Notes on MR. NOVAK, Season 2 (1964-65)

James Franciscus as Jefferson High School English teacher John Novak.

Last night, we completed our viewing of the second and final season of NBC’s MR. NOVAK, which aired in 1964-65. It isn’t commercially available, supposedly due to musical rights issues proposed by two episodes in particular, so we had to rely on a seller’s DVD-R set. (It was mostly taken from TNT broadcasts so a better-looking set of copies must exist somewhere.)

This was a troubled season; a new producer (Leonard Freeman) with ideas of his own took over, and halfway through the season Dean Jagger retired his role as Jefferson High School principal Albert Vane and left the show. Jagger was the eccentric bedrock of the show in many ways; it was reported that a chronic ulcer was responsible, and it later came out that his leave-taking may have been prompted by his dissatisfaction with some of the upcoming scripts of the season under Freeman's supervision. Whatever the cause, it was a great loss. Replacing him as principal was Burgess Meredith as Martin Woodridge, a venerable English teacher at Jefferson chosen by Mr. Vane to fill his vacated office after he ascends to the head of the Board of Education. Meredith isn’t quite Dean Jagger, but he’s nevertheless top form Burgess Meredith. Eccentric and earnest in his own ways, he gives outstanding performances in several episodes and, like Jagger, forms a special educative alliance with series lead James Franciscus. It also needs mentioning that Franciscus is consistently excellent throughout the series, embodying a mid-level of life learning, equidistant between the chairs occupied by Jefferson's principal and students.

Franciscus with Burgess Meredith.

For all this, and apart from several standout episodes, the second season eventually does meander away from Season One's more serious issues of education to become more of a “troubled-student-of-the-week” melodrama. It appears the show may also have had a hard time finding enough young actors of real dramatic quality to carry such episodes. For example, in the same season, Tommy Sands and Johnny Crawford were cast in one outstanding episode together and then again in two episodes separately, playing different (!) students—a hard trick to pull off, especially since their first was “Let’s Dig A Little Grammar,” perhaps the outstanding episode of the season, a gripping show-off between two young aspiring jazz musicians. This episode is one of the second season's music rights problems; the other is the second Tommy Sands episode, “And Then I Wrote...”, in which he plays a gifted science student whose once-in-a-lifetime scholarship plans are thwarted by his father’s selfish and outdated songwriting ambitions.

So there's lots to savor here, including “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt”, featuring a powerful performance (“Introducing Susan Tyrell”) as a returning student found innocent in a court of law of killing her sleeping parents with a shotgun, who has yet to clear the lingering suspicions of her peers and faculty. Also “The Tender Twigs,” in which Jefferson High’s debate class, enacting current United Nations debates with their most effective debater challenged with representing the Soviet Union, captures the attention of a smug right wing extremist agitator (well-played by Robert Culp) who publicly accuses the school of pandering communist sympathies. There are a couple of weaker episodes (Walter Koenig in "The Firebrand" as a narcissistic student protest leader, and the finale, a graduation story featuring Don Grady, who tries much too hard as a class clown who's not making the grade), but the season's high points are several and as stimulating as ever, maybe even a bit darker. They certainly warrant a proper release.

Season 1, which I heartily endorse as near wall-to-wall great television, is available from Amazon and Warner Archive Collection.

(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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