Theater Five — 1965
151 episodes broadcast in 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.
◆ ◆ ◆
Other seasons: 1964 ·