Playhouse 90
television series
Playhouse 90 is an American television anthology drama series that aired on CBS from 1956 to 1960 for a total of 133 episodes. The show was produced at CBS Television City in Los Angeles, California. Since live anthology drama series of the mid-1950s usually were hour-long shows, the title highlighted the network's intention to present something unusual: a weekly series of hour-and-a-half-long dramas rather than 60-minute plays.
Playhouse 90 received many Emmy Award nominations, and it later ranked #33 on the TV Guide 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. In 1997, the acclaimed Requiem for a Heavyweight was ranked #30 on the TV Guide 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time. In 2013, the Writers Guild of America ranked Playhouse 90 #65 on their list of the 101 Best Written TV Series. In 2023, Variety ranked Playhouse 90 as the nineteenth-greatest TV show of all time.
Background
The producers of the show were Martin Manulis, John Houseman, Russell Stoneman, Fred Coe, Arthur Penn, and Hubbell Robinson. The leading director was John Frankenheimer (27 episodes), followed by Franklin J. Schaffner (19 episodes). Other directors included Sidney Lumet, George Roy Hill, Delbert Mann, and Robert Mulligan.
“Playhouse 90” enters the record as television series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Playhouse, television and series can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Playhouse 90” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Playhouse, television and series provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1248532. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1960, 1997 and 2013.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Playhouse 90”, its source revision and the description used here.
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Playhouse 90” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.