Drama & Anthology · CBS / Mutual
Sears Radio Theater
February 5, 1979 – August 2, 1979 · 129 broadcasts
Sears Radio Theater was one of the last big-budget bids to bring drama back to network radio. Premiering on CBS on February 5, 1979 and sponsored by Sears, Roebuck, it ran a different genre every weeknight, each with its own marquee host: Lorne Greene's Western Night on Monday, Andy Griffith's Comedy Night on Tuesday, Vincent Price's Mystery Night on Wednesday, Cicely Tyson's Love and Hate Night on Thursday, and an Adventure Night on Friday helmed in turn by Richard Widmark, Howard Duff, and Leonard Nimoy. Produced and directed by radio veterans Elliott Lewis and Fletcher Markle at Paramount's Studio A, scored by Nelson Riddle, and broadcast in stereo, it drew on a deep bench of Golden-Age radio actors -- June Foray, Eve Arden, Peggy Webber, and dozens more. After a year on CBS the series moved to Mutual in 1980 as Mutual Radio Theater, which became the last network radio-drama series when it signed off that December. This is the complete held first CBS season: 129 nightly plays broadcast from February to August 1979.
Collection status:
129 of 129 held (100% complete)
◆ ◆ ◆
Episode Spine
1979
A frontier couple saddled with 160 worthless acres of Idaho scrub scheme to unload the parcel by spreading word that it is riddled with gold.
A young married couple so combative they turn even their own breakup into a contest over who gets to walk away first.
After a bank holdup, a police lieutenant's wife and the bank staff are held captive by the robbers.
A commercial artist confronts the ruin of his livelihood after an injury leaves his drawing hand and arm paralyzed.
Stranded by a jungle plane crash, six survivors face an impossible vote: which one of them will be put before a firing squad.
A grizzled cook and a green wrangler come to blows over whether to head back and finish a fight they once walked away from.
Two weeks from meeting to marriage -- a dash to the altar whose fallout may not spare the couple's friends either.
A killing in the park leaves one young man dead among thirteen nannies, each keeping watch over her own pram.
A young couple wears itself out trying to find a rest home that will take in two very elderly ladies.
High on a Colorado peak, two climbers -- one struck blind by a fall -- must get themselves down before nightfall.
A government offer of a $10,000 check to clear him off his land lands a mixed-heritage rancher in a world of trouble.
A single furious shareholder sets out to topple an industrial giant all by himself.
Two young women turn amateur sleuth, toy ouija board in hand, to track down a killer known as the Sidewalk Slasher.
A grief-stricken father sets out to kill the driver whose car ran down his young son.
A five-member spaceship crew is forced down on an uncharted planet that proves anything but empty.
A young Liberian travels to 1875 Laramie, Wyoming, to walk the ground where his grandparents -- escaped American slaves -- had built thirteen years of freedom.
A Hollywood talent scout is certain the sultry blonde he has found is the next Marilyn Monroe, if not a new Jean Harlow.
A girl of fourteen swears she is her own sister -- forcing the question of whether that sister was ever more than invention.
Three strangers who have never exchanged a word are thrown together for a night trapped in a stalled elevator.
Posing as the founder of a village school in an African port, a narcotics agent hides the real reason he is there.
To reach the summit of Longs Peak, a genteel Englishwoman hires the unlikeliest of guides: a whiskey-soaked fugitive.
Two brothers, each meeting her at a different moment, both fall for the very same young woman.
A terrifying account of how an innocent young woman is slowly remade into a vampire.
A biochemist insists to his scornful colleagues that he has sealed his late wife's soul inside a laboratory vial.
A celebrated travel writer and his wife, seized by South China Sea pirates, find their captors want munitions as badly as American cigarettes.
The men in a frontier saloon wager on whether a gut-shot preacher can cling to life until sundown.
A striptease dancer rehearsing a new act mistakes her guardian angel for a professor who vows to make her a 'flaming' sensation.
A woman who cannot accept that she is dead keeps telephoning the man she is unknowingly haunting.
A man cultivates a poisonous mushroom in his cellar, meaning to feed it to his overbearing wife.
A New York cabbie returns $200,000 left in his taxi and, to his astonishment, is repaid with public scorn rather than gratitude.
One of the world's most seasoned soldiers-for-hire plots to seize an entire island kingdom with just seventy-two hired men.
A freed convict and a prison escapee each scheme to keep for himself the $4,000 they buried after a bank job five years earlier.
A man's nightmare turns Kafkaesque at the teller's window, where the bank's computer has no record of him and lists him as six months dead.
A bayou town is convinced a newcomer is a werewolf -- certain of it because they knew her grandmother was one.
A television star tries to talk a despairing young actress back from a window ledge.
A blind girl masters her fear of ballooning and proves the bravest aboard when a violent high-altitude storm strikes.
Confederate sympathizers scheme to hand California and its gold over to the South.
An old lamp brings its owners nothing but misery until they learn how to manage the genie inside.
A struggling actor with a pregnant wife tries to fake his own death to collect on a life-insurance policy.
In wartime Vietnam, a soldier puts himself in the line of fire to keep peace between a local holy man and his own army.
A scene from the life of 'Mother' Mary Harris Jones, the labor organizer who turned up wherever a major strike was under way.
Two small-time con men reaching for the big score run up against a master of the game -- a bootlegging Chicago gangster.
A CB-radio operator famous for tall tales overhears a genuine plot to kill the governor, and no one will believe him.
A celebrated TV correspondent, claiming to be dying of cancer, cons a producer's soft-hearted assistant into nursing him.
A man gives his wife an anniversary necklace, unaware that it carries a curse.
A prosperous San Francisco businessman is convinced that his daughter's new husband, a French duke, is a fraud.
A television star trades his career for politics as the honorary mayor of a small California town.
A middle-aged couple's first child is a boy who eats ravenously and ages five years with every passing day.
A fifty-year-old tie-factory worker, mocked by younger coworkers for being unmarried, stuns them all by meeting a man of fifty-two.
A young college woman is sent to her great-aunt to learn how to heal body and mind with the humblest of weeds.
'Wild Bill' Hickok is hired to bring law and order to the Kansas railhead town of Abilene.
Henry Morgan casts his wry eye over the passing American scene, in the first of three comic outings.
An American professor's settled life is upended when he is chosen to lecture at a university in Vienna.
A writer's tenderness toward a newly divorced woman evaporates the moment her pregnancy comes to light.
The crew of an electronic surveillance ship on a secret Far East mission is captured by a flying saucer.
The true story of a slave who mailed himself in a crate from a Virginia plantation to freedom in Philadelphia.
A couple pick California for their getaway, hoping in vain to escape the friends who always ruin their vacations.
A wealthy grande dame who flaunts her money and belittles everyone around her becomes a natural target for murder.
A seventeen-year-old grieving one grandmother's death finds unexpected joy when he seeks out the other.
A honeymooning couple hunting Caribbean treasure face deadly rivals for the same prize.
A drifter and a brute compete for the love of the same woman.
Henry Morgan trains his wit on TV talk shows, disco joints, car ads, and the Late Show's seventeenth rerun.
Interpol knows a terrorist called Grappa is planning a killing, but has no idea who Grappa really is.
A Navy veteran chasing a Hollywood career gets surprising help from a fellow acting student when his money runs out.
A young Coast Guard officer investigates a string of yacht disappearances over a 30,000-foot ocean trench.
Ownership of a prize bull reignites a long-simmering feud between two Texas families.
A perpetual dabbler's wife reaches her limit when he takes up sculpture and hauls home a slab of granite pilfered from a breakwater.
A woman jolts awake in terror, having just watched, in sleep, the moment of her own death.
A crowd wonders why a Chinese-born tailor makes no move to escape a burning building.
An American graduate student of Spanish descent vanishes without trace in a repressive South American country.
A newspaperman is duped into billing a small-town hardware dealer as the fastest gun in the West.
The last of Henry Morgan's three comic monologue outings on the series.
A young wife tells her elderly husband's kidnappers she would sooner they made good on their threats than pay a $250,000 ransom.
A professional golfer is seized by a strange compulsion to brawl with his caddy -- and even with his admirers.
A twenty-seven-year-old woman sets sail alone in a 54-foot boat to finish what her dying father dreamed of: circling the globe solo.
Only an outside twist of fate can hurry the slow-blooming romance between a mountain-town postmaster and a widow of twelve years.
A comic account of the first recorded case of an affliction whose sufferer can speak only in rhyme; written and directed by Norman Corwin.
A woman is charged with murdering someone who was three thousand miles away in Delaware at the moment of the killing.
A small college town argues bitterly over whether to block a planned march by the American Fascist Party.
A U.S. narcotics agent sets out to smash another dope ring, this time with a woman partner he doubts belongs in such danger.
A young orphan on her first day of work is taken hostage in her room by a notorious bandit.
Two ex-cons hatch an outrageous plan to hijack a DC-10 and sell it for scrap aluminum at eighty cents a pound.
A renowned physicist who can uncannily bend fellow scientists to his will pays a steep price for his treachery.
A tender story of a penniless, out-of-work middle-aged couple who make their home on Chicago's elevated 'B' train.
Two college women hoping for a day's skiing are trapped by a whiteout, a blizzard dumping four inches of snow an hour.
A buffalo hunter searches for the peg-legged man who killed his parents in a wagon-train massacre years before.
A second-rate stand-up comic signs an exclusive contract with a mysterious Mr. Deville who guarantees to make him famous.
A mine owner, miserable at his wife's insistence on living in New York, weighs a hired killer's offer to arrange a fatal 'stroke.'
Two TV executives try to rescue their network's ratings by reviving a faded star, now a hopeless alcoholic.
Seven refugees from the shipwreck of modern life seek peace on a remote Caribbean island.
The head of a stage line's Wyoming division meets unexpected resistance when he takes the law into his own hands.
A young man can memorize everything he reads, but understands almost none of it.
Three 'kittens' from an elegant nightclub come to regret agreeing to a foolish celebration.
An older playwright and a young novelist agree to pool their gifts to adapt her first book for the stage.
A woman claiming to be a U.S. agent hires an expatriate to smuggle her into guerrilla-held Burma to retrieve a briefcase of secret papers.
Two young motorcyclists become convinced that an old man they meet in the Mojave is hoarding a fortune in buried gold.
A two-day pass for two soldiers stretches into a hazy three days, yet somehow neither is charged with being AWOL.
A father and brother race to find a nineteen-year-old escaped from a mental institution before he can harm anyone.
A college student and his girlfriend chase overnight riches by going into the hamster-breeding business -- with a gimmick.
Two trusted British Museum guards conspire to steal the world's most precious book, the 'Shah Namah.'
The true story of a seventeen-year-old Wisconsin farm girl trapped in a haunted house by a large black panther.
A middle-aged man braces for the arrival of his sixty-two-year-old mother, who has just left her fifth husband.
The decline and fall, through cocaine and heroin, of one of the world's great jazz horn players.
An English businessman who comes to Vienna to buy 30,000 dolls is accused of spying for the U.S., then abducted and beaten.
The tragic tale of a beautiful, passionate young woman who lights up the days -- and nights -- of a wandering ranch hand, for a while.
A young man is sent into the world to find new energy so his fellow villagers can run their whizbangs and heat their homes.
A TV star's homecoming visit turns to nightmare when her son is kidnapped.
A wealthy family's housekeeper struggles to manage her job and a daughter whose boyfriend she has never met.
A celebrated space pilot is dispatched on a three-month probe alongside an exact clone of himself.
A sheriff is determined to uncover the truth about a pair of bizarre twins -- one good, one evil.
The rulers of a tiny monarchy plot a counter-revolution to win back their power.
A Vietnam veteran stages a phony holdup to prove his courage to his wife.
A woman's eccentric uncle arrives for the town's annual pig festival and teaches its worst gossip a lesson.
In his second outing, con man Fontaine Harris heads to Hollywood flush with the proceeds of a fake movie company.
An honest plumber and a small-time hustler pull off a 'perfect' kidnapping, then find they need their victim's help to collect.
A man and woman who were once young and in love are reunited thirty-five years later.
A sheriff grows suspicious of a new resident who wants no one anywhere near his property.
A best-selling novelist in love with an aspiring young writer discovers that she is the very thing blocking his work.
The Story
Sears Radio Theater was one of the last big-budget bids to bring drama back to network radio. Premiering on CBS on February 5, 1979 and sponsored by Sears, Roebuck, it ran a different genre every weeknight, each with its own marquee host: Lorne Greene's Western Night on Monday, Andy Griffith's Comedy Night on Tuesday, Vincent Price's Mystery Night on Wednesday, Cicely Tyson's Love and Hate Night on Thursday, and an Adventure Night on Friday helmed in turn by Richard Widmark, Howard Duff, and Leonard Nimoy. Produced and directed by radio veterans Elliott Lewis and Fletcher Markle at Paramount's Studio A, scored by Nelson Riddle, and broadcast in stereo, it drew on a deep bench of Golden-Age radio actors -- June Foray, Eve Arden, Peggy Webber, and dozens more. After a year on CBS the series moved to Mutual in 1980 as Mutual Radio Theater, which became the last network radio-drama series when it signed off that December. This is the complete held first CBS season: 129 nightly plays broadcast from February to August 1979.
Full story — coming soon while it's being curated.
Gallery
Art pending