Every season of The Philco Television Playhouse ever, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best seasons of The Philco Television Playhouse!

Social-climbing Mrs. Oliver Jordan, whose husband's firm is in financial trouble, feels obligated to reciprocate hospitality for a visiting British aristocratic couple by arranging a small dinner party. The guests are chosen both to impress--a faded stage star, a well-known if over-the-hill alcoholic actor--and to meet certain social obligations. This means the necessary inclusion of a philandering doctor and his wife, and a gauche, nouveau-riche couple who are loathed but powerful.

Dinner at Eight

Brooding and moody Maxim deWinter returns from an extended trip to the continent with a young bride, less than a year after the tragic death of hi first wife, Rebecca. The staff of Manderley, his country home, including Mrs Danvers the housekeeper who rules over the house, are still devoted to their former mistress, the socialite Rebecca and they find it difficult to accept the new, shy Mrs deWinter who is inexperienced running a large home.

Rebecca

An upscale Manhattan attorney torn between his greedy practices of insider trading and embezzlement and his desire to help the working-class Jews from his old neighborhood.

Counsellor-at-Law

An understudy for a stage show's star takes over when an accident circumvents the stars performance. The understudy takes over and brings down the house.

Angel in the Wings

Abraham Kaplan lives with his family in a row house populated by a kaleidoscope of characters looking to break out of poverty. Kaplan's revolutionary, socialist views grate against some of his neighbors.

Street Scene

A professional couple marry and the wife insists on celibacy for three months to see if they really are compatible or not. The husband tries to lure her with all kinds of excuses and tricks to the marital bed.

This Thing Called Love

Camille, a beautiful courtesan and Armand Duval, a young man in the foreign service, are in love. Their relationship  jeopardizes his career and prevents the marriage of his sister into a ""respectable"" family, if Duval marries Camille. Camille becomes ill and dies.

Camille

When Inspector Goole calls unexpectedly on the prosperous Birling family, his startling revelations not only shatter the very foundations of their lives, but challenge us all to examine our consciences.

An Inspector Calls

Willie is a refugee who works as a houseman at a professor's home. He's a sweet and lovable man even when he's interfering in other people's lives. The Professor's daughter is in love with Brad, a young lawyer. Of course, Willie sees fit to give Brad all kinds of advice.

I Like It Here

20 years ago, a Scotswoman was accused of an ax murder and let off with the ignominious Scottish verdict of Not Proven. She changes her name and lives down her past, but when her son becomes engaged, his fiancée's godfather spots the mother and recognizes her. In his efforts to trap her, and hers not to be trapped trouble arises.

Suspect

An ambitious professor wants to become President of his university. He is soon caught up in the political opportunism of the State Governor, the wiles of an unscrupulous newspaper publisher and the parlor tricks of his own meddling wife.

Parlor Story

The skinflint Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve.

A Christmas Carol

The basement flat of Mrs Dowey, a Scottish charwoman who lives and works in London, during World War I, and Mrs Dowey and her guests - three other charwomen whom she has invited for tea - are discussing the tactics of trench warfare with the confidence of people who have never been near the Front.

The Old Lady Shows Her Medals

An old maid librarian has saved her money for twenty years, in order to buy a hotel where she can meet interesting people. She purchases a strange rundown place near the ocean and gets what she bargains for.

Ramshackle Inn

The poetry-spouting soldier with the oversized nose, Cyrano uses the handsome but inarticulate Christian as a conduit for his feelings, the ugly but eloquent Cyrano pours his heart out to the lovely Roxanne. And she, wooed by the beauty of the words, falls in love with Christian, not realizing that it is Cyrano whose voice has aroused her passion.

Cyrano de Bergerac

Papa is an ugly tempered, overly strict, scrupulously religious Pennsylvanian Dutch, his wife and children rebel.

Papa Is All

The trials of a woman trying to find husbands for her five daughters in 18th-century England.

Pride and Prejudice

In a remote part of Florida Coral Platt, a sinister woman has married a man considerably older than she. For reasons sufficient to her, she wants him out of the way and plans an ingenious though slow murder by poison. She has succeeded in making it seem that Marvin is dying through natural causes. However, she is forced unexpectedly to play hostess to two women who have come to Florida. The women stay longer than they planned because they have begun to suspect what Coral is up to. In a series of exciting scenes they discover just what is going on and prevent Marvin's death.

Dark Hammock

Dr. Haggett and his family, who have some of Bean's canvases, suddenly realize their value, and become hard, selfish, and ill-tempered. It is Abby, the family servant, who ultimately holds them all in her power; she has one of the greatest paintings, which she cannot be persuaded into selling or giving away. She is the only one who really understood the artist -- besides, she had been married to him!

The Late Christopher Bean

After the death of her husband Mary opened a boardinghouse to pay the debts owed by her husband. .. There she began a respectable boardinghouse business and met the man who would ultimately lead to her inglorious place in history - John Wilkes Booth.

The Story of Mary Surratt

Viola, a young woman who disguises herself as a man to work as a page in the court of Count Orsino. Orsino is hopelessly in love with a woman named Olivia, and soon Viola finds herself hopelessly in love with Orsino. But Orsino thinks she's a man, and her predicament worsens when she realizes that Olivia has fallen in love with her.

Twelfth Night

On St. Helena, the exiled emperor Napoleon Bonaparte is grim when his faithful Corscian attendant Cipriani dies. In his confinement he's suffering from a bad liver and a sulking mistress all this begins to weigh heavy on him as he continues to be haunted by spectres of his mistakes. He cannot forget, he says, that if he had not attacked so soon at Waterloo, he would have had 12,000 more men. The imperial manners gradually give way to those of a lonely and embittered country squire. Feeling death upon him at last, he hears that a comet has appeared in the sky.

St. Helena

An embittered professor comes near to wrecking the lives of a young man and young woman whose love for each other has been accidentally revealed to him through a letter written by the boy to the girl. The professor uses this to humiliate the young people, unconsciously venting upon them his own perverse cruelty for the disappointment suffered in his own life.

The Druid Circle

Because she's nearly 30 and still unwed, Phoebe Throssel is regarded as an over-the-hill spinster. Thus, when offered the opportunity for a reunion with Captain Brown, whom she hasn't seen in years, Phoebe desperately wants to rekindle his affections.

Quality Street

The murder of a woman at a dinner party unveils a multitude of twists and turns as the murderer is uncovered.

Dinner at Antoine's

A scheming illegitimate girl trying to claw her way up in English society. However, fate never seems to give her an even break.

Becky Sharp

A sixteen-year-old girl tries everything to attract the opposite sex.

And Never Been Kissed

The story of Sammy Glick, the man with a positive genius for being a heel, who runs through New York's East Side, through newspaper ranks and finally through Hollywood, leaving in his wake the wrecked careers of his associates; for this is his tragedy and his chief characteristic-his congenital incapacity for friendship.

What Makes Sammy Run?

Only Mr. Mergenthwirker, a person pure of heart, can see the lobblies, which are invisible fairy-like creatures.

Mr. Mergenthwirker's Lobblies

Vaudevillians Skid and Bonnie are partners onstage and off -- until success comes to Skip. He develops an oversized ego and a taste for booze, which alienates Bonnie. But his friends struggle to help him redeem himself.

Burlesque

Scottish nobleman who prompted by his own prophecy and ambitions, kills a king to wear his crown.

Macbeth

Star crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet are doomed from the start by the hatred of their families.

Romeo and Juliet

The ghost of Ulysses S. Grant materialises every year at Grant's Tomb.

This Time, Next Year

With the aide of his secretary and an ad man, he creates an enormously popular product and cant keep up with the demand.

It Pays to Advertise

A charming young girl comes to live in a household of an elderly priest.  Jenny, 18, is the precise opposite of the kind of smart sophisticated young miss that puzzles and exasperates Father Moynihan.  The plot is concerned with the priest's clumsy endeavors to make Jenny attractive to the boys.

Summer Formal

A charming young girl comes to live in a household of an elderly priest. The 18-year-old Jenny is the precise opposite of the kind of smart sophisticated young miss that puzzles and exasperates Father Moynihan. The priest makes clumsy endeavours to make Jenny attractive to the boys.

Jenny Kissed Me

A witch boy named John who falls in love with a beautiful girl named Barbara Allen. John has a conjure woman turn him into a human. The only condition of the spell is that Barbara must remain faithful to John for one full year after they are married. If Barbara is not faithful, then John will turn back into a witch boy.

Dark of the Moon

A young woman shows up during a thunderstorm at the country home of a famous actor.

For Love or Money

Katie Gordon, Richard's long suffering wife, has put up with his shenanigans to the point where she seeks a divorce. Her restless and bored spouse just keeps finding himself in hot water.

The Five Lives of Richard Gordon

The adopted son of a drunken former sea captain returns to the household as an adult. He asks the old man for his eldest daughter's hand in marriage. Everyone believes it's an attempt to secure an inheritance.

You Touched Me!

The life of a middle-aged couple has become to complacent and empty.

The Fourth Wall

A grand opera prima donna who practically deserts her husband to follow her career, even though she loves her better half. While the pampered pet of a suite of servants and receiving the homage of operatic mad foreigners, she believes he is sitting at home in Boston immersed in his work. Instead he has fallen for a designing widow and has about decided to divorce his songbird wife.

Enter Madame

A ghost story set in a theatre, legend claims a dumb woman will appear on stage and reveal the identity of a murderer.

A Murder Has Been Arranged

A little soirée is interrupted by a murder and the guests are all suspect in the pretty little parlor.

Pretty Little Parlor

Nellie Rimpleger tries to hold together her eccentric family (including her children, saucy daughter Elizabeth, law student Kenneth, and Eddie, a would-be actor) after they lose their fortune in the stock-market crash. While Elizabeth works in a shoe factory and tries to help her brothers find jobs, she falls in love with a melancholy writer, but marries a wealthy doctor.

Three Cornered Moon

A Victorian Scotswoman of far-reaching ambition. Using her supposedly frail feminine wiles, she maneuvers her fatuous husband into a successful political career. He rises to a parliamentary seat, never quite realizing that he hasn't done it alone.

What Every Woman Knows

Pride Dawson was one of those "Robber Barons", who started out his life in rags and turned his life to riches and women. His contempt for human decency or moral restraint left him ruthless and corrupt. He falls for Sharon O'Neill who is a woman filled with so much goodness in her soul, as much as he has evil in his.

Pride's Castle

A woman from Kansas comes to Marlowe to help find her missing brother.

The Little Sister

An engaged Air Force lieutenant goes on a ten-day furlough to Scotland with a female friend. Their understanding is that the trip will be purely platonic; instead, they fall madly in love. At his first opportunity, the lieutenant flies back to America to break the news to his fiancé and family.

The Lonely

A conniving and devious  Southern socialite who manipulates the lives of those around her with tragic results.

The Queen Bee

A couple of New England housewives disrupt their marriages by becoming an early morning radio team.

Something's Got to Give

A 1930's brilliant and efficient movie mogul and the story behind the Hollywood Dream Factory.

The Last Tycoon

The Lockwoods are patronising toward their former neighbours, the Hunters, who are now living in the poorer district in town. The Hunters are saved from despair from the help of a young junk dealer named Oliver Read, who teaches the Lockwoods a lesson in humanity.

Because of the Lockwoods

A theater owner's daughter discovers his father's true nature and is shaken by the discovery. She moments jealousy backstage to expose him.

Damion's Daughter

With the ownership of Seven Gables, the opulent family estate, at stake, a man frames his brother for murder.

The House of Seven Gables

A husband and wife are drifting apart due to different goals in their individual careers.

The Promise

Medical Meeting

A female psychiatrist visits the home of a famous woman novelist and discovers unhappiness aplenty. She learns the novelist's ambitions and vanity are causes of the trouble.

The Wonderful Mrs. Ingram

Blackmail terrorizes a couple because of an accident which was a terrible tragedy.

Mist on the Waters

The story of a spoiled and jilted young novelist of intellectual pretensions, who is freshened up and made marketable and happy again by design of his sporting publisher.

The Beautiful Bequest

A modern day Ebenezer Scrooge refuses to close his store on Christmas Day.

The Strange Christmas Dinner

A British pilot who lost his sight during the Second World War deals with the problems caused by the injury.

In Beauty Like the Night

An English poet searches for his son whom he has never seen. The child disappeared shortly after his mother was killed by the Gestapo.

Little Boy Lost

A small-town girl named Bethel Merriday is determined to become an actress.

Bethel Merriday

A wealthy matron is murdered at the Stork Club and the suspect list is growing.

Murder at the Stork Club

In England in the 1890s, Colonel Chart, a widower with four children, falls in love with a charming, wealthy American widow, Mrs. Churchley, but his 27-year-old spinster daughter Adela contrives to ruin the relationship. She also turns two of the other three children against their intended stepmother and spoils the widow's plans to help Adela's brother Godfrey out of an unpleasant situation.

The Marriages

Uncle Fred wants Pongo to marry Sally Painter, an unsuccessful American sculptor. They had been engaged but she broke it off when Pongo refused to smuggle jewellery into America for a friend of hers.

Uncle Dynamite

A New England spinster Miss Leckton disregards her neighbours' cry for help and assistance during a hurricane. She resents the intrusion, especially since her neighbours happen to be Jews.

The Sudden Guest

The short life of Ann Rutledge,  Abraham Lincoln's one true love who passed

away at age 22 of typhoid fever.

Ann Rutledge

An attorney, voted most likely to succeed in college, looks back on his life.

A Letter to Mr. Priest

Mitchell Hickok, an author from the country, comes to New York for a publicity build-up for his book. He meets a glamorous woman, who introduces him to the nightlife of Manhattan. He soon tires of cafés, cocktail parties, and public appearances, and returns to his simple way of living in the country and Eileen, his childhood sweetheart.

Hometown

The tragic life story of the tormented artist.

The Life of Vincent Van Gogh

A flirtatious woman has a difficult time settling down to her marital responsibilities.

The Uncertain Molly Collicutt

A jury foreman seeks to wreak personal vengeance on the murder defendant.

The Trial of Steven Kent

An idealistic newspaper editor battles with his stubborn publisher.

The Second Oldest Profession

In London in 1910, two sisters, Jenny and Emmy Blanchard, must support and care for their widowed, invalid father. Jenny, the younger, pretty sister, seeks to escape from the depressing reality of her poverty-stricken home, while Emmy, the older, plain sister, finds comfort and eventual happiness by serving their ailing father. At the end, both are engaged: Jenny will marry Keith Reddington and Emmy will wed Alf Rylett.

Nocturne

Dirty Eddie is a sleek black pig with a fat movie contract and Hollywood isn't too happy about it.

Dirty Eddie

A department store tycoon comes home and is nearly hit by a falling body. He then learns the suicide jumped from his apartment. A mystery surrounds a suicide.

The End is Known

A gambler has nothing to lose as his shady past with women and cards catch up to him.

The Man in the Black Hat

An American travelling in Europe finds clashes between the two cultures.

The American

A seaside resort hotel brings together an odd assortment of people: a frustrated married couple, four young lovers, children and an grouchy old miser.

The Feast

Identical twins concoct a plan to defraud an insurance company and collect a large sum of cash.

Brat Farrar

A poverty-ridden student feels out-of-place among his wealthy fraternity brothers. He eventually falls in love with a rich girl and leads a revolt against the President of the fraternity house.

The Charmed Circle

Story of the great physician who saved millions of lives due to his discovery of the cause of childbed fever (puerperal fever) and eliminated its danger by prescribing the absolute sterlization of all instruments and the cleanliness of all persons coming in contact with the mother.

Semmelweis

Sisters left poor by the death of the family matriarch search for suitable husbands in Georgian England.

Sense and Sensibility

A bonk on the head turns a grouchy hothead into the sweetest man in town. Brannigan runs for mayor of his small town--and wins--with his "love everybody" campaign. He even wins over the crooked newspaper publisher.

The Bump on Brannigan's Head

A Russian emigrant to America finds a new language, and strange manners bewildering but tries mightily to adapt to his new homeland.

Anything Can Happen

A shell-shocked WWI ex-soldier is unable to speak though doctors say the problem isn't physical. Tired of completing with his overbearing, doting mother, the woman he loves begins to withdraw from his life. It's then that he regains his ability to talk.

Hear My Heart Speak

Georgi, a kindly and honest immigrant from the Georgian area of Russia, experiences many difficulties as he tries to adapt to his adopted country. He works hard to make a place for himself in America, all the while fighting with the English language and the strange customs of an alien people.

The Reluctant Landlord

A young wife fights to free her husband from the control of his manipulative and controlling father.

The Tentacles

Van Dorn is getting the hard sell from businessmen wanting to buy his mountain, High Tor, for commercial use. When the group becomes trapped by a landslide, Van Dorn goes for help and encounters a Dutchwoman who's been haunting the mountain for two centuries.

High Tor

The Long Run

A mother receives help with her troublesome kids from a friendly ghost.

Dear Guest and Ghost

A scientist's life has been destroyed by another man's greed and takes out his anger on three innocent strangers, implicating them in his own death.

The Touch of a Stranger

Seeds planted in a New York City backyard grow into a magical plant that brings happiness to those living near it. Formerly unpleasant neighbors turn into caring, warm-hearted individuals.

The Vine That Grew on Fiftieth Street

The three children of a widowed woman scheme to get their mother a new husband, setting their sites on a middle-aged doctor.

A Husband for Mama

A debt collector searches for the woman who saved him from an armed holdup; he wants her to have a $1000 reward. As he talks with those who knew her, he learns that she was a siren with a couple of murders to her credit.

Portrait in Smoke

A scathing denunciation of gambling and feudal aristocrats of the 19th Century, this story relates how Philip, a young medical student, bargains away his career for the unsure success of high gambling stakes. His caution turns to uncontrollable greed when he learns that money can buy women and quick fame. His destiny is bound to Theresa's, a beautiful young woman who has been mortgaged in marriage for her stepfather's debt, and to her wealthy grandmother's, who chooses to gamble away her fortune so there will be no inheritors.

The Gambler

A young attorney involves himself in many shady deals as he pursues political ambitions. His wife speaks up and demands he clean up his act. The threat of disbarment also contributes to his final decision.

The Power Devil

The Man Who Got Away With It

The Philco Television Playhouse is an American anthology series that was broadcast live on NBC from 1948 to 1955. Produced by Fred Coe, the series was sponsored by Philco. It was one of the most respected dramatic shows of the Golden Age of Television, winning a 1954 Peabody Award and receiving eight Emmy nominations between 1951 and 1956.

The Best Seasons of The Philco Television Playhouse

The Best Seasons of The Philco Television Playhouse

Season 8

Season 1

Season 7

Season 5

Season 6

Season 2

Season 3

Season 4