CBS Radio Mystery Theater

The Most Ambitious Comeback in Radio History

When CBS Radio Mystery Theater premiered on January 6, 1974, it was a full-throated attempt to bring network radio drama back from the dead — at a scale nobody had tried since the medium's collapse. The man behind it, producer-director Himan Brown, had been arguing for years that radio drama could still hold its own against television. In 1973, CBS finally gave him a slot to prove it. What Brown proposed was staggering: 195 original episodes on tape, fed to CBS affiliates across the country, with 170 repeat broadcasts to fill out the schedule. That ratio worked out to a brand-new show produced from scratch roughly every 1.9 days.

Brown was not a newcomer to the medium. Over a career that stretched back to his teens — he first went on air at 18, reading Yiddish newspapers on WEAF in New York, where Gertrude Berg heard him and cast him as Jake on The Goldbergs for six months — he had produced more than 30,000 radio programs, directing performers including Helen Hayes, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Orson Welles, Frank Sinatra, and Gregory Peck. He had also produced CBS Radio's first daytime soap opera, Marie, the Little French Princess, in 1933. The CBS Radio Mystery Theater was the capstone of all of that — the project that would either vindicate his belief in the medium or put the question to rest for good. The greenlight itself was likely a competitive response: the Mutual Broadcasting System had launched Rod Serling's anthology series The Zero Hour in 1973, and CBS wanted an answer.

During premiere week in January 1974, 218 stations around the country began broadcasting the show. Twenty-one of those were not CBS affiliates, which led to some title variations — in New York City, the all-news WCBS didn't carry it at all, so it ran on WOR as Radio Mystery Theater. At its peak, the series was estimated to reach as many as two million listeners each night.

How the Show Was Built

The production happened inside Studio G at the CBS Studio Building at 49 East 52nd Street — formerly Studio 27, renamed in honor of Arthur Godfrey, whose programs had originated there for decades. The studio's location near the theater district gave Brown a practical advantage he used constantly: Broadway was right there, and its performers were available.

Brown ran the operation with assembly-line precision. Actors arrived at 9:00 a.m. for a script reading, roles were assigned, recording began, and by noon the session was done and Brown was handing out checks. Post-production wrapped in the afternoon. The per-episode budget was $30,320 — roughly $155,000 in 2018 dollars — which sounds reasonable until you consider that it had to cover everything, including a union scale of approximately $73.92 per actor per episode. Writers earned a flat rate of $350 for a 52-minute script, a figure Brown himself considered too low to attract the top television playwrights the show needed.

That writer problem showed up in the reviews. The series premiered to mixed notices. The New York Daily News called the premiere episode "dull"; their review of the second episode noted "The premise may sound exciting, but the show wasn't." Newsweek was more measured but pointed: the series would infuse radio's horror show format with topical themes like abortion and unwed motherhood, they wrote, but the premiere had wasted Agnes Moorehead — who appeared for a $100 base pay, as did Zero Mostel and Richard Widmark. The second episode featured Kim Hunter as a housewife with an animal phobia; Newsweek singled out Gilbert Mack's imitation of a howling mongrel as a notable element, but concluded that the Mystery Theater needed help from writers of the caliber of Paddy Chayefsky and Reginald Rose. The problem, as Brown understood it, was structural: at $350 per script, those writers weren't going to come. Many of the scripts ended up written by people who were by nature performers, including Ian Martin, Mary Jane Higby, Elspeth Eric, and old-time announcer Fielden Farrington. Even as late as 1981, some scripts included references to "women's lib," a term that was by then a decade out of date, and early episodes leaned on character names — Jack, George, Phyllis, Mary — that seemed to belong to an earlier generation.

Despite the rough edges, the show went well beyond its originally planned run. It continued through December 31, 1982, producing exactly 1,399 original episodes. Total broadcasts, including repeats, came to 2,969. The series won a Peabody Award in 1975, and over the course of the run only three or four episodes per week were new originals, with the rest filled by repeats.

The Sound and Format

The show followed the template Brown had established with his earlier Inner Sanctum: a creaking door, and a host who guided listeners through the story. That creaking door wasn't just an atmospheric touch — it's one of only two sounds ever copyrighted by the U.S. Copyright Office. The other is NBC's three-chime signature.

The opening and closing theme music came from composer Nathan Van Cleave's score for the Twilight Zone episode "Two" — CBS owned full rights to the music, which made it available at no additional cost. The theme opens with three descending notes from double basses, followed by a stopped horn sting and timpani roll, then a low eerie theme played by bass clarinet. Other background tracks from the CBS-owned Twilight Zone library were used throughout the run; the same library had previously supplied music for Perry Mason, Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Suspense, and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. Sound effects were handled by Peter Prescott and Joe Cabbibo.

Each episode was allotted a full hour of airtime, but after commercials and newscasts, a typical episode ran about 45 minutes. CBS provided the time slot but very little money. Affiliates felt free to tape-delay or drop episodes at will — at KOA in Denver, the show was frequently bumped by sports programming. When a listener complained to KOA about losing the show, they were told, in effect, that they were lucky the station was carrying it at all. The contrast with the BBC in Britain, where radio drama had never been allowed to fade out, was not lost on people who cared about the medium. Radio actress Virginia Gregg put it plainly: "The British know a good medium when they hear it."

E. G. Marshall and the Voice of the Show

The host-narrator for most of the run was E. G. Marshall, born Everett Eugene Grunz on June 18, 1914, in Owatonna, Minnesota. Marshall had been one of the original members of the Actors Studio, class of 1948, alongside Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. He played the title role in The Crucible on Broadway and starred in Waiting for Godot. On television, he won back-to-back Emmy Awards in 1962 and 1963 for his role as defense lawyer Lawrence Preston in the CBS drama The Defenders. Throughout his life he declined to tell interviewers what "E. G." stood for, saying it meant "Everybody's Guess."

Marshall recorded his hosting narrations in batches — roughly a dozen scripts in a single day, about once a month. His signature opening was "Come in!… Welcome. I'm E. G. Marshall," and he signed off each episode with "Until next time, pleasant… dreams?" He appeared as a performer in only one episode of the series itself: as Ebenezer Scrooge in an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, first aired in 1975, which was repeated every Christmas Eve for the remainder of the run except in 1982. Marshall hosted from the premiere through February 1, 1982, when actress Tammy Grimes took over for the show's final season. Marshall died of lung cancer on August 24, 1998, in Bedford, New York, at age 84.

The Cast and Writers Who Kept It Running

Brown assembled a cast drawn from two worlds that didn't often overlap by the 1970s: television performers and the surviving community of New York radio actors who had spent their careers in front of studio microphones. Among the radio veterans were Leon Janney, Evie Juster, Ralph Bell, Jackson Beck, Teri Keane, Mason Adams, Roger DeKoven, Robert Dryden, Bryna Raeburn, Joseph Julian, Mary Jane Higby, William Redfield, Mandel Kramer, Paul McGrath, Amzie Strickland, Joan Lorring, Joan Banks, Santos Ortega, Arnold Moss, Grace Matthews, Bret Morrison, and Berry Kroeger. Robert Dryden alone appeared in more than 240 episodes, and additional golden-age voices passed through the studio, including Celeste Holm, Mercedes McCambridge, Howard Da Silva, Victor Jory, Lurene Tuttle, and Janet Waldo. Television talents Joseph Campanella and Lois Nettleton also took turns at the microphone.

The studio's proximity to Broadway meant Brown could also draw on stage talent. Marian Seldes and Howard Da Silva were regulars. Roberta Maxwell joined in 1975, shortly after appearing in Equus on Broadway; she described the ensemble as "a company who were telling stories — imaginative stories — with their voices." Vincent Price, on hearing that he considered radio drama "the ultimate acting chore," was personally invited by Brown to appear. Up-and-coming performers who passed through the studio included John Lithgow, Mandy Patinkin, Sarah Jessica Parker, Tony Roberts, and Morgan Fairchild. Some sessions were taped in Hollywood, where Jim Jordan and Les Tremayne participated.

The single most prolific writer was Sam Dann, born May 18, 1918, who died October 26, 2004. Dann wrote 311 of the 1,399 original scripts and also appeared as a performer in 438 episodes. His 1975 script "Goodbye, Karl Erich" won Best Radio Dramatic Script at the Writers Guild of America Annual Script Awards that year. Dann had previously written for Chandu the Magician and taught visual and dramatic writing as an adjunct professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts; he also co-wrote the off-Broadway musical Tuscaloosa's Calling Me (But I'm Not Going), which ran for 429 performances at The Village Gate in 1975–76. The other primary staff writer was George Lowther, who adapted seven Poe stories to open the show's second year. The series marked its annual seasons with themed programming: a "Mark Twain Week" at the start of the third year, an O. Henry celebration in the fourth, and week-long serialized adaptations of classic novels — The Last Days of Pompeii in 1980, Les Misérables in 1982.

Source material ranged widely. Beyond Poe, Twain, and O. Henry, the series adapted works by Ambrose Bierce, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, Guy de Maupassant, Algernon Blackwood, H. Rider Haggard, and Russian authors including Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Brown also pushed the genre label beyond strict mystery into horror, science fiction, historical drama, westerns, and comedy.

What It Left Behind

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater's impact extended in several directions. Its success directly contributed to the creation of Sears Radio Theater (later Mutual Radio Theater), which premiered February 5, 1979, and was often paired with CBSRMT in programming. Brown also produced a spin-off, The General Mills Radio Adventure Theater, which aired on CBS weekends from February 1977 through January 1978, hosted by Tom Bosley. General Mills dropped its sponsorship after the original 52 broadcasts, but the series continued as CBS Radio Adventure Theater for 52 repeat broadcasts.

The show's public relations campaign drew sustained media attention to radio drama at a moment when it had largely been written off, with coverage running in publications from The New Yorker to Newsweek. In 1976, Pocket Library published Strange Tales from the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, a paperback anthology of three short stories adapted from the series' scripts, edited with a foreword by Brown. In January 1999, McFarland & Company published Gordon Payton and Martin Grams Jr.'s 475-page The CBS Radio Mystery Theater: An Episode Guide and Handbook to Nine Years of Broadcasting, 1974–1982, which documents all 2,970 broadcasts with synopses, airdates, cast lists, and writer credits, along with a 25-page index of actors and series titles and a log of the General Mills Radio Adventure Theater. Michael Anthony Stahl returned to the show academically in 2006 with The CBS Radio Mystery Theater as an Educational Degree, and followed up with a journal article in 2024. The series was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1990, and on May 6, 1979, Brown received a Broadcast Preceptor Award from San Francisco State University for his work on it.

From June through November 1998, the series was rebroadcast over CBS affiliates; in 2000, select episodes ran on some NPR stations. For both revivals, Brown re-recorded the original introductions and narrations that Marshall and Grimes had delivered. All 1,399 original episodes survive, many with original network and local commercials and newscasts intact.

Himan Brown himself lived to just short of his hundredth birthday, dying on June 4, 2010. He had lived in the same apartment at 285 Central Park West since 1938. His legacy is preserved in the Himan Brown collection at the University of Georgia's Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, and his charitable trust endowed a Senior Program at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. He was, by any measure, the person most responsible for the fact that American network radio drama had one more genuine run.