The media world is abuzz with speculation about revolutionary developments: more and better public television, new community cable systems that will offer a wide choice of programs, videotape cassettes that promise to release the viewer from bondage to mass taste and fixed program schedules. In the midst of such heady visions, no one seems to have noticed that the current season on the commercial networks is the most promising one for several years.
Optimism on this subject is so out of fashion that such a statement seems almost indecent. Perhaps I had better qualify it. There are just as many imitations of feeble imitations around this year as there ever were, and none of the new shows seems likely to achieve the status of a popular classic. Nevertheless, there is only one totally repellent entry among those that I have seen (and that one is going off the air in January), and the other weak shows are at least honestly bad: they don’t try to hide their imaginative poverty behind a screen of violence and mayhem. (That small blessing, but no more, we may owe to Senator Pastore.)
Choosing the season’s worst is the work of a moment. Here’s Debbie (NBC), Debbie Reynolds’ somewhat out-of-date pastiche of I Love Lucy, is pretty bad; and The Survivors (ABC), a costly epic by Harold Robbins, featuring Ralph Bellamy (who quit the show while he was still ahead), Lana Turner, and George Hamilton is worse—a sort of glossy, global Peyton Place. The prize for sheer nullity, however, goes to The New People (ABC). About a planeload of suitably assorted young Americans crash-landed on a remote Pacific island without hope of rescue, this joyless adolescent Lord of the Flies seems to be based on the assumption that American youth is no more than the sum total of its hang-ups. The result is a revolting mixture of paranoia and cliché Don’t trust anyone under twenty-five would have to be the conclusion of any adult foolish enough to take this stuff seriously.
It seems hardly necessary to report what everyone knows: the most obvious feature of the new season is the greatly increased involvement of black actors and performers. In itself, this is a fact of social rather than artistic importance. Until the present, blacks have usually found themselves playing the game according to white rules, as in I Spy, Mission Impossible, and even Julia. This year, however, two or three shows make something more than a gesture toward the recognition that true integration is a matter of lifestyle as well as mere color.
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The most engaging of this year’s new situation comedies takes a small step in the right direction. Set in a large integrated high school, Room 222 (ABC) is about a capable black history teacher (Lloyd Haynes), his students and his colleagues. Unlike the institutions where Our Miss Brooks and Mr. Novak used to flourish, Walt Whitman High is quite believable, from its amiably dyspeptic principal (brilliantly played by Michael Constantine), its Spartan teachers’ common room, and its eager but inept student teachers, to its inedible cafeteria food. What gives the program strength is the relative intelligence, wit, and humanity of the scripts. Most of the episodes that I have seen have dealt with authentic racial, social, and pedagogical problems. Let us admit it, the entertainment formula and the half-hour format preclude recognition of the real complexity of such situations—and that is enough to damn the series entirely in the eyes of purists. I believe, however, that a weekly display of humane and intelligent attitudes toward pressing contemporary problems serves as a healthy ritual, reaffirming the liberal pieties for those in danger of succumbing to the temptations of populist anti-intellectualism.
Room 222 offers occasional snatches of black revisionist American history in the classroom scenes; and recent episodes have involved such representative types as a bright black ghetto boy illegally attending Walt Whitman instead of his local blackboard jungle where he would learn nothing (solution: enroll him in Hebrew, a subject not taught at his own school); and a tough cool Afro-haired semi-militant who concludes that the student counselor must be in love with him when she tries to help him. However, there is no attempt to make the personal life of the Haynes character and his girlfriend (the student counselor—played by Denise Nicholas) anything other than a conventional Hollywood version of courtship American style.
Hoping, perhaps, to assuage liberal resentment at the dropping of the Smothers Brothers, CBS began the season by scheduling The Leslie Uggams Show in the tough Sunday night slot opposite Bonanza (NBC) and the Sunday Night Movie (ABC). Predictably, she did not make it in the ratings, and the program has been dropped. No great loss. However, one regular weekly feature of the show might have gone down in history as a pioneer attempt to dramatize black working-class life before a national audience. “Sugar Hill” seems to have been conceived of as a kind of Negro Honeymooners. Unfortunately, the model chosen was apparently the new inauthentic musical version rather than the classically austere and proletarian Honeymooners of the mid-50’s. As a result, the excellent casting (Mama, married daughter and son-in-law, stage-struck son, and hipster daughter) and “authentic” jokes served only to emphasize what an opportunity was being missed. “Sugar Hill” was kept light, sweet, and frothy throughout its short run—too innocuous to be really funny, even though its humor was dependent upon such bitter Harlem realities as unemployment, the prevalence of prowlers, and the housing shortage. Let us hope that the failure of this experiment will not deter others from attempting something better along the same lines.
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In the meantime, thank God for Bill Cosby. His cartoon special Hey, Hey, Hey—It’s Fat Albert (NBC) may have been rather crudely drawn, but its vision of life in the streets of North Philadelphia during Cosby’s youth was so convincing as to achieve an almost mythical authority. To be quite frank, that is not my scene and I was able to resist the charms of this urban pastoral. Nevertheless, Cosby’s narration was a tour de force, and the scenes of his gang in the movie matinee watching Lon Chaney as Wolfman, or battling the Green Street Terrors for the Tackle Football Championship of the Entire World, probably bridged the urban ghetto generation gap about as firmly as it’s ever been done. The cartoon form enabled Cosby to draw lovingly upon the memories of youth in the early 50’s without distancing the whole experience in a welter of historical data.
Cosby’s regular situation comedy show (NBC) is almost as idiosyncratic a production as his specials. Set in a much less credible high school than Walt Whitman, it features Cosby as a physical-education instructor. The scripts are often thin and unconvincing, and much of the action and dialogue has the air of having been improvised upon the spur of the moment. However, these seem to be not so much shortcomings as part of the Cosby style. He goes through each episode as though faintly surprised at what is going on, and uncertain about what will happen next. Considering that Kincaid’s world contains as bizarre a collection of white eccentrics as one could hope to find, his bemused black normality stands out sharply. Among the stereotypes of a couple of dozen situation comedies, he alone seems a fully realized human being. Whatever the case, Cosby’s cool, fuzzy style seems ideally suited to television comedy—and the success of this apparently casual and impromptu production makes most other series seem fussy and over-directed. Incidentally, the background music by a small jazz group under Herbie Hancock is beautifully adjusted to the action. Cosby himself sings the scat vocal as the titles roll by.
The relaxed, gentle, and unstructured spirit of the Cosby show is only the most striking manifestation of a trend which can be discerned in a number of new programs, successful and unsuccessful. Cynics may call it escapist and blame it on a desire to evade the complex and painful realities of contemporary life. On the other hand, I am not sorry to see what may be the beginning of the end for many of those actings-out of hysteria and self-hatred that now masquerade as Westerns, police thrillers, and action adventures. Violence may be as American as cherry pie, but, much as Americans love their cherry pie, it is rarely the main dish on the menu. So long as the media accept their responsibilities in the field of news and public affairs, there is nothing very wrong about devoting a good deal of entertainment time to the celebration of values which seem threatened by the irresistible force of social and technological change.
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In theory, James Thurber’s My World and Welcome to It ought to have been a rich source of raw material for this kind of comedy. Thurber’s cosily satiric sketches of the sex war in the nuclear family read almost like plot outlines for half-hour situations, and the use of his sparsely linear drawings provides opportunities for juxtaposing cartoons and live action—generally an effective technique on TV. In practice, however, the NBC show does not quite come off in spite of solid performances by William Windom as the Thurber character and Lisa Gerritsen as his know-it-all daughter. The difficulty seems to be that the producers rightly decided to set the scene in the present (after all, the sketches are supposed to be about the timeless verities of family life), but Thurber’s world belongs irretrievably on the other side of World War II. The result is an ironic vision which wobbles when it should be as steady and unrelenting as a laser beam. Nevertheless, My World and Welcome to It is a failure only in comparison to the expectations aroused by the Thurber material. Judged by standards which are appropriate to situation comedies in general, it clearly deserves to be ranked with the two or three others that are worth watching at all.
The notorious conservatism of the medical profession seems to be matched by the reverence for tradition of the producers of hospital melodramas. After a two or three year break, the doctors are back at work before the TV cameras, but two of the three new series—Medical Center (CBS) and the medical episodes of The Bold Ones (every three weeks on NBC)—take place in clinical communities in which nothing seems to have changed since Kildare and Casey sweated out their hectic residencies.
Marcus Welby, M.D. (ABC) tries to be different. Though there is an older doctor (Robert Young) and his young assistant (James Bolin), their practice is a general one and the ambience is semirural. Away from the emotional hothouse of hospital ward and operating room—except at appropriate moments—the action has a chance to develop more naturally out of the everyday lives of the characters. Early episodes involving a young schoolteacher at the point of death (beautifully acted by Susan Clark), an autistic boy, and a couple facing the birth of a child with Rh-factor complications managed to be tender, exciting, and informative, without recourse to the usual strident histrionics of video medical practice. Honesty compels me to add that Marcus Welby, M.D. does not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath with the greatest of all TV medical series, the BBC’s Dr. Finlay’s Casebook—a silk purse made out of the sow’s ear of A. J. Cronin’s bestseller. As a portent of the future of American TV, however, Welby is mildly encouraging.
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Dr. Welby drives a car, but his young assistant prefers to get about by motorcycle. So do Wyatt and Billy, the heroes of this year’s cult movie sensation Easy Rider. And so does the taciturn and peripatetic hero of Then Came Bronson (NBC). In the second episode of this series, Keenan Wynn gave a touchingly comic performance of a middle-aged farmer trying to relive his glorious youth as a racing cyclist. Quite clearly, as the golden age of the traditional Western recedes farther and farther beyond living memory, the motorcycle is taking over from the horse as a poetic symbol of grace and freedom. (Vintage automobiles played a similar part in Bonnie and Clyde.) We are beginning to learn that human associations over several generations can incorporate any piece of machinery into a pastoral vision. Even computers?
Superficially, Then Came Bronson resembles such previous dramas of man on the move as Route 66, The Fugitive, and Run for Your Life. However, its real analogue is Easy Rider, a film which must have been made about the same time that Bronson was being put together. (Whether there was any influence either way, I do not know.) Both feature heroes who lack full baptismal names (Wyatt and Billy have no surnames, and Bronson has no given name), ride the roads from West to Southeast, cannot or will not express their feelings in words, and bear on their backs a heavy weight of symbolic implications. Both works were filmed almost entirely on location, using local people, and celebrate the beauty and variety of the American landspace.
However, Bronson, naturally, is a much less complex work than Dennis Hopper’s movie. From the ritual conversation with the envious motorist that opens each episode (“I wish I was you”) Bronson is established unambiguously as a symbol of freedom and liberation, and the America through which he passes is a much less sinister territory than that explored by the easy riders. In each weekly adventure, his arrival upon the scene helps to resolve conflict or precipitate self-realization in communities as varied as a camp for disturbed children, a town called Jackson’s Hole where a widow and her daughter both fall in love with him, a bullfighter’s ranch in Wyoming, and an automobile demolition derby in Colorado. Michael Parks gives Bronson exactly the right degree of inarticulate charisma (though he says little, he is capable of quoting Byron), and the productions usually achieve a kind of gentle, muted authenticity. Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether a character so frighted with typological implications as Bronson can be integrated in a naturalistic drama. We are presumably meant to think vaguely of Christ, the Wandering Jew, or Sir Galahad, but I keep wondering what such a nice young man is running away from and why he seems so unwilling to enter into a serious or permanent relationship with a woman.
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In spite of such doubts, the programs I have been describing clearly represent a turn for the better in television entertainment. So far, there has been no comparable improvement in the field of public affairs. NBC’s ambitious two-and-a-half-hour special From Here to the Seventies (October 7), for instance, turned out to be a pretentious excess of manner over matter. On the other hand, First Tuesday, their monthly magazine show which last year seemed square and pedestrian in comparison with its bi-weekly rival Sixty Minutes (CBS), now threatens to take the lead in journalistic wit, imagination, and courage. Both shows must be giving the Pentagon a hard time, with their exposure of disciplinary brutality in the armed services (CBS) and their unsympathetic account of the American presence on Okinawa (NBC). Of course, this sort of thing would have been even more heroic last year or the year before, at a time when stomping the brass was not such a popular sport as it has since become.
The general tone of this survey has been so unlike my usual carping manner that I am reluctant to close on a note of unqualified enthusiasm. Nevertheless, I must add my mite to the praise that has already been lavished on two new daytime programs for children H. R. Pufnstuf (NBC; Saturday mornings) combines live actors and puppets in a luxuriant surrealistic never-never land in which a benevolent dragon (Pufnstuf) wages defensive war against the wicked Witchiepoo, with the aid of a boy called Jimmy (played by Jack Wild, Oliver’s Artful Dodger). Sometime, when I have worked it all out to my own satisfaction, I shall try to define exactly how Sid and Marty Krofft manage to achieve a comic fantasy which is entirely traditional and yet unmistakably post-typographical in form and feeling.
Seasame Street (weekdays on NET) is very post-typographical too, even though the aim of the program is to prepare millions of pre-school kids for literacy. I have always been skeptical of the alleged latent educational potential of television, but I hope Sesame Street proves me wrong. In effect, the program offers gently educative entertainment punctuated by brilliant hard-selling “commercials” for numbers, letters of the alphabet, and a wider working vocabulary. If it were to succeed in penetrating a significant number of slum living rooms, it would mean a great victory for equality of educational opportunity. I can’t hope to describe in one paragraph the hour-long daily mixture of puppets (The Muppets), cartoons, short films, and live action. All I can say is that it’s too much fun to be wasted on a lot of pre-literate children.
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