Since The Birth of network television, autumn has been open season for the exercise of critical wit. Each batch of new programs is held, with some justice, to be worse than the last. Though savage indignation was as common an emotion among the critics of 1955 as it is today, in some circles the mid-50's are now being celebrated as the golden age of American television: people are beginning to write of Studio One, Sid Caesar, and The Honeymooners with the reverence once reserved for Buster Keaton, Erich von Stroheim, or the Marx Brothers.
At the beginning of the 1965-66 season, the chorus of critical scorn reached almost orgiastic proportions when the networks, for the first time, unveiled all their new treasures during the course of one stupefying September week. The memory of this television season is unlikely ever to be bathed in a golden glow. Nevertheless, I shall try to avoid the supercilious tone that most of the new entries seem to call for, even though this self-denial may make it difficult to do justice to the prime-time wasteland. Most of the new programs seem to be bizarre collages, bits of previous successes improbably pasted together: My Mother the Car (NBC) is a kind of machine-age marriage of Mr. Ed and Bewitched; A Man Called Shenandoah (ABC) is a lugubrious Western half-breed, by Branded out of The Fugitive; F Troop (ABC) is a 19th-century Sergeant Bilko (redeemed, if at all, by the improbable casting of Edward Everett Horton as Roaring Chicken, an Indian medicine man); Big Valley (ABC) is a matriarchal Bonanza, with Barbara Stanwyck presiding over three sons, a daughter, and an illegitimate offspring of her late husband—a household that allows scope for sexual and emotional permutations by contrast with which family life at the Ponderosa seems even more improbably wholesome than we thought it was.
There are still plenty of cowboys about, but the new lord of the airways is undoubtedly the secret agent. Seven network shows are devoted to spies or domestic undercover operators. Some of them dare to be (at least slightly) different. The FBI (ABC), the only dramatic series ever to be authorized by J. Edgar Hoover, claims to be based on FBI files and shows mugshots of real-life Most Wanted Criminals; for all that, the plots are very dubiously authentic and the production pedestrian. Amos Burke (ABC), who was a millionaire cop last year, became a millionaire agent this year (before being taken off the air). I Spy (NBC) is stylishly produced and features an integrated pair of agents (played by Robert Culp and Bill Cosby) disguised as an itinerant tennis bum and his trainer. The Wild, Wild West (CBS) is a period piece about James West, a secret agent operating out of Washington in the 1860's. Honey West (ABC) (no relation) is a routine thriller except for the fact that the operative is a female karate expert. (Karate is definitely in, this year: all the agents use it—even the 19th-century ones.) The Man from UNCLE (NBC), which pioneered the offbeat treatment of international undercover skulduggery, seems to have lost its light touch this season; while Secret Agent (CBS), a British-made series, has been upgraded from a summer replacement in order to help plug the gap in the schedule left by the demise of Slattery's People. Two more secret-agent shows, to begin in January, have just been announced by ABC: Blue Light and The Double Life of Henry Phyfe.
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Though the fathers of the tradition—Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Graham Greene, and Ian Fleming—are all British, the secret agent is rapidly establishing himself as the heir of the two greatest American popular heroes, the cowboy and the gangster.1 Both earlier myths merge in his identity. The secret agent resembles the cowboy in his loneliness and his melancholy. He acts out these qualities, however, not in shabby cow towns or lushly arid deserts, but amid urban affluence and stylishness in which he participates gracefully and knowledgeably, without ever committing more than a fragment of his personality. His loneliness is that of the lonely crowd; and his stoic melancholy cannot be assuaged by the delights of the affluent society.
Like the gangster, the secret agent is incessantly active, but though he inhabits a similar “underworld” where normal law and morality do not govern human relations, he is a rather special kind of bureaucrat, not a criminal tycoon. Politically he is very square—a creature of the Cold War, and almost painfully respectable and conservative. His sex-life is not. It is more like the gangster's than the cowboy's—to him beautiful, well-dressed women are symbols of status rather than potential wives or even permanent mistresses. He demands quantity as well as quality. Those to whom he makes love are almost always enemies; in the midst of the most torrid embrace (TV embraces are getting warmer every season), his mind is always tensed against the possibility that his partner will try some kind of murderous trick.
All the agents share a passion for gadgetry which they presumably inherit from James Bond—or could it be Tom Swift? There is an obsessive preoccupation with devices for bugging conversations (an understandable obsession considering the revelations of “The Big Ear,” NBC's excellent documentary special on listening devices in modern society, broadcast October 31). Walls, rubber plants, compacts, sun-glasses, telephones, and even martini olives bristle with microphones, transmitters, receivers, and miniature wire recorders. There are pistols which look like cigarette lighters or lipsticks (and vice-versa), hollow heels full of smoke bombs, rubber flapjacks which are really recordings, cufflinks with concealed razors for cutting loose bound wrists, earrings made of tear-gas capsules, and garters (Honey West's) which do double duty as gas-masks. Even James West, President U. S. Grant's favorite agent, makes the most of the primitive technology of the 19th century: he carries a dismembered Derringer in the heels of his boots, a pistol attached to a retractable rod up his sleeve, razor-sharp knives concealed in his belt, and canes that double as guns or swords. He travels about in a plush private railway car stuffed with mechanical marvels, including a secret arsenal and a billiard table with balls that are really hand grenades.
Except for The FBI, which is in many ways a rather old-fashioned program, the tone of all the secret-agent shows is cool. Just as in the James Bond movies, there is an air of parody and self-mockery about them which stops short of destroying the excitement and violence of the plot, but enables would-be sophisticates to watch them without excessive shame.
One of the few really successful and original new shows carries the spoof a stage further. Get Smart (NBC) stars an ex-standup comedian (Don Adams) as Maxwell Smart, the world's most incompetent agent. Though the first episode—involving a fight to wrest a disintegrating ray machine from the control of a criminal Mr. Big (played by the dwarf Michael Dunn, naturally)—was very funny, I didn't think it would be possible to keep the joke fresh for the length of a whole season. So far I have been proven wrong. Smart's struggles with the electronic technology of his profession, his bluffs that always get called (“Would you believe me if I told you that this house is surrounded by fifteen men? No? Would you believe ten? . . . five? . . .”), his apologies when things go wrong, as they always do (“Sorry about that, Chief”), and his imperturbable stupidity in the face of danger have acquired, like good vaudeville acts, a kind of ritualistic predictability.
The distaste with which intellectuals regard the products of a medium like television is often based on the idea that they are mere machine-made reinforcers of the status quo, the new opium of the people. There is plenty of evidence to support this view, much of it supplied by the very men who plan and pick the programs. Undoubtedly, many (even most) mass-produced TV series do seem designed to inculcate a kind of brutal conformity.
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On the other hand, the idea that popular art can always question and disturb, or that it should serve as a kind of storm trooper of the imagination, is an obvious oversimplification. Art with a strong popular element (Fielding, Hogarth, Scott, Dickens) has always combined reassurance and celebration of the common virtues with touches of fantasy which may be both critical and liberating. What Northrop Frye says of the action of comedy might be said of the successful TV series drama; both are intensely Freudian in shape: “The erotic pleasure principle explodes underneath the social anxieties sitting on top of it and blows them sky-high. But in comedy we see a victory of the pleasure principle that Freud warns us not to look for in ordinary life.”
The best popular art, therefore, tends to provide an authentic and meaningful glimpse at the reality of our lives, but exploded or irradiated by fantasies of reconciliation or destruction, fear or joy. In the world of television, New York is identified with programs that emphasize the first half of this creative equation, Hollywood with those that stress the second.
As everyone knows, however, New York is on the way out as a center of production for TV drama. The realistic, documentary tradition survives today almost exclusively in the non-fictional specials put out by network news services. The classics of the fictional documentary, shot on location, are Naked City (earlier episodes), the first half-dozen episodes of East Side, West Side, much of The Defenders, and—perhaps the best of them all—Z Cars, the British series about Newtown, Liverpool (never shown in the USA, so far as I know). Calhoun, the project whose abortive history was traced by Merle Miller in Only You, Dick Daring, was to have been an attempt to translate this essentially urban style to rural New Mexico.
In such series, each episode is designed to illuminate a different facet of contemporary life. The camera and the story-line collaborate to dramatize part of the hidden reality behind the anonymous and discontinuous facade of a complex modern society: Puerto Ricans or Hasidic Jews in New York, blacklisted actors, jazz musicians, the children of divorced and quarreling parents—these are natural subjects for the New York school of documentary television just as they are for the novelist of “social realism' from Emile Zola to Hubert Selby, Jr.
Each hour-long episode has to focus upon a different problem or conflict and, more often than not, resolve it happily. This is where Frye's definition applies, and it is also where the trouble begins. The characteristic weakness of all problem-oriented documentary serials is to present the moving and convincing image of a human predicament, but to spoil it with an ending which is hasty, unconvincing, sentimental—or all three at once. This is not surprising; life is full of situations which are easier to dramatize than to resolve. The canons of popular art lay it down that a pseudo-solution is better than no resolution at all, and even aesthetic puritans might agree that ten minutes of unearned wish-fulfilment at the end of a program do not entirely nullify forty dramatically authentic minutes at the beginning.
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For some reason the tradition of documentary realism has been on the wane during the last few years. Near the end of its long run, Naked City began to depend more and more on perverse violence to provide the kick that had once come from its fresh and poetic view of the city; even after it had been all but drained of social content, East Side, West Side lost the ratings war; The Defenders' formula was running very thin during its last season. More recent contenders like Mr. Novak and Slattery's People, not content with pseudo-solutions, devoted themselves to dramatizing the pseudo-problems of pseudo-people. No one need feel any regret that these pathetic attempts to appear well-intentioned fooled neither viewers nor network executives.
The last and newest decent representative of the New York tradition is The Trials of O'Brien (CBS), in which Peter Falk, supported by a strong cast, plays a sympathetically disreputable lawyer who bets, gambles, lies, and is behind with the rent and the alimony. The off-beat love interest is supplied by his ex-wife (their divorce is “very shaky,” he says). The Prestons of The Defenders would not approve of either his life style or his professional standards, and neither does the American Bar Association. However, in this case art triumphs over morality. Falk's pleasantly mannered performance may owe a little too much to the study of old Cagney movies, and O'Brien's New York may be rather too Runyonesque for fastidious tastes; but the direction has style and the scripts are witty. As these comments suggest, documentary realism is not the sole mode of this program. Many scenes are shot on location, but the dominant spirit is one of comic exaggeration: two typical recent plots involved a thief betrayed by the wailing of a stolen caseful of “Patty Poo” dolls, and a murderer detected by a keen-nosed arsonist who sniffed out the killer's brand of cologne in a roomful of men at a fashion show. Newton Minow might not feel that O'Brien fertilizes the wasteland, but there is much to be said on behalf of a program which both avoids most of the respectable clichés of “family entertainment” and adds to our pleasure in the variety and absurdity of life. In its original early Saturday-evening spot The Trials of O'Brien did poorly in the ratings war; let us hope that it will do better on the late-Friday slot left vacant by Slattery's People.
Meanwhile, out in Hollywood the dream factory is turning out a more highly refined product every season. A year or so ago, even the most trivial program had to have a story-line which was held together by some semblance of continuity. Today, the plots of many television dramas seem no more than excuses for the display of technical and imaginative virtuosity. Probability, motivation, authenticity are out; the unnatural, the artificial, the exaggerated are in.
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These happen to be just the terms used by Susan Sontag in a celebrated article, “Notes on Camp,”2 to define the essence of Camp, the new avant-garde art- and life-style. According to Miss Sontag, Camp constitutes a private code, a badge of identity among small urban cliques. But her article was published seventeen long months ago. Thanks to the miracle of American mass communications, the delights of Camp can now be enjoyed during prime evening time in every living-room on the continent. “Affluent boredom,” to which Miss Sontag relates the origin of the style, has become the privileged fate of millions.
Most Hollywood-produced programs now show traces of campiness, but a couple of obvious examples will be enough to illustrate the trend. The Wild, Wild West (CBS) features a leading actor (Robert Conrad) who resembles an impassive Raymond Burr, and a story-line of remarkable unimpressiveness, but it abounds in exotically anachronistic “period” settings and flamboyantly off-beat minor characters. Typical recent episodes have been set in a spectacularly imagined old-fashioned circus complete with skilled but sinister performers; and the den of a mad, blind criminal, full of objects beautiful to the ear or touch. The blind man feels his way about the room by running his saber along guide-wires strung just below the ceiling. At the climax of this episode, the hero (temporarily blinded by powder-flash) fights a gun battle with his sightless opponent, to the accompaniment of shattering statuary, chiming clocks and tinkling music-boxes. In other episodes, Michael Dunn (a favorite guest performer this year for obvious reasons, apart from his brilliance as an actor) pops up again as a master crook whose right-hand man is about 6'6” tall; and John Drew Barrymore plays an impressively sophisticated Cheyenne chief who turns out to be a Dartmouth man.
Amos Burke (ABC) is not produced with quite the verve of West, but the program has become increasingly campy since the hero (played by Gene Barry) turned in his police badge and went to work for The Man. Predictably, Michael Dunn has already made an appearance this season as wicked Mr. Sin, diminutive visual amalgam of Sukarno and Nehru, whose jungle retreat boasts an efficient white army, an imaginative torture chamber and auctions at which captured secret agents are sold to the highest international bidder (I Spy showed us a similar event taking place in Hong Kong). Other episodes have involved an explicitly Lesbian villainess (the first I have seen on television—but probably a harbinger), a fight in a Spanish kitchen with meat axes for weapons and hanging carcasses for shields, a lady bullfighter, and a plot to loot Manhattan by infiltrating nerve gas into the central steam-heating system.
By now, Miss Sontag's subjects have no doubt broken Camp and pushed on to areas of sensibility yet unknown to someone who, like myself, observes the cultural scene from an unfashionable distance. It's hard not to feel sorry for the apolitical American avant-garde: when last year's outrage wins this year's high Nielsen rating, the effort to keep out in front must demand superhuman stamina and resourcefulness. Lesser reserves of these qualities are also demanded of television critics. I wish I could persuade myself that this season's programs are worth even such modestly heroic devotion.
1 See Robert Warshow's The Immediate Experience.
2 Partisan Review, Autumn 1964.
