The show, hosted by Alistair Cooke in his American television debut, featured diverse programming about science, the arts, and the humanities.

The program featured original works by playwrights such as William Saroyan, interviews with public figures such as architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and performances by many of the most prominent entertainers of the day such as Jack Benny and Orson Welles.

A heavily abridged version of Shakespeare's King Lear starring Orson Welles, staged by Peter Brook and directed by Andrew McCullough, was telecast on 18 October 1953 on CBS.

Bernstein gave his first televised music lectures on the program, and conducted one of the earliest telecasts of excerpts from Handel's Messiah on it.

The program demonstrated the effect of the music in La bohème by having actors speak portions of the libretto in English, followed by opera singers singing the same lines in the original Italian.