society and must have cost the play many a bored viewer who turned it off." Jack Gould in The New York Times went even further, calling Carol "a pretentious and wearing exercise in garrulous ineptitude, one of the more dismaying TV disappointments in several seasons." After receiving letters from viewers disagreeing with his review, Gould wrote a second opinion piece calling the film "condescending, pretentious and dull", "platitudinous propaganda", and "an exercise in heavy-handed sermonizing that the U.N. is good for you." The Washington Post printed a generally positive review, but wrote that the film "failed" because "[t]o most of the audience...the lesson that was being stressed has already been learned." Despite expressing dissatisfaction with the overall program, critics still praised the performances of some of the actors, particularly Sellers, Lawrence and Hingle. Public reaction was mixed. Gould acknowledged in The New York Times that based on letters received, "many disagreed" with his sharp criticism of the film, in some cases suggesting that the program was "entitled to generous appreciation, if only because its espousal of the United Nations was so much more worthwhile than the average escapist Hollywood fare." However, according to Phil Hall, audiences disliked the film's heavy-handed approach. In addition, many right-wing viewers were fundamentally opposed not only to Carol but to the overall idea of television programs promoting the UN, and the John Birch Society had organized a letter-writing campaign against the film even before it was broadcast. Xerox, the sponsor, claimed to have received an approximately equal number of verified letters (about 6,000) for and against the UN film series. Later, Carol's production supervisor, C.O. "Doc" Erickson, described the film as "overdone", saying, "It was too long, too tiring, and beat you over the head too much." Marc Scott Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion (1982), has cited Carol as an example of Serling's more "didactic" writing. Serling biographer Gordon F. Sander noted that unlike much of Serling's screenwriting dealing with social change, Carol was depressing and did not end on an optimistic note, possibly because Serling in 1964 was influenced by the then-recent assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Johnson administration's escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Awards and honors At the 17th Primetime Emmy Awards, despite the negative reviews, the film competed with nominations in two categories — Outstanding Program Achievements in Entertainment (Joseph L. Mankiewicz and ABC) and