The Week in Review

Three NBC shows last week had to get out of town. The migratory programs were Today, Home and Tonight. The stimulus to move was provided by NBC President Sylvester ("Pat") Weaver, who thinks that the TV tendency to originate everything from Manhattan or Hollywood may eventually get the industry in a rut. At Weaver's orders Today and Tonight took off for Miami Beach where their prize funnymen, Dave Garroway and Steve Allen, working in the open air, shivered on the TV screens in Florida's "unseasonable weather." Home, after a stopover in Chicago, took Arlene Francis and her pots and pans on to San Francisco. Next in line for trips to the hinterland: some of Weaver's 1 1/2-hour color spectaculars.

Innocent Guinea Pig. Things were again stirring excitingly on the drama front. NBC's Producers' Showcase went all-out with a 90-minute color production of the 1934 Broadway play Yellow Jack by Sidney Howard. In the dramatized account of the U.S. Army's conquest of yellow fever in Cuba, Lorne Greene was convincing as Major Walter Reed. Dane Clark packed considerable power into the role of Dr. Lazear, and Jackie Cooper, stuffed with brogue, blarney and bluster, was effective as O'Hara. Wally Cox wittily handled his small part as the soldier who becomes an innocent guinea pig for the medicos. Unfortunately the play itself had a tendency to drag between high moments and a habit of making its points over and over again.

NBC's Kraft TV Theater supplied the week's dramatic surprise with a play called Patterns, by Rod Serling. A many-sided study of top-level stress in a big corporation, the play had areas of strength and persuasiveness that made Executive Suite look like Little Women. The plot dealt with the arrival at the multimillion-dollar Ramsey & Co. of Richard Kiley, a young Midwest engineer who was being groomed to replace Ed Begley, veteran vice president. The sun around which both revolved was Bossman Everett Sloane, a tough, intelligent operator who handled power as if it were his own invention. The drama lay in the meteoric but uneasy rise of the young engineer and the spent-rocket fall of the aging vice president, and their agonizing appraisals of each other as they passed in the cold reaches of executive space.

Low-Echelon Job. Producer-Director Fielder Cook gave Patterns just the proper elaboration of office gossip, politics and detail and, as often happens in a soundly built play, all the actors turned in superlative jobs. Top honors went to chunky Ed Begley, one of TV's most valuable utility actors, who brought to his role of a businessman hagridden both by his boss and his ulcer a fine pitch of stubborn and despairing dignity.

At 30, Writer Rod Serling is another of TV's homegrown dramatists. An ex-paratrooper and amateur boxer, Serling had corporative experience only in a stint with Crosley Corp. in a low-echelon job After World War II, Serling wrote his own local dramatic show for Cincinnati's station WKRC-TV. Last year, after selling 20-odd scripts to Kraft, Studio One, Danger and Lux Video Theater, he moved to Connecticut where he is now working on a drama for the U.S. Steel Hour. Says Serling: "I'm one of the few TV writers who doesn't hope eventually to write plays, films or novels. I like TV fine, and I'll have it as long as it'll have me."

At week's end, NBC scored again with the Max Liebman production of that tuneful old light opera. Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta, beautifully sung by Alfred Drake and Patrice Munsel and with dances of a fine Latin fervor devised by Choreographer Rod Alexander. CBS celebrated Jackie Gleason's return to the air after a two-week vacation with one of the funniest Honeymooners scripts of the season. Gleason, Art Carney and their TV wives (Audrey Meadows, Joyce Randolph) gave it a bang-up performance, but the chief credit for remaining always a comic step ahead of the audience goes to Gleason's writers: Marvin Marx, Walter Stone and A. J. Russell.

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