The series aired for two seasons, one of 39 episodes and the other of 36, before its cancellation in 1946, and adapted a combination of literary classics, contemporary literature and films.
Guest stars included many notable actors of the day, such as Ralph Bellamy, Jack Benny, Joan Blondell, Joe E. Brown, Virginia Bruce, Jack Carson, Ray Collins, Robert Cummings, Louis Hayward, Rita Hayworth, Hedda Hopper, Van Johnson, Charles Laughton, Ida Lupino, Virginia Mayo, Burgess Meredith, Thomas Mitchell, Gregory Peck, Rosalind Russell, Ann Rutherford, Sylvia Sidney, Akim Tamiroff and Keenan Wynn.
[2] He was fired after a disagreement with Clark, when Welles wanted to substitute an adaptation of Don't Catch Me by Robert Powell which Clark had scheduled with his own adaptation of Ferenc Molnár's The Guardsman, starring himself and his wife Rita Hayworth.
Despite the show's sponsors being very happy with the idea (Hayworth was then at the peak of her stardom), Welles was sacked within three hours of the argument.
[1] It was during Welles' stint that his friend President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, and so he made his penultimate episode, I Will Not Go Back (broadcast 17 April 1945) an FDR special, dedicating it to "an American president who has fallen in battle.