The Week in Review

Word has gone out that this season's TV dramas are to be "happy stories about happy people with happy problems." NBC's Television Playhouse, which TV-men laughingly called the "neurotic hour" because it pioneered in the realistic plays of Paddy (Marty) Chayefsky and Horton (The Trip to Bountiful) Foote, has had a change of producers and a change of view. CBS Story Editor Don Moore concedes that sponsors are begging for "upbeat" plays, but argues that it is simply because "morbid themes were overdone and a natural reaction set in." Writer Rod (Patterns) Serling agrees: "Plays of TV's dark brown era--they were usually set on a decaying front porch of a Southern mansion--went down deep but they were run into the ground. Maybe a change is for the better."

Insulted Ego. A vigorous opposition to the new trend comes from Veteran TV Producer Fred Coe, who guided the Television Playhouse through its earliest, most realistic days. Coe, who last month produced Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth on NBC, thinks TV is becoming the sick man of the arts: "I don't know why the American people should give Ed Sullivan 65% of the audience against Helen Hayes, Mary Martin and The Skin of Our Teeth. I'm puzzled by it.

"If TV doesn't break the trend itself, it will become the nation's next drug. The public is being simply mesmerized by the same stories back to back. There is the boy-meets-girl formula, and then there is crime-doesn't-pay. The public will revolt --this is what happened to motion pictures." Coe this week begins his new NBC series, Playwrights Hour, with scripts by Chayefsky, Philip Wylie, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. His gloom may be deepened by the fact that his show will run opposite The $64,000 Question during its last half-hour.

Changeover. Last week's TV drama indicated that the happiness boys were leading their more morose brethren by a score of about ten to one. Television Playhouse seemed to be making the changeover gradually: its Merry-Go-Round was about a grimly possessive girl who loses two men before she has enough sense to change her tactics to entrap a third. Studio One briefly dismayed its viewers with Reginald Rose's Three Empty Rooms which dealt with a pair of miserably shy newlyweds, but wound up strongly affirming the solidarity of the human race. The stratosphere of Pollyannic joy was reached by Request Performance, which offered The Mumbys, a fable about a passel of vagabonds who magically transform an avaricious realtor and his purse-proud clients simply by camping out on the best lot in the swank subdivision. Robert Montgomery spread cheer with Charlton Heston as a plucky cowboy who triumphs over both the cops and robbers while winning the love of spirited Pat Roe. Kraft TV Theater took the edge off any social satire that remained in its adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Diamond as Big as the Ritz by playing the script as farce; U.S. Steel introduced the TV audience to Broadway Comic Menasha Skulnik with a Runyonesque comedy about a genial barber who outwits a combine of gangsters and horseplayers: Lux Video Theater, with an updating of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's classic The Enchanted Cottage, proved without question that there can be as much happiness in ears and disfigurement as in girlish laugther. The Max Liebman Spectacular, Heidi made a sentimental tour of Switzerland, Germany, and almost everyone's childhood. There were yodeling villagers, a flinthearted housekeeper and a curmudgeon grandfather. As Heidi, Jeannie Carson got strong support from Bil Baird's marionettes, Natalie Wood, and a number of pleasant tunes.

Unfortunately for the new upbeat trend, the week's best play was downbeat all the way. On CBS's Climax! Irving Stone's Sailor on Horseback charged head on into TV taboos-illegitimacy, Socialism and failure. As hard-living Novelist Jack London, Actor Lloyd Nolan seemed physically too slight for the role but in the essential scenes he created a sense of force and fury that lifted the play over its hurdles. Mercedes McCambridge played London's chillingly correct sister, and Mary Sinclair was excellent in her despairing efforts to be the proper wife for a national hero. The play's simple story line--how a proud man pulls down his world and himself--just missed a Greek starkness. The ending had imagination as the camera panned down a row of shelves to show the dwindling of London's annual output; from four books to two to one to none--and death.

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