Camera Three

Camera Three was an American anthology series devoted to the arts. It began as a Sunday afternoon local program on WCBS-TV in New York and ran “for some time”^[1] before moving to the network on CBS at 11:30 a.m. Eastern time, airing from January 22, 1956, to January 21, 1979, and then moved to PBS in its final year to make way for the then-new CBS News Sunday Morning, which incorporated regular segments devoted to the arts. The PBS version ran from October 4, 1979, to July 10, 1980.

Camera Three featured programs showcasing drama, ballet, art, music, anything involving fine arts. The first network presentation was a dramatization of Feodor Dostoevsky’s short story “The Drama of a Ridiculous Man,” with Canadian actor John Drainie as the “ridiculous man,” and directed by Francis Moriarty.

Said media columnist Charles Mercer of the initial network broadcast, “The concept of Camera Three, as aptly expressed by its moderator James Macandrew, is that ‘television is more than an engineering miracle.’ In the past, it has revealed the artistic dimensions of the medium in multipart dramatizations of Moby Dick, The Red Badge of Courage and Crime and Punishment. Unquestionably it will go on to do similar superior works.”^[1]

One of its most notable presentations was a condensation of Marc Blitzstein's leftist opera The Cradle Will Rock. Presented on November 29, 1964, it was a dramatic demonstration of how far television had come since its early days, in its willingness to present a work that surely would have been banned from the airwaves during the era of Joseph McCarthy.