Save Ted Bessell From Cancellation!

Every week, he seemed to exasperatingly bleat “Ann!” at Marlo Thomas on That Girl. Ted Bessell’s role as Donald the lacklustre boyfriend may have resulted in fame, but it was nothing compared to his first starring role a few years earlier on a TV show that few people today even remember, a show that resulted in fans bubbling up in anger at NBC.

The show was called It’s a Man’s World. As best as I can tell, it was an attempt to dramatise post-teen angst in changing, early ‘60s America. That Girl, it wasn’t.

The concept sounds very interesting, but concepts don’t always translate into results. Not all the critics were kind when It’s a Man’s World debuted September 17, 1962. Barbara Delatiner of Newsday wrote “Perhaps the overall dullness of the hour can be attributed to one thing: reality, especially when dressed up in silly fiction, can be boring.” Percy Shain of the Boston Globe opined “its opening story was one long yawn. In fact, properly speaking, it was no story at all.” And here’s a pan from Variety’s “Rose” from September 19th:

This show had a bad initial outing. The association of the name of Peter Tewksbury with what was passed off as “comedy-adventure” was the greatest puzzle of all. The comedy was just as elusive as the adventure, or anything else, to justify putting “It’s a Man’s World” into production. Maybe Tewksbury as creator-producer-director has something special in mind for later installments (and considering what he did for “My Three Sons” it’s within the realm of possibility), but inviting the audience to do an encore on that Monday 7:30 period, after what was perpetrated last week, may take a bit of doing. If this is the season of “no mischief” programming on the networks in eschewing action-adventure, certainly what’s been substituted in this instance (and for a whole hour yet) is considerably worse and a lot more dull. For the truth is that Tewksbury, and his scripters for his initialler, Jim Leighton and James Menziers, didn’t take the trouble to substitute anything. It had no humor, no characters, no plot, no spark.
Designed to relate the “adventures” of four boys on a houseboat on a river in a small Midwest town, two of them collegians, one a kook; the kid brother and a wandering minstrel of sorts, it emerged as ersatz Mark Twain, full of half-baked homilies, the quartet of principals all clean and pure as all get-out—cute, coy, scrubbed and unreal with nary a bad thought in their collective minds. It all had to do with the kid brother’s loss of $32 and the wandering minstrel-with-a-guitar making the great sacrificial gesture of returning the money, new boots or no.
Glenn Corbett, Michael Burns, Ted Bessell and Randy Boone play the foursome in what NBC and Revue euphemistically describe as a “permanent character anthology.” The viewer was lulled into such boredom that he couldn’t even feel sorry for them.

But critics be damned. Post-teens (perhaps even angsty ones) in changing, early ‘60s America latched on to the show—just not in large enough numbers to keep it on the air. Today, anyone with some small slight against the thousands of TV channels out there will click onto some on-line petition site in a vain hope of stopping the cancellation of their personal entertainment wishes. In 1962, campaigns against axing shows were rare. But one rose up to try to save It’s a Man’s World, assisted in great quantities by the show’s producer.

This is from the L.A. Times, November 15, 1962

A Revolting Development
BY CECIL SMITH
I sometimes think the most fascinating thing about television is its audience.
It’s the largest audience that anything ever had anytime anywhere; its immensity is staggering.
It’s an articulate and vocal audience that rises on its hind legs and screams. At the moment, it has been screaming very loudly about the audacity of Howard K. Smith in placing on the air a convicted perjurer and discredited man to analyze the career of one who came within a whisker of being President of this nation.
It’s an audience of fierce loyalties, willing to battle tigers for the things it loves. It rarely wins its battles, but it’s willing to take up the mace again the next time around.

I measure the fierceness of these battles only in the barrage of letters aimed at this desk.
The greatest barrage I ever received was on the production of “The Iceman Commeth,” on Play of the Week last year—the majority of them in deep and sincere praise of the program and containing bitter hope (unrealized) that television would offer more work of this stature. There were healthy outcries in scores of letters at the deaths of Matinee Theater, Omnibus, Playhouse 90.
But the death most deeply mourned by letter writers was that of Sam Peckinpaugh’s passionately honest little series The Westerners, which died after a bare 13 weeks on the air.
New Snowstorm of Letters
During the last week, there has been a new snowstorm of letters, prompted by a hint in a wire service column in these pages that It’s a Man’s World, a new NBC entry, might not be long alive on TV’s fickle air. I rather think the report was premature—that the columnist might have been using the hint only to stir up the faithful, an old journalistic trick.
But at any rate, the hordes have risen in their wrath, lances cocked, ready to battle any who would disturb the sanctity of It’s a Man’s World.
The letters are from young and old, businessmen and housewives, teen-agers and grandmothers. They range from the note of a girl in La Jolla who thinks Glenn Corbett is the greatest thing alive since sliced bread to threats of, “I’ll kick the screen of the set if they take that show off the air.”
Why the Enormous Appeal?
I feel the enormously intimate appeal of It’s a Man’s Worth, like The Westerner, is the fundamental honesty of the show. Creator Peter Tewksbury assembled a collection of kids and rather than force them into intricate plots simply let life act upon them. The program is less drama than mood, hunger, restlessness and the desire to understand and be understood.
Last Monday’s entry, for example, was concerned more with the small town reaction to a budding romance between Tom Tom (Ted Bessell) and Molly (Dawn Wells) than to the romance itself. Molly is the steady girl of the town hero, now in the army, and the town doesn’t approve of her dating anyone else.
In the end Tom Tom and the hero fight, but it isn’t really their idea—they’re forced into it by the town busybodies.
Director Tewksbury swept the entire town into the lens of his camera, cutting from face to face, whispered comment to chattering gossip, winding up with nobody winning, nobody losing, just a perplexed grocer pulling the boys apart and saying: “We shouldn’t make them fight.” It was a striving, building, moving show that touched you where you live. It’s no wonder it inspires such loyalty in its fans.

And from the Washington Post of January 8, 1963:

NBC Unmoved by Protests Against Burial for ‘Man’
By Lawrence Laurent
NBC hasn’t made a move to change the Jan. 28 burial date for “It’s a Man’s World” (7:30 p.m., Mondays, WRC-TV) and the network may have to face the noisiest funeral in television history.
The letters keep on coming and some of them are downright angry. Producer Peter Tewksbury claims that 40,000 letters of protest have been written. Writer Ron Bishop bought advertising space in Daily Variety to write an “Open Letter to the Industry.”

Ted Bessell, who plays Tom-Tom DeWitt, and Randy Boone, who plays Vern Hodges, made a cross-country trip to enlist support and to appeal to NBC board chairman Robert Sarnoff and NBC president Robert Kintner. (They had to settle for an unsatisfactory chat with Mort Werner, vice president in charge of programming. Mort said only one-fourth of the 40,000 letters is valid, because each letter-writer had written to four people).
Jan Norris, who plays Irene in the series, flew home to Pittsburgh and tried to line up new sponsors. She claims to have won “definite interest” from a foods company and a soft drink bottler. Jan also visited Mort Werner.
I took the position a couple of weeks ago that the whole scheme was a little too slickly engineered to have developed spontaneously. I also offered a considered judgment that Booth Tarkington’s and Mark Twain’s reputations would survive, in spite of Tewksbury and writer Bishop.
Then, I got some letters.
Fred W. Siffrin of 715 Wyngate dr., Frederick, Md., wrote that TV critics need a new set of standards. He added:
“All of the episodes contained the shifting of the psychological viewpoint away from external objectivity and allowed the viewer to see the story more from the inside. One way this is done in ‘Man’s World’ is by cutting back and forth between two parallel scenes. One holds the meaning to what is happening in the other. All the episodes contained a respect for character that was never betrayed in the end.”
Patricia Brown of 4746 68th ave., Hyattsville, Md., suggested I had spent too long on a recent special assignment. “Perhaps,” she added, “it’s just that you’ve been out in the sun too long or are just to [sic] old to crusade anymore.”
She added, of the cast: “Those kids react in a very positive way to their daily situations and frustrations.” Mrs. Hugh A. Maplesden of 8433 Piney Brand rd., Silver Spring, was more kind. She wrote: “The main characters in ‘It’s a Man’s World’ seem to be a crosscut of the small town of humanity and if you have ever lived in a small town you could appreciate how well compiled these people and incidents really are.
“I think it is a sin that anyone should even consider shelving this interesting program. It is one of the few on television—including those morose children’s cartoons—that doesn’t harm anyone or shake down the morals of our morally shaky youth of today.”
Another protest was entered by Miss Duffie Monroe of McLean, Va.: “It is unfortunate that people can cancel a show so worthy of remaining. It is an injustice to those of us who watch and expect shows which are different. It is true that the show will go, no matter how much we do. But still I have tried and this makes about the tenth letter I’ve written.”
While I am not exactly ecstatic about “It’s a Man’s World,” I do have to grieve about its replacement. NBC will fill Monday night with feature movies. Who would have thought that the magnificence of a great TV network could ever be reduced, voluntarily, to the status of a second run movie theater?

Perhaps the unhappy viewers received an omen and didn’t realise it. Bessell and Boone’s tour to save the show came to a quick stop when the jeep they were riding in broke down in the dead of December and had to be towed into Albuquerque.

It’s a Man’s World went off the air at the end of January 1963 and we can only presume protesting fans moved on to something else, except for that girl in La Jolla who must have had to pay the repair bill for the TV set she promised to kick in.

It’s all just as well. Bessell went on to a role in the feature film McHale’s Navy Joins the Air Force (McHale wasn’t on it) before gaining fame by hearing Marlo Thomas croak “Oh, Donald!” at him every week.