Reginald Rose was one of the outstanding television playwrights to emerge from the “Golden Age” of television drama anthology series. Like his acclaimed contemporaries—Paddy Chayefsky, Tad Mosel, and Rod Serling, for example—Rose takes a place in history at the top of the craft of television writing. In addition to other accolades, Rose was nominated for six Emmy Awards during his career, and won three. Although most of Rose’s fame derived from his teleplays for the live drama anthologies, he also wrote a number of successful plays for screen and stage. Additionally, he created and wrote scripts for The Defenders at CBS, and he won recognition for the revived CBS Playhouse in the late 1960s.

Rose’s first teleplay to be broadcast was The Bus to Nowhere, which appeared on Studio One (CBS) in 1951. It was the 1954–55 season, however, that gave Rose his credentials as a top writer—that year has been referred to as “the Reginald Rose season” at Studio One. His contributions included the noted plays 12:32 A.M., An Almanac of Liberty, Crime in the Streets, as well as the play that opened the season and became perhaps Rose’s best-known work, Twelve Angry Men. In addition to winning numerous awards and undergoing transformation into a feature film, Twelve Angry Men undoubtedly established Rose’s reputation almost immediately as a major writer of drama for television.

What distinguished Rose’s teleplays from those of his colleagues, such as Chayefsky and Serling, was their direct preoccupation with social and political issues. Although the other writers were perhaps equally concerned with the larger social dimensions of their work, they concentrated on the conflicts that emerge in private life and the domestic sphere, and the problems of society as a whole remain implicit in their writing. Rose, in contrast, tackled controversial social issues head-on.

In one of his best-known and most contentious plays, Thunder on Sycamore Street (Studio One, 1953), Rose aimed to confront the problem of social conformity. In this story, an ex-convict moves to an upscale neighborhood in an attempt to make a new beginning. When the man’s past is discovered, one of his neighbors organizes a community march to drive the ex-convict out of his new home. Rose dealt directly with the issues of mob anger and difference from the norm, issues of general concern in a time when the pressures of conformity were overwhelming and the memory of fascism still prevalent. This play was controversial from the outset, since the central character was originally written to be an African American. Rose was forced, under pressure from Studio One sponsors fearful of offending (and losing) audiences in the South, to change the character into an ex-convict. This controversy, perhaps more than anything, was indicative of his ability to touch on the most sensitive areas of American social life of that time.

Although Rose kept his sights directed at the scrutiny of social institutions and mechanisms, his characters were as finely drawn as those of writers who focused on domestic struggles. Exemplary in this regard is the tension created by exhausting deliberations within the confined closeness of the jury room in which Twelve Angry Men occurs. The remake of this powerful drama and Paddy Chayefsky’s teleplay Marty (Goodyear Playhouse, 1953) into successful feature films marked the breakthrough of the television drama aesthetic into Hollywood cinema. Rose was responsible in part for the creation of this new approach. This gritty realism that became known as the “slice of life” school of television drama was for a time the staple of the anthology shows and reshaped the look of both television and American cinema.