the quality of the radio writing with a cinematic look worthy of feature films; to this effect, they established a multi-camera setup (a revolutionary process that would become an industry standard in the decades to come) to allow for a live studio audience, hired cinematographer Karl Freund to oversee filming and recorded the series on movie-quality 35mm film (the relatively high cost prevented the show from being filmed in color as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had originally hoped). End of the American golden age By the late 1950s network era, as television began reaching larger portions of rural America, their viewing habits began to be reflected in overall television ratings. Sylvester "Pat" Weaver was fired in 1956 after his strategy of programming highbrow "spectacular" productions once a month on NBC proved to be a ratings failure against more conventional fare on CBS. Rural sitcoms and Westerns boomed, perplexing even the writers of the shows and being treated as an opportunity for callous exploitation by the network executives, who nonetheless hated the programs, as did most critics. Americans' fondness for the rural sitcom and Western formats would last well into the 1960s. James Aubrey, the president of CBS Network from 1960 to 1965, introduced to television the shows such as Mister Ed, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Danny Kaye, in addition to already well-established Danny Thomas, Ed Sullivan, What's My Line?, Perry Mason, I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke. Characterized by a former colleague at ABC as having "a smell for the blue-collar", Aubrey later admitted: The nation as a whole was also tiring of high-culture programming as the Baby Boomers were beginning to come of age; over the next several years, high-culture programs would be relegated to public television, where older audiences with more money were tolerated. By the 1980s, enough highbrow enthusiasts had gradually died, such that public television even began resorting to more popular fare to maintain donations. A general decline in quality had been noticed as early as 1958, as the Peabody Award committee, in issuing an award to The Steve Allen Show that year, lamented that television was "conspicuously lacking ... genuine humor and frank experiments". As filmed series such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone began to dominate during the mid-1950s to early 1960s, the period of live television dramas was viewed as the Golden Age. The exact