Forbidden Area (Playhouse 90 episode #1 1956)

Aired: 10/04/56

stars Charlton Heston as Col. Price  Vincent Price  Tab Hunter Diana Lynn Victor Jory and Charles Bickford
written by Rod Serling    Directed by John Frankenheimer

The 1st live episode from Playhouse 90 was a cold war thriller in the vein of Seven Days in May, with a slight sci-fi aspect which suggested that it took place in some indefinite near-future. It was about the chilling prospect of nuclear attack and, specifically, a Soviet sleeper agent hiding in plain sight in the U.S. military. The USA's B-90 jets are being targeted by the Soviet agents, who have created a diabolical plan to secrete pressure bombs on the aircraft and blow them up one-by-one each time they attain a certain altitude. Heston plays a U.S. military man with  an eye-patch (an earlier version of Nick Fury and a precursor to Heston's own much later character in True Lies-1994) who is part of a small think tank (the Forbidden Area of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) that attempts to proactively challenge the Soviet threat. He eventually deduces that this on-going sabotage will cause the government to temporarily ground all the crucial air forces, leaving the nation wide open to Soviet attack. It also falls to him to uncover the hidden Soviet agent.  This obviously had the constraints of no-budget live TV but there was some heady suspense in the final act regarding a bomb. BoG's Score: 7 out of 10