Despite a long technical and practical experience with television production, previous attempts by General Electric (GE) to establish a Sunday evening company program had fared poorly. In the fall of 1948, General Electric entered commercial television for the first time with the Dennis James Carnival, a variety show dropped after one performance. A quiz program entitled Riddle Me This substituted for 12 weeks and was also dropped. In April 1949 GE returned to Sunday evenings with the musical-variety Fred Waring Show. Produced by the Young and Rubicam advertising agency under the sponsorship of GE's Appliance, Electronics, and Lamp Divisions, the program occasionally included company-voice messages. In November 1951 GE transferred television production to the Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn (BBDO) advertising agency, under whose direction the General Electric Theater debuted February 1, 1953, as an "all­ company project" sponsored by GE's Department of Public Relations Services.

     The first two seasons of General Electric Theater established the half-hour anthology format of adaptations of popular plays, short stories, novels, magazine fiction, and motion pictures. "The Eye of the Beholder," for example, a Hitchcock-like telefilm thriller starring Richard Conte and Martha Vickers, dramatized an artist's relationship with his model from differing, sometimes disturbing, psychological perspectives.

     The addition of Ronald Reagan as program host at the start of the third season, beginning September 26, 1954, reflected GE's decision to pursue a campaign of continuous, consistent company-voice advertising. Reagan's role as program host and occasional guest star brought needed continuity to disparate anthology offerings. The casting of Don Herbert of TV's Watch Mr. Wizard fame in the role of "General Electric Progress Reporter" established a clear-cut company identity for commercials. "Outstanding entertainment" became the watchword of GE's public and employee relations specialists. Reagan, in the employ of BBDO, helped market the concept within the company itself. In November 1954 the first of many promotional tours orchestrated by BBDO and the GE Department of Public Relations Services sent Reagan to 12 cities with GE plants to promote the program idea, further his identity as spokesman, and become familiar with company people and products. By the time General Electric Theater concluded its eight-year run in 1962, Reagan claimed to have visited GE's 135 research and manufacturing facilities, meeting some 250,000 individuals. In later years, Reagan's biographers would look back upon the tour and the platform it provided as an opportunity for the future president of the United States to sharpen his already considerable skill as a communicator.

     By December 1954, after only four months on the air with Reagan as program host, the new General Electric Theater achieved Nielsen top-ten status among all programs and was television's most popular weekly dramatic program. The format accommodated live telecasts originating from both coasts, as well as the increasing use of telefilms by Revue Productions, the motion picture production company of the Music Corporation of America (MCA). During Reagan's tenure as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) in 1952, and again in 1954, SAG granted unprecedented talent waivers to MCA-Revue. These waivers allowed MCA-Revue to dominate the fledgling tele­ film industry, as the studio could now simultaneously represent artists and employ them in telefilms it produced. MCA's stars appeared on Revue's General Electric Theater, and ratings soared. Many made television debuts in dramatic roles. Joseph Cotten starred in "The High Green Wall," an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust; Jack Benny starred in "The Face Is Familiar," a comedy about a man whose face no one could remember; Alan Ladd starred in "Committed," a mystery about "an author who advertises for trouble and finds it." Joan Crawford made her only 1954 television appearance in "The Road to Edin­ burgh," a story of '"terror on a lonely road." "The Long Way Around" featured Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis Reagan, who solved "a unique marital problem to reunite a family." In a direct dramatic tie-in with a company-voice theme, Burgess Meredith portrayed "Edison the Man," a telecast coinciding with GE's commemoration of "Light's Diamond Jubilee."

     General Electric Theater saturated its audience with Reagan's genial progress talk in introductions, segues, and closing comments, and with Herbert's commercials. From the viewpoint of its sponsors, the program's entertainment component seemed less important than audience "recall scores," "impact studies," and the "penetration" of company messages that culminated with the motto, "Progress is our most important product." Commercials from the 1954 fall season, for example, included "Kitchen of the Future," "Lamp Progress," "Jet Engine Advancement," "Turbosuper­ charger Progress," "Sonar Development," "Atomic Safety Devices," and so on. "Kitchen of the Future" achieved the highest impact score (90 percent audience recall) recorded to date by the polling firm of Gallup-Robinson, whose specialists reported the General Electric Theater as "the leading institutional campaign on television for selling ideas to the public." Following a 1956 Herbert "progress report" on the subject of steam turbine generators and their contributions to "progress toward a fuller and more satisfying life," Reagan reiterated, "In the meantime, remember: from electricity comes progress; progress in our daily living; progress in our daily work; progress in the defense of our nation; and at General Electric, progress is ... "

     By 1957 General Electric Theater had hit its stride with a top-rated program package that was equal to the company's early technical proficiency in television. While GE's product divisions developed individual sponsorships to reach appliance, lamp, and electronics consumers via The Jane Froman Show, The Ray Mil­ land Show, I Married Joan, Ozzie and Harriet, and To­ day, the General Electric Theater aspired to the overarching sale of "Total Electric" living. One telecast featuring Jimmy Stewart, for example, celebrated the first anniversary of the electric utilities' "Live Better Electrically" campaign and "National Electric Week." The closing commercial featured Nancy and Ronald Reagan in the kitchen of a Total Electric home. "When you live better electrically," Reagan told viewers, "you lead a richer, fuller, more satisfying life. And it's something all of us in this modern age can have." In his 1965 autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me?, Reagan recalled that GE installed so many appliances in his home in Pacific Palisades, California, that the electrical panel needed to serve them soon outgrew the usual pantry cupboard and had to be relocated in a 3,000-pound steel cabinet outside the house. General Electric Theater was no less loaded with the corporate stewardship of personal and social improvement, expressed over and over by Reagan: "Progress in products goes hand in hand with providing progress in the human values that enrich the lives of us all."

     In 1962 General Electric Theater left the air in a welter of controversy surrounding the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust investigation of MCA and the SAG talent waivers granted to MCA-Revue. The hint of scandal lessened Reagan's value as company spokesman and program host. As SAG president in 1952, Reagan had, after all, signed one of the waivers, and he later benefited from the arrangement as a General Electric Theater program producer himself. The suggestion of impropriety fueled Reagan's increa­ingly antigovemment demeanor on tour, and his insistence upon producing and starring in episodes combating communist subversion in the final season of General Electric Theater.