During the Kennedy years, with an increased regulatory zeal emanating from the Federal Communications Commission, the networks attempted to deemphasize the violence of action-adventure series. One result was an increase in character dramas. There was a trend toward programs based on liberal social themes in which the protagonists were professionals in service to society. As one producer of that era explained, “The guns of gangsters, policemen, and western lawmen were replaced by the stethoscope, the law book, and the psychiatrist’s couch.” This new breed of episodic TV hero struggled with occupational ethics and felt a disillusionment with the values of the past.

Unlike action-adventure series in which heroes often settled their problems with a weapon, the troubles in New Frontier character dramas were not always resolved. Writers grappled with issues such as poverty, prejudice, drug addiction, abortion, and capital punishment, which do not lend themselves to tidy resolutions. Although the Loose Ends of a plot might be tied together by the story’s end, the world was not necessarily depicted as a better place at the conclusion of an episode.

East Side/West Side, produced by David Susskind and Daniel Melnick, was among the best of the genre and won instant acclaim. The program, about a New York social worker, appealed to sophisticates because, according to Lawrence Laurent of the  Washington Post, it violated “every sacred tenet for television success.” Typical TV Heroes all had a similar look, said Laurent, “short straight noses, direct from a plastic surgeon, gleaming Smiles courtesy of a dental laboratory.” But, observed Laurent, Niel Brock (played by George C. Scott) was “hooknosed and disheveled.”

An exemplary episode of East Side/West Side titled “Who Do You Kill?” aired on November 4, 1962. The story portrays how a Black couple in their early 20s living in a Harlem tenement face the death of their infant daughter, who is bitten by a rat while in her crib. Diana Sands played the mother who works in a neighborhood bar to support the family. Her husband, played by James Earl Jones, is frustrated by unemployment and grows more bitter each day.

The week after the broadcast, Senator Jacob Javits, a liberal, pro-civil rights Republican, moved that two newspaper articles be entered into the Congressional Record: “A CBS Show Stars Two Negroes: Atlanta Blacks It Out,” from the New York Herald Tribune, and, from The New York Times, “TV: A Drama of Protest.” Javits praised CBS for displaying courage in airing “Who Do You Kill?” and told his Senate colleagues he was distressed that not all southern viewers had the opportunity to see the drama. The program, Javits said, “dealt honestly and sensitively with the vital problem of job discrimination, housing conditions, and terrible cancerous cleavage that can exist between the Negro and the white community.” “Who Do You Kill?” he said, was “shocking in its revelations of what life can be like without hope.”

The stark realism of the series was discomforting. Most viewers did not know what to make of a hero who was often dazed by moral complexities. For CBS, the series was a bust; one-third of the advertising time remained unsold, and the program was not renewed. A few years later, David Susskind reflected on the ratings problem of East Side/West Side: “A gloomy atmosphere for commercial messages, an integrated cast, and a small Southern station lineup, all of these things coming together spelled doom for the show. I’m sorry television wasn’t mature enough to absorb it and like it and live with it.”