Playhouse 90 Redux

It’s time to fix something that’s been bothering me for (exactly!) ten years.

Presented below is the “writer’s cut” of a piece from 2014 that was mangled badly during the editing process.  If you had the misfortune to come across it in its bastardized form, then I hope enough time has passed so that the essay which appears below will seem fresh.

Between 2013-2016 I wrote sixteen feature articles for The A.V. Club, plus a handful of capsules for “listicles” by multiple contributors.  Before I throw anyone any further under the bus, I should clarify that my experience with the editing process was either positive or neutral on all but one of those full-length stories; and that overall I held the editorial staff in high regard (especially Emily St. James, who recruited me to write for AVC, and was not responsible for the revisions I objected to in this instance).  I left something cringeworthy in one of the “Random Roles” interviews and a junior editor did me a favor by taking it out.  My infamous Breaking Bad takedown was a contentious edit, with extensive notes from multiple staffers and a publication delay, but a ultimately a productive one.  Emily shielded me from the office politics (I found out later that one of the editors-in-chief was a Breaking Bad superfan who wanted to kill the piece entirely) and wrote something that made me realize the flaw that was setting people off was in the tone, not the content.  So I did a pass to soften any phrasing that was harsh or sarcastic, making the contrarian argument as neutrally as I could manage in the hope that readers would be more open to it that way.  Thanks to that note, the final draft was much better than the one I handed in, which is how it’s supposed to work.

But everything bad that can happen on a freelance assignment happened to poor Playhouse 90.  There were cuts for length that were probably justified, but still damaged the piece structurally; a short section was rewritten to alter its meaning, over my vehement objection; my own revision in response to those changes was submitted ahead of an agreed-upon deadline, but nonetheless ignored without explanation; and the “fact-checking” process introduced at least one embarrassing Wikipedia-sourced howler.  Although it was routine to request corrections post-publication, that error remains in the piece as published at AVC (See if you can spot it! Actually, don’t.), just because I was so livid that I didn’t trust myself to contact anyone on the staff for a month or so.

Because of the unsanctioned changes to the text, I effectively disowned the piece, opting not to promote it on social media or participate in the comments section (which was encouraged by AVC staff, and which I enjoyed).  I did acknowledge its existence obliquely, and buried a link to it, on this blog, only because I had prepared two sidebars (a listicle of parentheticals and footnotes that couldn’t fit into the main piece, and a brief interview with Playhouse 90 story consultant Joy Munnecke) that I was too vain to spike.

To give credit where it’s due, some of the editorial input was beneficial.  This version is therefore not my original draft; it’s a hybrid that reverses the unwelcome deletions and rewrites, but also incorporates some of my second-draft revisions.  I had no complaint with the headline The A.V. Club ran it under (I think the change was just to reduce the character count, which had a design-imposed limit), but the title below is what I submitted.

The 2014 version is still out there, albeit minus the embedded video clips and rendered partially into gibberish due to the sad, Spanfeller-era neglect of AVC’s archives, but my strong preference is that citations refer to this post instead.

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The super-sized dramatic anthology Playhouse 90 was an elegy for live television

by Stephen Bowie

More than any other single series, Playhouse 90 has come to represent the legacy of live anthology drama. Although most of its 134 episodes are frustratingly out of circulation, three of them have been revived over the years on PBS and home video, most recently as part of a Criterion DVD box. Rod Serling’s “Requiem For a Heavyweight,” which swept the 1957 Emmy Awards and put Playhouse 90 on the map in terms of critical acclaim, examines the aftermath of a punchy boxer’s last fight. Although it’s set in scuzzy gyms and bars, Serling finds a soft center: the heart of the story is the tentative romance between Mountain McClintock (Jack Palance) and the employment counselor (Kim Hunter) who tries to help him find dignity and purpose. Their scenes together, in which Palance reveals that the brutish-looking Mountain has a shy, sensitive soul, channel the emotional delicacy of Paddy Chayefsky’s Philco Television Playhouse segment “Marty,” which prior to the arrival of Playhouse 90 was widely acknowledged as the high-water mark of live television.

“The Comedian,” Serling’s adaptation of an Ernest Lehman story, stars Mickey Rooney in a terrifying, unhinged performance as the kind of nakedly narcissistic star (think Milton Berle or Jackie Gleason) that the new medium had minted in its formative years.  JP Miller’s “Days of Wine and Roses” was The Lost Weekend as a duet, a harrowing take on alcoholism in which heavy-drinking lovers (Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie) are torn apart as one gets sober and the other cannot. “Days of Wine and Roses” was eventually remade as a very good movie, as were “Requiem” and several other segments, including “The Miracle Worker” and “Judgment at Nuremberg.” The film versions have displaced the abandoned-in-the-vaults originals in our cultural memory, but Playhouse 90 came first.

“We had some stinkers,” said the author Dominick Dunne, who worked as a production coordinator on the series. “But when it was good, it was great.”

Act One: Program X

Playhouse 90 began as a pitch by Dr. Frank Stanton, CBS chairman William S. Paley’s formidable, forward-thinking right-hand man, during a brainstorming session for program ideas. But the project was developed by Hubbell Robinson, a CBS vice president who received no screen credit on Playhouse 90 but is often described as its creator.  Along with NBC’s Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, Robinson was one of the most vocal early advocates for quality television. The idea that the medium should aspire to some cultural significance, apart from its primary function as a source of revenue, became increasingly embattled in the late fifties, as popular cookie-cutter Westerns and situation comedies appeared to affirm an audience craving for unchallenging fare. With a wearying regularity, Playhouse 90 became the front line on that battlefield of culture versus commerce.

Developed under the placeholder title Program X, Playhouse 90 was an outgrowth of the ninety-minute and two-hour “spectaculars” that had been a fixation of Weaver’s at NBC.  Stuffed with all-star casts and often broadcast in color, the spectaculars were part of an ongoing arms race with the movies. Hollywood, its profits threatened by television, had rolled out CinemaScope and stereo sound, and now television was countering with bigger and better reasons to stay home. Both networks had created weekly series comprised of spectaculars (NBC’s Producers’ Showcase and CBS’s Ford Star Jubilee), but the material was usually light in nature: comedies, musicals, festivals of opera or jazz. It was Robinson’s inspiration to combine the scale of these programs with the gritty, “kitchen drama” aesthetic of the dramatic anthologies.

Robinson put out the welcome mat for underpaid artists. Teleplays would fetch $7500, and top directors who had been earning $400 a week could command $10,000 for a single Playhouse 90 segment. The show’s widely publicized, $100,000-per-episode budget was high enough that CBS had to enroll three or more sponsors, which necessitated a whopping nine commercial breaks. Episodes of Playhouse 90 feel choppy even by the  standards of modern network television’s forty-minute hour. Robinson and his newly-hired producer, Martin Manulis, had to break it to the writers that their three-act plays were about to become six-act plays, with a surfeit of artificial climaxes.

A sophisticated veteran of the New York theater, Manulis had a rare ability to earn the confidence of both the creative types and the network suits. Two years earlier, Manulis and his star director, John Frankenheimer, had rescued the live anthology Climax from a creative downward spiral that, er, climaxed with a broadcast in which an actor playing a corpse stood up and walked off the soundstage in full view of the camera. (CBS fired the original producer the next day.) It was Manulis who made Playhouse 90 a hit.

Act Two: Television City

Climax was the first major prime-time anthology broadcast live from Los Angeles, rather than New York City, from the beginning to the end of its network run. Playhouse 90 became the second and last. Although many of the “Golden Age” writers and directors looked down on the West Coast as the place where artists went to sell out, Los Angeles was a fait accompli. One of the reasons CBS had mounted the project in the first place was to get some use out of Television City, a new complex at Beverly and Fairfax that still stood mostly empty in 1956. For technophiles like Frankenheimer, the new studio was a kid’s toy box: a huge, state-of-the-art facility that could accommodate bigger sets and more cameras (four became the norm for Playhouse 90, but some episodes deployed as many as seven) than any television studio in New York.

Manulis set out to court the best of the newly famous television writers – and indeed all of them, save for Chayefsky and Gore Vidal, would eventually contribute to Playhouse 90 – and paid homage to them with an unprecedented “audio credit.”  (“Written especially for Playhouse 90!” the show’s announcer bellowed, even when a script hadn’t been.)  But the scale of the endeavor meant that the true auteurs of Playhouse 90 were the directors.  

Manulis gave Frankenheimer every third episode, and first choice of scripts. Alternating with him were another CBS contractee, Vincent J. Donehue, and freelancers Arthur Penn and Ralph Nelson, each hired for six segments.  Later Franklin Schaffner became the most prolific director after Frankenheimer, and George Roy Hill, Fielder Cook, Delbert Mann, Robert Mulligan, and Sidney Lumet joined the rotation. Most of these men leapt immediately from Playhouse 90 into feature film careers, and they would direct some of the best American movies of the following decade: The Manchurian Candidate, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Pawnbroker, Bonnie and Clyde, Planet of the Apes, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  If the “kitchen” school of television writing peaked somewhere around “Marty” (1953) or Serling’s “Patterns” (1955), live television as a visual medium did not reach its full potential until it moved into Television City.

Each director had his own hand-picked technical crew and, atypically for television, Manulis allowed the directors to select much of their own material.  Frankenheimer went on a literary kick and turned his favorite modern classics by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Odets, and Faulkner into Playhouse 90s.  “The Miracle Worker,” about Helen Keller and her teacher, was a passion project that Arthur Penn had tried to get made on earlier anthologies. In “Invitation to a Gunfighter,” a “Western without horses” (because, as story editor Del Reisman pointed out, horses had a habit of relieving themselves on camera), and “Portrait of a Murderer,” about the real-life killer Donald Bashor, Penn tries out innovative themes and approaches that would recur in his first film, The Left-Handed Gun, and Bonnie and Clyde.  “Portrait of a Murderer” makes extensive use of Bashor’s actual statements and a first-person camera to create a faux-documentary style that was decades ahead of its time.  Penn marveled at the “improvisatory aspect” of Tab Hunter’s performance as Bashor, citing an unplanned moment in which Hunter stops to pick up a basket of spilled laundry just after his character has committed murder.  It was a textbook case of how the immediacy of live television was meant to work.

But Frankenheimer set the style of Playhouse 90 more than anyone else.  Only twenty-six when the series debuted, Frankenheimer was a decade younger than most of the other directors.  He projected a total confidence that tended to win back many collaborators initially alienated by his brusque demeanor. “There was very little discussion, or leeway, with him,” said Reisman.  “That can be very effective, particularly for actors who are thinking, ‘Well, I’m not quite sure of this.’  Veteran actors accepted his direction.”

Frankenheimer projected himself into the work, literally. He composed shots by moving through rehearsals in place of the camera, so that actors were often startled to turn and find his face inches from their own. While Frankenheimer was justly lauded for his rich imagery – which favored wide-angle lenses and a blend of both long takes and complex cutting – in Playhouse 90 he also displayed a command of performance that was at best intermittent in his subsequent film career. The love scenes in “Winter Dreams,” a rich girl-poor boy romance adapted from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, have a fervid delicacy; the last ten minutes consist of just the stars, John Cassavetes and Dana Wynter, murmuring to each other in front of a fireplace. Sterling Hayden, playing desensitized brutes awakened by love in two of Frankenheimer’s best episodes (“Old Man” and the visually dazzling science fiction piece “A Sound Of Different Drummers”), and Robert Cummings, totally unsympathetic as a cruel Air Force officer in “Bomber’s Moon,” created fearless critiques of masculine stoicism. And in the squalid motel-room set of “Days Of Wine And Roses,” Piper Laurie performed the screen’s definitive drunk scene, finessing precise notes of anger, seductiveness, self-pity, self-hatred, and a dozen other emotions.

The married Frankenheimer had brief but passionate affairs with Laurie during “Days” and with Janice Rule (memorably ferocious as a brilliant manic-depressive) while making the group therapy drama “Journey To The Day,” and at least an infatuation with Wynter (“perhaps the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen”), the star of “Winter Dreams” and another Frankenheimer segment, “The Violent Heart.” During rehearsals the author of “Days,” JP Miller, complained that Frankenheimer was neglecting Laurie’s co-star, Cliff Robertson, in order to fine-tune her drunk scenes, prompting producer Fred Coe to offer the director a witty critique: “You’ve got the wine, now see if you can get the roses.” But Laurie’s excellence in the broadcast affirmed the aptness of her director’s focus. Romances between great directors and their leading ladies (or men) are a cliche of the cinema, but the corporatized two- and five-day schedules of early television production rarely permitted them. That Frankenheimer and his actresses ended up channeling off-screen intimacy so productively into their work was a consequence of the artist-indulgent environment of Playhouse 90, which permitted directors and actors to spend weeks or even months preparing each segment. In many ways beyond its extended length, Playhouse 90 emulated the methods and the creative aspirations of feature filmmaking, bridging a gap between mediums that were much farther apart in the fifties than they are today.

As gripping as his best projects were, Frankenheimer also ended up directing treacly family fare like “The Family Nobody Wanted” and “Eloise” (based on the children’s book). If the main emphasis was on the “Marty” school of quality television, CBS still hedged its bets by insisting on occasional comedies and specials, like a color broadcast of George Balanchine’s ballet The Nutcracker for Christmas 1958 and, indefensibly, a “party” to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the film Around the World in 80 Days. (Who took home that payola?) Even though he felt the “excitement” was in original scripts, Manulis had no compunction about dusting off an old chestnut or two. “I tried to balance all the hifalutin stuff with Johnny Carson and Carol Channing doing Three Men on a Horse,” he said.

Ostensibly to give the live crews a rest, but probably to break up the challenging dramas with something more traditional (and cheap), CBS hired Screen Gems (and later Filmaster and Universal) to film some westerns and melodramas that would run about every fourth week. “They were dreadful,” said production supervisor Ralph Senensky. Most of the live Playhouse 90 staff tried to pretend the filmed shows didn’t exist, and CBS discontinued them after the second season.

Act Three: Summer Stock in an Iron Lung

For CBS, another part of the allure of Los Angeles was access to movie stars.  Stunt casting was a network mandate from the start, even inspiring the visual motif of the opening titles and interstitials: sponsors’ products, the rotating hosts (usually one or more stars of the following week’s episode, then in rehearsals), and sometimes even the principal actors themselves were introduced against a black backdrop surrounded by chintzy papier-mache stars dangling from above.

Playhouse 90’s casting director, Ethel Winant, was one of the most influential women behind the camera in early television; although she never received credit as such, Winant was in effect Playhouse 90’s “invisible producer” (in John Houseman’s words), advising on matters outside of casting and functioning as a liaison to the network. Winant mitigated the celebrity decree somewhat by casting against type as often as possible. “Ethel was really good about finding the other side of somebody,” said Manulis.

Stunt casting yielded some unexpected gems, like matinee idol Hunter (fortunately filling in for first choice Robert Wagner, whom Twentieth Century-Fox declined to loan out) in “Portrait of a Murderer,” oily sitcom star Cummings in “Bomber’s Moon,” singer Mel Torme as “The Comedian”’s spineless brother, and horror icon Boris Karloff as Kurtz in “The Heart of Darkness.” But just as many Playhouse 90s were sunk by a star shoehorned into the wrong part: comedic actor Tony Randall as a Gatsby-ish social climber in “The Second Happiest Day,” the veddy British Charles Laughton as a Polish rabbi in “In the Presence of Mine Enemies,” and Jack Palance as a frail Jewish movie mogul in “The Last Tycoon” and a Spanish bullfighter in “The Death of Manolete.” Somehow Winant came up with smarmy musical comedy star Jack Carson for the role of a career military officer in “The Long March,” adapted from the William Styron novel. In an early scene Carson stumbled over the tongue-twister line “tank tactics,” and for the rest of the show he stammered constantly, looking like a deer caught in headlights and throwing off the other actors’ concentration.  

“The Long March” was one of Playhouse 90’s legendary on-air disasters, of which there were more than a few. “The Death of Manolete” was the most famous, thanks to Frankenheimer’s dubious judgment that a bullfight could be simulated with a pair of antlers mounted on a cart. The funniest occurred during “In Lonely Expectation,” a ensemble piece about the limited options faced by young women in a home for unwed mothers. At the climax, when one of the women decides to keep her baby and leave the home, the actress (Susan Harrison) tripped and dropped the “baby” (a doll, fortunately), which tumbled halfway down a tall staircase: thud, thud, thud. After an endless moment of stunned silence, someone picked up the doll and handed it to Harrison, and the actors tried to carry on as if nothing had happened. “Well, there goes the rerun,” quipped the technical director.

The pressure involved in mounting a show under those conditions was, of course, enormous. The analogy everyone loved to use – Frankenheimer attributed it to the character actor Sidney Blackmer – was “summer stock in an iron lung.” Only adrenaline junkies thrived making Playhouse 90. It’s no coincidence that the generation that came of age in live television was also the generation that had fought World War II – Serling had been a paratrooper, Penn a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, Hill a bomber pilot who liked to compare the television control room to a cockpit. The war was Playhouse 90’s favorite subject: at least fifteen segments were set during World War II or its immediate aftermath. Even “The Comedian” (one of many episodes about Playhouse 90’s second favorite subject, television itself) has the war buried deep inside: its protagonist, a surrogate for Serling, is an insecure comedy writer who plagiarizes a script left behind by a buddy killed in combat.

Act Four: Target For Three

Martin Manulis burned out after two years. Playhouse 90 was a seven-day-a-week job, in which Sunday afternoon story conferences around Manulis’s pool were the closest thing to a respite. After Manulis quit in 1958, he would always brag that it took three men to replace him.

Those three men were superstars of live television: Fred Coe, who had pioneered the idea of commissioning original dramas for television on The Philco Television Playhouse; John Houseman, a founder of the Mercury Theatre, later famous in his acting role as The Paper Chase’s Professor Kingsfield; and Herbert Brodkin, an iron-willed up-and-comer who would go on to produce Emmy winners like The Defenders and Holocaust. Coe and Houseman were contracted to handle half a dozen segments each of Playhouse 90’s third season. The bulk fell to Brodkin, augmented with contributions by a handful of one-shot guest producers.

Manulis predicted that, under split authority, Playhouse 90 would lose some of its variety, as the three producers competed to produce the most significant, serious episodes. That’s precisely what happened – and, if anything, it made the series even better. All three of the new producers were New Yorkers who had produced “kitchen drama” anthologies as well as spectaculars, and to a certain extent they shifted the series back toward a model of small-scaled, character-driven works. Reginald Rose contributed “A Marriage of Strangers,” his answer to “Marty,” in which a fortyish man and woman (Red Buttons and Diana Lynn) marry just because they’re afraid of growing old alone. Steven Gethers’s keenly observed “Free Weekend” found a cross-section of middle-aged regret in the unlikely occasion of a summer camp parents’ visit. Some of Brodkin’s segments were so intimate that they were dwarfed by the size of the Playhouse 90 format – but even that, in a perverse way, served as a defiant tribute to a fading mode of television drama.  

Brodkin’s preoccupation with the holocaust led to two bold, sprawling anti-fascist dramas, both starring Maximilian Schell and directed unsparingly by George Roy Hill: “Judgment at Nuremberg” and the lesser-known, but superior, “Child of Our Time,” a parable about a boy who wanders Europe during the war, neglected or abused by institutions of authority (the nazis, the communists, the church) as they occupy themselves with the “adult” business of genocide. Houseman produced the similarly allegorical “Target For Three,” a suspenseful assassination story notable for presenting Latin American revolutionaries in a heroic light during the same year that Castro seized Cuba, and the amazing “Seven Against the Wall,” a docudrama about the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Boasting a cast of fifty speaking parts (last-billed, as “Pete’s girl”: Louise Fletcher) and spilling over into a second studio, it was the ideal project for Franklin Schaffner, an uneven director whose skill for taming massively-scaled shows anticipated the best films he would go on to direct, Planet of the Apes and Patton.

Act Five: Gas

The network interference began in the first episode, “Forbidden Area,” a pulpy Cold War story adapted by Serling from a Pat Frank novel. CBS compelled Manulis to recast the voice of the U.S. president, because the original actor sounded too much like Adlai Stevenson, then a candidate for the office. Actually, it started even before that: “Requiem For a Heavyweight,” unmistakably a better script than “Forbidden Area,” was slotted as the series’ opener until a CBS executive decided it was too depressing. Censorship had always dogged the live dramatists who pushed the envelope, but Playhouse 90 was a bigger target than ever before. The executives watched rehearsals on video monitors in their offices. “It was a very Big Brother kind of thing,” said Frankenheimer. “A network executive’d come down with notes, and you did what they said.  You fought up to a degree, but when you lost, you lost.”

Manulis had hoped to play the multiple sponsors against each other and keep any one of them from exercising too much control over the show, but the opposite happened. “They ganged up on us,” he said. “They chopped it up like a roomful of butchers at work on a steer.” “It” in that instance was Serling’s “A Town Has Turned to Dust,” a confrontational fictionalization of the death of Emmett Till, the black Mississippi teen who was murdered after he (allegedly) whistled at a white woman. The sponsors’ objections forced Serling to change an interracial romance to a flirtation, the lynching victim to a Latino, and the setting of the story to the Old West. Only four days before airtime, one sponsor, Allstate, delivered another blow: as insurance companies were unenthusiastic about people, even bad ones, offing themselves, the climactic suicide of the killer (Rod Steiger) had to be eliminated. “A script has turned to dust,” Serling punned.

The most troublesome sponsor was the American Gas Association (a trade organization for regional household natural gas suppliers, which in the ad segments billed itself not by name but, presumptuously, as “Your Gas Company”). During the second season the AGA had wanted Donald Bashor’s climactic trip to the gas chamber excised from “Portrait of a Murderer.” In that confrontation, Manulis prevailed. But “Judgment at Nuremberg” contained multiple references to the gas chambers used to murder Jews in the concentration camps, and the utility balked. Perhaps the phrase “death chamber” could be used instead? Brodkin and Hill refused to make the change, and the network countered by threatening to mute the word “gas” every time it was spoken on the air. Anyone else would have compromised at that point, but Brodkin – whose stubbornness and contempt for authority were legendary – let them do it. Although Hill was scapegoated and never directed Playhouse 90 again, Brodkin won a Pyrrhic victory. The deletion of the word was so obvious that the press took note, and raked CBS over the coals for what stands as perhaps the most craven and notorious incident of fifties television censorship.   

Act Six: Old Man

In the fall of 1958, Frankenheimer began rehearsing Horton Foote’s adaptation of the William Faulkner story “Old Man.” The old man of the title was the Mississippi River, which Frankenheimer set out to recreate indoors. A gigantic water tank was constructed on Stage 43 for the scenes in which the river overflowed its banks and sent the main characters, a chain gang laborer (Sterling Hayden) and a pregnant woman (Geraldine Page), on a waterlogged odyssey. The tank was so heavy it cracked the foundation of the studio. “We’ll drown the actors,” worried Frankenheimer. The solution: cancel the live broadcast and shoot it all on videotape. 

Although tape had already supplanted kinescopes as the method for recording the show’s live episodes for posterity, the difficulty of editing videotape had prevented it from being used to pre-record episodes. “Old Man” broke that barrier. “I made the first splice ever done on tape,” Frankenheimer recalled. “We had no instruments to cut it; we cut the master with a single-edged razor blade.” Instantly, everything changed. It helped that “Old Man” was triumphant, the quintessential Frankenheimer show. The director’s bold compositions concealed the artifice of the studio-bound tempest and zeroed in on the vulnerable performances at the center of the chaos. Most of Frankenheimer’s remaining episodes, as well as others from the third season and nearly all of the fourth, were pre-taped.

The “liveness” of Playhouse 90 had always been fungible; most episodes made use of filmed or taped inserts of scenes that couldn’t be staged live. The first season’s “The Comedian” contained forty such cues. But the directors quickly realized that shooting entirely on tape, although superficially similar to a live staging, removed all the urgency. Composer Jerry Goldsmith, who scored the many of the live episodes by conducting an eighteen-piece orchestra on an adjacent soundstage, said, “I felt the energy drop out of the performances, and it’s never been back.” Videotape was like the atom bomb – someone would have made it eventually – and during the sixties and seventies it would provide a lifeline for Playhouse 90’s few close successors, dramatic showcases like CBS Playhouse and PBS’s Visions, niche projects that would’ve been too expensive to do on film. But, just as J. Robert Oppenheimer had some second thoughts about his contributions to that other endeavor, Frankenheimer and Foote often lamented, in interviews over the years, their role in killing the medium they loved.

Playhouse 90, in any case, was after three years dying an actual death as well as an aesthetic one. The ratings had declined over time and, with $4 million of ad time left unsold, cancellation after the third season seemed certain. Hubbell Robinson engineered a fourth-season reprieve, but that was truncated at the end of 1959, after James Aubrey assumed the presidency of CBS and forced Robinson out. Aubrey, an especially rapacious and cutthroat executive, programmed shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and openly scorned anything highbrow. Immediately, Playhouse 90 was deprived of its regular timeslot, the episode order was cut, and the taped shows already in the can were rescheduled as occasional “specials.”

“Networks destroy things, you know,” said Herbert Brodkin. “It couldn’t be allowed to go unscathed. Too good for television. It had to be destroyed.”

A handful of hour-long anthologies – The U.S. Steel Hour; Armstrong Circle Theatre – limped into the early sixties, but when Playhouse 90 ended everyone knew the party was over. Critics rightly celebrate the series as a pinnacle; they less often notice that it was also an elegy. As it assembled the best and brightest of live drama, Playhouse 90 gradually undercut – or outgrew – what made their work unique. In its lavish budgets, its emphasis on celebrity, its cinematic aspirations, its shift away from liveness, the show sowed the seeds of its own obsolescence. After Playhouse 90, live television had nowhere left to go.