The Alfred Hitchcock Hour

Hitchcock and the commercials. Hitchcock's signature was his friendly rivalry with sponsors, which probably helped his sponsors simply by the recognition. It tough to rate an anthology, but most of these stories were very good. His best ones were with characters you didn't really relate with, but still felt something for. Such was the case for what I call his "masterpiece", with Gig Young and Robert Redford playing brothers with sky high superiority complexes in "A Piece of the Action", and with Robert Keith, Ed Byrnes, and Stephen McNally in "Final Escape", and with Mr. Haney himself in "The Jar". Then there were some comedies. One in which he purposely made it predictable that a "dining club" was eating its members when they got fat enough. The dark comedy was funny because of how oblivious the member was for being the next meal, even though everything pointed to it. There weren't many episodes where you felt you could relate to any of the characters, which is good, because most of the characters were fanatically arrogant, egotistical, or sadistic, so you didn't mind when they were buried alive or killed by mobsters who didn't like card cheats.