Comedy Spotlight

Background

By the mid-1950s, television networks annually ordered far more pilots than they could broadcast as series, creating a large backlog of unsold pilots. The industry began packaging these pilots into summer anthology series to provide fresh programming and recoup production costs. ABC and NBC pioneered the concept in 1956, but CBS did not air its first such series until the summer of 1960, when it launched The Comedy Spot and New Comedy Showcase.

Production and content

Art Gilmore hosted The Comedy Spot in 1960. For the summer of 1961, the series was retitled Comedy Spotlight and consisted entirely of reruns of episodes of General Electric Theater. In its final run in the summer of 1962, it reverted to the name The Comedy Spot and consisted entirely of unsold pilots, one of which was a repeat of an episode aired in 1960 on New Comedy Showcase. On July 19, 1960, The Comedy Spot aired the unsold pilot "Head of the Family," which featured Robbie Petrie, a writer for a comedy television show who struggles to explain his job to his son Ritchie.

With a revamped cast but largely the same characters, a reworked version became the successful sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966), and the pilot's plot served as the basis for that show's February 1962 episode "Father of the Week." CBS filmed a pilot titled "A Pony for Chris" for a proposed series called Medicine Man, starring Ernie Kovacs and Buster Keaton, in which Kovacs played a traveling medicine salesman in the 1870s. The day after filming some scenes, Kovacs died in an automobile accident on January 13, 1962.

CBS planned to broadcast the pilot as an episode of The Comedy Spot in 1962 but dropped the idea after problems with Kovacs's estate.

Broadcast history

The Comedy Spot premiered on June 28, 1960, as a summer replacement for The Red Skelton Show, airing 11 episodes over 13 weeks on Tuesdays from 9:30 to 10:00 p.m. Eastern Time. It returned in summer 1961 as Comedy Spotlight, replacing The Tom Ewell Show in the 9:00–9:30 p.m. Tuesday slot, premiering on July 25 and running nine consecutive weeks through September 19.