Casablanca

Casablanca is an hour-long American television series, in the genre of spying and intrigue during the Cold War, which was broadcast on ABC between September 27, 1955 and April 24, 1956 as part of the wheel series Warner Bros. Presents. The third of 20 filmed shows produced for ABC, between 1955 and 1963, by Warner Bros. Television, under the supervision of executive producer William T. Orr, Casablanca is also the only one among those shows to be structured in the form of a non-U.S.-based Cold-War-intrigue storyline, while 14 of the 20 productions were western and detective/adventure series. Series elements The series was based on Everybody Comes to Rick's, a play written in 1940 by American authors Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, and the celebrated 1942 film version, Casablanca starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Peter Lorre. The television series stars Charles McGraw as Rick Blaine, the character played in the film by Bogart. After the 7-episode Kings Row, it was the second-least-successful among Orr's twenty ABC series, canceled after the production of only ten episodes. Director John Peyser has attributed the failure to studio head Jack L. Warner's refusal to finalize the hiring of charismatic rising star Anthony Quinn to play Rick and settling instead on McGraw, an actor Peyser said "couldn't act his way out of a hat". Although the standard length for episodes of hour-long filmed series was 53 or 54 minutes, the first 23 episodes of Warner Bros. Presents, including 8 of the 10 installments of Casablanca, were timed to run 48 minutes, thus enabling Warner Bros Television to append 6-minute segments, hosted by Gig Young, promoting upcoming Warners films and chatting with stars under contract to the studio.