'Way Out

Did You Know?

• Preservation funding for "Button, Button" was provided by the John H. Mitchell Television Preservation Endowment.
• The preserved episode screened at the 2024 UCLA Festival of Preservation.

Origin

The show was a last-minute replacement for a Jackie Gleason talk show CBS was about to cancel. Producer David Susskind brought in Roald Dahl to help get it on the air quickly. CBS scheduled it alongside The Twilight Zone on Friday nights at 9:30 Eastern time from March to July 1961. Liggett & Myers, the maker of L&M cigarettes, was the main sponsor. Writers included Larry Cohen and Sumner Locke Elliott. Only one episode adapted a Dahl short story: the premiere, "William and Mary," where a wife gets revenge after her husband's brain is kept alive in a bowl. In "Dissolve to Black," an actress playing a murder victim on a TV studio set finds the line between rehearsal and reality blur as she gets trapped on the nearly empty set. Other episodes featured strange images: a snake crawling up a carpeted staircase in a suburban house, a headless woman in an electric chair with a light bulb for a head ("Side Show"), and half a man's face erased ("Soft Focus"). Dahl's story "Skin" was bought along with "William and Mary," but CBS thought it was too gory to air, especially after they asked Susskind to keep the brain in the jar off camera. The cast included Martin Balsam, Michael Conrad, Mildred Dunnock, Kathleen Widdoes, Murray Hamilton, Martin Huston, Henry Jones, Mark Lenard, Kevin McCarthy, John McGiver, Barry Morse, Richard Thomas, Doris Roberts, and Fritz Weaver. Dahl was paid $650 per episode to host the first three shows. CBS hired Susskind to produce 26 half-hour episodes. Dahl told Susskind he only wanted to host the first three to cover his son's medical bills, but he enjoyed it so much he chose to stay on. The original plan was to film Dahl sitting on a rock in Central Park answering a phone, but the cold January weather and high costs meant the introductions were shot in a studio instead.