening perceptions of the woman contesting Mary’s right to the apartment who will eventually become her dearest friend.

The influence of The Mary Tyler Moore Show can be seen in such later ensemble sitcoms as Cheers, 30 Rock, Friends, Murphy Brown, and The Office, as well as other critically acclaimed but now less well-remembered Eighties shows as Blair Brown’s The Days and Nights of Molly Brown and Geena Davis’ Sara. But it was difficult for any of these latter series to match the intricate craftsmanship of the original, and impossible to match its warmth.

Moore, Tinker, Burns and Brooks fashioned something miraculous: not merely brilliant writing, but actors who performed with consistent professionalism and ease with each other. For all the wit of the dialogue, the appropriate enduring impression of the final episode is of a group hug among perhaps the finest ensemble in sitcom history.  

This Day in TV History (Joan Wilson, American Force Behind ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ and ‘Mystery,’ Dies)

July 4, 1985—Joan Wilson, an executive producer responsible for turning the British-originated series Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery into American public television standbys, died of pancreatic cancer at age 56 in Boston.

In a sense, this post, written on the Fourth of July, is my equivalent of counter-programming: an acknowledgement that America, for all its claims to independence, remains enthralled to the Mother Country for its notions of good taste.

Over the years, the sniffing of certain critics has been audible over these series’ middlebrow inclinations, stately costume dramas, and what Slate’s Bryan Curtis saw as its “curatorial” cultural mission. (Indeed, the longtime default criticism of Merchant-Ivory films was that they were slightly higher-budget alternatives to Masterpiece Theatre.)

But in the ‘70s, a time when much of American commercial TV in the 1970s consisted of cops, lawyers, improbable adventurers (The Six Million Dollar Man), and jiggle queens (Charlie’s Angels), TV series that aimed for quality felt like an oasis for viewers like me.

I began watching this fare when The Six Wives of Henry VIII first aired on CBS in the summer of 1971, then rebroadcast a few months later, without commercial interruptions, on PBS as part of Masterpiece Theatre. From then on, I watched other series under the latter umbrella such as Elizabeth R, The First Churchills, The Last of the Mohicans, Pere Goriot, Cousin Bette, and adaptations of the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels of Dorothy L. Sayers.

Not all of these were successful—indeed, The First Churchills moved at a glacial pace, in hagiographic style, about a controversial figure who deserved a far more incisive treatment: Sir John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough. But at their best, they offered the opportunity to see top-flight talent: Glenda Jackson, Helen Mirren, Kate Nelligan, and Anthony Hopkins, among others.

A former actress, Ms. Wilson was not present at the creation of the series. That distinction belonged to Stanford Calderwood, President of WGBH, and Christopher Sarson, executive producer at the same PBS affiliate, who—seeing the rapturous attention given in England in 1967 to the mini-series The Forsyte Saga, thought something like this could work in the U.S. They convinced Mobil to underwrite the costs of Masterpiece Theatre.

The departure of Sarson opened the way towards Ms. Wilson overseeing the series and taking it to new levels of popularity and cultural influence through casting suggestions, and, where needed, tough-minded editing to make the fare more palatable to U.S. audiences. 

Upstairs, Downstairs might not have become positively addictive for American audiences had it not been trimmed by half of its 50-episode length, and clipping several minutes from a Roman orgy scene in I, Claudius helped PBS avoid greater condemnation from American puritans.

The consistent result was “what American middlebrows have been seeking since the advent of the medium: TV without guilt,” according to William Henry III of The New York Times.

Michael Gorra, a professor of English at Smith College, summed up much of the not-so-secret appeal of Masterpiece Theatre to many academics in an essay included in Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite TV Shows:

“Costumes accents, servants, the past, a safe past that couldn’t hurt us, at least not over here. I loved all that, and if you push on most English teachers my age, they’ll admit to having loved it, to having their own period of swooning Anglophilia in front of their parents’ TV.”

I am not a fan of the odor of Anglophilia emanating from both Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery, and I wish that PBS had used these series as springboards to long-lasting American counterparts.

But, despite such carping by me and others, the cultural influence of these British imports was not only significant but beneficial. Bookstores benefited from the spotlight given to I, Claudius and The Jewel in the Crown, and the success of mini-series featured in Masterpiece Theatre led American TV to experiment with the genre, often with great success, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Recognizing the importance of series host, Ms. Wilson cultivated friendships with English journalist Alistair Cooke for Masterpiece Theatre and actor Vincent Price for Mystery.

Ms. Wilson was also connected, in the most deeply personal way, with her programming, as her second husband was Jeremy Brett, who, before Benedict Cumberbatch, made Sherlock Holmes must-view TV on Mystery.

This Day in TV History (Murrow Assails McCarthy-Bred Fear and ‘Age of Unreason’)

March 9, 1954—In a hard-hitting takedown of unusual daring for television news at the time, CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow (pictured) spotlighted to a nationwide audience the dangers to American civil liberties posed by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the Red Scare engulfing America. 

The year before, Murrow had given over an entire episode of his show See It Now to Milo Radulovich, a 28-year-old lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve, who was discharged as a security risk because of allegedly communistic sympathies of his father and sister. 

But this time on See It Now, Murrow was going directly at the senator who, in just four years, had ridden the fear of Communism gripping the nation to a position where he had intimidated not just ordinary citizens and government bureaucrats, but even his own peers on Capitol Hill. Murrow employed no investigatory work, merely used McCarthy’s own words to demonstrate the grave damage he had done.

Murrow later acknowledged ruefully that he should have confronted McCarthy sooner. Nor was he responsible for bringing him down: that distinction belongs, in varying degrees, to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, so incensed that “Tail Gunner Joe” was going after the institution to which Ike had devoted himself the last four decades—the military—that he employed behind-the-scenes surrogates like Richard Nixon to undercut him; and then-Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who carefully marshalled the votes leading to the censure of McCarthy by his colleagues a half-year later.

But Murrow did bring the resources of the still-fledgling medium of television journalism to extremely controversial subject matter, and—for all his initial caution in finally taking on McCarthy—he never walked it back or stilled his voice thereafter, and survived the senator’s subsequent attempt to smear him on camera.

The broadcast aired despite deep concern shading into disapproval by CBS brass, including company head William S. Paley. Only two months before the broadcast, American public opinion still ran half in favor of McCarthy and only 29% against, according to a Gallup poll. Paley feared that he would lose the sponsor of See It Now, Alcoa--and, in fact, that company did not renew their contract with CBS.

Yet in the wake of that show, followed by an ineffectual rebuttal by the Senator and Murrow’s unflinching denial of McCarthy’s attempt to smear him, responses ran 15-1 in favor of Murrow, according to Jim Willis’ 100 Media Moments that Changed America.

That night, Murrow took on what had troubled his journalist colleagues: how to bring the American public face to face with a demagogue of unparalleled recklessness, cupidity and cruelty. That same dilemma has become an overriding concern of today’s journalists as well, as they try to report, news that Donald Trump would rather not hear. 

For a long time, I did not believe that the conditions were right in America for the appearance of another Joe McCarthy. But in the last few years, the conviction has hardened in me that Trump is not only McCarthy’s natural successor, but in certain ways is even worse. 

McCarthy, after all, had to content himself with the not-inconsiderable powers given to Senators to conduct hearings on matters that call for legislation. Trump, though, has the full power of the Presidency behind him. 

Moreover, alcoholism not only hastened McCarthy’s descent from influence and ensured he would not make a comeback, but sped him to an early death, at age 48, from cirrhosis of the liver. On the other hand, Trump—with older brother Fred as a warning example—has avoided substance abuse.

The greatest factor differentiating Trump from McCarthy, however, derives from Trump’s fortune. No other occupant of the Oval Office has ever combined the inherent powers of this position with the financial resources of a billionaire—commercial influence he has continued to wield even after entering the White House.

It is rich indeed that Trump has decried the Mueller investigation as a “Witch hunt” and an example of “McCarthyism” in his daily tweets, for reasons going back the oft-noted fact that his friend and attorney when he was just starting out was Roy Cohn, who in his youth had been McCarthy’s chief counsel. 

Trump hopes that the longtime understanding of “McCarthyism”—i.e., guilt by association—will work wonders with followers who see nothing wrong with hanging out with Russians. But the term  also represents charges sprayed out indiscriminately, without a shred of evidence, even contradictory at points. When proof is requested of the politician, he offers distraction rather than evidence. 

Thus, McCarthy, in the event bringing him to the world stage, saying he had “in my hands a list of 205 names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party,” kept changing the number. Thus Trump, having made a big splash with GOP voters by calling for Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate to prove he was a U.S. citizen, eventually not only admitted that Obama was, but ludicrously suggested that the falsehood had been spread by Hilary Clinton rather than himself. 

In other respects, the press in both cases found it difficult to pierce the veil of lies woven by the Senator and the President:

*Each had a strong right-wing media “amen corner.” The Hearst organization enjoyed a direct link to McCarthy through Cohn and the latter’s close young friend, David Schine; Trump enjoys the near-total support of Fox News.

*GOP colleagues on Capitol Hill started out believing they could use McCarthy and Trump for their own purposes, only to crumble spinelessly when he influenced the party faithful against anyone who spoke out against him. In 1950, "growing numbers of Republicans were convinced that McCarthyism was their ticket to political power," wrote Thomas C. Reeves in his 1982 biography, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy. They were right in that assumption, but wrong in believing that they could simply use him with no danger to themselves. After seeing McCarthy help defeat a critic, conservative Democrat Millard Tydings, Republican senators were terrified of taking him on. Similarly, even Republicans who harshly criticized Trump during the primaries, such as Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz, have fallen in line after witnessing the rank-and-file’s support of the President.

*The menace of physical assault hung in the air around journalists covering the demagogue. McCarthy’s assault on muckraker Drew Pearson was so shockingly brutal (a knee to the groin, followed by a slap) that it even met with disapproval by otherwise sympathetic conservative historian Arthur Herman; Trump merely excites crowds against journalists such as Katy Tur, or praises a congressman (Greg Gianforte, R-Mont.) for pummeling a reporter.

In dealing with McCarthy, Murrow had to depart from one of the tenets of journalism—objectivity. His “Report” would not be a “he said, they said,” point-counterpoint presentation of points of view. He was reporting in a way that left no doubt whatsoever how he felt about what he called the Senator’s “methods.” 

Contemporary journalists face a not-dissimilar problem with Trump. His relationship to the truth has been so casual that they have increasingly transitioned how they process his claims. Early in his White House, stories would say that Trump's claims were "without evidence." Now, they are increasingly calling these outright "falsehoods." But as this reporting becomes more aggressive, it leaves the media open to being called by the President "enemies of the people."

They would do well to go back to Murrow's original broadcast.  

Though most of his report used McCarthy’s words against him, the closing was in Murrow's own words. Unlike in much of today's journalism, whether from the right or left, a tone of sobriety infuses the message and raises it to a level of eloquence virtually unimaginable now. The words are as searing to read as to listen to and watch:

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. 

“This is no time for men who oppose Senator [Joseph] McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. 

“We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. 

“And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’"

This Day in TV History (Birth of Desi Arnaz, ‘I Love Lucy’ Star and Industry Innovator)

March 2, 1917— Desi Arnaz, a musician, bandleader, director, and producer who made as large an impact behind the scenes as he did in front of the camera with wife Lucille Ball on the Fifties hit sitcom I Love Lucy, was born in Santiago, Cuba.

Arnaz arrived at his mega-success at a time when Hispanics were often not accepted in mainstream American society. (In fact, when he found out, at the peak of his success, that a hotel wouldn’t admit him because of his ethnicity, he opened nearby the 42-room Desi Arnaz West Hills Hotel, complete with a restaurant featuring his own personal recipes.)

When he instructed the chief writers of I Love Lucy on how he wanted his character portrayed (no flirtation with other women, never falling for Lucy’s schemes), he ended up protecting his own dignity. But intentionally or not, he was also ubverting American prejudices about Latinos. With Lucy and Desi, it was the Latino who was the sober, responsible one in the relationship, not the Anglo. (More problematic: the wife remained subservient.)

The rise to fame and fortune of Arnaz is emblematic of the striving immigrant success story. Forced out of Cuba with his family as a teenager, he was forced at one point to clean canary cages in his adopted country. In time, he became a member of Xavier Cugat’s band, then head of his own 16-member ensemble, before co-managing Desilu Productions, a sprawling television empire with multiple shows on the air—and even a merchandising sideline.

While the public chuckled at Desi’s slow burn on the air, it couldn’t begin to appreciate that he was, as Lucy put it, “a genius with keen instincts for comedy and plot.” She continued, in her posthumously published memoir, Love, Lucy: “He has a quick, brilliant mind; he can instantly find a flaw in any story line; and he has inherent good taste and intuitive knowledge of what will and will not play."

At the height of his fortune, much of this came undone—partly through the cumulative stress of juggling so many balls in the air, partly because of the personal issues present in his marriage to Ms. Ball from the start: his philandering, heavy drinking, and gambling. After nine years, Lucy and Desi were finished as an on-screen couple--and so was their marriage.

While Ms. Ball moved on with her life, enjoying a longer-lived marriage to comedian Gary Morton and establishing a friendly relationship with her ex, some of the pain of the breakup lingered. “I married a loser before…,” she told Barbara Walters in 1977. “He was brilliant. But he had to lose…Everything he built, he had to break down. And he still claims he’s the same way.”

Neither Lucy nor Desi apart reached the artistic heights they had scaled together. She had three sitcoms, two of them quite successful, but on the air she lacked him as a foil, and off the air she could not lean on him to do the tough but necessary work of negotiating with network brass and production crews. He could be counted on to be shrewd (shooting the show on film ensured that it would have enough technical quality to rerun forever in syndication) and innovative (his adoption of simultaneous shooting from multiple cameras remains par for the course to this day for sitcoms).

Desi’s last show, The Mothers-in-Law—one I recall watching as a child in the late Sixties—featured two top-notch comic actresses, Eve Arden and Kay Ballard, who exuded a Lucy-and-Ethel vibe, carried over by the sitcom’s two chief writers, who had served in the same role on I Love Lucy. As executive producer and director of 23 episodes, Arnaz kept a strong hand on production. But the show only lasted two seasons.

A heavy smoker, Arnaz died of lung cancer at age 69. For a full immersion in the work of this TV pioneer--along with his peerless wife, co-star and business partner--you owe it to yourself to take a trip up to Jamestown, N.Y. to see the Lucy Desi Museum and Center for Comedy.