Your Show Time is an American anthology drama series that debuted on NBC Television on the East Coast in September 1948 and then on both the East and the West Coast, as a network show, on January 21, 1949.
The show was produced by Marshall Grant/Realm Productions and was hosted by Arthur Shields.
Filmed by Grant Productions at Hal Roach Studios, Your Show Time was American television's first dramatic series to be shot on film instead of being aired on live television or as a kinescope. The series Public Prosecutor was produced on film in 1947âÂÂ48, for a planned September 1948 debut, but remained unaired until DuMont aired that series in 1951âÂÂ52.
In 1949, the number of television sets in American households was till quite small. By shooting on film, it was feasible for the producers to increase their audience with theatrical releases.
The series was sponsored by the American Tobacco Company for Lucky Strike cigarettes.
The show featured half-hour dramatizations of stories by renowned authors such as Guy de Maupassant, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frank Stockton, and Mark Twain. Other episodes were adapted from chapters of novels, such as The Bishop's Experiment, an adaptation of the section featuring the bishop in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables with Leif Erickson as Jean Valjean. An adaptation of "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" marked one of the earliest known television appearances of Sherlock Holmes.
Each episode opened in an old bookshop where host Arthur Shields was seated behind an old desk, from which he introduced that evening's story.
The show featured appearances by such actors as Julie Adams, Robert Alda, Evelyn Ankers, Morris Carnovsky, Melville Cooper, Reginald Denny, William Frawley, Eva Gabor, Hurd Hatfield, Hugo Haas, Sterling Holloway, Marjorie Lord, Alan Napier, Dan O'Herlihy, Eve Miller, Gene Reynolds, and Selena Royle.
A review of "The Diamond Necklace" episode in the trade publication Variety found it to be "not good television" and "a dull half-hour." The review noted that a long commercial and a long introduction by the narrator took up almost five minutes before the first dialog was heard. In addition to that "deadly beginning", it said that the rest of the episode offered "little action".
Your Show Time is notable for being the first series to win an Emmy Award. The 1949 episode "The Necklace", produced by Stanley Rubin, won the Emmy Award as Outstanding Made For Television Movie.
In January 1950 Jerry Fairbanks Inc. bought "full rights for television, films and allied media" for the 26 episodes of Your Show Time.
25 episodes survive at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.