The New Shows

TV news programming grew in stature last week with the addition of two shows by two first-rate newsmen--John Daly and Eric Sevareid.

Open Hearing (Thurs. 9 p.m., ABC) concentrates largely on the work of congressional committees "where the issues--great and small--first rise to the viewable surface." The opening show was a sharp, well-done photographic wrap-up of the McCarthy-Army fracas, and was defined by John Daly as an "unfinished morality play." The show dealt with each of the principals in turn, and, mostly, in their own words. It highlighted the interesting process by which Senator McCarthy has sought, in a few short weeks, to change his role from that of participant in the fray to that of a sorrowing observer of an unfortunate scuffle between his counsel, Roy Cohn, and the Army's counsel, John Adams. Daly was eminently successful in his announced purpose of taking up one subject each week "and wringing it dry."

The American Week (Sun. 6 p.m., CBS) was a more uneven offering. Eric Sevareid started in major-league fashion with diagrammed displays of what would happen to big cities of the U.S. if they were targets of the H-bomb, and followed with filmed quotes from Physicist Ralph Lapp ("Let's have the facts given to the public") and ex-Diplomat George Kennan. But anticlimax followed with a "human interest" look at baseball and a too-long digression into the progress of the Wisconsin movement to vote the recall of Senator McCarthy. Sevareid announced that "I expect to use some words here and there, for old times' sake." In his opening show, he used just a few too many.

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