The Battle of Sunday at 8

Like prime beef, a choice hour on television is costly. The hour beginning on Sunday nights at 8 E.S.T. is about as prime as a TV hour can get. In an effort to attract customers, NBC has been working away at the hour for years, while CBS's Ed Sullivan has been dishing it up medium to well done, with viewers taking avidly to his servings. This situation has understandably made NBC officials extremely unhappy; it has caused big executives to fear for their jobs, and even brought NBC's Chairman of the Board Sylvester L. ("Pat") Weaver himself into the fight. Weaver delivered a ukase: "Sunday at 8 must be licked." Last week it was.

Trouble with Traubel. True, Sullivan had trouble when Soprano Helen Traubel, his operatic guest star, fell ill and could not appear. But this was no mere victory by default. The Sullivan show was enveloped when NBC began its 90-minute Spectacular at 7:30 p.m., half an hour before Sullivan went on. It was outmaneuvered when NBC produced a star-studded, revue-type show that Sullivan could not come close to matching. Sullivan was outscored in the Trendex rating by 26.8 to NBC's 30.1, the highest Trendex rating that any 90-minute NBC Spectacular had ever won.

NBC did it with Inside Beverly Hills, a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the small town (area, less than 5 sq. mi.; pop., 30,000) where the great, rich, famous and beautiful stars of Hollywood live and play. Unhappily, NBC showed the customers little Hollywood living and less playing. The principal commodity the community has to offer is glamour, and in its advance ballyhoo NBC shrewdly used the come-on: "Visit the homes of the stars!" But though the camera got to the front lawn, rear garden, perch and doorstep of many a noble mansion, it never quite managed to get inside.

Typical Town? With Art Linkletter as host, and the stars twinkling on and off in a series of filmed interviews, Beverly Hills was jokingly presented as a fabled little hamlet whose 600 doctors and 500 lawyers make it "the sickest and crookedest town in the country." Then, brushing aside the jokes, the show tried to present Beverly Hills as a typical American town--and merely succeeded in stripping it of its glamour. Introduced were a churchgoing father of four (Jimmy Stewart), a home-loving, family-raising couple (Rory Calhoun and Lita Baron), a beauty who spends her time quizzing kids on the Bible (Eleanor Powell), a couple who have been ideally married for 30 years (the Sam Goldwyns). There was no telling how many fascinating residents were considered and rejected for the show as not fitting a phony and tedious concept.

Inside Beverly Hills was neither true, good nor beautiful, but it got inside most U.S. TV homes, was seen by an estimated 54 million people. Said Sullivan, on hearing the bad news: "NBC won a Pyrrhic victory. It took 25 stars to beat me." This week, with NBC once again throwing comedy into the Sunday-at-8 spot, Sullivan could feel confident that the network would not soon repeat its coup of tempting so many viewers to look at so many stars in so indifferent a show.

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