The Week in Review

Most daytime radio and TV shows seem aimed at ten-year-olds. But on Sunday the rules change. Instead of soap operas and giveaways and cosmetic hints, the Sunday audience is considered grownup enough to hear--as they did this week --readings from Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (on NBC's Anthology) and to enjoy an appraisal of Ralph Waldo Emerson by the University of Southern California's Professor Frank Baxter (CBS), who pretends to be nothing more or less than an interested and interesting teacher.

Several explanations are offered for the cultural flowering of Sunday. According to Hubbell Robinson, CBS vice president in charge of TV programming, Sunday was chosen for culture because "that's when the entire family is at home and receptive." Less generous critics suggest that audience ratings are responsible; they say that Sunday ratings have always been low, and therefore the networks moved their "worthwhile" shows into Sunday's hours, where they would not compete with the easily salable evening time. Whatever the reason, the radio-TV Sunday has turned out to be a refreshing, satisfying and educational U.S. institution.

The Fourth R. Sunday morning, naturally enough, is devotional. In the earlier hours, radio religion ranges from the evangelical thunder of Pasadena's Rev. Herbert Armstrong ("Catastrophic happenings will soon shake the world!") to the fundamentalist tenets of Grand Rapids' Dr. Richard De Haan ("Read the Bible closely and never out of context . . ."). Television's religious note is more often interdenominational and inspirational. This week Dr. Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking) and his wife devoted 30 filmed minutes (CBS) to assuring viewers that an inferiority complex should not prevent financial success. The Peales told how a friend of theirs, a perennial business failure, utilized his return to the bosom of the church to develop a profitable line of costume jewelry: he featured the "mustard seed of faith" (Matthew 17:20) in charm bracelets, clips and watch fobs. Said Dr. Peale: "It helps to have faith in God as well as in yourself."

For the children, TV offered a number of nondenominational Sunday schools. On Fourth R-Religion, pretty Lori Darmi explained how bread is made, giving credit to God for the grain and to Pepperidge Farm for the skills needed to prepare the loaf. On the filmed They Live By, parents were briefed on how to answer such adolescent questions as "Where is God?" (the answer: "Everywhere"). Exploring God's World spent an agreeable half-hour exhibiting sea shells that were shaped like harps or striped like zebras or wore fur coats (to guard the shells against acids in Alaskan waters).

Escape Hatch. Hardly a split-hair's distance away from inspirational churchmen, the Sunday philosophers take up their stand. Some of the most stimulating debate is about books. On Invitation to Learning, Moderator Lyman Bryson, Critic Clifton Fadiman and Professor Arthur Mizener dealt with Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers, brought out the fact that Dickens wrote the classic at the age of 24 without any previous plan or outline. Fadiman held that Dickens failed in his aim of ridiculing English justice in the book's great trial scene and ended, instead, by just writing one joke after another. The panel's conclusion: Pickwick Papers is a "fairy tale that is endlessly and eternally funny." Critic Fadiman, a Sunday natural if there ever was one, returned to the air a few hours later on NBC's Conversation, this time to discuss puns with pun-making Novelist Peter (The Tunnel of Love) De Vries, Alan Green and Editor Bennett Cerf.

The networks thoughtfully provided an scape hatch from too much talk. NBC devoted 2 1/2 hours to the semifinals of the U.S. National Singles tennis matches at Forest Hills. For music lovers, Mutual presented a 2 1/2-hour broadcast of Thomas' opera, Mignon; CBS offered the Peninsula Music Festival from Ephraim, Wis., and NBC an hour-long summer concert featuring Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty waltz.

Ham & History. On Sunday even drama shows a decent respect for the intellect. A Precious Heritage concerned itself with the quarrel between revolutionary and conservative Jews in colonial Rhode Island; Hall of Fame paraded the life and times of Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite and founder of the Peace Prize; You Are There added a touch of ham to history in probing "The Emergence of Jazz," with the help of Louis Armstrong. But with Old Jazzman Armstrong on the trumpet, you were, in fact, there.

The most vigorous Sunday talk comes hot off the griddle of political forum and panel shows (which frequently provide Washington correspondents with a story or two on an otherwise dull day). An attentive listener could have learned this week that the U.S. was in a recession (according to Labor Leader Dave Beck on Youth Wants to Know) or that the country was not in a recession (according to Secretary of Labor James Mitchell on the American Forum). Secretary Mitchell also starred on a CBS documentary, Labor '54, which found him teamed with his uncle, Actor Thomas Mitchell. Uncle Thomas was televised in filmed visits to both the Lincoln and Washington monuments, while his off-camera voice intoned the Corwinesque prose that still turns up in TV documentaries. On Man of the Week, Seaborn Collins, the newly elected commander of the American Legion, got a mauling from Panelist William Hines of the Washington Star. Hines harked back to the Legion's recent criticism of the Girl Scouts' Handbook, read successive patriotic excerpts from the book. Commander Collins, who seemed uncertain what all the shooting was about, protested that "you are picking out the good things in that book."

On Meet the Press, A.F.L. President George Meany exposed a bland and impervious hide to four eager newsmen. Even as determined and tenacious a questioner as Lawrence Spivak was unable to make any headway, and when the New York Times's Stanley Levy suggested that Meany had worked with Governor Thomas E. Dewey to enforce the licensing of stevedores on Manhattan's odorous docks, Meany snapped: "I guess you don't read your own newspapers. I publicly opposed licensing."

Cloudy Screen. By sundown, Sunday's quality shows disappear in a flood of guns, games and dramas like the Roy Rogers Show, Earn Your Vacation, the College of Musical Knowledge, the Loretta Young Show and What's My Line? These shows are not bad in themselves--but they offer a cloud no bigger than a TV screen on the Sunday horizon. The increase in their numbers means that network program directors have discovered that Sunday can be a pretty good thing after all. In this frame of mind, they could spoil everything by making Sunday an everyday affair.

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