They're starting to show The Alfred Hitchcock Hour on METV. They used to show two half-hour episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I saw what may have been the first episode, written by Robert Bloch, based on a story by Patricia Highsmith, starring Dean Stockwell.
It had a total of eight people in it. They could have cut it down to five if they wanted to economize.
Had a surprisingly grotesque shot of a strangling victim.
I watched another episode last night that had, let's see, seven characters including a child actor, plus several extras. The child did his own stunts.
In this era of COVID-19, work only with tiny casts. Maybe that's my point here.
They do that anyway. Unless it's a comedy about a giant family, every child on TV is an only child and most of the parents are single.
The TV show Daniel Boone was set in a time before contraception about a historical figure who had at least a dozen children in real life. On the show, he and his wife have only one son, Israel. The real Israel Boone died at a young age in a battle with the British. Maybe they picked him so they could kill off his character when he wasn't cute anymore. "We HAD to! It was historically accurate!"
Someone told me they watched an episode of Bonanza which detailed how each of the sons had a different mother. Ben Cartwright had only one child with each of his late wives.
I thought Bonanza was a little more plausible than The Big Valley. The family on The Big Valley was supposed to be so respectable and high class, yet the sons were always getting into fist fights and they killed one or two people every week. Bonanza was about a semi-degenerate all-male household who raised and slaughtered cattle for a living.
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