Studio One, a weekly dramatic anthology created by Fletcher Markle for CBS Radio in 1947, wasn't a runaway success (it lasted only one year), but once CBS committed to expanding their nascent television broadcasting, Studio One's format of a weekly adaptation of either an established classic or newly created play, was considered a natural for the new medium. If established Broadway and Hollywood actors, directors, and writers spurned the new bastard medium television as a faddish, freakish novelty, all the better the new talent was much cheaper, much more easily controlled, and the initially small audiences (many of them upper-middle class urban viewers who could actually afford the first expensive TV sets) didn't seem to care what was coming over these miraculous small little boxes of ghostly black and white shadows. It didn't hurt that network TV production in those early days was centered almost exclusively in New York City, where the networks could tap a myriad number of performers and writers, many of them young and hungry for their first big break in show business. As the networks greatly increased the time they were broadcasting in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and as they encountered more and more criticism from journalists (almost all of them New York City-based) about the "intellectual wasteland" of television, the networks were able to kill two birds with one stone: get high-toned dramatics on the air to silence the critics, and air these plays and dramas live (before video tape) to save money and to fill all those big, empty prime-time scheduling slots. Not unlike what Hollywood did back when sound films were first introduced, when the new medium seemingly demanded actors and playwrights with a theatrical background, so too did early network TV cast about for actors, performers, directors, and writers whose roots in the legitimate theatre (as well as the so-called "lower" forms of stage theatrics, such as vaudeville) would help bring quality and "class" to the ever-expanding network TV schedules - along, of course, with the sporting events, westerns, and sitcoms that dominated the first few years of network programming. It's must-viewing for anyone interested in the roots of American network television history. The anthology sports a few video extras, including those great, original Westinghouse commercials with Betty Furness, along with a glossy 52-page booklet with detailed cast and crew information, along with background information on the plays. Kaufman's June Moon Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights Michael Dyne's Pontius Pilate McKnight Malmar's The Storm George Orwell's 1984 George Axelrod's Confessions of a Nervous Man Reginald Rose's The Remarkable Incident at Carson Corners Gore Vidal's Dark Possession Reginald Rose's The Death and Life of Larry Benson Rod Serling's The Strike Reginald Rose's Twelve Angry Men Reginald Rose's An Almanac of Liberty Gore Vidal's Summer Pavilion Reginald Rose's Dino, and Rod Serling's The Arena. Plays (and one opera) included in this collection are: Gian-Carlo Menotti's The Medium Williams Shakespeare's Julius Caesar Ring Lardner, Jr.'s and George S. Koch Vision, in association with The Archive of American Television, has released Studio One Anthology, a six-disc, 17-play collection representing the "golden age" of live network television anthology drama from one of the most well-regarded examples of that short-lived genre: CBS's Studio One, which ran from 1948 to 1958.
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