On the evening of May 7, 1947, RCA-made, Image Orthicon-powered television cameras came to life at NBC’s Studio 9-H in Rockefeller Center — the same studio where, a decade earlier, Maestro Arturo Toscanini had made NBC a cultural force with live broadcasts of the NBC Symphony. 1
The new show was called Kraft Television Theatre, and represented a turning point for the new medium in two respects.
First, it was live theater, like Broadway on the air. It was not filmed, canned, or recycled from radio. Kraft Television Theater was written and produced for TV, performed live by marquee actors, and broadcast into American living rooms in real time.
I was also American advertising’s first serious foray into the new realm of television.
1 And where, three decades later, Saturday Night Live would launch another five decades of comedy history.
