During its running of the Jack Lemmon-Kim Novak comedy, The Notorious Landlady, someone at the controls of the film's broadcast inadvertently got the reels mixed up, and it was with some chagrin that a network announcer issued an apology during a commercial break before a substantial portion of the movie was then replayed just to get the continuity back on track.

The series' initial season thus comprised a total of 31 movies–12 from Warner Brothers, 13 from Columbia, 3 from Paramount, 2 from United Artists, plus one classic (Harvey) from Universal Studios in a transaction involving an aborted TV-movie deal.

Given that this occurred just a year after producer-director George Stevens had sued NBC over its telecast of his movie A Place in the Sun (1951), arguing that "the network would damage the film by interrupting the narrative with a series of commercials",[15] this move by CBS to collaborate with a filmmaker on the broadcast of his own work suggested that commerce could, on occasion, co-exist with art.

Then the next evening, the Friday Night Movie kicked off its sophomore year with an oddity: American-International Pictures' Beach Party (1963), the first of a series of zany romantic comedies featuring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.

Additionally, the network poured forth the remainder of United Artists titles acquired two years earlier—a balance of 20 motion pictures, including Stanley Kramer's tense racial drama The Defiant Ones (1958), Jules Dassin's caper classic Topkapi (1964), as well as the inspirational One Man's Way (1964), based on the life of the influential pastor, Norman Vincent Peale.

Among the network's other offerings, Warner Brothers movies maintained their steady minority presence, among them actor Vic Morrow's eccentric interpretation of Prohibition-era bootlegger Dutch Schultz in Portrait of a Mobster (1961)—a film so violent that its repeat performance in June 1968[20] had to be postponed for a later broadcast,[21] as it had been scheduled just two days after the slaying of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.

[22] As the CBS Thursday (and Friday) Night Movie entered the 1967-68 season, media critics took increased notice of the mature topics and risque themes explored in network movies—subject matter heretofore considered taboo in TV-land.

"[23] But with the showing of The Apartment (an Academy Award-winner for Best Picture) and other movies that tackled risky subjects, Gould concluded that "as the networks buy even more recent films, the trend [to challenge previous taboos] will very likely increase."

And Gould's colleague, George Gent, writing on the same page and same issue of the Times, confirmed this sentiment after "national Nielsen figures" revealed that CBS's two-part TV-premiere of the prisoner-of-war drama The Great Escape (1963) had been ranked #1 and #2 of that week's most-watched programs.

Warner Brothers contributions, for example, ranged from soap-opera pathos (Youngblood Hawke, which The New York Times called "as thin and glossy as wax paper"[33]) to wooden heroics (the Troy Donahue western, A Distant Trumpet, with a story that "looked implausible or just plain hollow.

"[48] And upon the arrival of 1969, another media critic made a hopeful New Year's prediction that "[s]ome network will bravely drop one of those nightly two-hour movie reruns" and replace it with "two half-hour situation-comedies plus a one-hour variety show [whose star is] a very young singer with a Southern accent and a guitar".

[53] Indeed, CBS had completed a deal with Fox a year earlier for exclusive rights to televise some of its most recent films (Rio Conchos and Guns at Batasi, to name two), but the network had been allowing those to merely trickle through to viewers at a rate of 5 or 6 per season.

For film fans, however, this third movie-night proved to be only a summer fling, for at the beginning of the 1970-71 season, CBS cancelled its Tuesday anthology to make room for its customary sitcom fodder with new episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres.

Motion picture studios, having withstood the long decline of theater-attendance by families (who presumably preferred to stay home and watch TV), had increasingly re-crafted their product during the 1960s to appeal to a smaller, more mature (adult) audience in both theme and presentation.

"[65] This pact resulted in such successful TV-films as the disaster movie The Doomsday Flight (1966) starring Jack Lord; The Borgia Stick (1967), an industrial spy drama with Don Murray and Inger Stevens; and Prescription: Murder (1968), the original manifestation of Peter Falk's police detective/character, Lt. Columbo.

[75] As a result of the film's success, the new season would witness CBS's determination to increase its output of works produced directly for television—especially during late February to early April 1971, when 5 out of 11 features shown were made-for-TV world premieres.

After 23 successful years, this icon of the airwaves was ordered to vacate the premises[83] and beginning in September, the CBS Sunday Night Movie launched its 1971-72 season with the TV premiere of the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn 1967 comedy-drama, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

There was also the TV debut of the Danny Kaye military comedy On the Double (1961) on June 8, which included a bawdy sequence in a wartime Berlin cabaret where the comedian/hero, in drag, impersonates Marlene Dietrich singing "Cocktails for Zwei" and is later "seduced" in a dressing room by a drunken Luftwaffe officer.

[104]What perplexed viewers about ABC's censorship was that a week later, the same network would show the movie Patton (1970), leaving George C. Scott's swear words intact[105]—a move that may have emboldened CBS to retain the double entendres and much of the blue language in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

In an October 1973 address to the Better Business Bureau in Nashville, CBS president Robert D. Wood discussed "the changing tastes and standards of society and the growing maturity" of television audiences that influenced his network's decision to air such controversial films as In Cold Blood and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Adopting a highly alarmist stance, Power published what was, in essence, an angry manifesto blasting the networks: A guy falls out of a high-rise building, his arms flail and his necktie flaps...and you know that in the next second he is going to be an ex-human being—a horribly broken spill of bones and blood.

[146][147] And with Steve McQueen's box-office smash, Bullitt (1968), as well as Dustin Hoffman's breakthrough performance as The Graduate (1967) and the Clint Eastwood action-adventure Kelly's Heroes (1970) leading a pack of hit premieres, it was one of the Thursday Night Movie's most robust seasons.

It was also a good year for the network's made-for-TV films, largely due to the January 31, 1974 premiere of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which was greeted with near-unanimous praise by critics like Jay Sharbutt, who called the work "profoundly moving...it's the only description that seems to fit this production.

"[148] And Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, who devoted her entire weekly column to the film, praised John Korty's understated direction as well as Cicely Tyson's performance,[149] for which she would win the Emmy Award for Best Actress in a Special Program.

And to round out its list of the season's newcomers, the Richard Burton film Villain (1971) premiered June 27, while the medieval drama Alfred the Great (1969), with David Hemmings in the title role, made its bow the next evening.

[183] The story's heroine (played by Linda Blair), a teen-ager serving time inside a juvenile detention center for young women, becomes the victim of sexual assault when she is forcibly violated with a foreign object by a gang of the institution's most violent inmates.

[187] This case represented one of several legal skirmishes resulting from the television industry's decision to accommodate what CBS president Robert Wood had earlier described as "the changing tastes and standards of society and the growing maturity" of a 1970s audience.

Thus, in addition to the eight premieres in early June (as listed above), there was also the July 18 TV debut of The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz (1968), starring Elke Sommer as an East German athlete who fantasizes pole-vaulting over the Berlin Wall to the other side.

The film was notable for featuring several actors from the 1965-1971 Hogan's Heroes television series, including Ms. Sommers's co-star Bob Crane, along with the show's other regulars, Werner Klemperer, John Banner, and Leon Askin.

"[221] Sherill further argued that CBS's new film did exactly that—by taking the real-life case of persecuted radio entertainer John Henry Faulk (played by William Devane) and dramatizing his battle in court, where he is ably represented by high-powered lawyer Louis Nizer (George C. Scott).