To be the “regular television critic” even of a magazine like COMMENTARY is surely to occupy an excessively modest position in the vast hierarchy of American criticism. The job offers little gratification to the ego. On one hand, boredom induced by the Brobdingnagian triviality of what has to be watched, and nervousness in case friends drop in and catch one in front of Green Acres or I Dream of Jeannie; on the other, an inhibiting awareness of the folly of sweeping condemnation. Cultural history abounds in cautionary examples of reactionary fastidiousness: the talker, Socrates, distrusted writing, aristocratic Elizabethan poets disdained print, genteel Victorian critics disparaged the vulgarian Dickens, and movies which were once ignored even by newspaper reviewers are now reverently studied at film society showings.
Come to think of it, even the Beverly Hillbillies doesn’t seem so vapid a show as it did three seasons ago. For all its corniness and its narcissistic appeal to rural sillybillies, the program reflects a genuine confrontation in contemporary American society—as anyone will have to agree who saw Buddy Ebsen (who plays Jed Clampett) campaigning for Ronald Reagan. James Aubrey, the malign genius who brought the Hillbillies and other popular classics to the living-room screen, wrought more finely than he knew.
The professional uneasiness I have described is usually exacerbated each season by the public’s enthusiastic appetite for just those programs most thoroughly damned by the critics. This year, however, things are different. Everyone—critics and adult viewers alike—seems united in indifference to the new shows unveiled in September. According to a survey conducted by the Home Testing Institute, not one new program is among the twenty favorites of viewers over fifty years of age, and only three have made the grade with those aged from thirty-five to forty-nine. Even more significantly, five out of six top choices of the eighteen to thirty-four age group (cream of the ratings crop) are the five weekly network movies. Presumably, if there were six or seven regular movie series a week, they would displace even more top-ranking television shows.
As though to confirm the not-very-profound conclusion of my last column that TV is increasingly designed for adolescents (COMMENTARY, October 1966), it turns out that only those under eighteen seem happy about the new season: the teen-agers’ top twenty favorites include sixteen new shows. Children from six to eleven are only slightly less enthusiastic. But adults still apparently maintain some control over the family set. Nielsen ratings for the new entries are generally low this year. As I write, a high proportion of new shows is scheduled to disappear prematurely from the networks.
Of course, even mediocrity has its degrees. There are at least two competently produced new adventure series—Mission: Impossible (CBS), a sort of American equivalent to Secret Agent with a whole racially and sexually integrated team to do what Patrick McGoohan used to manage on his own; and Jericho (also CBS), about a not-unsimilar crew of World War II underground agents. (On television, the cult of personality appears to be giving way to collective leadership.) Among comedies, only The Monkees (NBC) seems remotely worth the trouble and expense of production: though it is an outrageous steal from the Beatles and their two movies, this series about a teen-age rock’n’roll group started out by being engagingly highspirited, full of slapstick comedy, puns (verbal and visual), trick camera work, and mad chases. (Later episodes have fallen off sharply in wit and verve.) None of these shows aims to do more than help pass the time pleasantly, but they do that adequately enough.
The two liveliest moments of the week are provided by holdovers from last season, Get Smart (NBC) and Jackie Gleason (CBS). Buck Henry and Mel Brooks, the creators of Smart, continue to extract an incredible proportion of pay-dirt from the narrow lode of the spy spoof. Recent episodes have extended the range a little to include parodies of pre-Fleming classics; one of the best carried viewers back over the years to Casablanca, with Don Addams as a bungling Bogart and Barbara Feldon (in a blonde wig) as a slinky, husky-voiced chanteuse.
Smart is the only spy series, comic or serious, that ever risks spicing its fantasy with a dash of moral realism. A characteristic little shock came at the end of an adventure in which Smart blew up an enemy agent with an explosive cigarette. When his faithful companion looked depressed and wondered whether Control was not as bad as KAOS, Smart retorted, “What’s the matter with you, 99? We have to shoot and kill and destroy: we represent everything that’s wholesome and good in the world.”
Gleason has revivified his sagging show with a musical revival of The Honeymooners, which brings back Art Carney, but not, alas, Audrey Meadows. The two old pros are still perfect foils for one another (almost, but not quite, in the Laurel and Hardy class), and every episode has its funny moments, but those who remember the social and psychological realism of the great original series (1954-6) will hardly be satisfied by this glossy and emasculated version, which has the Kramden and Norton families on an improbably lavish tour of Europe. The old Honeymooners was produced with an economy and an austerity unusual for television. Almost everything took place in the Kramdens’ claustrophobic, shabby, and unforgettable tenement apartment—a setting which inspired both writers and actors at times to carry the action beyond comedy. The difference between the old and the new is the difference between New York, where the original series was produced, and Miami, where Gleason now makes his headquarters.
Interspersed with episodes of The Honeymooners, Gleason occasionally presents special features. One of the best of these was “The Politician” (broadcast September 24), a musical play with Gleason and Carney as a mayor and his campaign manager (“I’ve been your mayor for twenty years—and I can. truthfully say that it’s been a rich experience.”) This was an uproariously successful expression of nostalgia for the good old-fashioned type of municipal corruption.
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Long before the debut of ABC’s prestige series, Stage ’67, I had conceived an irrational (and somewhat masochistic) hope that it would be a flop. The paeans of anticipatory self-congratulation far exceeded even the liberal limits which the broadcasting industry usually allows itself. (Is there a more disgustingly fulsome rhetorical genre than a speech by a network president or vice-president?) However, the series got off to a good start with an amusing, if inconsequential, play by Murray Schisgal, The Love Song of Barney Kempinski (September 14). This exercise in pop surrealism—a sort of vestpocket Manhattan Ulysses—starred Alan Arkin as a brash and engaging proletarian eccentric, and the city of New York as his one true love. In the approved contemporary fashion, the production had a mad, heightened, and improvised quality; it was full of witty and learned allusions to new wave films and the theater of the absurd. Apart from the rather shocking spectacle of Sir John Gielgud playing a drunk, and the vignette of a pair of gargantuan adulterers indulging in illicit mutual gormandizing (between mouthfuls: “Does your husband know about us?” “Yes. I’ve gained twelve pounds this month.”), the funniest episode was perhaps Arkin’s violent and singleminded attempt to extract a tip from a totally impassive Buddhist, deep in a meditative trance. If it were judged as a movie, Barney Kempinski would probably elicit little more than mild approval; as a contribution to prime-time network television, I thought it exciting and, perhaps, even revolutionary.
But subsequent weeks of Stage ’67 soon demonstrated that there was no real thaw in the ABC Kremlin. Dare I Weep, Dare I Mourn (September 21) looked promising—a teleplay by Stanley Mann from a story by John Le Carré, directed by Ted Kotcheff, and featuring James Mason and Hugh Griffith. But it turned out to be no more than a sort of competently warmed-over Spy Who Came In, hastily brought to a conclusion, in the nick of fifty-three minutes, by an O. Henry ending. As the season went on, even competence seemed to be beyond the reach of those producing this “new and unique experience in television viewing.” Where It’s At (September 28) was a rather pathetic attempt at a far-out variety show, featuring an amiable nonentity called Dick Cavett; Olympus 7000 (October 5) will probably rival The Canterville Ghost (November 2) as the worst television musical of the year; Jack Paar on The Kennedy Wit (a typically new and daring program idea) was like Jack Paar on the Kennedy wit; The People Trap (November 9), a play about a future in which the USA has become so crowded that only twenty acres in Yosemite National Park remain unoccupied, was chiefly notable for Jackie Robinson’s remark in a cameo appearance as a television announcer: “Older viewers will perhaps remember automobiles.” All in all, the odds are that older viewers will not long remember Stage ’67.
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This is the last survey of American television that I shall be contributing to COMMENTARY. There has been a certain piquancy to my situation as a Canadian observer eavesdropping on the networks from a situation North of the border. However, there have also been disadvantages arising out of my dependence upon three Northeastern rural outlets. I have missed not only many excellent programs of the commercial networks which local stations did not choose to carry, but also the entire output of the National Educational Television system which, with all its shortcomings, seems to be the only real hope for responsible broadcasting in the United States.
With the partial exception of the French Canadians, the audience for popular television entertainment is continental rather than national in scope. When I began systematic viewing in preparation for this job, I encountered many programs of which I had happily been ignorant; but Canadian stations had for years been broadcasting a catholic selection of the best and the worst American programs and there were not many real surprises. Few American shows sink to the depths of Canadian television at its amateurish worst, and even fewer light Canadian programs come close to rivaling the best American ones; but producers on both sides of the border seem to think in terms of the same program categories, and the list of Canada’s ten top-rated favorites is not usually very different from its American counterpart. For these reasons, a casual viewer might be forgiven for concluding that the differences between the two traditions amount to no more than minor regional variations.
However, this near unanimity of taste in entertainment only serves to emphasize the striking contrast between American and Canadian attitudes to programming in the field of news and public affairs. This was my first strong impression when I began this stint as a television critic; and one of the pleasanter aspects of giving the job up is the thought that I shall never again have to immerse myself in the stiflingly conformist world of the U.S. network news services.
This is an absurd situation because, like most Canadians, I am heavily dependent upon the American intellectual community both for ideas and information. No country in the world rivals the U.S. in the brilliance of her journalists or the range and quality of journals of opinion. The magazines which I read most avidly are almost all American; and Americans make many of the most impressive and intelligent contributions to Canadian television programs in the fields of both public affairs and the arts. Yet, except for the odd hour on a Sunday morning, one would never guess that all this intellectual energy and talent was so cheaply and readily available to the American commercial networks.
Television’s contribution to the recent off-year elections can only be considered a national disgrace. If there was one program that made a serious attempt to provide a forum for extended discussion of the issues, or to treat the campaigns as more than a matter of merchandising candidates, then I failed to see it. Programs like Meet the Press or Face the Nation, where politicians give carefully uninformative answers to an overly deferential panel of journalists, are more like rituals than contributions to political enlightenment; and campaign news specials invariably seem to focus on handshaking, electoral strategy, and trend analyses rather than serious political choices. One can, perhaps, forgive an industry so dependent upon ratings its obsession with opinion polls and the calculation of “interest groups,” but how stultifying to see the American dream reduced to nothing more than these sordid exercises in addition and subtraction. Characteristically, the networks entered with enthusiasm into something they could understand—the President’s image-oriented tour of the Pacific, the most spectacular pseudo-event since the South Vietnamese elections.
In other countries, where the general level of political and intellectual journalism may be far lower than it is in the U.S., publicly-owned television services dare to encourage debate, controversy, and even, at times, outrage. The American networks, smug in their devotion to free enterprise, are content to offer three virtually identical versions of the Madison Avenue-corporate establishment ethos. If any kind of real intellectual dialogue is ever to take place on U.S. television screens, it will have to be on a network organized on totally different principles. For years, the NET has been trying to do such a job, though hampered by poverty and inadequate national coverage. Now, the dramatic plan of Mc-George Bundy and the Ford Foundation to make possible an ETV network linked by communications satellites may be the breakthrough that once looked as though it would never come. How appropriate that the Ford money which helped to nurture the electronic Cerberus of commercial TV may be used to finance a more civilized alternative.
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