The NBC Presents Short Story Radio Program

Background

The National Broadcasting Company marked its 25th Anniversary in Radio in 1951. Throughout the year, NBC aired several celebrations and special programming to mark the event.

NBC premieres Short Story as a 25th Anniversary feature

NBC Presents: Short Story first aired on February 21, 1951 as a natural extension of NBC's critically and popularly successful NBC University Theater productions, later retitled NBC Theater. Beginning in 1942, NBC had formalized its concept of the NBC University of The Air and its companion NBC Inter-American University of The Air. Throughout the mid-1940s NBC produced some twenty-five productions specifically designed to both educate and entertain. NBC Presents Short Story continued in that vein, devoting the first two minutes of each production to a brief history of the author of the work to be presented that evening.

NBC Theater (the former NBC University Theater) ran through February 14, 1951. With the emphasis on retaining quality while at the same time lowering expenses, NBC introduced an anthology of the world's finest short stories. The series was to feature the greatest short story authors throughout history. And indeed the series went to great lengths to tout the authors of this fine series of classic short stories. The authors were some of history's most celebrated, award-winning writers:

Ernest Hemingway | Conrad Aiken
F. Scott Fitzgerald | Shirley Jackson
James Aswell | William Faulkner
Sherwood Anderson | H.D. Boyleston
James Street | Gladys Hasty Carroll
Ben Ames Williams | Elizabeth Alexander
Ring Lardner | John Steinbeck
Len Petersen | Grahame Greene
John Cheever | Frank R. Stockton
Jean Kenyon | Ray Bradbury
James M. Cain | Geoffrey Household
Erskine Caldwell | John Galsworthy
Anton Checkhov | James Thurber
John Collier | Edgar Allan Poe
Herman Melville | Robert Louis Stevenson
Mary Shelley | Charles Dickens
Stephen Vincent Benet | Neil Bell
Felicia Gizycka | Prosper Mérimée

As marvelous as was the promise of such celebrated authors' works, NBC Presents: Short Story was almost immediately beset with a myriad of pre-emptions that continued on for both seasons of the fine series. A sustained production for its entire run, NBC used the series as much to tout its other Silver Anniversary programming as to serve as a late-night place-holder for future features. It's almost as if NBC felt that it needed to mount yet another in the long lineage of its fine NBC University of the Air productions as it celebrated its heritage, while at the same time hedging its bets with a far more economical production.

As it eventually transpired, NBC pre-empted NBC Presents: Short Story a total of seven times and ultimately left eleven performed and recorded productions utterly abandoned. They were transcribed by NBC Orthcoustic but never aired. Those productions were:

• The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Bell-Tower Of Bonnadonna by Herman Melville
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• The Duel Without Honor by Alexandre Dumas
• The Fall Of The House Of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Oblong Box by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Rope of Hair by Guy de Maupassant
• The Spectre Bride by M. G. Lewis
• The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Thing In the Tunnel by Charles Dickens

We're certainly not inclined to believe that all seven pre-emptions were last-minute productions--with the possible exception of the H.V. Kaltenborn 30th Anniversary Tribute. The other six preemptions were ambitiously mounted productions, clearly long in the planning. More curious for Edgar Allan Poe fans, it would seem that the overwhelming majority of the Poe selections for the series never made it to air. For all of NBC's bleating about Radio programming costs throughout the 1950s, it's all the more surprising that NBC abandoned eleven of its fifty-two recorded programs from the canon. This was after all a sustained production. The programs had already been performed and recorded. It remains a mystery why the above eleven programs were abandoned. At an estimated cost of $5,000 per production, that money was already spent. Indeed, NBC replaced NBC Presents: Short Story with a documentary series, Who Goes There?.

It's perhaps no coincidence that 1951 was the year that NBC inaugurated its first coast-to-coast Television Network service. This, much as with its January 4, 1928 Dodge Victory Hour broadcast which, for the first time, linked all of NBC's variously 'colored' networks of the era to one coast-to-coast Radio broadcast. NBC was all about Television as it entered its 26th year and its previous prestigious sustaining features over Radio seemed almost put on hold with that first coast-to-coast Television broadcast. NBC had turned a corner in broadcasting history, as did much of the nation from that point forward.

Series Derivatives:

Notes on Provenances:

The most helpful provenances were newspaper listings.

OTRisms:

We have no idea where the other circulating logs got their information that forty-five episodes of NBC Presents Short Story actually aired. We traced the series over both WNBC in New York City and the mid-west broadcasts in Wisconsin. Neither chronology supports forty-five broadcasts--least of all from NBC's own flagship station, WNBC, during the period. There were forty-one actual broadcasts of the series. The other eleven recorded programs simply never aired due to a combination of pre-emptions and an abrupt cancellation of the series.

We're naturally more than willing to keep an open mind. If the SPERDVAC can demonstrate to us--from any source--that NBC's flagship station pre-empted its own widely publicized specials to air another NBC Presents Short Story in its place at the last minute, we'd love to learn about it. Perhaps someone at the SPERDVAC is aware of something that the National Broadcasting Company isn't.

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