On October 11, the Paley Center—in conjunction with Warner Archive and New York Comic Con—will host a panel celebrating Batman: The Brave and the Bold, the animated series teaming the Caped Crusader with heroes from across the DC Universe. This provides us with an interesting approach to commemorating the character's seventy-fifth anniversary, coming up in May. Much of the show's charm comes from the many references to events throughout the character's history, particularly during the Silver Age, from 1956 to 1970. Among my personal favorites were the appearances of the wonderfully ridiculous Rainbow Creature (see right) from Batman #134 and Damian Wayne as the son of Batman and Catwoman.

Damian's creator, the brilliant Grant Morrison, completed his landmark seven-year run on the Batman character just two months ago. Like the creators of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Morrison loves the character's rich history, especially the Silver Age. He paid tribute to that history while simultaneously changing many aspects of the character's world. The story told over those seven years, through many books, was filled with science fiction, mystery, suspense, horror, adventure, the creation and destruction of families, joy as well as sorrow. It was a historical epic, following Batman as he struggled through the past to save the present.

Morrison has a deep love for Batman's 1950s sci-fi adventures and was not afraid to make radical changes to DC Comic's continuity. Those adventures from the Silver Age had been excised from DC's comic universe, the world in which the main stories take place, after the landmark limited series Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985. To Morrison, however, these stories remain legitimate and relevant. He created many Silver Age–esque characters and made them fan favorites, while reinventing such characters from the era as Bat-Mite, the original Batwoman, and the Knight (though he re-created him in a different story in 1999). My personal favorite is Bat-Cow (see left), whom Batman and Robin saved from a group of animal-mask-wearing assassins at a slaughterhouse. This character displays its own prowess in combining the goofy with the dark and disturbing.

Both The Brave and the Bold and Morrison's run focus a great deal on Batman working with other heroes, as opposed to working as a lone detective, as Bob Kane and Bill Finger originally planned. Batman discovers, under Morrison's guidance, that although he has always thought of himself as a loner, he has never truly been alone. Rather, he has been assisted by Alfred, Dick Grayson, Commissioner Gordon, Batgirl, Catwoman, the Justice League, and others. Bruce Wayne goes public and tells the world he had been funding Batman for years. Under Batman Incorporated he funds "Batmen" globally.

 Morrison's run is extremely dense. Many important details go unnoticed at first, like puzzle pieces that become visible only as the story moves forward, finally fitting together as the reader becomes engaged in the story, as if sucked into an entirely new world of pleasure. Morrison is able to create darkness through ostensibly goofy ideas. A great example takes place in Batman R.I.P. when Bruce Wayne loses his mind, yet still retains partial control of his facilities. Exhibiting great foresight, Bruce had created a new mind for himself, in the event he ever went mad. When his mind shuts down, a new one emerges, with his new identity as The Batman of Zur-en-arrh. The Bat-Mite (see left), a character from the late fifties with seemingly endless magical powers, is reintroduced as a guide inside of Bruce's new mind. Bat-Mite and the Batman of Zur-en-arrh also appear in several episodes of The Brave and the Bold.

The Brave and the Bold is an intelligent tribute to the long history of the character, with references to older DC stories throughout. This provides longtime comic book fans with great pleasure while also entertaining children with scant knowledge of the character's history. Take, for instance, this scene in which the Bat-Mite transforms Batman into different incarnations of himself:

The difference is that The Brave and the Bold encompasses Batman's long history within the goofy world of the Silver Age, while Morrison brought the Silver Age into the current world of the gritty DCU, or DC universe. Any dark Batman story could be retold or referenced in The Brave and the Bold by altering it to maintain the show's light-hearted nature, since the essence of both the Silver Age and the show was kid-friendly fun.

Morrison's run is best appreciated with a vast knowledge of Batman's history, though I started with Batman and Robin: Batman Reborn, a collection of issues from almost halfway into the story, and greatly enjoyed it—despite not understanding everything. To this day, it remains one of my favorite comics. Often I find that I must read issues several times to understand them. The chemistry between Dick Grayson's Batman and Damian's Robin was beyond enjoyable, with its new take on the Dynamic Duo. Dick is known for being lighthearted and fun, while Damian has a more cynical mind, having been raised by the League of Assassins. Placing them in their new roles as Batman and Robin reversed the dynamic of the team. While Bruce was away, presumed dead by many, the Robins struggled to defend the city.

People have strong opinions about who Batman should be. Often people find a version of the character they like and decide that is the only way the character should be. Friends have told me they hate the Robins and think Batman should be a loner, or that they think the sixties TV version with Adam West is a disgrace, or that the Tim Burton or Christopher Nolan films are the only versions of the character they respect, or that they only like Bruce Timm's animated TV take on the character. Well, I could go on and on, but I believe Bat-Mite said it best in the following clip from The Brave and the Bold. (Fun sidenote: In this clip, the Joker and Harley Quinn are animated to resemble Bruce Timm and Paul Dini, the creators of Quinn and collaborators during Timm's landmark show Batman: The Animated Series.)

Nicholas Doblovosky is an intern in the Paley Center Curatorial Department and likes to sit back and relax and embrace the world of Batman.

The pilot episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was over. My roommates and I stared absently at the end credits as we tried to compose our thoughts. Did we feel overwhelmed by geeky exultation? Were we ecstatic at the televisual expansion of one of our beloved cinematic universes? Were we still laughing at the surprise reveal of the flying car? Did we doubt revolutionary/hacker Skye’s motivations for joining the team?

“Well,” I said eventually, “it’ll probably get better, right?”

It turned out that my roommates were just as underwhelmed as I was. Maybe that’s inevitable for a show that was so thoroughly hyped as the union of Joss Whedon — who, whatever his flaws, is widely regarded as one of the luminaries of geek culture — and the Marvel Universe. Nothing could live up to those kinds of expectations. And, honestly, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t. But it was a pilot, we reminded ourselves, and thus deserved a little leeway. So that monologue at the end had been painfully unsubtle, and the characters read more like archetypical compilations of quirks and one-liners than unique individuals. So what? Just a bad case of pilot syndrome. The writers hadn’t settled into their groove yet. There were still intriguing hints of mystery about Agent Coulson and Tahiti, and the marvelous Ming-Na Wen as Agent Melinda May. The second episode would be better.

So we watched the second episode. And as we sat there, in the few minutes we had before New Girl came on, one of my roommates said thoughtfully, “You know, the first season of Buffy wasn’t that great, either.”

S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn’t hooked us, but it had enough potential that we’ve kept watching it — and, yes, we’ve been more and more delighted, and less and less frustrated. (The “seduce him” scene in Eye Spy? That made up for a lot. My roommates and I were worried that Ward and Skye would end up being bland pretty faces with a canned will-they-won’t-they relationship, but they’re actually starting to develop a fairly solid dynamic. Even if it all goes downhill from here, at least they’ll have been Battleship buddies.) And I hold out hope that A] we’ll get more character backstory; B] a lot of the elements I find problematic, like, say, the constant theme of characters of color being manipulated and going bad, will get smoothed out; C] Agent Coulson will lose his cool a little; D] S.H.I.E.L.D. and Rising Tide will be developed as morally grey entities rather than as clearcut good guys and bad guys; E] the episodic plots will become a little stronger; and F] Melinda May will get more screen time. However, the writers are building a solid enough foundation that I’m content to wait and see how things pan out.

In general, I think of myself as an investment viewer: I invest a lot of time and energy in a show, and hope that it’ll pay me back in feelings and good writing. Sometimes a good show isn’t always going to hook you immediately. Sometimes you have to stick it out for a while before the narrative starts to hit its stride. I saw a few episodes of the first season of Scandal and didn’t find them very interesting, but when my friends bugged me to try out the second season, it slayed me. I found the first half of the first season of Community fairly slow going, but by the time I hit season two I was addicted. Similarly, I’ve heard that Farscape is awful in the first season — mostly I’ve heard this from my friend J, who would regularly rail at our friend G for convincing her to watch it — but that you’re rewarded thrice over for your patience when you reach the later seasons.

And yet, I stopped watching Ironside after the first fifteen minutes. Blair Underwood is always great, but it took itself waaaay too seriously. Nobody’s got time for that. And apparently NBC agreed with me, because the network has already pulled it. (Sorry, Mr. Underwood.)

Like any kid who has fallen in love with a one-season wonder, I have spent a lot of time bemoaning an industry that will cancel a show on the basis of a few episodes. Some patience from the networks might have gotten me more episodes of The Middleman, Firefly, or My So-Called Life. Still, I stand by my decision to ditch Ironside mid-episode. There’s nothing wrong with realizing that a show isn’t giving you anything you might enjoy. And, honestly, sometimes quitting a show is just self-preservation. I stopped watching Glee in the third season because I finally had to admit that its moments of campy fun were far outweighed by the rage headaches it kept giving me.

For me, the key to knowing when to stick something out is balance. My roommates and I balanced S.H.I.E.L.D.’s pedigree, its concept, its potential to be a truly interesting show (so many narrative possibilities!), and the fact that our friends would inevitably talk about it, with the fact that the first few episodes didn’t thrill us. My friend J balanced the bad first season of Farscape with our friend G’s glowing recommendation of the rest of the series. Sometimes you’re disappointed, but ideally, the not-great bits go away, the slow episodes are much rarer, and the good bits keep getting better and better.

Does it sound a little cold to talk about a show like an investment? Eh, maybe, but it doesn’t feel that cold. If you’re like me, you’re investing time and passion, and those aren’t cold at all. Hopefully, the satisfaction that you eventually get, be it related to character or to plot, should be worth everything you put in. Otherwise, it’s not even an investment with the possibility of future return; it’s just a black hole.

Sasha Lamb is a Paley Center curatorial Intern and a habitual watcher of too much television.  

A funny thing happened to me back in December 2012: More than three years after posting this piece on venerable CBS newsman Walter Cronkite—who had just passed away—and his role on the fifties CBS-TV program You Are There, I received an unsolicited email from a man named Tom Manoff—someone I neither knew nor had ever heard of.

Tom, it turned out, is the son of Arnold Manoff (pictured right), one-third of the triumvirate of blacklisted writers who penned the bulk of early You Are There scripts, all three employing fronts to circumvent the powers that be at CBS (Abraham Polonsky and Walter Bernstein being the other two). Tom (pictured below) is no slouch himself, a writer, composer, and record producer who reviewed classical music for National Public Radio's All Things Considered from 1985 to 2012. A "red diaper baby," he served on the front lines down South during the civil rights battles of the sixties, and is currently writing a book titled Chase the White Horse, a political history/memoir. (Tom's mom was not actress Lee Grant—the best known of Arnold Manoff's three wives—but rather wife number two, Marjorie Jean MacGregor, herself an accomplished social activist who was cited by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951.)

My original Cronkite piece, posted in July 2009, referenced a 2003 NPR report on You Are There in which Cronkite reflects at length on the program, which he hosted at the outset of his television career (listen here). Tom Manoff was reaching out to me with information about an earlier NPR report, airing in 1994, in which Robert Siegel interviewed Polonsky and Bernstein about scripting for the show (Arnold Manoff had passed away in 1965, at the age of 50). This was a groundbreaking story, instigated by Tom Manoff with Polonksy's blessing, to set the record straight and accurately establish once and for all who wrote what for You Are There. Many of these fronted scripts were historical allegories targeting red hysteria—during the interview Polonsky describes them as "the only guerilla warfare waged against McCarthyism at that time in television."

At one point during the interview Siegel and the two surviving writers discuss the origins of the show's enduring tagline—written by Polonsky and delivered weekly by Cronkite: "What kind of a day was it? A day like all other days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times, and you were there." "Did Walter Cronkite know, Abe Polonsky, that you, that a blacklisted writer, were the author of those immortal words?" Siegel asks. Replies Polonsky: "I don't think he knew. He may have suspected, but it was better not to know. That was the age of it being better not to know anything."

Manoff says he has it "on good authority" that Cronkite heard the 1994 NPR piece, but it would be almost ten more years before he went on NPR himself to address his role on the show, stating that he had had no independent knowledge that the scripts were written by blacklistees. Cronkite did have kind words for Charles Russell, the You Are There producer and one of the great unsung heroes of the blacklist era: "In presenting the complexities of history on You Are There, our producer, Charlie Russell, was not willing to play the blacklist game or concern himself with the politics of his talent. When the three most literate New York writers available for the series turned out to be blacklisted, he secretly hired them." Still, Manoff is critical of Cronkite's "many years of silence": "Cronkite was arguably the most respected voice in broadcast news. He had the power to back up the story in 1994 and, more importantly, to help restore the real names of the blacklisted writers to their scripts."

In setting history straight, Tom Manoff relied on not just first-hand testimony from Polonsky (since deceased) and Bernstein ("feisty and kicking," per Manoff) [both pictured left, respectively], but also Russell's unpublished autobiography, sections of which he shared with me. At one point in the manuscript Russell wrote: "I considered myself apolitical but I did have strong feelings about personal freedom and I reacted emotionally to these witch hunts"; though he was specifically addressing CBS's directive to sign a loyalty oath, the comment edifies Russell's motives in employing the blacklisted writers. He'd known Bernstein from their days together on CBS's Danger, but wound up forging profound friendships with all three as they limned their Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern-like roles in one of the most notorious chapters in the narrative of early television: "four guys on a raft floating through history," as Russell puts it. At one point he references the trio as the "cut, make, and trim factory ... these guys invented the fantasy of a garment factory. Walter/aka/Small and Wiry was the outside man. Arnie/aka The Grey Fox was the cutter. Abe/aka/the Prof was the crazy designer."

In one particularly captivating moment, Russell recounts meeting with Edward R. Murrow over Sunday morning (!) drinks - Scotch with a dash of water but no ice for Murrow and a bloody Mary for Russell. "You know, Charles, I watch your program on the control-room monitor, whenever possible, before going to air," Murrow tells him. "It's a damn good program. I admire it. How do you get away with it?" Russell thus speculates that You Are There's allegorical attacks on the communist witch hunt may have inspired Murrow's famous March 1954 See It Now broadcast "Report on Senator McCarthy," which helped trigger Tailgunner Joe's ignominious downfall.

For Manoff, exposing the You Are There fronts—in order to publicly recognize the real authors—was prickly business. At least one of his father's fronts —Lulla Adler (aka Kate Nickerson)—was still alive at the time (though now deceased) and was friendly with his sister, precipitating a familial rupture; Manoff was prohibited from seeing his father's scripts and papers until rapprochement in 2008. I've seen some of these documents, including a 1953 contract between CBS and Nickerson paying her $125 for a You Are There script titled "The Conspiracy of Catherine the Great."  (According to Manoff, Woody Allen's character in The Front, a 1976 movie about the blacklist scripted by Bernstein, bore certain similarities to Adler/Nickerson). Russell recounts how in 1962 the Museum of Modern Art - honoring Arnold Manoff's script for "The Death of Socrates" - contacted him in search of Nickerson so that she could attend the ceremony, still believing she was the actual writer; Russell turned to Arnold Manoff, who advised him to "Just tell them she's touring Europe."

"History," Tom Manoff wrote me, "has a purity to it when you get it right." So here's the really good news: Thanks to Tom Manoff and the Russell manuscript, the Paley Center is able to correct the credits for eleven episodes of You Are There, finally recognizing the true writers (though the fronts will continue to be acknowledged), plus two episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood scripted by another blacklisted writer, Waldo Salt, using the front Neil R. Collins. Interestingly, according to Tom Manoff, there was friction between Salt and the other three writers, who felt he was being stingy about sharing Robin Hood assignments, whereas Manoff, Polonsky, and Bernstein were always looking out for one another out. "Understanding the real story of You Are There is very much about the friendship between these three writers," Manoff wrote me.

We're also finally crediting Arnold Manoff with two episodes of Naked City penned under the nom de plume Joel Carpenter: "The King of Venus Will Take Care of You" and "Hold for Gloria Christmas." Tom Manoff considers the latter—about the murder of an alcoholic Greenwich Village poet—among his father's greatest scripts: "Quite sad for me, because I understand the biographical material—my father was dying, he knew it, and the script deals at many levels with that realization." Tom Manoff is event titling a chapter in his book after "Gloria Christmas," "looking at my father's work and also the crazy years at the end of his life, capsulated in the episode," which can be viewed in its entirely here.

Arnold Manoff lived three more years, "on some crazy edge with a Playboy Bunny girlfriend (among many) and a last trip with [Naked City producer] Bert Leonard to sell a movie, Chase the White Horse, to Julie Dassin in Greece." He died soon after, of a heart attack, pleading for a pastrami sandwich in the hospital, as Abe Polonsky later recounted it.

"The blacklist didn't just run out," Tom Manoff said. "People had to get off. There were many behind-the-scenes deals." Arnold Manoff refused to make one, even though he had long since left the Communist Party. In the end, he was denied not just a pastrami sandwich, but rightful credit for his work ... until his son came along and fixed it almost thirty years later - not just for his father, but for his father's friends too.

Now that's purity.

Thanks to interns Sasha Lamb and Craig Solomon for their research assistance.