The show, hosted by
Alistair Cooke in his American television debut, featured diverse programming about science, the arts, and the humanities. The program featured original works by playwrights such as
William Saroyan, interviews with public figures such as architect
Frank Lloyd Wright, and performances by many of the most prominent entertainers of the day such as
Jack Benny and
Orson Welles. A heavily abridged version of Shakespeare's
King Lear starring
Orson Welles, staged by
Peter Brook and directed by
Andrew McCullough, was telecast on 18 October
1953 on
CBS.
Leonard Bernstein and
Jonathan Winters made their first television appearances in the series. Bernstein gave his first televised music lectures on the program, and conducted one of the earliest telecasts of excerpts from
Handel's
Messiah on it. The best remembered episode featuring Bernstein was his first, transmitted on November 14, 1954: an analysis of
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in which the conductor demonstrated what the music might have been like if Beethoven had left some of his discarded music sketches in the symphony.
Hans Conried was featured in the 1958 episode "What Makes Opera Grand?", an analysis by Leonard Bernstein showing the powerful effect of music in opera. Conried played Marcello in a spoken dramatization of act 3 of
Puccini's
La bohème. The program demonstrated the effect of the music in
La bohème by having actors speak portions of the
libretto in English, followed by opera singers singing the same lines in the original Italian. Author Stuart Kallen, in his 2012 work, ' The History of American Pop ', (Greenhaven Publishing), claims that the show, in 1953, was the first American television programme to play a rock and roll record, '(
Crazy Man Crazy)', by
Bill Haley and His Comets. It was used in the soundtrack of ' Glory in the Flower ', starring
James Dean. ==References==