The three networks "rushed to copy this latest hit format, quickly filling prime time with similar contests".
)[1] For years, ABC had "struggled to cobble together a TV schedule",[2] but following the network's major success with Disney-produced series Disneyland in 1954, other Hollywood film companies began embracing television.
The hour-long umbrella series featured TV adaptations of three Warner Brothers movies: Cheyenne, Casablanca, and Kings Row.
[1] Immediately following Warner Brothers Presents, ABC scheduled The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp.
Over the next few years, "the rush to Westerns had become a virtual stampede so that, by the fall of 1959, viewers had their choice from a staggering twenty-eight different Western-based prime time series.
[3] By 1954, the American television industry had begun to consider the idea of packaging these unsold pilots in anthology series and airing them during the summer, providing television networks with a way of both providing fresh programming during the summer rerun season and recouping at least some of the expense of producing them.
Summer Originals, the New York Times wrote that "the problem of what to do with ‘pilot’ or sample films of projected television series that previously have failed to sell has been solved.
[9] DuMont hoped to go into independent television production; the company's studio facilities and Electronicam system were used to produce CBS's The Honeymooners during the 1955–56 season.
The crumbling and eventual death of the old DuMont Network meant the 1955–56 television season would be the first year in which the three major remaining U.S. television networks would be the only full-time commercial participants in prime time, a situation that was to remain for the next 31 years, until Fox entered prime time on Sunday, April 5, 1987.
As of November 1, You'll Never Get Rich officially became The Phil Silvers Show, swapping time periods with Navy Log.
Summer Originals on ABC and Sneak Preview on NBC were the first U.S. anthology series composed of unsold television pilots.