Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season One

I wanted to take a breather here at the end of season one of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and look at what the show has been like so far.

In the days where ultra-short seasons have become not only routinely possible–a good thing–but virtually mandatory–a bad one–it’s staggering to think about the sheer amount of work that goes into a 39-episode season. Anthology shows offer their writers and directors some relief on that front, since they can leave a bad week and a bad choice or two behind them, but they also demand constant invention. New characters. New plotlines. New twists.

AHP, in a move that should have helped manage any potential loss of energy, had a revolving door of writers: certain names, like Robert C. Dennis and Francis and Marian Cockrell, pop up again and again, but no one has anything like Rod Serling’s run of writing the teleplays for an incredible 28 out of 36 episodes of The Twilight Zone’s first season. Even if you factor in that a handful of those are adaptations of short stories or radio plays, that’s a ton of creative energy to demand from one defining voice. (It worked out brilliantly, as we’ll get to in a few weeks; it took Serling quite a few seasons to hit any recognizable level of weariness.) Hitchcock, reserving most of his time for movies, was much more sparing with his directorial largesse, helming only four episodes in his show’s first season and otherwise simply enjoying himself as our dryly witty host.

But while Hitch himself may have staved off artistic exhaustion from TV’s constant demands–those four episodes are all very good to great–I think it’s fair to say that the show’s first season still succumbed to a certain shambling-about as it tried to come up with week after week of semi-plausible suspense plots. Sprinkling in a few more oddities, like the barely crime-tinged “Santa Claus and the Tenth Avenue Kid” or the Twilight Zone precursor “The Case of Mr. Pelham,” might have helped keep things fresh–even if that strategy also brings you the weaker “Whodunit.” This season has rarely been obviously bad, but there have been too many episodes I’d class as “defensible” rather than “great.” I look over the list, and I find myself saying, time and time again, “That had its good points …,” as though I’m arguing against my initial sigh.

Indeed, almost all of these do have their good points, especially in their performances. The show gathered up an incredible crop of 1950s character actors and budding stars–and sometimes even already existing stars, like Claude Rains–and often gave them eccentric material to work with. It took interesting angles–there are several episodes that provide sympathetic, if not always optimistic, looks at older women, for example. Still, when a show can be as compelling and memorable as AHP at its best, it’s disappointing to see it have so many outings that are at best “reasonably satisfying.”

But I wanted to hit some highlights here. My top ten episodes this season, in chronological order, are:

“Revenge”

“Salvage”

“Breakdown”

“Our Cook’s a Treasure”

“The Long Shot”

“The Case of Mr. Pelham”

“The Cheney Vase”

“You Got to Have Luck”

“Back for Christmas”

“The Creeper”

I was tempted to sub in “Triggers in Leash,” because of the Western setting and the fun of watching Ellen Corby’s character’s life-saving cunning, but I think I’ll let this stand. It creates a good set of associations for me: Vera Miles’s hauntingly blank face at the end of “Revenge,” the mean long-term revenge plot in “Salvage,” the iconically posed Joseph Cotten in “Breakdown,” that almost 3D cocoa offering in “Our Cook’s a Treasure,” the amused acceptance in “The Long Shot,” the uncanny horror of “The Case of Mr. Pelham,” the much more down-to-earth horror and unexpected ownage (“Probably mad, you know”) of “The Cheney Vase,” the electrically unpredictable John Cassavetes performance in “You Got to Have Luck,” the dark comedy of “Back for Christmas,” and the (appropriately) creeping dread of “The Creeper.” A lot of these moments come down to endings, which means that an AHP episode that can pull off a strong conclusion if halfway home, and as previously mentioned, we’ve got some incredible work here from the constantly changing cast.

Thank you for sticking with me through this journey. I’ll come back to AHP later on, though I think I’ll switch to highlight-based rather than comprehensive coverage there. But after two weeks off, I’ll return on May 7 to kick off season one of The Twilight Zone.