One of the most unique of modern directors, with a film and television career that has experienced more peaks and valleys than most, Robert Altman’s long journey to feature acclaim took over ten years of apprenticeship toiling in the television fields. This experience accumulated a richly diverse body of work that, along the way, helped change certain staid production perceptions and, later, introduce an innovative style to small-screen drama presentation.

His first work for television came in the early 1950s, during a period when he was engaged in directing short films for Calvin Industries, in his hometown of Kansas City. Unfortunately, this television work, a limited crime anthology called Pulse of the City (broadcast via the DuMont stations in late 1953), remains something of an obscurity in the program details of television history.

Following a move to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, Altman codirected (with George W. George) the compilation documentary The James Dean Story, released by Warner Bros. in 1957. The documentary came to the notice of Alfred Hitchcock, who had recently launched his mystery series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS/NBC, 1955–62) and who was immediately impressed by its expedient style of camerawork and editing. On the strength of this he invited Altman to direct two episodes of his half-hour series for the 1957–58 season. It marked the beginning of Altman’s television apprenticeship.

For the next two years Altman learned the art and craft of the weekly grind of episodic television making, turning out multiple segments of the action/adventure series The Whirlybirds, United States Marshal, and The Troubleshooters. Among the more interesting moments to emerge from this period were the often-exceptional episodes he directed for The Millionaire series, a collection of compact, self-contained stories about the diverse types who find themselves the improbable recipients of a $1,000,000 bank draft. Altman’s episodes ranged in genre from skittish comedy to gripping film noir.

From this period on, Altman began exploring the method and style of genre television, experimenting and innovating his way through the then-popular Western, private eye, and crime drama genres, mainly under contract to Warner Bros. Television.

While his work for the Warner TV westerns Sugarfoot, Bronco, Maverick, and Lawman was restricted somewhat by that studio’s tight rein over their money-making properties, Altman managed somehow to invert some of the series’ formal standards and conventions and celebrate his sense of offbeat adventure. Given a slightly freer hand, the eight episodes of Bonanza that he directed for NBC during the 1960–61 season reveal a certain flair for extracting colorful characterizations from an otherwise mundane frontier family saga.

During his period with Warner, Altman was also put to work on their private eye capers Hawaiian Eye and Surfside 6, but the studio’s formula production method offered few opportunities for experimentation. However, Altman was able to fashion a few episodes with a difference from their period mobster drama The Roaring 20’s, managing to create some surprisingly literate studies amid the screeching tires and machine gun fire.

In 1961 he joined his friend and the series’ producer Robert Blees at Twentieth Century Fox Television to work on the character-driven drama series Bus Stop. This program gave Altman the opportunity to explore new dimensions without the usual restrictions of series’ character and format conventions. Unfortunately, Bus Stop reached its terminus prematurely when the ABC network—defying objections from its affiliate stations—decided to air the controversial (Altman-directed) episode “A Lion Walks Among Us” (a disturbing study of a teenage psychopath). The episode caused a national outcry and its powerful content contributed to the ongoing Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings on television violence in 1961. Bus Stop was abruptly cancelled thereafter.

Altman was reunited with Blees when he was offered the director-producer assignment on the new men-at-war drama Combat!. This period, 1962–63, marked the peak of Altman’s creative power during his years in filmed television. As director, producer, and sometimes writer (the latter often uncredited) for most of Combat!‘s first season, he set the series’ visual style and structure as well as introducing innovative production values for the television form (the handheld camera, low-key lighting, overlapping dialogue). When Altman went ahead with production on a particular episode (“Survival”) that had been denied the approval of executive producer Selig Seligman, Altman was fired. (Combat!’s costar Vic Morrow went on to receive his only Emmy nomination for Best Actor for his work in this episode.)

He then followed Robert Blees to Universal Television, where they worked on the studio’s Kraft Suspense Theatre anthology until, once again, Altman got himself fired for his well-publicized remark that the Kraft-sponsored series was “as bland as its cheese” (due to Altman having ten of his scripts rejected by the company). One of Altman’s Kraft Suspense Theatre episodes, the crime thriller “Once Upon a Savage Night” (actually a backdoor pilot for a projected series), was later reedited and made available as the TV movie Nightmare in Chicago; it was also released to European cinemas in 1969 under that title.

For the next few years Altman pursued various personal TV pilot projects while at the same time trying to get a foothold in feature work. When, in 1970, critics discovered M*A*S*H, it seemed that his feature career was assured. But it was just the beginning of a new series of peaks and valleys in feature production (the high of Nashville and the low of Popeye).

Throughout most of the 1980s, Altman moved between his intermittent feature work (Streamers, Fool for Love) and a form of videotaped theater production for television: The Laundromat for HBO, The Dumb Waiter and The Room for ABC.

Then, in 1988, he introduced a captivating narrative form and style new to television drama: Tanner ’88. This remarkable miniseries (written by Garry Trudeau) was a superb fusion of flamboyant U.S. politicking and television verité (reminiscent of the John Drew-Richard Leacock 1960 Kennedy documentary Primary) and featured Michael Murphy’s fictional candidate Jack Tanner during the 1988 presidential campaign. The continuously active project and its irregular screenings spanned some six months (paralleling the real-life U.S. campaign). Tanner ’88 became a cult hit and was only limited in reaching a wider audience due to its presentation via cable TV. Nevertheless, Altman won the 1988–89 Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series.

The 1997 dramatic anthology The Gun, about the effect a pearl-handled, semiautomatic pistol has on its various owners, appeared to mark a return to main- stream television for Altman, this time as executive producer (and director of one episode).