Word: caesares
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...Personally, I think Sid Caesar is the greatest, but ..." The line has been echoing all season in Radio City and on Madison Avenue, in the top-level shoptalk about NBC's Saturday night Caesar's Hour, TV's best comedy show. TV bigwigs have not let their tribute to Caesar keep them from rendering unto the sponsor what is the sponsor's: the right to expect that so costly a show ($223,000 a week, including time charges) will pay off in a far bigger audience than its sagging ratings have reflected. Last week Caesar...
...Caesar's reign also closes a TV era in which the comedian was king, and leaves supremacy to a new breed of blander favorites-the Perry Comos, the Lawrence Welks. the Tennessee Ernie Fords (see below). Almost all the comics have surrendered or compromised in the face of TV's terrible challenge of keeping both material and audiences from getting tired. Next fall CBS's Jackie Gleason will take a sabbatical, and NBC's George Gobel will try to salvage his popularity by cutting down his exposure. Such perennials as Bob Hope, Jack Benny and Burns...
...comedian, even the TV Pleistocene Age's Milton Berle, has matched Sid Caesar's staying power or his grip on the loyalty of hard-core fans. More than that, by common show-business consent, he is one of the truly great clowns. Apart from sheer technical mastery of pantomime, dialect, timing and the ad lib, Caesar has a creative gift for spoofing the stuffy and the phony and for finding endless fun in universal human foibles and frustrations. His career, which began as a $10-a-week saxophonist on New York's borsch circuit, has made...
...Much, Too Long. What went wrong? "If somebody could tell us," says an NBC executive, "maybe even Sid's psychoanalyst would be delighted to hear it." One part of the answer is simply that he has been visible too frequently for too long a time. Caesar's Hour has been uneven in quality, has suffered from a tendency to prolong sketches and milk laughs. Sidekick Coca is still missed, say diagnosticians, both for herself and because Caesar seemed more sympathetic as a henpecked fall guy in her sketches than he has as the assertive husband of Nanette Fabray...
Whatever the cause, while his prestige bloomed, Caesar's ratings skidded. In March the Academy of TV Arts and Sciences heaped him and his program with five Emmy awards, but ABC's Bandleader Lawrence Welk, on the air at the same hour, had already cut deeply into Ihe Caesar audience.* Last month his audience shrank by Nielsen figures to 5,800,000 TV homes. For a show that cost only $5,000 more a week, Perry Como's sponsors were getting viewers in 13,870,000 homes. Caesar had become a luxury no advertiser could afford...