Spell It Out

An unpretentious show called Fireside Theater (Tues. 9 p.m., NBCTV) last week had shot to second place in TV popularity ratings. Having distanced such formidable rivals as Toast of the Town and Arthur Godfrey, it is now hot on the heels of TV's perennial leader, Milton Berle.

To Eastern TVmen, Fireside's surge has caused some alarm: it strikes directly at their ambition to make New York the television center of the U.S. by concentrating on "live" shows. Not only is Fireside produced in Hollywood, but it is done on film and costs less than such $20,000-and-up New York productions as Philco Playhouse, Robert Montgomery Presents and Ford Theater, Fireside actors are relatively unknown and scripts are picked impartially from obscure free-lance writers and the classics. Producer Brewster Morgan and German-born Director Frank (Maedchen in Uniform) Wisbar will try almost anything. They have retold the plot of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in 30 minutes and a modern setting, and turned Thomas Hardy's The Three Strangers into a western.

Convinced of the basic advantages of film ("Live TV depends on actors ad-libbing in front of a live camera"), Producer Morgan started Fireside Theater in 1949, from the start had a sponsor (Ivory Soap, Duz, Crisco). Originally, each show consisted of two separate, 15-minute playlets, but this technique had a serious drawback: "People who didn't like the first show sometimes switched before the second one came on."

Morgan bends every effort to keep the televiewer's hand away from the knob. Inheriting a large audience from the Berle show, which precedes his own, Morgan tries to keep it by spelling out the plot quickly and in big, block letters. "We've even had to tack things up on the wall so people can see plainly what we're talking about from start to finish," he admits. Every scene moves the plot forward, with little time frittered away on character and atmosphere. "It's not that we're so damned much better than the others," says Morgan, explaining Fireside's success. "It's just that we've tried to find a sound TV technique for telling a picture short story."

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