Omnibus

Photo courtesy New York Philharmonic Archives

OMNIBUS, stands as a bright beacon in television history. It brought together the most remarkable assemblage of talent ever presented on American screens, and demonstrated for the first time that television could bring the arts, science and letters to a mass audience. Conceived as a model for a newly-emerging medium, this award-winning collection offers a vivid, moving document of American social, political, and cultural concerns at mid-20th Century.

Omnibus began as an initiative of the Ford Foundation, aiming to exert a socially-responsible influence on commercial broadcasting. The series aired successively on CBS, ABC, and NBC, regularly attracting over 13 million viewers to each episode.

When its executive producer Robert Saudek died in 1997, the New York Times dubbed him "the alchemist in chief of what is often called the golden age of television," adding that he "gave the era of live television some of its most elevating and electrifying moments." A comprehensive directory today lists Omnibus as "the most outstanding and longest-running cultural series in the history of commercial network television. When it left the air, something wonderful about television went with it."

Omnibus showcased both established stars and rising talent, many of whom made their television debuts on the show. Classic drama, modern comedy, musical theater, ballet, jazz and popular music, folk music and dance, art and architecture, avant-garde literature, American and world history, criminal and constitutional law, international relations, sports, science, and engineering are among the topics it presented to viewers.

The series was distinctive not only in its diversity of subject matter, but also, thanks to the Ford Foundation's backing, in its independence from advertisers, delicately referred to as "subscribers," whose messages never interrupted program segments. With objectives resembling those later undertaken by public television, Omnibus launched its first program 18 years before the appearance of PBS.

That initial Omnibus episode aired four days after Dwight Eisenhower's first presidential election. In the months following, Stalin died, Elizabeth II's coronation was televised, Watson and Crick published their DNA findings, the Rosenbergs were executed for espionage, and the U.S. signed the Korean War armistice. By the second Omnibus season, the Army/McCarthy hearings were in full swing, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against segregated public schools, and the U.S. tested a hydrogen bomb. Subsequent seasons coincided with creation of the Warsaw Pact, the rapid growth of the American civil rights movement, introduction of a polio vaccine, the Hungarian uprising, the launch of Sputnik, the Nixon-Khrushchev "Kitchen Debate," and revocation of the publication ban on "Lady Chatterley's Lover." The final Omnibus broadcast occurred a day before the doomed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. As the Omnibus collection vividly reveals, America at mid-century was hardly complacent or conformist, let alone bland; rather it was a nation in social, political, and cultural ferment.

In the midst of rampant Cold War suspicions, producer Robert Saudek successfully resisted political and corporate pressures to shun performers, writers, and directors whose names appeared on communist-hunting blacklists. Secure in the Ford Foundation's support, he made his hiring decisions solely on the basis of talent.

Omnibus's innovations became staples of television programming ever after:

A short, slow-motion film of a running jackrabbit inspired Mr. Saudek to devise a then-novel magazine format for most episodes, allowing unpredictable leaps from one topic to the next, with as many as five different features in each show. A notable heir to this format was Don Hewitt, a director for Omnibus, who later replicated the structure for CBS in his long-running news series 60 MINUTES.

When James Mason and his wife Pamela appeared on Omnibus to read from authentic letters exchanged between Napoleon and his lover Josephine, Mr. Saudek began searching for other historical documents on which he might base Omnibus episodes. He engaged a prominent historian who delivered a survey of the Adams family, drawing on direct quotation for dialogue. The following year, a staff member obtained transcripts of Billy Mitchell's court-martial, which the Pentagon still classified as secret 30 years after the event; undeterred, Omnibus proceeded with a faithful re-enactment, and the non-fiction television drama was born.

Before Omnibus, unscripted television was a rarity. But the series host, the urbane Alistair Cooke, invariably spoke extemporaneously, without depending upon a teleprompter. Mr. Cooke thereby maintained an engaging, conversational tone, and could smoothly expand or curtail his remarks to fit the strict time requirements of each live broadcast.

The bulky cameras and sound equipment of early television presented daunting challenges for producers inside the New York Times seeking to escape the confines of a studio, but Omnibus helped pioneer the live remote broadcast, as when Mr. Cooke paid a visit to the offices of The New York Times.

The motion-picture industry initially regarded the new medium of television as its antagonist, but Omnibus persuaded some distributors to let it broadcast film excerpts prior to theatrical release, resulting in an unexpected surge of box-office receipts. Similarly, Omnibus invited authors, such as Fred Allen and Pearl Buck, to discuss their forthcoming books on the program. Their publishers, at first skeptical, were delighted with the effect such appearances had upon sales. Long after Omnibus showed the way, cross-promotion remains an indispensable technique for marketers everywhere.

Although Omnibus restricted advertisers from interrupting program segments, the series experimented with novel advertising techniques. For its sponsors in early seasons, the series embedded some commercial messages within short educational segments it called "institutionals," forerunners to what came to be known as "infomercials."

But its most profound influence was on the relationship between advertisers and the broadcast networks. In the early days of television, following the model established for radio, sponsors produced and owned their own programs, determining both their content and placement in the broadcast schedule. The production costs for Omnibus, by contrast, were for the first five seasons subsidized by the Ford Foundation, permitting networks to reverse the model and sell advertising time within and around each broadcast.

Over the course of Omnibus's eight broadcast seasons, television penetration of American households grew from 10% to 90%, and programming evolved into a corporate commodity, with the goals of sponsors paramount. By the 1960's the networks, favoring film recording over live transmission, moved all but their news and daytime drama production from New York to the West Coast, and Omnibus's wide-ranging intellectual curiosity no longer suited the commercial demands of the medium. For five decades after its final, 164th broadcast on April 16, 1961, Omnibus was virtually unavailable until now.