Last season in Britain, the BBC presented a program called That Was the Week That Was, a sort of U.K. News & World Retort in which a group of bright and biting youths said what they pleased about Parliament, the Crown and current affairs. It was ragged and embarrassingly sophomoric, but it had the stamp of originality, and it became a sizable milestone in British television.
Last week NBC—having been pleased by a trial show broadcast last autumn—began a new weekly series of That Was the Week That Was in the U.S., produced by Leland Hayward and written by Robert...