The Week in Review

The TV screen was not likely to become a major issue in the U.S. as it had been in Britain (see below), but last week the U.S. TV industry was campaigning for votes of its own with all the vigor and many of the weaknesses of a full-fledged political campaign.

Not all of the electioneering was successful. Appearing for the first time after a summer of well-publicized tiffing. Funsters Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were so busy patching up their feud that they mostly forgot to be funny. For the second week in a row Thornton Wilder proved himself TV's most adaptable playwright.

Producer's Showcase offered up his tender Our Town in a musical version that preserved much of the quality of the original, only to drown its author's most eloquent asides in a droning of catchpenny lyrics by Tin Pan Alley's Sammy Cahn.

TV's standbys are the continuing situation series that keep viewers coming back to their sets at the same time week after week. Like politicians, the standbys are often corrupted by long tenure. Last week a batch of new candidates took the platform to win the weekly vote. Navy Log, the best of them, started off with a tense incident about frogmen that captured much of the eerie excitement of underwater warfare as long as its frogmen stayed below. Out of the water, they were left to founder in a thoroughly contrived dramatic situation.

CBS gave 90 minutes to a sentimentally tinted reprise of Judy Garland's famed 1951 song-and-dance act at the Palace. Judy performed with all the stridently throaty nostalgia of a starlet just picked to play the lead in some future filming of The Judy Garland Story, and if the stage seemed overly empty when Judy was making her changes, her legs at least --when they reappeared--proved more than adequate to any candidate's platform.

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