Way back: when TV was black-and-white and golden

Imagine scriptwriters losing all of their favorite moves.
No car chases, no foot races. No bursts, blasts, infernos or explosions; hardly any zombies, vampires or space ships.
With such deprivation, writers would have to resort to wit and character and nuance and such. That’s how the first golden age of TV drama began.
Shows were done in small spaces with large cameras. They were done live; there was no room for error … or for second-guessing.
“We had technical freedom, creative freedom, financial freedom,” director Fielder Cook told journalist Gordon Sander, adding: “Nobody could come and take it away from us, because nobody knew how to do it but us.”
That was in the early 1950s, when the odds against them were steep, Marc Robinson wrote. “The studios were tiny, the lights were brutally hot and the tension was often unbearable.”
Yes, some shows failed. As director Buzz Kulik told Sander in “Serling” (Dutton, 1992): “There was a lot of crap around and there was a lot of stuff being badly done. But there was a kind of electricity and energy, a great kind of vitality.”
By some views, that era vanished vanished quickly. By others (more on that later), the era keeps being reborn.
It started in 1947, with the Kraft Television Theatre. Over the next 11-and-a-half years (before switching to music shows), Kraft did 650 plays (none of them cheesy), adapting Shakespeare, Ibsen, Tennessee Williams and beyond.
In 1948, “Philco Television Playhouse” arrived, with a producer (Fred Coe) who knew what he wanted. “He felt the writer was the center of the universe,” writer Horton Foote once said. “Writers like to hear that.”
He also went with rising talent, Robinson wrote:
“Coe and other anthology-show producers relied on untested new directors such as Delbert Mann, Arthur Penn and Sidney Lumet. And on hungry young actors such as Grace Kelly, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward, Steve McQueen, Eva Marie Saint, Jason Robards and Walter Matthau
“When James Dean died a week before starting work on Hemingway’s ‘The Battler,’ Coe replaced him with Paul Newman. Another star was born.”
That happened to be the perfect time to find such people in New York. The Actors Studio had formed in 1947, creating a style that was subtle, not Shakespearean.
“What was then emerging was a distinct New York acting style,” Arthur Penn told Sander. “That’s why live TV was able to function, because these were theater actors, not actors who needed four takes.”
These were eager people, Roddy McDowall told Sander. “All of us were just a bunch of young kids throwing our hats in the air, with nothing to lose. So we were able to commit without fear.”
The resources were limited, Brooks and Marsh wrote. The first Kraft hour had a budget of $3,000. The entire studio was half the size of the space used to produce the commercials a decade later.
Given the limits, the emphasis was on tight tales. Reginald Rose’s 1954 “Twelve Angry Men” was all the better for being confined to a jury room.
Rose’s story was adapted into a play in 1955 and a movie — nominated for three Oscars, including best picture – in ‘57. Other movie versions were made in India, Russia and China; a cable remake was in 1997,
Not everything was tight, though. In 1956, George Roy Hill directed “A Night to Remember,” with 106 actors and the sinking of the Titanic.
But most golden-age dramas emphasized compact stories and complex characters. It was a springboard for Rose, Rod Serling (“Requiem For a Heavyweight”), Paddy Chayevsky (“Marty,” shown here in its movie version) and more. Gore Vidal alone wrote 70 dramas.
The one-hour drama anthologies peppered the NBC and CBS schedules, bearing the tames of their sponsors. In fall of 1956, there was Alcoa, Armstrong, Aluminum, Goodyear, Kraft and Lux.
“It was a vital young industry about which no one knew a great deal,” producer Jerome Hellman told Sander. “It was really dominated by creative people, to whom New York City represented a kind of creative Mecca.”
Alas, a change was coming in both geography and approach.
In 1952, CBS had opened Television City in Los Angeles, designed for live shows. For four years (1956-60), its “Playhouse 90” created classics — “The Miracle Worker,” “Judgment at Nuremberg,” Serling’s “In the Presence of Mine Enemies” – and more.
Later, Television City would range from Serling’s “Twilight Zone” to “All in the Family” and “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” With a few exceptions, TV was moving west.
ABC – which mostly missed the golden age — had tried to accelerate that move.
“I went out to Hollywood and made the rounds of the major studios,” Leonard Goldenson, an ABC founder, wrote in “Beating the Odds” (Scribner’s, 1991). “I was trying to sell television as an opportunity to rejuvenate the movie business. Nobody was buying. Television was the enemy.”
At Warner Brothers, Goldenson wrote, Jack Warner – who used to make some films for double-features – was adamant about no TV, saying: “I made those quickies 30 years ago and I’m not going to make ‘em again.”
One exception, he wrote, was Walt Disney, who was desperate to finance a theme park. “ABC was really Disney’s last hope. He’d gone to the banks and when he tried to explain what he wanted to build, they just couldn’t grasp the concept.”
So ABC helped finance Disneyland; in return, Disney began making shows for it. That started in 1954; soon, TV had Davy Crockett and Zorro and lots of Mouseketeers.
Other Hollywood people also relented. In ‘56, the Golden Age was still going strong, but ABC was adding cowboy shows – Wyatt Earp, Jim Bowie, Lone Ranger, “Cheyenne,” “Broken Arrow.”
Soon, most TV production was at the movie studios or at CBS’ sites. Even Serling moved west.
“The golden age of television was essentially over,” Sander wrote. “Video had left New York …. Hollywood had won the battle.”
By 1960, only a couple golden-age survivors remained. And yet, the notion of quality drama never totally vanished:
— “Hallmark Hall of Fame” kept lofty standards. It started in 1951 with an opera (“Amahl and the Night Visitors”), followed with three Shakespeare dramas and more. In 1960, it was still doing Shakespeare and a musical adaptation of “Shangri-La”; in ‘86, Quigley wrote, “Promise” became “the most-honored dramatic special in television history.”
— PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre” opened in 1971. Its first project (“The Churchills”) was no masterpiece, Alistaire Cooke (the host) granted in a 1991 overview of the series. Then things perked up with “dramatizations of Henry James, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Hardy, Tolstoy and Stella Gibbons, pausing for a three-month bout of rattling costume drama, … before reverting to the Masterpiece form.” It’s a form that continues today, through “Downton Abbey,” “Wolf Hall” and beyond.
— In ‘72, PBS added “Great Performances.” It would eventually focus mainly on music and dance, but at first it had drama in the golden-age tradition.
— Then came the new era. NBC’s “The West Wing” and HBO’s “The Sopranos” both arrived in 1999, forever dueling for Emmys and other honors. Cable channels kept adding more, led by “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.”
TV dramas were entering what critic David Bianculli dubbed “The Platinum Age.” That would fade a bit, but remind us of TV’s once-golden past.