October 14, 1958 - August 13, 1961
OPEN END with David Susskind: (WNTA Channel 13 Television)
September 10, 1961-May 5, 1963
OPEN END with David Susskind (WNEW Channel 5 Television)
June 9, 1963 last show of the season broadcast on WPIX TV.
October 13, 1963-September 18, 1966
OPEN END with David Susskind (WPIX Channel 11 Television)
October 2, 1966-September, 1986
DAVID SUSSKIND SHOW (SYNDICATED, PBS, and COMMERCIAL STATIONS, including WNEW, New York).
OPEN END with David Susskind: (WNTA Channel 13 Television)
"PSYCHE, PSYCHOSIS & PSYCHOLOGY"
Open End with David Susskind was a break through talk show which literally had no time limit. The show ended when host, moderator David Susskind felt all conversation points were discussed. Some of these marathon telecasts lasted over four hours!.
The series premiered on WNTA Channel 13 in New York for three years, an independent broadcast station, before it would become a Public Broadcast Station in 1962. A myriad of talk show guests, famous, infamous and unknown, found a forum on OPEN END. Subjects varied focusing on usually one topic...show business, politics, the economy, sex, education, crime, etc. Typically, many guests would discuss a subject sitting around a large table with David Susskind moderating, leading his guests with baited questions. For the first three years, of its 26 year existence as a regular series, WNTA TV was home to OPEN END which originally began its broadcasts on Tuesday nights, switching on January 18, 1959 to Sunday nights...a future Sunday evening time slot of the week where it would remain until 1986, for the rest of its run. The OPEN END with David Susskind Show also found syndication across the country and each market would run the program at different time at their own discretion.
Most all of the telecasts were recorded on video tape, 2" quadruplex. Most shows were kept for a year or two like THE MOVIE MAKERS broadcast which was re-run on August 6, 1961 almost a year after it was first telecast on October 2, 1960. By this time the show ran for a finite three hours long. Thus the re-run of the MOVIE MAKERS had some footage deleted from its original run which aired for over three and half hours, including commercials.
This rare example of a very early OPEN END with David Susskind broadcast is an historic and important television audio air check, now archived and preserved in digital form, reprocessed with continuity by Phil Gries (all extraneous audio eliminated), for the first time in six decades. It is considered one of the oldest surviving OPEN END complete broadcasts, or almost complete broadcasts extant.
