TT: The ghosts of Studio One

Like many another aging baby boomer, I’m fascinated by early television, and in particular by the live telecasts that dominated network TV from its inception at the end of the Forties to the introduction of videotape in the late Fifties. So when Koch Vision sent me a copy of Studio One Anthology, a six-DVD box set containing kinescopes of seventeen dramas that aired between 1948 and 1956 on Studio One, perhaps the best-remembered anthology drama series of the live-TV era, I immediately felt a “Sightings” column coming on.
Studio One Anthology contains, among other interesting things, the original 1954 TV version of Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, which was later turned into a Hollywood film starring Henry Fonda and a stage version that was first performed on Broadway in 2004. I never cared for the movie and had mixed feelings about the play, but I was eager to see what Twelve Angry Men looked like in its original form.
How did it measure up to its better-known successors–and is Studio One as good as its still-formidable reputation? To find out, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal and turn to my “Sightings” column.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.