The Week in Review

As the first play ever televised in its entirety fresh from its Broadway run, NBC's Peter Pan was the biggest news of the week, even as TV's shorter homegrown programs sprouted some encouraging successes.

Warm, saucy and soaring, Mary Martin made Peter Pan close to 100% make-believe on both color and black-and-white screens. From nursery beginning through Never Land to nursery ending (adapted from Playwright James M. Barrie's sequel, Peter and Wendy). Director-Choreographer Jerome Robbins shaved away sentimentality in favor of movement and daughter; Cyril Ritchard turned Captain Hook ( "the swiniest swine of them all") into a Pirate of Penzance with a fine mixture of cringe and gusto. Of the two sponsors (total payout: $450,000), Ford made palatable its light-touch commercials; RCA tried to fob off Vaughn Monroe in a fantasy of its own and suffered by contrast. After a look at the size of the audience (an estimated 65 million) NBC announced that it will stage a second production of Peter Pan at Christmastime.

Best Marks. Through the week TV's own writers, actors and producers earned their best marks in the documentary and semi-documentry line. In Background (NBC, Sundays, 5:30 E.S.T), Producer Ted Mills turned a sympathetic, revealing eye on Puerto Rico's dirt-poor barrio farmers, their homes and their lush hills, and their first efforts to develop better roads and schools through community cooperation. With notable restraint and suspense, CBS's Danger (Tues. 10 p.m. E.S.T.) re-enacted the story of Polish Skipper Jan Cwiklinski (played by George Voskovec), who escaped from his ship Batory in 1953 despite close Communist surveillance and his long-held conviction that he need not be "a political man. "

On a lighter note, Walt Disney's Tomorrowland (ABC, Wed. 7:30 p.m., E.S.T.) made its bow with a lively film-and-animation look at man's attempts to reach the moon via rocket ship. Most authentic touch: the serious, heavily accented explanation of the nation's own German born rocket experts, Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun. To pay a Person-to-Person (CBS Fri. 10:30 p.m., E.S.T.) visit to Internal Revenue Boss T. Coleman Andrews at his modest 4 1/2-room apartment in Parkfairfax, Va., CBS's Ed Murrow unearthed an odd fact: Collector Andrews leaves the job of making out his own tax returns to his 30-year-old son.

Desperate Young. Not for the tender-minded was the week's most probing social drama, Crime in the Streets (ABC's Elgin Hour, Tues. 9:30 p.m., E.S.T.), about the effect of grinding poverty on a sullen 18-year-old named Frankie (John Cassavetes). Author Reginald Rose's dialogue was blunt and crisp, with an authentic cadence and idiom. When a social worker (Robert Preston) asks Frankie why he is at home, just lying on his crumpled, ratty bed, he gets an unforgettable cry of anguish masked in a snarl: "Because I got a hole in my shirt and my brother's wearin' my underwear and my mother's got her thumb in some slob's soup . . . And you're not here because you want to help us . . . You're scared to death of us . . . you shake in your pants every time you pass us on the street." Without hokum, without false sentiment or a spurious stiff upper lip, Crime shaped a rare portrait, well worth reshowing, of the desperate young who are already down and out.

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