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I normally don't review television, so when the press release arrived touting this particular artifact from the dawn of the medium, my first instinct was to ignore it. The prominence of Boris Karloff in the promotional flyer, though, caused me to take a second look. The entry for this series on the IMDB really peaked my interest. Adaptations of stories by Poe, Faulkner, Cornell Woolrich (including "Post Mortem," one of my favorites), John Dickson Carr rubbing elbows with appearances by a lot of actors at the crossroads between classic studio Hollywood and it's decline (or transition, if you will). Not only that, but this particular series contains the final performance of Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes! So I requested a screener.

Unfortunately, the screener contained but a single episode of the series: "The Brush-Off," first aired in November of 1950, and no Karloff (and no Cornell Woolrich and no Sherlock Holmes) to be seen anywhere. It did, however, have the pilot episode of The Real McCoys on the same disc, about which I have nothing to say. "The Brush-Off" is an interesting artifact. I don't know that it's "good." I'm not even sure I have the contextual feel for its qualities at all. Television of this vintage is a very different animal from film or even from the television that comes along in the mid-1950s. It's a weird conflation of radio drama and stage play, performed live, with an accompanying organ track (the kind of organ track that persisted with soap operas longer than with any other genre). This particular episode starred a very young Leslie Nielsen as a hapless actor who overhears a plot to bump off a prominent agent. The other cast members include Royal Dano as one of the killers and a pre-Superman George Reeves as the prospective victim, who, it must be said, deserves every bit of bumping-off that can be provided. This is exactly the same sort of story that would be grist for the mill for Alfred Hitchcock Presents later in the decade, but the visual idiom couldn't be more different.

The first thing you'll notice about the picture is the murk. The video signal was not particularly refined at the time. Nor, for that matter were the production values. The episode is filmed on obviously painted flats, a la a stage set, though no live audience seems to be present. I presume that the cumbersome early video cameras and restricted camera angles are to blame for the tight framing of most shots, though it's also possible that the meat-grinder nature of the early medium prevented anything but the most rudimentary blocking. Unlike film, television began as a writer's medium, and, to a lesser extent, an actor's medium. Nielsen is surprisingly good at live performance. George Reeves--whose entire career was in television--is surprisingly stiff. Everyone occasionally gropes for their lines. More amusing, still, is the single-sponsor advertisments. Suspense was brought to you by Auto-Lite automotive parts, and darned if their ads didn't have a pleasant retro-cool animation style. One misses the presence of Hitchcock deflating the sponsors, alas.

The downside of only having a single episode to examine--particularly a single episode of an anthology series--is that it doesn't provide enough information about the rest of the series. Did I get a bad episode relative to the series' usual standards? A good one? An average one? I have no idea.