Postscript

Summary

Victory's years in syndication were surprisingly profitable, but its gradual move downmarket seems inevitable in retrospect. During the series’ first season NBC had given affiliates the network's Sunday afternoon feed without time gaps for advertising, and those stations broadcasting from film in other timeslots were forbidden to break Victory's twenty-six-minute continuity with commercials, as “such action would breach the mood of the show and destroy the dramatic impact.” Soon enough, however, came the intrusion of local advertising in most markets. By 1957 the series was in its fifth syndication cycle in New York City, but Henry Salomon was reluctant to view broadcasts: “I really can't look at it anymore. It was my first television effort and it's rather like one's oldest, dearest child. I can't bear to see it brutally broken up for commercials, to see its continuity spoiled. Any mishandling hurts me.”

Salomon died unexpectedly in 1958 and would never know the extent of Victory's durability: by 1964 Japan and Germany were among the forty countries where the series had aired, Japan having “bought it and liked it so much that they renewed it for a second showing a year later,” according to NBC. In 1962, the FCC's pivotal All Channels Act stipulated that new TV sets receive both the VHF and UHF broadcast bands—the latter typically used by “educational TV” stations—and Victory's US syndication shifted from commercial to non-profit outlets through the 1960s and 1970s. It would have pleased Henry Salomon that, in the years preceding home video's emergence, his program could again be viewed without commercial interruption and by an audience somewhat like 1952–53's Sunday-afternoon demographic. America's corporate TV networks had found themselves unable to fully sustain the ambitious cultural programming of their postwar dreams, but Victory at Sea earned a special distinction: an early-1950s commercial TV series later granted the prestige of regular public television exhibition.

Musically, Bennett's Victory writing is as unfashionable in today’s Hollywood as Rodgers-style tunes are on Broadway. Yet the series’ orchestral scoring repays study by both aspiring and veteran film composers, just as Rodgers's body of work is instructive to musical theater's current and future songwriters. Excerpts from the three Victory LPs remain available as digital downloads, and the score retains an independent concert life today in the form of Bennett's 1950s band and orchestra medleys which showcase the Rodgers themes.