Hallmark Hall of Fame
Genre	Anthology
Written by	Robert Hartung Jean Holloway Helene Hanff Gian Carlo Menotti
Directed by	George Schaefer William Corrigan Albert McCleery Kirk Browning Fielder Cook Jeannot Szwarc
Composer(s)	Gian Carlo Menotti Bernard Green Richard Addinsell Jerry Goldsmith
Country of origin	United States
Original language(s)	English
No. of seasons	60
No. of episodes	350+ (List of episodes)
Production
Executive producer(s)	George Schaefer Brent Shields
Producer(s)	Maurice Evans Samuel Chotzinoff Phil C. Samuel Robert Hartung
Editor(s)	Henry Batista Robert L. Swanson Sam Gold Richard K. Brockway
Cinematography	Freddie Young
Running time	30–150 minutes
Production company(s)	Hallmark Hall of Fame Productions
Broadcast
Original channel	NBC (1951-1978) CBS (1979-1981, 1982-1989, 1995-2011) PBS (1981) ABC (1989-1995, 2011-present)
Audio format	Monaural Stereo (from 1980)
Original run	December 24, 1951 – present

Hallmark Hall of Fame is an anthology program on American television, sponsored by Hallmark Cards, a Kansas City based greeting card company. The longest-running primetime series in the history of television, it has a historically long run, beginning during 1951 and continuing into 2013. From 1954 onward, all of its productions have been shown in color, although color television video productions were extremely rare in 1954. Many television movies have been shown on the program since its debut, though the program began with live telecasts of dramas and then changed to videotaped productions before finally changing to filmed ones.

The series has received eighty Emmy Awards, twenty-four Christopher Awards, eleven Peabody Awards, nine Golden Globes, and four Humanitas Prizes. Once a common practice in American television, it is the last remaining television program such that the title includes the name of the sponsor. Unlike other long-running TV series still on the air, it differs in that it broadcasts only occasionally and not on a weekly broadcast programming schedule.

Early years [edit]

The series is the direct descendant of two old-time radio dramatic anthologies sponsored previously by Hallmark: Radio Reader's Digest, adapting stories from the popular magazine (though the magazine never sponsored the show); and, its successor, The Hallmark Playhouse, which premiered on CBS in 1948. The Hallmark Playhouse changed to more serious literature from all genres. The Hallmark Hall of Fame debuted on 24 December 1951 on NBC television with the first opera written specifically for television, Amahl and the Night Visitors, by Gian Carlo Menotti, featuring Chet Allen and Rosemary Kuhlmann. It was the first time a major corporation developed a television project specifically as a means of promoting its products to the viewing public. The program was such a success that it was restaged by Hallmark several times during a period of fifteen years. Amahl was also staged by other NBC television anthologies. Hallmark also transformed its radio Hallmark Playhouse into a Hallmark Hall of Fame format—this time, featuring stories of pioneers of all types in America—from 1953 through 1955.

Early productions included some of the classical works of Shakespeare: Hamlet, Richard II, The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest. Biographical subjects were very eclectic, ranging from Florence Nightingale to Father Flanagan to Joan of Arc. Popular Broadway plays such as Harvey, Dial M for Murder, and Kiss Me, Kate were made available to a mass audience, most of them with casts that had not appeared in the film versions released to theatres. In a few cases, the actors repeated their original Broadway roles. Noted actors such as Richard Burton, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Maurice Evans, Katharine Cornell, Julie Harris, Laurence Olivier and Peter Ustinov all made what were then extremely rare television appearances in these plays.

Two different productions of Hamlet have been broadcast on the Hallmark Hall of Fame, one featuring Maurice Evans (1953) and the other a British one featuring Richard Chamberlain (1970). Neither one was more than two hours long. Evans and actress Judith Anderson performed their famous stage Macbeth on the Hallmark Hall of Fame on two separate occasions, each time with a different supporting cast. The first version (1954) was telecast live from NBC Studios; the second (1960) was filmed on location in Scotland and released to movie theatres in Europe after being telecast in the U.S. The Richard Chamberlain version of Hamlet, which was also telecast in England on ITV Saturday Night Theatre,[1] won five Emmys when telecast on the Hallmark Hall of Fame, out of a total of thirteen nominations. [2][3] It may have set a record for the most-nominated Shakespeare production to ever be televised.

Hamlet, Macbeth and the other Shakespeare plays presented on Hallmark Hall of Fame were cut (sometimes drastically) to fit the time limits of a standard film or of the Hallmark Hall of Fame itself, which during the 1950s ,'60s and '70s never ran longer than two hours and frequently even less. It was left to National Educational Television (NET) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) to be the pioneers in presenting nearly complete Shakespeare productions on American television.

After a few decades Hallmark Hall of Fame began to offer original material, such as Aunt Mary (1979) and Thursday's Child (1983), although its lineup still primarily consisted of expensive-looking Masterpiece Theatre-style adaptations of American and European literary classics, such as John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent (1983), Robert Louis Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae (1984), and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1980), Oliver Twist (1982), and A Christmas Carol (1984). A Tale of Two Cities was the first Hallmark production (and to date, one of the very few) to run three hours. The late 1980s featured productions such as Foxfire (1987), My Name is Bill W. (1989), Sarah, Plain and Tall (1991), O Pioneers! (1992), To Dance With the White Dog (1993), The Piano Lesson (1995), and What the Deaf Man Heard (1997). One installment, Promise (1986), featuring James Garner and James Woods, won five Emmys, two Golden Globes, a Peabody award, a Humanitas Prize, and a Christopher Award.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Hallmark Hall of Fame movies often had twice the budget of other network movies.^{[citation needed]} Hallmark movies also ran (in some cases) approximately 10–15 minutes longer (or up to 110 minutes minus commercials) because Hallmark Cards fully sponsored the movies and had fewer commercial breaks. Unlike most network movies of the period, Hallmark always filmed on location,^{[citation needed]} and usually filmed for 24 days, compared to 18–20 days for most other TV-movies.^{[citation needed]}

Post-NBC [edit]

For nearly three decades the series was broadcast by NBC, but the network cancelled it in late 1978 due to declining ratings. Since then, the series has been televised by CBS from 1979 to 1989 (except for one episode, which was televised by PBS in 1981), then on ABC from 1989 to 1995, then CBS again from 1995 until 2011, when that network cancelled the series due to low ratings. ^[1]

On November 27, 2011, Hallmark Hall of Fame returned to ABC with Have a Little Faith, which debuted to very low ratings for the night.^[2] The total number of viewers was estimated at 6.5 million, compared to 13.5 million for the Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation of November Christmas on the weekend after Thanksgiving in 2010.^[3]

Encore broadcasts of these ABC episodes will air on Hallmark Channel a week after their initial broadcast on ABC.^[4] The films will also be available for streaming on the website SpiritClips.com a few days after airing on ABC.^[5]

Many recent Hall of Fame movies repeat on the company's Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movie Channel and are available on home video and DVD, distributed through Hallmark Gold Crown Stores and online at Hallmark Hall of Fame.

Episode list [edit]

Only a small number of Hallmark Hall of Fame programming (considering how long the series has lasted) has been released on VHS and DVD. The 1960 production of the Tempest appeared on VHS, but is not yet on DVD. The 1954 Macbeth has been available as a bootleg DVD, but not as an official one.

References [edit]

External links [edit]

• Hallmark Hall of Fame episodes
• Hallmark Hall of Fame at the Internet Movie Database
• Streaming Hallmark Hall of Fame episodes
• Hallmark Hall of Fame at TV.com
• 50 Years of Hallmark Hall of Fame at the UCLA Film and Television Archive
• Hallmark Hall of Fame