Meeting of Minds --- Complete Scripts -- Second Series

     The first season of the PBS_TV network series “Meeting of Minds” received a more enthusiastic critical response than any program ever carried on American educational and cultural television. Since that initial telecast, and the subsequent publication of the scripts of the six one-hour shows, the program has continued to win awards and citations. The nation’s television critics voted Steve Allen’s scripts as Best TV Writing of 1976-1977, sharing the honor with James Costigan’s “Eleanor and Franklin.” Subsequently the program has won the Peabody Award, an Encyclopaedia Britannica Award, and an official endorsement by the National Education Association.
     This next volume contains the Second Series of six scripts, originally telecast in 1978 and subsequently repeated in 1979.
     The program—described by Dr. Max Rafferty, dean of the School of Education at Troy State University, as “the best, most original TV far since the boob tube was invented”—brings together some of history’s most significant figures in stimulating discussions of ideas and beliefs that illuminate the past, the present, and even the future.
      The first pair of shows of the Second Series brings together the MARQUIS DE SADE, CESARE BECCARIA, the DOWAGER EMPRESS OF CHINA, TZ’U-HSI, and FREDERICK DOUGLASS discussing ideas and experiences concerning which they have special knowledge.
      The second pair of programs includes MARTIN LUTHER, VOLTAIRE, PLATO, and FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
      The third quartet consists of SIR FRANCIS BACON, SOCRATES, EMILIANO ZAPATA, and SUSAN B. ANTHONY.
      Karl E. Meyer of Saturday Review has summed up the general critical, academic, and public response to “Meeting of Minds” in saying “the script is wonderfully entertaining….Crazy as this grouping may sound, it works…we ought to have more such jeux d’esprit on television.”