Anthology drama · ABC
Theater Five
August 3, 1964 – July 30, 1965 · 260 broadcasts
Theater Five was ABC's flagship bet that great radio drama could be brought back to life. Broadcast from New York over the ABC Radio Network from August 3, 1964, into 1965, it ran as a daily strip of short, 20-minute self-contained plays across many genres -- a number of them tackling topical contemporary issues -- fed twice a day, afternoon and late night, to subscribing affiliates Monday through Friday. The revival was led from the top down. In 1964 ABC put Ed Byron -- a news-sales executive who had earlier created Mr. District Attorney -- in charge of its plan "for the restoration of top-grade radio drama," a plan delayed, Variety reported, by "a shortage of writing talent up to projected standards." A roster of New York radio veterans -- George O. Petrie, Jackson Beck, Robert Dryden, Elliott Reid, and Romeo Muller (who both wrote and acted, later of Rankin/Bass Rudolph fame) -- doubled as writers and stock company. Its single 1964-65 season captured a remarkable run of early and notable performances -- James Earl Jones, a pre-M*A*S*H Alan Alda, Sammy Davis Jr., Elaine May, and recent Oscar winner Ed Begley -- securing the show's place in the lineage of radio-drama revivals that led, a decade later, to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater.
Collection status:
257 of 260 held (99% complete)
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Episode Spine
Grouped by year. Jump to the full list below, or open a season on its own page.
1964
A small-time gangster's reckless kid brother wades into far deeper trouble than he grasps, on a fog-smothered San Francisco night.
Sealed in a fallout shelter after the bombs fall, a family slowly learns that surviving may be the crueler fate.
Alien minds from the distant world Demos reach across space to invade and seize control of Earth.
A widow becomes convinced her dead husband has come home -- and the footsteps climbing the stairs seem to agree.
A charming male escort's flawless smile turns out to serve a purpose far darker than comforting lonely women.
A schoolteacher uncovers a cabal of mutated students quietly plotting to take over the world.
An aging actor chasing one last role finds himself thoroughly upstaged by a Great Dane.
A young writer inches toward a hotel-roof ledge while his father and his girlfriend flounder to talk him down.
A wink-to-the-audience melodrama that never pretends to be anything but exactly what it is.
A mysterious visitor turns up for a brief stay in this featherweight comedy of manners.
A restless search for the fabled 'Golden People' and their promise of endless pleasure.
What unfolds when the first law of robotics -- that a machine may never harm a human -- is quietly voided.
An anonymous caller torments a woman with obscene calls, and somehow always knows her next move before she makes it.
A U.S. intelligence agent comes face to face with his own exact double -- literally.
A weary tale of spies and their shadows, where the old cloak-and-dagger trade has seen better days.
A hallucinogen-fueled 'trip' curdles into an ordinary murder case in an early radio look at a brand-new drug.
A world-famous author has just died, taking with him the secret of his success: a madman who wrote his every word.
A stuffy fusspot returns from vacation to discover he never left home at all -- and has been having the time of his life.
An astronaut cracks up in orbit and strands the first man ever to walk in space, forever beyond reach.
As a grand old mansion is torn down, the wreckers swear they hear a woman -- a lady far too proud to cry out -- scream.
An astronaut vanishes in space and rematerializes in mission control bearing a message from somewhere beyond.
A desperate addict in agonizing need of a fix tries to hold up the one physician who might help him.
Uncle F.C. and the disturbing collection of heads he keeps -- neatly, in boxes.
Drawn from the Kitty Genovese killing, an older couple watch a woman attacked outside their window while the neighborhood stays silent.
Replaced at work by a machine, a man finds every door to a new job has quietly closed against him.
At a lonely late-night truck stop, a sneering customer needles the frightened patrons about their fear of dying.
A cold-war fable about a little Soviet girl whose one wish is to grow up to be exactly like her mother.
Earth's first lunar landing party is seized by the 'Lunies,' whose notion of world peace proves decidedly odd.
Mutual suspicion curdles through New York's rag trade in a twisty tale of strike-first ethics.
An allegory of a boy who can see the stars in broad daylight -- and of the sins he carries.
A surgeon discovers that the criminal on his operating table, whom he must save, is his own brother.
Given only a short time to live, a man chooses to be frozen until medicine can find a cure.
A frustrated understudy finally gets his big break -- at a steep and unexpected price.
A woman lies murdered and someone in her group-therapy circle did it -- though in the end it hardly seems to matter who.
Sprung after thirty years inside, an old gangster called Big Dolly is determined to pick up right where he left off -- but nothing is the same.
An astronaut has gone missing in orbit, lost somewhere out in the silence of space.
Mysterious signals arrive from deep space, and the long, uneasy work of decoding them begins.
A scientist's tranquilizer could end all crime overnight -- but a world without criminals may not be one anyone can afford.
A blind old man parts with his last treasure, selling it away for a pittance.
The first true conversation between humankind and the dolphins.
What happens when the Law itself decides to take the law into its own hands?
A clever little tale of a red telephone that rings exactly once.
A television producer coaxes a genuine recluse onto a truth-telling game show, with unpredictable results.
A scientist claims his computer can predict any subject's behavior flawlessly -- but can it foresee his own murder?
An East German who escaped to the West slips back across to East Berlin for a thoroughly dishonorable reason.
In an overpopulated tomorrow, citizens may claim plots along the highway medians -- and must kill to hold them.
A strange guest checks into an even stranger hotel in a suspenseful night that never quite pays off.
A thoroughly rotten gangster beats extradition back to the States -- or so he believes.
A rich woman's son schemes to stage his own kidnapping and pocket a $100,000 ransom.
In a youth-obsessed society, the mayor's 'old' father rises up against the rule of the young.
A woman rules her family's every move by any ruthless means she can find -- until a deliciously macabre reckoning.
A pack of young delinquents makes sport of tormenting the elderly Winstead sisters.
A naked, injured man lies in the middle of the highway -- and every passing driver must decide whether to stop.
An old man hires a private eye to find his runaway daughter, who is found but refuses -- for a startling reason -- to come home.
With a transcontinental airliner in danger of going down, one passenger finds he simply can't be bothered to care.
A man wakes in a hospital bed to find he can suddenly read the minds of everyone around him.
A hard-bitten sea captain is utterly transformed after his ship is torpedoed and a strange orange suit becomes his.
Warned by a detective that her husband may be plotting to have her killed, a wife refuses to believe it.
A loyal company man is asked to make a devastating sacrifice -- watch for the biblical echoes and the boss's telling name.
An evening on the town in the big city ends abruptly in gunfire.
A man is hired to pose as another father's long-dead son.
An air-traffic controller who owes money to gangsters is pressured into downing a passenger plane.
A schoolgirl levels an assault accusation at her history teacher -- and dares anyone to doubt her.
A middle-aged man stumbles onto the secret of aging in reverse, growing a year younger with every passing year.
A woman who paid for a ninety-day trip around the world bitterly complains she got only eighty-seven days' worth.
Three unemployed film actors resolve to fake a kidnapping, staging it like a scene from their old pictures.
A man wishes aloud that his quarreling wife would break her neck -- and confesses to murder when she does exactly that.
A boozy, faded film actress signs on for the ultimate publicity gambit -- faking her own death.
You are what you charge -- a warning that only lands once something goes badly wrong.
A man finds a watch engraved with his own name and dedicated to him -- dated a full decade before he was born.
A man who outran old age by forever chasing the international date line westward faces ruin when a car crash threatens to ground his next flight.
A poor Mexican couple receives a wedding gift from a famous artist -- one they do not remotely appreciate.
A businessman abandons his suburban existence; two decades later, a lawyer decides to do the very same.
An alien invasion begins quietly -- the visitors arriving through the body of a teenage boy.
In the business of running a city, efficiency turns out to be absolutely everything.
Hired to gun down an aging judge, a young contract killer finds his target one step ahead of him.
Three miners trapped by a cave-in receive help from a wholly unexpected quarter.
Worn down by endless bickering, a husband meticulously arranges to pass his wife's murder off as suicide.
A couple rob an armored car and hole up in a run-down hotel, where things take a decidedly odd turn.
A man searches high and low for an old friend -- so that he can kill him.
In a spare two-voice drama, human speech itself becomes the fragile music of a civilization slipping away.
Two women each identify the dead man in a hotel room -- and each insists he was her husband.
A quiet neighborhood is rattled by the newcomer in the big house: no car, never eats, and no face at all.
A hospitalized woman wakes inside another woman's body, to the maddening tick of a relentless clock.
You can't swindle an honest man -- but is a con artist himself fair game?
A stream-of-consciousness descent through the mind of an addicted mother whose small daughter is in grave danger.
The Carter family's dream house curdles into a nightmare that offers no happy ending.
A frightened babysitter's only lifeline is the party line she shares with unseen strangers.
A spotless town with no crime, no drink, and no trouble at all -- and the unsettling reason why.
In the jungles of wartime Vietnam, a journalist and photographer are ambushed and rescued by a striking Vietnamese woman who is not what she seems.
A pupil at a strict boarding school pushes back against every rule laid down for her.
Two enemy soldiers, both wounded in the jungle, find themselves facing a shared and deadlier foe.
A woman is nearly murdered -- but the police are far from convinced it happened at all.
When does the ordinary American murder tend to happen? On payday.
The tale of an Alaskan named Lucky, who truly is lucky -- just never in the way you'd expect.
Newlyweds on a deserted road are stalked and menaced by three hot-rodders.
Noises in the night unsettle a household in a slight thriller that never quite earns its scares.
A briefcase left in a phone booth is scooped up by an executive too busy even to look inside -- and it holds a fortune no one is left to claim.
The eternal romantic triangle plays out at a carnival midway shooting gallery.
In a story set in the future, a troubled man seeks out a doctor and a machine that grants wishes.
A washed-up boxer takes one last fight, wins it -- and loses everything that matters.
Five strangers aboard a DC-3 touch down at a destination none of them expected.
An early tale of the 'mechanical brain' era, in which a computer named Charlie learns exactly who is boss.
A pair of baby-snatchers are cornered by a sharp-eyed doctor -- with an assist from the long-dead Gregor Mendel.
A couple of Americans buy a very old Mexican hacienda that comes complete with its own resident ghost.
1965
The very-1960s dialogue dates fast, but the discotheque itself is rendered as one hell of a place.
A crisp, finely acted drama unfolding in the sewing lofts of New York's garment trade.
One of the last five 1937 Cord coupes on earth sits, gleaming and undriven, outside an old Navajo man's desert shack.
An office worker receives an anonymous memo, signed only 'X,' ordering her to resign or face something terrible.
A toothache-plagued Soviet agent with a photographic memory schemes his way into a classified American base.
Two aging pleasure-seekers refuse to admit they've outgrown a town's yearly frolic -- the year the police are told to jail all comers.
Long out of the secret service, Andrew Mallory realizes he's being played -- and has no intention of being anyone's fool.
At seventy-three, a once-great dancer refuses the truth of her age, living in a daydream where she is still young, beautiful, and adored.
A mobster arranges to haul a former gang member back for a session with 'the Whip' -- until the plan goes sideways.
A spacefaring 'Flying Dutchman' pauses at the Lunar station on his endless voyage out to the asteroids.
An old man dies in the hospital of an apparent broken heart -- and a reporter and detective wonder whether that's the whole story.
A predictable but well-mounted melodrama about a bereaved mother and an unwanted boy.
Young Penelope brings an escaped convict home to Grandma's cottage deep in the forest -- care for a cup of tea?
A how-to in murdering your wife -- and getting the police to lend a helping hand.
A scheming butler and maid plot a killing and an impersonation, in a con that's older than they think.
A girl newly home from a youth house comes back to her father and the gulf of a generation between them.
A gangster plans to slip out of the country -- dead, and lying in a coffin.
A hard-up painter and his wife rent a room to an odd stranger who proves to be quite the handful.
Phoning for a simple weather forecast, Nina Lauper finds herself connected instead to someone in the year 2035.
A run of menacing phone calls keeps a married couple awake night after night -- but who is on the line?
A lonely roadside diner on a fog-thick night proves the perfect setting for a slip in time.
A slightly batty Englishman is handed a prediction of his own death -- and seems genuinely delighted by it.
An alcoholic and his son head into the woods to hunt, the father's bottle along for the trip.
An elderly doctor and a young girl compete for the one dialysis machine at the same critical hour.
An Air Force pilot comes to grief in a strange land ripe, as he sees it, for a communist takeover -- guess the country before the final twist.
People are to be frozen for ten centuries in suspended animation -- with or without their consent.
A doctor laboring to save lives in a flood is stalked by the very madman he once had committed.
Roseanne's suitor seems the perfect catch -- until it emerges he told her one story and her father another.
A trivial incident in a New York taxicab sets off a chain of events that ripples clear around the world.
A mysterious 'Dr. Lazarus' recruits a crew of scientists for a six-day building job code-named 'Project Adam.'
A ninety-five-pound, gray-haired nursery-school teacher takes on the mighty Hydra National Bank -- no contest.
Alone in a stalled elevator after midnight, a woman realizes the stranger beside her is dangerously unhinged.
Wouldn't it be lovely to hear exactly what people think as they speak to you? Perhaps not.
Avast, mateys -- a sea serpent turns up at the Dead Bosun's Club out on the Outer Banks.
A candy-store owner receives a strange visitor exactly at midnight -- and can't say who, or what, she is.
The army of the night is on the march -- and it's coming soon to an office near you.
A murderer is handed his own private hereafter in a paradise flowing with milk and honey.
A married couple visits a fortune teller and comes away with a chilling prediction -- and a demand for two thousand dollars.
A welfare investigator tries to help a condemned killer awaiting execution, in a tale with a sting in its tail.
A trio of teens abducts a rock-and-roll singer and demands his ransom on the air.
Is the boy fated to repeat his father's path? Not here.
A wry survival guide to academic life -- and to striking back at it.
A kindly school custodian is charged with molesting a child down in the boiler room.
A young married couple is shipwrecked on Eniwetok Atoll in a solid tale let down by its ending.
Grandfather is dead -- and no one in the family ever seems to leave the house. Why?
An architect finds himself haunted by the ghost of his late employer.
A young boy remembers Colonial America in vivid detail -- from a life he lived long before this one.
A bride is warned that the man she just married may be a killer -- and has to wonder if it's true.
After Aunt Allison's stroke, the greedy heirs turn on one another for control of the family's Hazleton fortune.
An atomic-warhead missile bears down on an army base -- though its point of impact lies in empty country -- toward a surprising end.
A grifter moves up to outright theft, only to learn -- maybe -- that crime doesn't pay.
A Southern widow and her daughter frame a passing drifter for murder.
A shortwave engineer who claims he can speak with the dead takes on missions of revenge -- praying his targets into their graves.
An unhappily married couple is visited by a silent, weeping, altogether strange woman.
A scheme to steal the world's largest ruby is undone by the wrath of an Indian goddess.
A grasping, ruthless man has earned at least three would-be killers -- and manages to cheat even them of the satisfaction.
Two youngsters steal a car and a wad of cash and set off on a night of reckless adventure.
Mrs. Wilson greets a new couple to the block in her own decidedly bewitching fashion.
Two star-crossed lovers plan to die together in an out-of-the-way motel.
An old enemy turns friend, and the gifts a woman once despised become, in time, gifts she welcomes.
A banker loots his own vault and sets sail with his mistress -- a getaway that becomes a very long trip.
Alone in the world and in a hospital bed, an old woman quietly refuses the operation that could save her.
Left to keep house while his wife earns the paychecks, a husband sinks into depression -- it's a matter of pride.
A safari driven by greed pushes into East Africa, where the real big game is gold.
A senator's daughter, touring Italy, is wooed by a charming blackmailer.
A jealous man books passage on the same ship as the married woman he cannot let go -- and a shipboard confrontation turns fatal.
A tender, well-acted study of a teenager dead of an overdose and the grandmother he leaves shattered.
A curse supposedly hangs over the wife of a Ceylon tea-plantation owner -- or does it?
A woman athlete is the best in the world at almost everything -- almost.
An adventure hinging on airmail stamps that are 'airmail' in the most literal sense imaginable.
A killer is loose on a snowbound highway.
A hard-nosed homicide cop can't crack a murder pinned on 'the Bag Man.'
A man's affection curdles for his wife and rekindles for a woman out of his past.
Lorna is a strange child indeed -- for one thing, she happens to be human.
A man ruled all his life by a domineering mother grows up, at last, overnight.
On his deathbed a gangster plots to fleece the greatest patsy of his career, in a sharp, meaty drama.
A yacht's captain, sick of taking the owner's orders, decides it's time he made the calls himself.
A stick-up man walks into Joe's Diner -- in a taut, twist-ending entry counted among the series' very best; an early James Earl Jones.
A cabbie with a pet roulette theory finds a wallet holding three hundred dollars and a credit card -- and Vegas starts calling.
A wealthy businessman comes back to the sweetheart he left a decade ago and finds her, at least, comfortable.
Six months after her husband's murder, a widow springs her revenge on the killer using very unusual bait.
After forty faithful years, an old elevator man and 'Old Nellie,' his creaking car, face retirement and the scrap heap.
On a 1965 airliner, the carrier's unhinged owner shoots the pilots over a menu dispute and must somehow land the plane himself.
A hard-drinking newspaper photographer crosses paths with a girl from the morgue.
Two spouses locked in a long secret affair face the Wednesday afternoon that could shatter both their marriages.
A crook parks his girlfriend and her young son with his straight-arrow brother.
A sketch of a Woody Guthrie-like folk singer that slides into sentimentality.
A Hollywood star stuns the industry by turning down an Academy Award -- an unthinkable act in 1965.
An old blind newsstand operator turns out to be nothing like what he appears.
Sammy Davis Jr. plays a Sinatra-styled gangster in a noir heist that borrows the mood of 'Casablanca' and the finish of 'White Heat.'
A dying ex-convict, freed early after fifteen years, drops in on the old friend who helped put him away -- meaning to take him down too.
An unhinged obscene caller curdles into something far more dangerous -- because he has fallen in love.
A death-row melodrama redeemed by a believable ending and superb harmonica interludes.
An American prisoner of war is interrogated by his captors, in a well-mounted Vietnam drama.
A summer fling with an engineer sours into a stormy affair with a philosopher.
A woman executive plagued by threatening calls escapes on a Caribbean vacation.
The hunt goes on for the Nazi gold said to lie at the bottom of Lake Toplitz.
Elaine May carries a near-monologue -- built, like 'Sorry, Wrong Number,' around a telephone -- in a standout that proves real radio was still alive.
A woman endures her impossible aunt for fourteen years, dreaming of the day she'll inherit her fabulous pearls.
Father and son each turn hit-and-run driver and each rushes to confess the same crime -- toward a neat surprise.
A trek into head-hunter jungle in search of gold, with a beautiful and treacherous woman along.
Every closet has its skeleton -- and there's a rat here threatening to fling all the doors open.
June 9, 1965
The Big Lonely
A little girl's found 'wishing stone' turns out, astonishingly, to grant whatever she asks.
June 11, 1965
The Bottom of the Bottle
A blunt, imposing businessman means to purchase a rambling old house -- along with its former mistress.
A white policeman shoots and kills a Black youth in Harlem and a crowd gathers, in a charged, finely acted drama; an early Alan Alda.
Two reporters chase a hot story through a hotter jungle, machine pistol in hand.
A Northern college student, stranded when her car breaks down in the rural South, is met by an all-too-helpful country boy.
A slumping tournament golfer gets a piece of very good advice.
A solid private-eye yarn in the mold of 'Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.'
A con man sweet-talks a mark into realizing his 'potential'; a guest turn by Oscar winner Ed Begley.
A thorough heel scrambles to cover up being caught with another woman -- each scene closing on the words 'Goodbye Matt.'
June 24, 1965
A Cup of Snow for Lt. Vogel
An amnesia tale tangling a race-car driver, a devoted nurse, and an unfaithful wife.
A troubled daughter meets an understanding father -- seventeen years too late.
When Papa's delicatessen is served a condemnation notice, he calls in his son the lawyer, in a warm Jewish comedy.
A scheme to rule the world by mass poisoning is hatched inside a madhouse.
A teacher loses her faith and her students run wild -- a blackboard jungle for radio.
Marital in-fighting rendered as a battle of Japanese fighting fish -- no contest.
A western yarn with a sting in its tail.
A western sheriff who dreads having to hang a killer works out another way entirely.
The mounting pressures bearing down on the young producer of a television special.
On her honeymoon a bride discovers her new husband with another woman and decides the marriage is over.
An old man plots one last battle -- against the younger generation.
A farmer takes a U.S. senator hostage, demanding the President pull his own son out of the Vietnam War.
An All-American college football star discovers that fame and glory carry a price.
Three alumnae reunite at their twenty-fifth, each guarding a secret, in a tale that leaves you thinking.
With witness descriptions all in conflict after a jewelry heist, a police stenographer claims her ESP puts her on the suspect's wavelength.
An insurance administrator must tell a widow about a fifty-thousand-dollar policy -- and has her own reasons to doubt the suicide.
A contrived beach romance between a surf bum and a third-grade teacher that never rings true.
A soused Shakespearean actor meets his end at the tavern rail as his daughter looks helplessly on; a fine Martin Gabel turn.
From her window a woman sees a killing but won't give the murderer up to police; an Eileen Heckart guest turn.
A boxer refuses to enter the ring -- over a woman.
A commuter who misses the 5:25 to Scarsdale nearly slides back to being twenty-two again.
A science-fiction outing that opens much like 'Planet of the Apes,' three years before that film reached theaters.
Charged with a killing she can't remember, a woman is defended by a psychologist who suspects a second, murderous personality within her.
A ghetto kid marches a reluctant physician to his sick mother's bedside at the point of a gun.
An Upper East Side kidnapping goes comically wrong, in a riff on O. Henry's 'The Ransom of Red Chief.'
The series' final broadcast: an adopted boy must be taken back from the foster parents who love him.
The Story
Theater Five was ABC's flagship bet that great radio drama could be brought back to life. Broadcast from New York over the ABC Radio Network from August 3, 1964, into 1965, it ran as a daily strip of short, 20-minute self-contained plays across many genres -- a number of them tackling topical contemporary issues -- fed twice a day, afternoon and late night, to subscribing affiliates Monday through Friday. The revival was led from the top down. In 1964 ABC put Ed Byron -- a news-sales executive who had earlier created Mr. District Attorney -- in charge of its plan "for the restoration of top-grade radio drama," a plan delayed, Variety reported, by "a shortage of writing talent up to projected standards." A roster of New York radio veterans -- George O. Petrie, Jackson Beck, Robert Dryden, Elliott Reid, and Romeo Muller (who both wrote and acted, later of Rankin/Bass Rudolph fame) -- doubled as writers and stock company. Its single 1964-65 season captured a remarkable run of early and notable performances -- James Earl Jones, a pre-M*A*S*H Alan Alda, Sammy Davis Jr., Elaine May, and recent Oscar winner Ed Begley -- securing the show's place in the lineage of radio-drama revivals that led, a decade later, to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater.
Full story — coming soon while it's being curated.
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