#Youtube alfred hitchcock hour episodes full
#Youtube alfred hitchcock hour episodes tv

It was late in the day for live anthologies, but these shows were videotaped in New York “as live”, which is why announcer Paul Tremayne says they’re “pre-recorded”. These episodes have the staging and direction of live TV, cutting between cameras on adjacent sets where all the action occurs.

#Youtube alfred hitchcock hour episodes tv

These are kinescopes (recorded off TV monitors during broadcast) with commercials for L&M cigarettes and other CBS shows. Rather, people who become exposed to the show in this way will be the first to get excited by the prospect of any official DVD, if someone should make the effort to put one out. I’m not one of those who believe that such exposure of obscure shows will impede a legitimate, cleaned-up release. It turns out that 11 of the 14 episodes are currently on YouTube in lousy if watchable shape. What’s being omitted? Is “way” short for “away”? In any event, this show has been invisibile for decades, although executive producer David Susskind reportedly donated the tapes to the Paley Center for Media, where they can be seen - if you live in New York or Los Angeles. Almost every episode features an oppressive relationship, either with a domineering husband and mousy wife or a nagging shrew and her henpecked hubby.ĭahl’s show was called Way Out, although for some reason the opening titles have an apostrophe before “way”. Dahl’s series, which ran for only 14 episodes, feels like a merging of Serling’s horror and sci-fi with Hitchcock’s obsession with unhappy marriages.

In 1961, Dahl was tapped to host a new anthology that preceded Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone on Friday nights. That celebrated 1958 episode was written by Roald Dahl from his own short story. Still, viewers vividly recall certain marital murders, the most famous probably being the Hitchcock-directed “Lamb to the Slaughter”, in which a devoted housewife (Barbara Bel Geddes) reacts to her husband’s intention to file for divorce by bludgeoning him to death with a frozen leg of lamb and feeding the evidence to the police. Episodes explored plenty of other modern anxieties, generally within a solidly American middle-class framework. This was a dominant theme of the show, though not the only one. Hitchcock himself hosted these tales with droll little soliloquies to the effect that all this marital murder was jolly good fun. The most prominent example of this was Alfred Hitchcock Presents, where stories regularly featured spouses at each other’s throats, literally. A few oases on the prime time schedules seemed dedicated to the proposition that middle-class suburban marriage was hell on earth. There was a flipside, however, or rather, a flippant side.

#Youtube alfred hitchcock hour episodes full

This certainly seemed true of the happy families who populated American TV in the ’50s and ’60s, especially the sitcoms full of pleasantly competent housewives, bread-winning husbands, and cute if slightly mischievous offspring whose problems were easily resolved within half an hour.

At the beginning of Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy declares that all happy families are alike.