Writing one of these quarterly reports inevitably involves a period of intensive viewing followed by a lapse back into old-fashioned alphabetic culture, as I brood over what has been seen and try to distill the essence into an appropriate number of words. Usually, about six weeks pass between the most recent program to which I am able to refer and the moment that the magazine reaches its earliest readers. During the interim, I seldom glance at any of the programs I have dealt with—but publication week always sends me uneasily back to the TV set to see whether once-confident judgments still seem valid.
Last January, for instance, my spot check led to several revised verdicts. The authenticity of Room 222′s Walt Whitman High School seemed no longer to be so evident as it was in the first few weeks of the season: recent episodes involving a pop singer (Nancy Wilson) who fell in love with Pete Dixon, and a girl who started a student fad by bringing her baby brother to school, have been amusing enough but totally lacking in the kind of quasi-documentary quality that made the first two or three memorable. Marcus Welby, M.D.—away from the humane clutter of his general practice—was mixed up in a hospital cliché involving injury to the son of a black civil-rights leader (Ossie Davis), and behaving like any of the run-of-the-ward television doctors from whom he had once seemed a refreshing change.
Fortunately, some programs not only succeed in remaining faithful to their informing idea, but even manage to deepen and extend its reverberations. Then Came Bronson (NBC) still celebrates its somewhat limited myth of the motorcyclist as pastoral hero, but continues to find new ways of doing it. For instance, a recent episode featuring Buffy Sainte-Marie began with a classic Western confrontation—a lone traveler passing through the mesa country near Boise, Idaho, and being observed by half-naked, war-painted Indians perched high on a cliff. Suddenly, the braves jumped on their steeds and swooped down on him (it was Branson) whooping and clattering and—gunning their engines! After a spirited cavalry-style chase along the highway, the plot modulated into a drama of passion, racial feeling, and cyclemania, punctuated by folkish songs by Miss Sainte-Marie. The script capitalized very effectively on the strange mixture of with-it knowingness and devotion to communal traditions that often characterizes the contemporary radical ethnic style.
Bill Cosby has also managed to sustain the air of casual, almost haphazard, informality that can make even indifferent material seem more charming than it has any right to be. When he has the support of performers like Henry Fonda and Elsa Lanchester (with whom he was stuck in an elevator throughout an entire hilarious episode) or Wally Cox (as a would-be suicide for love), Cosby comes close to establishing the status of a comic classic—by TV standards, anyway. (Incidentally, in my last column I incorrectly attributed Quincy Jones’s background music to Herbie Hancock.)
By this time, some readers may be asking, who cares? There seems to be a natural conflict between typographical and electronic communication. When one adds to this the problem of writing for a monthly journal about a lot of programs which flicker briefly on the screen before disappearing into a limbo from which only daytime or summer reruns return, it is not hard to see why the art of television criticism is practiced, when at all, mainly in daily or weekly journals. Theater and movie reviews serve as guides for potential audiences as well as preserving judgments and interpretation of important productions. Television reviews, on the other hand, tend to be ancient history even on the day of publication—and often concern programs which the very perpetrators themselves would be glad to forget. Film critics may have to sit through many a dismal movie, but at least they need not fear that their judgment of (say) Putney Swope will be tested by readers on the basis of an eighth variation on the same theme by a flagging production crew.
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Of course, it is absurd to expect masterpieces in a series that is expected to grind on for thirteen, twenty-six, or thirty-nine episodes a year. A rational broadcasting system organized to serve viewers rather than advertisers would allow the nature of each program concept to determine the length of its run. (That is, in fact, what happens on NET right now.) Some, like Lucy, would go on forever; others would run for only five or six weeks. This sounds like a utopian idea, but it may not be too long before we see a few cautious experiments on commercial TV. After all, the present system does not seem to be working too well, if falling ratings and lower advertising revenue mean anything—and they certainly do to the hard-eyed men in the network boardrooms.
Some series are already moving in this direction—though none of them is much of an advertisement for the artistic benefits of limiting the number and pace of productions. These are programs in which a number of loosely related dramatic teams share the same weekly time-slot. Name of the Game (ABC) pioneered the technique last year with its expensive, flashy 90-minute episodes, each centered upon one of three improbable magazines in a journalistic empire owned by Glenn Howard (played by Gene Barry), an impossible combination of Henry Luce, Howard Hughes, and George Plimpton. This year there are two more. The Bold Ones (NBC) uneasily alternates teams of physicians, policemen, and lawyers, but there is nothing bold about either them or the series as a whole. A more promising formula is that of Love, American Style (ABC), which features two or three playlets each week, making use of a wide variety of actors and directors. All that has been lacking so far has been a few decent scripts. Perhaps next season will see further mutations in this direction. If open-line shows and underground programming can liberate commercial radio from slavery to the clock and the exactly interchangeable program segment, there is no theoretical reason why a similar revolution cannot release television from the same kind of bondage.
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In the meantime, those who count upon specials to provide an occasional hour of superior, unhomogenized entertainment have had a rather lean season. It appears that specials have not been showing up well in the Nielsen and Trendex ratings, so their number has been drastically reduced by all the networks. Disturbing political documentaries are nowhere in evidence (for reasons that are obvious enough), and socio-cultural material has tended to be collected together in the new magazine-type shows such as 60 Minutes (CBS) or First Tuesday (NBC). (They usually compete for audiences in the same late-Tuesday-night slot, naturally.) There, the alternation between sweet and sour, and the cushioning commentaries of old pros like Harry Reasoner and Sander Vanocur help to make the intolerable seem more tolerable than it ought to be. Nevertheless, I am fond of these programs—particularly 60 Minutes when the team of Reasoner and Mike Wallace is at work—and would like to see more of the same.
Dramatic specials have been particularly scarce this year, and most of those scheduled were so unappealing that I made no effort to watch them. The sense of waste is particularly pronounced because, presumably lacking a budget large enough to engage top stars, the producers usually choose highly competent actors of lesser celebrity—people like George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, or Martin Balsam. Then they present them in vehicles of utter banality.
Both the dramas I have seen since Christmas fall into this category. A Storm in Summer (NBC-Hallmark; written by Rod Serling, and directed by Buzz Kulik) might win a prize for the most improbable plot of the year. Peter Ustinov’s impersonation of a misanthropic old Jewish delicatessen owner was accurate and perceptive in all its details, but quite unconvincing in its entirety. No wonder, when he was called upon to develop a warm, paternal relationship with a tough anti-Semitic black ghetto kid after years of brooding over the death of his own son. Uta Hagen found herself in a similar dilemma in The Day Before Sunday (CBS Playhouse; written by Robert Crean, directed by Paul Bogart). The action of this play chiefly consisted in a number of humiliations meaninglessly inflicted upon a middle-aged spinster during the course of her niece’s graduation from an expensive private school. Uta Hagen carried the whole thing off with style and conviction—but there was really no point to play beyond a kind of sadistic contemplation of human suffering—the revenge of those who have made it to comfortable domesticity directed against the losers who make us feel guilty and uncomfortable.
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Unquestionably the greatest drama of the season has been provided by the two hour-long episodes of the LBJ show. Those who still believe that television somehow conveys the truth about a man in a way that other media don’t would do well to compare these illustrated conversations with Walter Cronkite (CBS) with Johnson’s on-camera personality while he was President. It was always clear that his pious and lugubrious country-preacher’s manner was no more than a mask, but I never detected even a hint of the fearsomely ebullient and aggressive character that apparently lurked behind those myopic eyes. Of course, I had read about Johnson’s salty wit and heroic rages, but my literary preparation notwithstanding, I couldn’t quite imagine them.
Well, I can now—and, in a way, I almost thank God for the illusion that prevented us from realizing the full truth about this extraordinary man while he still exercised such awesome power. Compared with their carefully stage-managed equivalents during Johnson’s Presidency, these Cronkite conversations have to be called “great television.” Even though neither Cronkite nor the producer tried to correct the distortions and oversimplifications of LBJ’s account of recent political history, his energy, his hatreds, his jealousies, and his self-deceptions were made only too brutally apparent. It seems unlikely that Richard Nixon will ever offer us a comparably revealing glimpse of his true self when he retires from office. If he does, however, let us hope that he will not still find it necessary to explain why he too failed in the attempt to bring about a peaceful settlement in Vietnam.
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