Swing (Feb-Dec 1952)

THE CRBAM OF CROSBY 73 Along with the glut of panel shows, there were far too many private eyes, suspense or horror series and whodunits. If they didn't have Ilka Chase or a private eye, the new shows were — like "Amos "n' Andy" and "Break the Bank" — simply picture versions of successful radio shows. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with any of the formulas except there arc too many of them and too few shows which broke new ground, which challenged any of the old precepts. Daytime television, last year a whisper, became thunderous. The Kate Smith show, a sort of grab bag operation, spent as much as $12,000 on sets and costumes alone. ABC-TV blew $37,000 a week on the Don Ameche-Frances Langford show. The emergence of these expensive daytime shows is significant in light of what happened in radio. It wasn't the muchpublicized evening shows — the Jack Bennys and so on — which made network radio rich; it was afternoon radio which poured an unending stream of gold into the NBC and CBS vaults. This year we may expect network television to move boldly into the morning field, starting with Dave Garroway's early show "Today." What shape day-time TV will finally take is hard to say. There are now half a dozen television soap operas, but it's too early to predict whether soap opera will preempt the field as it did in radio. In radio, soap opera's great virtue was not its popularity — actually, soap opera never grabbed even half the available audience — but its cheapness. And televised soap opera is not cheap. Network television became big business, very big business, indeed, this year, but its economic structure was still in a ferment. NBC-TV outstripped NBC radio in gross income and proudly proclaimed itself the leading advertising medium in the world. (It was grossing at the rate of $126,000,000 a year.) However, NBC's parent, RCA, was still very much in the manufacturing business, and the vast amount of NBC-TV red ink has been absorbed by the much vaster black ink from RCA television set sales. Could advertising continue to pay the expanding TV bills and provide the set owner with something besides John Daly? There was a lot of talk about subscription television and theater television. In Chicago subscription television was tried out in an extremely limited experiment and was very successful. The Joe Louis-Lee Savold fight was piped into a handful of theaters and attracted crowds beyond anyone's dreams. Alarmed by dwindling revenues, promoters continue to black out sports events to the great distress of the fans. The National Collegiate Athletic Association attempted a rather miserable experiment in which football games were telecast only outside their immediate areas in order to bring the local populace in at the pay window. It infuriated a lot of football fans and apparently didn't prove very much. The two most spectacular broadcast* of the year were in the field of public affairs — the Kefauver hearings and the return of General MacArthur. The Kefauver hearings succeeded in making a national figure out of a previously obscure lawyer, Rudolph Halley. Television can claim most of the credit for electing him to the presidency of New York's City Council against the opposition of both Republican and Democratic candidates. Of all the potentialities demonstrated by television in 1951, its potency as a political force, its ability to stir and challenge the people on public issues, was perhaps the most important. It has made at least one candidate; it can break a lot of others. And 1952 is an election year. The candidates had better look and sound convindng. Two Oceans at Once t<' I 'HIS is an old team starting a new trade," remarked Edward R. Murrow at the outset of "See It Now," C.B.S.'s