Frances Buss Buch, 92, television’s first female director, who directed the first television talk show and the first color program, died January 19, 2010, at a rest home near Hendersonville, N.C. No cause of death was reported.
In 1941, while taking acting classes, performing off-Broadway and modeling in New York, Buch took a temporary job as a receptionist at CBS, and was soon asked to be in front of the camera for various black-and-white programs. According to news reports, she appeared on TV’s first game show, The CBS Television Quiz, as a scorekeeper.
She also worked on news coverage of the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
When networks had to suspend live TV broadcasting in 1942, Buch directed and produced U.S. Navy training films in Florida, where she met her husband, Bill Buch. They married in 1949, and he died in 1998. Survivors include a sister.
She rejoined CBS in 1944, and by 1945, the network made her television’s first female director.
She directed and produced a number of shows, from Brooklyn Dodgers games to musicals to crime dramas.
Buch is credited with helping to establish familiar programming templates and much of television’s unique visual language. Another milestone came in 1951, when, after CBS won government approval for its color system, Buch directed the first color television program, Premiere.
In 1954, she resigned to be a full-time homemaker, the family said.
Buch’s husband died in 1998.
On June 16, 2005, Buch had the distinction of being interviewed by the Television Academy Foundation’s Archive of American Television. During the interview, conducted in Hendersonville, North Carolina, by Karen Herman, director of the Archive of American Television, Buch described how a two-week temporary job at CBS led to an over decade-long association with the network, and her historic role as CBS’ very first female director.
She went on to detail her work at CBS before and after broadcasting was interrupted during World War II. She also talked about her assistance creating maps for the news program on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. In addition, described several of the earliest commercial broadcasts on CBS, which featured her on-camera, including The Country Dance, a monthly dance program by the American Country Dance Society; Children’s Story, in which a story was read to a child, “illustrated” by an artist on camera; and the CBS Television Quiz, which featured such games as “Peanuts in the Bottle,” in which a contestant attempted to spoon peanuts into an empty milk bottle that they held on their head.
She talked about some of her earliest directorial efforts such as Sorry, Wrong Number, an adaptation of the famed radio show. Buch talked about several of the key creative talent at CBS at the time, including Worthington Miner and Gilbert Seldes. She spoke in great detail about other early CBS series, including The Missus Goes A-Shopping, To the Queen’s Taste with Dione Lucas, The Whistling Wizard and Mike and Buff. She also talked about CBS’s color experimentation and her role as a director of the first color broadcast for the network on June 25, 1951 (she says she directed the show's "live" commercials). She also discussed “Telecolor Clinics,” a series of television documentaries done for the American Cancer Society.