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DESK SET
December 22, 2015  | By David Bianculli

TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET

 

This Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn comedy was released in 1957, and concerns a subject that ought to be especially interesting to TV enthusiasts in general and Mad Men fans in particular. It looks behind the scenes at a television network, and the unsettling but unavoidable decision to bring new-fangled computer technology into the network’s research department. This takes place, in Desk Set, just before the era we saw on Mad Men, and you can remember how unsettling the introduction of computers was to at least one member of that firm. (And if you don’t remember, I don’t want to describe it.) In Desk Set, Tracy plays the engineer plotting to introduce the computerized system, and Hepburn plays the research department head who feels threatened by its, and his, encroachment.

 
 
 
 
 
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