What to watch on your early color set!

[David Roper]

Originally Posted by holmesuser01

1965 seems to be when many shows made the big switch to color. The Wild Wild West on CBS started in 1964, and went color in 1965, as did Petticoat Junction, and The Beverly Hillbillies, and Bewitched, to name a few.

1965 was a transitional year, that's for sure, but a couple of corrections are in order. It would be more accurate to say that the 1965-66 season was one big transition period from B&W to color.
NBC of course had quite a few color offerings at night in the mid sixties, but CBS had done very little color broadcasting up until this time, no doubt still bitter after all those years about the stillbirth of its field-sequential color system. By 1963 ABC had several nighttime series in color every week. At that time CBS had none and was really doing almost no color broadcasting whatsoever outside of the occasional special or "Wizard Of Oz". But just like ABC's formation of a TV network in 1948 prompted CBS to quickly do the same (or be left out in the cold), ABC's plans to expand its color offerings in 1965 caused to CBS pull out the palate, going from 0% weekly color in 1964 to about 50% in 1965, which ended up being a little bit more than ABC did that fall. Paul Henning had lobbied heavily in 1964 for a switch to color for Petticoat Junction's second season, but the network wasn't yet interested. Heck, The Lucy Show had been filming in color since 1963--and CBS still broadcast those episodes in black and white! Little wonder that Petticoat Junction got the nod to go color in 1965 (a whole year after producers were told there was no reason to do so) along with Beverly Hillbillies, but Wild Wild West was not in color that year. 1965 was in fact WWW's first year, and it went to color (along with everything else) in 1966. Bewitched didn't begin color filming until 1966 either. It was on ABC, which had made some odd choices in 1965 as to which shows would go color first. I mean, The Farmer's Daughter and Ozzie & Harriet? That the former was forgettable even then is borne out by its being virtually forgotten today and the latter already had a thirteen year cache of black and white shows in addition to the fact that it was on its last legs. The 1965-66 primetime schedule is something of a patchwork quilt, with a network's offerings on any given night switching back and forth from black and white to color and back again. About the only thing on NBC that that wasn't in color was I Dream Of Jeannie, reportedly because the network had little faith in it.