This week in TV Guide: March 7, 1970

If you're a regular reader (and, as I always say, if you aren't, why not?), you know how much and how often I rag on the Hallmark Channel, and whatever remnant there is of the Hallmark Hall of Fame, once one of the most prestigious programs on television. I've done it so often that it ceased to become a challenge, and, in fact, got to be something of a bore. I mean, it was so easy. And so I resolved I'd try to avoid it, and thereby make my life just a little bit easier. 

However, as my wife can tell you, I don't always stick to my resolutions, and so it is that we take a look at this week's Hall of Fame presentation of "Neither Are We Enemies" (Friday, 8:30 p.m. ET, NBC), this year's Easter episode. The story takes place during the Roman occupation of Judea, and stars Van Heflin as Joseph of Arimathea, the man whom the Bible tells us helped take Jesus down from the Cross after the Crucifixion and lay Him in the tomb. Kristoffer Tabori co-stars as Joseph's son Jonathan, who hears Christ's words not as those of love and peace, but as a call to revolution. Also featured in the cast are J.D. Cannon as Pilate, Ed Begley as Annas, Kate Reid as Deborah, and Leonard Frey as Judas. 

There are many facets to this story, which scriptwriter Henry Denker wrote "to interpret the events surrounding the Crucifixion with a parallel to the conflicts of our time." And it's easy to see, even in this brief description: the clash of generations, the conflict between war and peace, the military occupation of one nation by another, and so on. It points out the timelessness of Denker's story—indeed, of the entire Bible—in that the parallels that existed in 1970 are just as present today, and likely will be in another fifty years, if we last that long. 

I have no idea if "Neither Are We Enemies" is any good or not; you can't really find out much about it online. For what it's worth, Jack Gould, the TV critic of The New York Times, called it "something out of the ordinary"; while Heflin "was unsteady at the beginning, perhaps because of the initial unevenness of the script," he was effective in portraying the anguish he felt over his estrangment from his son. Gould also singled out the performance of Tabori as "exceptionally good," while Begley was "persuasive as usual." The hope offered by the play lay in the idea that "when the family breaks up there is the consolation that a respect for different outlooks could remove the element of enmity." It's also worth noting that the cast includes three Oscar nominees: Begley, Heflin, and Frey, and that Begley and Heflin both won Oscars.

Having established the bona fides of the play itself, we'll now turn to the sorry state of entertainment at Hallmark, for there are many people, I am sure, who have never, in their lifetimes, seen even five minutes of programming from that network that begins to compare to the impact of this type of story. In a time when the nation is bitterly divided, with family members pitted against each other over matters both substantial and trivial and almost always connected in some way to politics, it would be nice to think that Hallmark might consider offering something relevant like this, rather than the umteenth rendtition of some soapy, soggy, sentimental drivel about reconcilation, finding the right partner, or discovering the perfect Christmas in a quaint small village square. Yes, reconciliation is important, but as this drama suggests, it is also messy, difficult, and painful, and it involves sacrifices on the part of all concerned. That's not all, of course; the story also deals with religion in a way that is totally foreign to today's modern productions, and as for the star quality of the cast, well, perhaps the less said, the better.

I'm no longer worried that I sound like an old man shouting at the clouds when I get off on rants like this; I'm old enough that I simply don't care anymore. What I do care about, however, is the quality of programming on television, another subject of many a piece here. Quality is not, in fact, that hard to achieve if one really wants to achieve it. Hallmark sent the message, many years ago, that it was something they no longer cared about, so we shouldn't be surprised any time we run across an example of what the Hallmark Hall of Fame used to be like, back in the day. The company's motto, "When You Care Enough to Send the Very Best," applied to television as well as greeting cards back then. Of course, if you even send cards these days, you know that much of Hallmark's output hovers somewhere between the crude and boorish on one hand and the saccharine and dewy-eyed on the other; there's a reason for the existence of terms like "sentimental fool." 

It's likely that Hallmark wouldn't be up to the task anyway; doubtless they'd fill the story with romance and woke politics, and water it down. But if they didn't: think of what could come from this simple message that families didn't have to be divided, that friendships didn't have to be torn asunder, over something like politics. That's not to discount the importance of some of these issues, but what ever happened to that innate human dignity to which Jack Gould mentioned, the idea that "respect for different outlooks could remove the element of enmity.

Yes, we shouldn't be disappointed by this fall from grace anymore. One could say that we don't have the right to be disappointed by it. But we do have the right to be offended by it. More than a right; an obligation.

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From 1963 to 1976, TV Guide's weekly reviews were written by the witty and acerbic Cleveland Amory. Whenever they appear, we'll look at Cleve's latest take on the shows of the era.

This week Cleveland Amory checks in on one of television's rare genres, the half-hour variety show. It's one hosted by a comedian who was once quite well-known in pop culture, but has now joined the ranks of those one-hit wonders remembered only by those of a certain age or disposition. In case you haven't figured it out yet (to be honest, I'm not sure how you could have), we're about to look at Pat Paulsen's Half a Comedy Hour.

Pat Paulsen came to prominence as one of the regulars on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, where he launched a deadpan, and often very funny, campaign for president. And herein lies the problem, for there are comedians, such as Tim Conway, who were often the life of the party, provided that someone else was hosting it. Try as he might, though, he could never carry a show on his own. Pat Paulsen is one of those comedians. "Put him in Medical Center or The Bold Ones and you've got a large riot. Even put him in another comedy show and he's so individual he'll still give you at least a small riot. But give him his own whole show and you've got a problem." It's that there needs to be contrast, something (or someone) for him to play off of, and as the host of the show, that element is missing. 

As Amory puts it in one of his classically painful puns, Paulsen's comedy persona is one of Caspar Milquetoast. "Make him Mr. Milquehost and he'll still be funny. But one thing is certain—you're going to have to milque harder." Things started off well, with an extremely funny bit, filmed on location, that involved Paulsen's car breaking down in the middle of winter outside former Vice President Hubert Humphrey's home in Waverly, Minnesota. Humphrey, playing himself, still remembered some of the jokes Paulsen had made at his expense during the 1968 campaign, and adroitly avoided inviting Paulsen out of the knee-deep snow to phone for help. It's difficult to explain in a limited space, but it was very funny, and showcased both Paulsen's dry humor and Humphrey's graceful self-deprecation. There was another good sketch involving Paulsen demonstrating how to make a 25-inch color TV "using only materials at hand." However, the effect was undermined by a pair of lame bits, one including guest star Debbie Reynolds. The trend continues through subsequent shows: strong absurdities followed by weak sketches. The best consistent feature of each episode is the close, and these are "so funny that we guarantee, even if you don't like the rest of the show, Mr. Paulsen will leave you laughing." At thirteen episodes, the problem was that they didn't leave viewers wanting more.

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ABC has announced its new fall schedule, and, as is typical for the perennial last-place network, it features what Richard K. Doan, in The Doan Report, calls a "massive shake-up," with nine shows biting the dust, including the aforementioned Pat Paulsen show, It Takes a Thief, The Flying Nun, Here Come the Brides, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, variety shows hosted by the Lennon Sisters and Englebert Humperdinck, and the network's Monday night movie. And that leads to the centerpiece of the new schedule, Monday night pro football. (Although, at this point, nobody could possibly imagine how successful this would become.) Other than that, however, the new shows will leave something to be desired. The Odd Couple, starring Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, will be an unqualified success, unlike The Young Lawyers, The Immortal, The Young Rebels, the Burt Reynolds vehicle Dan August, The Silent Force, Matt Lincoln, and the Danny Thomas comeback Make Room for Granddaddy. 

Doan adds, however, that there is one positive note, with a series that is being renewed, albeit on another network: Sesame Street, which NET has announced will be back in the fall with a new season of episodes.

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Speaking of "Vince Baby" Edwards, as we were a couple of weeks ago when his career seemed to be in a kind of holding pattern, we now get a look at the TV series he did take on, after having turned down more than a few opportunities. As I mentioned above, his new series Matt Lincoln is on the fall schedule, although at this point it's not called Matt Lincoln. It's called Dial Hot Line, and the pilot can be seen on the ABC Sunday Night Movie this week (9:00 p.m.). Edwards stars as David Leopold, a "hip psychiatric social worker" who operates a telephone hot line which troubled young people can use when they need someone to talk to. In her review, Judith Crist sees it as an ideal vehicle for a weekly series: "The entertainment possibilities are limitless—suicide and rape are touched upon this time around—in case you haven't problems of your own." 

Now, you may be asking yourself how Dial Hot Line morphs into Matt Lincoln, presumably including a name change, given that the new series isn't called David Leopold, and therein we find ourselves with a story that's probably as entertaining as anything that appeared on the series. According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, citing the reasonably authoritative Harlan Ellison, the name change came about as a result of jokes around the office regarding the Leopold and Loeb murder case, and worries that viewers might make the same association. (One has to wonder if the script was run by DeForest Research in advance; the company, which was frequently used for name clearance and other research projects, might well have pointed out the potential for mischief.)

Ellison also dryly noted that while Leopold was "described as an example of 'the new breed' of mental health professionals, serving 'the many, rather than the few' and involved in a wide array of volunteer activities," that didn't prevent him from obtaining an income that allowed him to "drive a Mustang, have a Marina apartment and a sailboat." By the time Matt Lincoln made it to the fall schedule, the lead character had morphed from a "psychiatric social worker" to a "community psychiatrist" who maintained a private practice that allowed him to take on volunteer activities, as well as maintain a lifestyle to which he had become accustomed.

In any event, Matt Lincoln, by any other name, was a disappointment, lasting only 16 episodes before being cancelled. Considering that one of the series Edwards had previously passed on had included a two-year guarantee from ABC, one wonders if Edwards might have sought professional help himself afterward. Either that, or perhaps a new agent.

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Having led off this issue with a look at one of the most distinguished programs on the air, we now turn to something a little different: Neil Hickey's article on Hee Haw, which some critics called the worst show ever when it premiered, but which now is having the last laugh—a laugh it's sharing with its substantial audience.

When Hee Haw debuted, a little less than a year ago, the more responsible critics (and by that, Hickey means those accepted by the entertainment elite) denounced the show as "a program of such stupefying banality, witlessness, irrelevancy, pointlessness, unregenracy and inepitude." Imagine their dismay when the show "immediately zoomed to the upper reaches of the ratings charts and stayed there all summer." And make no mistake about this, the blowback against the show was a prime example of that elitism in action, the sniffing from snobbish upper-crust Eastern Establishment critics "blaming it all on the Silent Majority and the Middle American, who are fed up with bad news, crime in the streets, protest and student unrest." They're especially irritated, Hickey continues, "because this show came to life over the dead bodies of the Smothers Brothers, who were always making those terrific jokes about racial tensions, the Vietnam War, Congressional ethics, air pollution and the military industrial complex." 

And yet, as Hickey points out, "the program was nothing more, really, than a grab bag of purloined bucolic knee-slappers going back to Aristophanes, melded with bathetic rural ballads of a sort never imagined by Sir Walter Scott nor Robert Burns nor Francis James Child." Plenty of people were happy to see the Smothers Brothers go, replaced by down-home humor that struck a chord with ordinary Americans. "We get a lot of letters saying, 'It's great to see a real American show,' " according to Frank Pepplatt, one of the show's creators (he and his partner, John Aylesworth, are, ironically, a couple of Canadians). "We also get angry mail from old Smothers Brothers fans who say, 'How dare you put on material like that? It has no content, no message.' Well, that's the whole point! It's not supposed to have a message."

Says Grandpa Jones, a legendary country comedian who's now gaining mainstream recognition, "these fellows dared to give us a chance. TV people have always been afraid to put on common country stuff. They always figured it had to be polished and slicked up. It took somebody from Canada to show 'em it could be done." (Perhaps there's something to be learned in that SCTV, one of the greatest bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you series of all time, was also brought to life by Canadians.) Co-host Buck Owens adds that "You don't have to be up on current events, nor have watched the Huntley-Brinkley show that day to enjoy it. Anybody can grasp this material."

A couple of confessions: I rarely watched Hee Haw growing up, either during its network run or on first-run syndication. I'm just not with it on that kind of humor, nor the country music stars (some of the top names in the business, mind you) who frequented the show. It's not my style. Number two, I freely admit to being a TV elitist, in case you hadn't figured that out from my lede screed. Nevertheless, I would be the last person to say that there's no room on television for programs like Hee Haw, programs that appeal to the dreaded flyover country. When CBS ushered in the rural purge, Hee Haw was one of the victims, cancelled in 1971; it then went on to thrive in first-run syndication from 1971 to 1993. And let's not forget that Lawrence Welk, another show that supposedly appealed to the "wrong" audience, was also a hit in syndication, with reruns continuing on PBS to this day. 

The point is that television doesn't have to be a homogeneous blob. Just as I'll frequently rail against the romantic slop of the Hallmarks, the crude boorishness of so much network television, and the leftist bias of the late-night shows, I'd be just as dismayed with a television world that had no room for Hogan's Heroes, Top Gear, Mystery Science Theater 3000, or, yes, Hee Haw. We complain that television has become so niche that there's no place for programming appealing to a broad audience, and for good reason. After all, a television diet of nothing but Shakespeare would get pretty boring after a while. Besides, as Hickey notes in his conclusion, "one is nagged by the suspicion that Shakespeare—that most shameless purveyor of bad gags—would have loved it." I wouldn't doubt it for a moment.

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So what, in fact, is on this week? Well, in the days before March Madness became a bloated excuse for everyone in the world to take a chance on their own bracket, the NCAA Basketball Tournament tips off on Saturday afternoon (2:00 p.m., NBC), with the major contenders including St. Bonaventure (led by Bob Lanier), Notre Dame (Austin Carr), Jacksonville (Artis Gilmore), Western Kentucky (Jim McDaniels), and eventual champion UCLA (Sidney Wicks). Attention on the tournament might be eclipsed, however, by the real thing: a total solar eclipse, with all three networks planning live coverage, beginning at 1:00 p.m. (You can see CBS's coverage here, with an excerpt from ABC's coverage here.) If you miss it, though, don't worry; you can see it again, following a similar path, in 2024. Remember that?

Fred Astaire guest-stars on It Takes a Thief (Monday, 7:30 p.m., ABC), in a cleverly-titled episode called "An Evening with Alister Mundy," a play on the series of successful television specials that Astaire did in the 1950s and 1960s. Astaire, you may remember, appeared on It Takes a Thief several times as Robert Wagner's father, a fellow master thief. Tuesday's highlight is the delightful Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (7:30 p.m., NBC), the whimsical 1965 adaptation of A.A. Milne's stories, narrated by Sebastian Cabot, and with Sterling Holloway unforgettable as the voice of Pooh. And on Thursday, the Young Americans music group host their first network TV special, with special guest stars Lorne Greene, Tiny Tim, and the Committee improv group. 

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Finally, the starlet of the week is Karen Wyman, a 17-year-old "slinky adolescent with a lod of schoolbooks in one arm," as Judith Jobin styles her. More than that, she's a singer with a voice that is equal parts "controlled, earthy, hypnotic, and sexy"; one critic calls it "the voice of a woman who's done a lot of living," quite an accomplishment for someone who's not yet out of high school and, she says, "emphatically hasn't done a lot of living." Her voice teacher, Marty Lawrence, says she has "one of the greatest sounds I'd heard in my 21 years of teaching," and sent a demo to Greg Garrison, producer of The Dean Martin Show. Garrison told him, "If she can perform the way she sings, she's on the show." She could, and she was; she appeared on the show a year ago, did a five-song medley with Martin, who kissed her afterward and said, "You are wonderful, and you are beautiful, and you are some kind of singer," and the rest is history.

Since then, she's done four shows with Ed Sullivan (you can see one of them here), made a couple of visits to Johnny Carson, and her first album is due out this month. And despite her youthful enthusiasms, she displays "a solid core of drive, ambition and perfectionism (which a few people are calling temperament), and has a clear vision of what she wants; while her voice has been compared to Garland and Streisand, "I want to be unique. I want to be the original Karen Wyman." And she wants to be a star: "A star is...you're the hottest thing in show business. The public is nuts about you. It's not so much the money—it's class, people running to the box office to see you. You know when you're right on top, when you get the largest sum ever to appear somewhere."

That kind of stardom is not in the cards for Karen Wyman; she would later say that "I needed to grow up. I felt that I didn't deserve to be a star." She endured two failed marriages, raised a son and daughter (born sixteen years apart), quit singing altogether, and made a "comeback" in 2014. And to this day, she says that her most memorable moment was meeting Dean Martin; "it was really like a fairy tale."

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MST3K alert: Agent for H.A.R.M. (English; 1966) Tale of a creeping blob from outer space that transforms human flesh into fungus. Mark Richman, Wendell Corey, Carl Esmond. (Thursday, 11:25 p.m., WTIC in Hartford) Peter Mark Richman and Wendell Corey: what are you doing here? H.A.R.M. was, apparently, initially supposed to serve as a pilot for a new series, but wound up in theatrical release instead. My favorite review comes from The New York Times, which called it an "anemic James Bond imitation." I don't believe this is currently part of the MST3K episodes that run on TV; all in all, probably a good thing. TV

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Around the dial

t Cult TV Blog, John continues his "Tony Wright Season " by looking at two episodes of the 1954 Sherlock Holmes series, starring Ronald Howard as Holmes and Howard Marion-Crawford as Watson. It's a fun series, and the two episodes in which Wright appears are no exception.

David is up to Wednesdays in 1977 in his review of 1970s primetime television at Comfort TV. It's another dominant night for ABC, with a new hit in Eight is Enough and a returning one in Charlie's Angels; let's see what the other networks have to offer in competition.

Television presenter Robert Symes was a well-known personality on the BBC when he hosted The Model World of Robert Symes, a series dealing with his love of various types of models, which he would build and operate. Read all about it this week at Silver Scenes. 

If you watched any kind of variety show in the Sixties and Seventies, you probably saw Neil Sedaka performing at some point. Sedaka died last week at the age of 86, and Terence looks back on his legendary career at A Shroud of Thoughts. 

"The Island" is the latest episode of The A-Team to come Roger's way at The View from the Junkyard, and Face is the face of this episode, in which our heroes battle the bad guys, a drug gang trying to control a, you guessed it, island.

I've written before about Clellan Card, who played Axel, the beloved kids' show host of Twin Cities television, and Minnesota KidVid continues its look at his work, concentrating on the period 1953 to 1960. They don't make 'em like Axel anymore!

At Cult TV Lounge, it's a look at the 1999-2002 series The Lost World, based on the sci-fi adventure novel of the same name by the man responsible for the stories in the series that kicked off this trip around the dial: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A great way to wrap up the week! TV

If you enjoy the content here and want to support my broader creative work, please consider making a donation at my Ko-fi page. Any amount you contribute helps me continue writing, researching, and sharing these articles and projects. Thank you!

What I've been watching: February, 2026

Shows I've Watched:

The Rebel

Blue Light

Nixon in China

Aou may recall my occasional series "If I Ran the Network," in which I propose ideas for various series that might run on a fictional television network. (Then again, you might have a better chance of remembering it if I did a better job of running it more than just occasionally.) Anyway, one idea that has come true, more or less, is that of the Saturday Night Opera, which we've taken to watching the past couple of months. Most of these have been 20th-century operas, including one I reviewed last month, Doctor Atomic by John Adams.

This month features another Adams work, Nixon in China, based on President Richard Nixon's historic 1972 trip to Communist China. Now, if that seems like an unlikely subject for an opera, you're right; even Adams was somewhat skeptical when he received the commission. However, the result was one of the greatest operas of the late 20th century, a work that manages to be both historic and creative, and unlike anything that anyone might have expected. In this Metropolitan Opera performance from 2011, James Maddalena reprises his role as Nixon (which he created in 1987 for the opera's world premiere in Houston), with Janis Kelly as Pat Nixon, Robert Brubaker as Chairman Mao, and Russell Braun as Chou En-lai, and Adams himself conducting.

Adams's music could best be described as a pleasing minimalism, with elements of atonality that nevertheless avoid many of the less pleasant aspects of dissonance. The story is built around four major events: the arrival of the Nixons and the president's meeting with Mao; a tour by Mrs. Nixon of various sites in China; a visit to the Peking Opera where a Chinese political ballet is performed; and the final night of the trip, in which the principals reflect on the events that brought them to this time and place.

In interviews, director Peter Sellars has talked about how the production of the opera has evolved over the years, particularly since more and more of the atrocities committed by Mao have come to light, while Maddalena has mentioned the depth and complexity of Nixon's character, which he describes as peeling away various layers of an onion. This, along with the historical nature of the opera's events, should enable it to remain in the repertoire without undergoing some of the more bizarre reinterpretations that have become commonplace in modern opera productions; it would be difficult, for instance, to stage it as science fiction or to place it in the American antebellum South, as I've seen in some operas I won't mention right now.

Two things that stand out every time I see this opera: first, the second act political ballet, "The Red Detachment of Women," in which the villain of the piece, an unscrupulous landlord taking advantage of the peasants, is played by the same singer who portrays Henry Kissinger, in this case Richard Paul Fink (who played Dr. Edward Teller in Doctor Atomic). Fink's portrayal, which includes a fair amount of interaction with the ballet dancers, is both harrowing and hilarious, given that everyone recognizes that the character so closely resembles Kissinger.

But the real power of the opera comes to light in the final act, in which Dick and Pat reminisce about his time in the Pacific during World War II; Mao and Chiang Ch'ing dance together; and Chou, dying of cancer, looks back with the faint air of disillusionment carried by a man who, with glistening eyes looks into the distance, asks rhetorically "How much of what we did was good?" It is a profoundly moving moment in an act that transcends everything we've seen to this point, a surrealistic look at the ways in which these characters have been scarred in one way or another by how their lives have played out. It is as good a meditation as one will ever see of the immense price that history demands from those who dare to shape it. Whatever one might have been expecting in this opera, this would not have been it; it provides a powerful conclusion to an opera of unique depth and emotion, and well worth the investment in time.

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As we seem to be on the subject of historical events, let's go back now to that post-antebellum time following the American Civil War, and the philosophical Western, The Rebel, co-created by and starring Nick Adams. I wrote about this series at some length a few years ago, so I'm not going to go into great detail about the existential meaning of the war, or of this series. Instead, let's look at it for what it is: a very effective half-hour drama that provides both action and an opportunity for reflection.

Adams plays Johnny Yuma, a former Confederate soldier looking for both adventure and a meaning to his life following the war. In that sense, it's reminiscent of another Western, Rod Serling's The Loner, which sought to break away from the conventions of the genre. The Rebel doesn't quite go that far; its situations are more traditional, and Adams's character is a more conventional Western hero. He does, however, have one trait that stands out: a journal that he keeps as he tries to come to terms with the horrors of war and the things he sees and experiences during his journeys.

Although Adams would be nominated for an Academy Award for Supporting Actor in 1963's Twilight of Honor, I'd never really paid that much attention to him in the roles I'd seen him play. He famously self-funded his Oscar campaign, and I'd frequently seen his name used as a punch line for such campaigns. Well, he's really good in The Rebel, and I mean really good. Perhaps it's just me, but he seems to infuse his character with a certain depth, a dignity and gravitas that one doesn't often see in shows like this. I recall a particular moment where he encounters a man who had deserted his unit during a critical battle; notwithstanding the "fog of war" that can cause men to do strange things under stress, Yuma reacts with a subtle but visible disgust that this man would have actually run from his duty—and, perhaps more important, his brothers-in-arms. 

Yuma does the things you'd expect him to do: fights for the underdog, fights against injustice, sees both sides of the conflict with the Indians, etc. He stops to help those who need help, and helps fight their battles even though they're not his battles. But Adams displays a toughness in the role that I hadn't expected. He's more than willing to beat the crap out of the bad guys or hold their heads under water until they cry uncle, and quite honestly, I'm much more partial to that than I am to seeing a hero who tries to get everyone together to talk it out like reasonable adults. Screw that; I say, if you've got a gun, use it! (Of course, with an attitude like that, you can see how television shows got in so much trouble over excessive violence.)

The Rebel may not be a great show, although it ran for two seasons. It is, however, a good one, and frequently a very good one. As I say, I've come to have a greater respect for Adams as an actor, and I like his character. The Rebel is a rare example of a Goodson-Todman production that isn't a game show, and for the most part it's a successful one. There is one sour note though, and that's the theme song, played at the beginning and end, and sung by Johnny Cash. There's nothing wrong with the song per se, and Cash is, of course, a legend, but the song's line doesn't do Cash's voice any favors, calling for a certain smoothness in the high notes that doesn't really suit his style. It's a small quibble, though, and I suspect that Cash fans are fine with it. I'm not his biggest fan myself, but who am I to complain?

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Our trio of "based on historical events" ends with a World War II drama, Blue Light, that stars Robert Goulet as David March, an American journalist who has supposedly renounced his American citizenship and joined the Nazis in their campaign to conquer the world. It's a ruse, however, as we're shown in the premiere episode; Goulet is actually a deep-cover sleeper agent; having successfully been planted in Germany prior to the war, he ingratiated himself with the Nazi hierarchy, even taking orders from Hitler, while secretly reporting back to the Americans under the code name "Blue Light," and occasionally being called on to sabotage Nazi war efforts. We're frequently reminded of the importance of March's mission: he is the lone survivor of a 18-man infiltration unit, thus he must be protected. He receives his orders from French underground member Suzanne Duchard (played by Christine Carère), who herself poses as a Gestapo officer.

This is another of the half-hour dramas that used to be common on television in the 1950s and 1960s before the networks were forced to give up a half-hour of prime time to local affiliates. The format works both for and against the show; stories are forced to cut extraneous events in favor of spare, lean storytelling that can work under the right circumstances. It can also be a detriment if the stories are forced to wrap up too quickly and too conveniently. Blue Light is not immune to to the latter, but what helps mitigate this tendency is that the series functions much like a serial, with each episode leading into the next, so much so that the first four episodes were edited into a feature-length movie after the show's cancellation.

Now, this is by no means a perfect series. It's been said that Goulet, who was a star on Broadway and in television for such hits as Camelot, Brigadoon, and Carousel, to branch out into truly dramatic acting, and in Blue Light there's nary a hint of Goulet the recording star; it's very much to the series' credit that they made David March a journalist rather than an entertainer, which would have given the excuse to have Goulet sing a couple of songs in each episode. On the other hand, perhaps the series would have lasted more than 17 episodes if they had done that; one of the drawbacks, one would suppose, of the half-hour format.

Goulet does, however, acquit himself very well as a dramatic actor. He's credible as a tough, smarmy turncoat who secretly carries the burden of playing the heel (his girlfriend was so distressed at his apparent act of treason that she committed suicide; he had been unable to tell even her of his true mission), and at times he shows a true ambivalance about his work, such as an early episode in which March is ordered to kill a fellow double-agent to assuage the Nazis of their suspicions about him; the fellow agent is not only an American but a friend with whom he's worked in the past. The fact that this agent was suffering from an incurable disease and had volunteered for the mission to give his death some meaning was no real solace to March, who worked to find a way in which he could throw the ever-suspicious Nazis off his trail while not having to kill his friend. ("There might yet be a cure!") All right, that was perhaps a little too neat of an ending, but the premise was really good, and posed an interesting moral dilemma.

Something difficult to accept, however, is the many scenes in which March and Duchard discuss his secret plans in settings where they're literally surrounded by German officers and Gestapo agents. Yes, I know they're supposed to be talking sotto voce, and the only reason they seem to be talking so openly is so they're audible to the viewers. Still, it works against the show's credibility, which is important when you're dealing with a premise such as this. Blue Light is not particularly a good show (in fact, the most recent episode we watched was average at best, managing to pack more than a half-hour's worth of cliches into its story), but it's not a bad show either, which is something, and it's an enjoyable show to watch, which is something more. The Rebel may be the better show of our hour-long bloc, but Blue Light mostly holds up its end of the bargain. TV

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What's on TV? Monday, February 28, 1966

Following Perry Como's Kraft Music Hall special with Judy Garland and Bill Cosby, NBC presents its version of CBS's successful "National Test" series (National Driving Test, National Citizenship Test, etc.), called Testing: How Quick is Your Eye? It's the second of four such planned programs, hosted by Frank McGee, with reports by Robert MacNeil, and TV Guide inlcludes a scoresheet for viewers to play along. Among the questions into which the program delves is the reliability of eyewitness testimony in trials. The show hopes to demonstrate "some of the factors that influence and even distort our visual perception." I see, and you can see it as well, in this week's Northern California edition.

This week in TV Guide: February 26, 1966

This week's headline proclaims, "TV's Impact on Our Civilization—A startling appraisal." Well, I'm always up for being startled, and this website is all about television's relationship with culture, so this sounds like a pretty good place to begin.

The author is Louis Kronenberger, Professor of Theatre Arts at Brandeis, author of novels and essays, and former drama critic for Time magazine. This must be understood, Kronenberger says at the outset: "[T]elevision is not just a great new force in modern life, but that it virtually is modern life. What, one might ask, doesn't it do?" It is, he concludes, "a truly stupendous addition to American life—our supreme cultural opportunity." It is, as well, "a supreme cultural commodity," a case of Big Business operating in tandem with Bigger Business. "Business calls—or cuts short, or calls off—the tune." And because of this, nothing else about television and its potential matters; "it makes any other fact about TV and its effect upon our civilization ultimately subsidiary and expendable."

Kronenberger compares television to the menu of a vast banquet; a fair amount on the menu is "unexceptionable" while a good deal more is "harmless entertainment." Some is even very good, but much else is not good, and even more is "truly dreadful." In offering this argument, though, Kronenberger goes beyond the artistic merits of the program itself, whether it is "good" or "bad" in conventional terms. Instead, he refers to the effect that such programs have on the audience. Not only does it pander to the lowest common denominator, it does so in the hopes of keeping that denominator low - hence, making it easier to keep the audience entertained, and available for the messages of its advertisers.

More than that, however, is the corrosive effect the programming has on the, for lack of a better word, dignity of the individual watching it. Take the Quiz Show Scandal, for example: the technical crime, as Kronenberger puts it, was that the shows were being rigged, the immorality being that the networks should and probably did know about it. "But what was really degrading, indecent, uncivilizing was that, rigged or not, the quizzes pandered to the venality of a whole nation, had multitudes glued to their televisions not at all for the fun of the game, but for the size of the stakes. Knowledge had become the grossest, the most uncultural, of commodities." To despoil the purity of knowledge, to turn it into a tool for making ever larger sums of money—aye, there's the rub.

It's not just this, of course—the corruption extends to violence, to "cheap gags and gossipy wisecracks," to an invasion of privacy—"not just in terms of outright gossip, but in the way of candid 'discussion,' or psychiatric 'discovery,' or photographs of the sick, the unhappy, the doomed?" In other words, the kind of exploitation found in everything from the early pity-party Strike it Rich to today's reality television. (Or, as I put it some time ago, trafficking in human misery.) The ratings system encourages "not merit but mass popularity"; by basing the value (and therefore continued existence) of programs on ratings, "it turns any illiterate into a critic; an entrepreneur into a craven; a defeated contestant into a criminal."

And it all surrounds money, money, money, making the offscreen antics just as craven, just as uncivilized, as what happens on the tube: "TV doesn't even wash its dirty linen in public; it merely waves it." The Great Networks are assisted by the Great Advertising Agencies and the Great Artists' Representatives, with the end result that "the alluring daughters and nieces of art—Language and Laughter, Melody and Declamation and Dancing—are constantly bedded and wedded to the paunchy sons and nephews of Mammon. The general effect is often about as civilized as gluttony." There's nothing in the least altruistic about the actions of the network executives responsible for all this; they have absolutely no interest in improving their audience, in enlightening them, in doing anything other than analyzing them not as individuals, as humans, but as statistics on a balance sheet.

It's a pretty harsh assessment, especially for a self-professed fan of television such as yours truly to have to record. And yet while I don't know that I can wholeheartedly agree with everything Kronenberger says—to do so would be to call into question most of the shows that I spend so much time watching and enjoying—I find it difficult to disagree with most of what he says, particularly the idea of how the quest for profit has made television's effect on the public both coarse and profane. "TV," writes Kronenberger, "has consistently either imposed uncivilized elements on American life, or aggravated and intensified those it found there. It has helped destroy respect for privacy, it has helped foster a more rackety publicity."

But herein lies the dilemma. Certainly we can argue about the corrupting influence of advertisers on viewers. Quoting Gore Vidal from some time back, what television could use is "a sense that getting people to buy things they do not need is morally indefensible." As for the coarsening of culture, as my friend Gary used to say, he feared letting his small son watch something as harmless as golf on TV because he didn't want to be asked "What does erectile dysfunction mean?" It's understandable that under these circumstances, networks want the highest ratings they can get in order to attract the advertisers whose dollars keep the network on the air. And since Kronenberger mentions sports in passing, let's take a moment with that as well—it's more than just ED commercials. Look at how TV has gone from covering the games to influencing them—start times, endless commercials stretching game lengths, advertising covering the players and saturating the stadiums, rules changes designed to make the game more exciting, more palatable to targeted demographics. And whereas once upon a time the goal was to win the championship, now it often seems that, as was the case with the quiz shows, winning means being able to get more money in the next contract negotiation.

What's the alternative, though? Sure, there's government subsidy, as you'd see in Britain, but if television is as pervasive in the culture as Kronenberger said it was in 1966 (and, expanding the definition of television to encompass all of today's mass media, it's probably even more so today), do you want the government to be controlling that? Really, do you? But if you go the PBS route, you're going to run into what PBS itself has discovered, namely that you still have to have "popular" programs in order to get viewers to contribute, which means more British series and aging Baby Boomer rockers. Plus, of course, the ever-present fear that if you broadcast something the government doesn't approve of, your funding will suddenly die out. Frankly, I don't have an answer, if indeed one exists, which suggests that perhaps television was doomed from the start.

Kronenberger's conclusion is not optimistic. About television, he says, "There has been nothing too elegant for it to coarsen, too artistic for it to vulgarize, too sacred for it to profane." For whatever good television may have done, truer words have seldom been spoken.

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During the 60s, the Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace were the premier variety shows on television. Whenever they appear in TV Guide together, we'll match them up and see who has the best lineup..

Sullivan: Scheduled guests are comic Alan King; singer Petula Clark; rock 'n' rollers Gary Lewis and the Playboys; singer Jerry Vale; comic Richard Pryor; the Tokyo Happy Coats, a girls' jazz band; and the Berosini Chimps. (According to the episode guide, Nancy Sinatra was also a guest tonight, taking the place of Pet Clark, and singer Blossom Seely and The Trio Rennos, an aerialists group, also appeared. Jerry Vale was "scheduled," but it sounds as if he might have been a no-show.)

Palace: Host Liberace presents comedian Bob Newhart; singers John Davidson and Marni Nixon; the comedy team of Avery Schreiber and Jack Burns; magician Channing Pollack, and trapeze artist Betty Pasco.

Well, this was easy. Liberace and Newhart start out pretty well, but after that the Palace goes off a cliff. No offense to Marni Nixon, who has a lovely voice and a lovely television presence, but I can't stand John Davidson, and Burns & Schreiber always left me cold. On the other hand, Ed has a strong lineup with King, Pryor, and Gary Lewis, and if Jerry Vale does show up, it's icing on the cake. This week is a comfortable victory for Sullivan.

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From 1963 to 1976, TV Guide's weekly reviews were written by the witty and acerbic Cleveland Amory. Whenever they appear, we'll look at Cleve's latest take on the shows of the era.

This week we're looking at the original Smothers Brothers show: not the variety show, but the sitcom that preceded it, wherein Tom plays an angel (on probation) who has to do good to earn his wings (quite possibly the most incompetent angel since Clarence, or perhaps Jack Benny in The Horn Blows at Midnight), and Dick is his brother, presumably the beneficiary—or victim, if you prefer—of Tom's good deed-ing. "If you accept it all," says Cleve, "you can have a very good time with this show. If, however, you can't accept it and are on the side not of the angels but the angles, and you even regard the whole thing as a rather "B" switch on Bewitched—you won't have a good time."

Amory is of two minds on the show; sometimes it works, other times, "we have seen another one which was so bad we wouldn't have accepted the fact that there were ,are, or even ever have been, two brothers named Smothers." A different producer has made the show, in Amory's words, character-funny instead of funny-funny, which is an improvement—especially when the writers avoid saddling Tom with hackneyed jokes, such as his telephone calls to his angel-in-chief, Ralph—e.g., "when he takes the telephone off his chest, and says inevitably, 'I've got to get something off my chest'; or. when he says, 'Roger and over,' and then asks, 'I wonder who "Over" is—I know who Roger is.' " Well, I think you get the point there. 

So things are looking up. Under the new regime, the show is, in Amory's opinion, "now developing some very funny character funnies—as, for instance, in the recent Christmas show when the brothers did an inimitable 'There isn’t any Kriss Kringle' routine." (It's possible that this could be due, in part, to Tom's more active participation in the production of the show; his involvement in the details didn't begin with the later Comedy Hour.) But there's one thing they absolutely need to do, according to Cleve, and that's improve the show's beginning. I mean the real beginning—the theme, which is "bad enough," and what follows it, when the brothers come on to tell everyone what's about to happen in the show. "Honestly, it takes strength to handle it when you don't know, but when you do—well, never mind." After one particularly painful beginning, "you could hardly wait for the first commercial." (You can judge it for yourself here.) His final verdict: like the angel Tom, the show needs to do not only good, but better.

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As predicted, the resignation of Fred Friendly makes headlines in "For the Record"—right below the item commending the networks for covering the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearings into the progress of the Vietnam War. (In particular, author Henry Harding singles out NBC for covering the hearings in their entirety, unlike some other networks we could name but won't, other than their initials are C, B, and S.) As you might recall, on February 15, Friendly "quit his job as president of the CBS News division after John Schneider, newly promoted No. 3 man in the CBS corporate hierarchy, turned down his request that the network telecast a specific session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Vietnam." The network instead scheduled a rerun of I Love Lucy. 

I don't suppose it's an exaggeration to say that these hearings, chaired by powerful Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, mark the beginning of the end of majority support for the war, or, as the above article says, they "parted the curtain," allowing the public a view of what was actually going on. Although the clip below shows the appearance of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, it is probably the testimony of General Maxwell Taylor, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that is the most pivotal; it is Taylor's contention that Hanoi will never agree to negotiate unless they are convinced that the United States is committed to fighting on behalf of the South Vietnamese. Harding calls the broadcast of the hearings "some of the most rewarding, most effective, most important, presentations in the history of network television."


The hearings, according to historian Marc Selverstone, "legitimized public dissent" over the war, creating a story that, along with its fallout (e.g. Watergate), would dominate television—and the nation—for much of the next decade.

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On Saturday's episode of Secret Agent (8:30 p.m. PT, CBS), a captured British agent is being tortured to reveal the links in his espionage network. There's nothing new in particular in this episode, but don't you find this title just a bit revealing, considering Patrick McGoohan's follow-up series The Prisoner? It's called "The Man Who Wouldn't Talk," with one of the key lines being, "We all talk. It’s just a question of time." Interesting, hmm? Ironically, NBC's Saturday night movie is a Bob Hope vehicle called My Favorite Spy (9:00 p.m.), about a burlesque comic mistaken for a foreign agent. My suspicion is that he won't be mistaken for John Drake. 

The Twentieth Century (Sunday, 6:00 p.m., CBS) profiles the show's "Man of the Month," Dr. Michael DeBakey, already a renowned cardiovascular surgeon, a pioneer in heart transplants, and already at work on the development of an artificial heart; "We could help many people if we had a truly workable artificial heart, and there is no really basic reason why we cannot," he tells Walter Cronkite. Later, it's a historic airing of Perry Mason (9:00 p.m., CBS). Does Mason finally lose to Hamilton Burger? Don't be ridiculous; that's already happened, and he managed to get his client off any. No, it's series' the first, and only, color episode. Had it continued for another season, every episode would likely have been in color. Personally, I don't think it worked; things just didn't look right, and the series lost whatever noir qualities it still had. A better story might have helped as well. Still, Mason is Mason, and there's a great turn from Victor Buono, so there's that.

On Monday night, Vivian Vance guests on I've Got a Secret (8:00 p.m., CBS), and that's followed (not surprisingly) by The Lucy Show, with guest stars Jay "Dennis the Menace" North and the wonderful character actor Vito Scotti. Meantime, on the music side, Hullabaloo (NBC, 6:30 p.m.) has George Hamilton doing the hosting, with guests Lainie Kazan, Simon and Garfunkel, Mel Carter, and the Young Rascals. Later, at 8:00, NBC preempts Andy Williams for Perry Como's once-a-month Kraft Music Hall, with Judy Garland and Bill Cosby. Big show!

Tuesday's highlight is the first of the two-part episode "Hills Are For Heroes" on Combat! (7:30 p.m., ABC), in which the platoon is given a hopeless assignment: take two entrenched German pillboxes preventing the Americans from advancing. It's a hopeless task, and the story (directed by Vic Morrow) doesn't shy away from the "Knee Deep in the Big Muddy" vibes, fully justifying the two-hour overall length of the story, as well as co-star Rick Jason's comment that it was the greatest anti-war movie ever made. Later, on the IBM-sponsored Town Meeting of the World (9:00 p.m., CBS), the subject for debate is "How to Stop the Spread of Nuclear Weapons." The debaters: Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in New York, French presidential adviser General Pierre Gallois in Paris, former West German Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss in Munich, and Lord Chalfont, British Foreign Minister, in Geneva. Eric Sevareid is the moderator. Perhaps the best-known of these Town Meetings would come a year later, when RFK debates California Governor Ronald Reagan over the Vietnam War (there's that war again). Alas, it was not to be a preview of coming presidential attractions.

Wednesday has some fun highlights of over-the-top performances, beginning with Cesar Romero as The Joker, the Guest Villain on Batman (7:30 p.m, ABC), and continuing with The Beverly Hillbillies (8:30 p.m., CBS), starring John Carradine as Marvo the Magnificent, an unemployed magician. And it wouldn't be an over-the-top evening without the presence of William Shatner and John Cassavetes, who appear on Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre  (9:00 p.m., NBC). For a little sanity, we'll go with The Danny Kaye Show, featuring a rare television appearance by Academy Award-winning actress Joanne Woodward, and Robert Goulet, who appeared earlier in the evening on the WWII spy drama Blue Light, seen, as they say, on another network.

Gilligan's Island always was a little surrealistic, but on Thursday's episode (8:00 p.m., CBS), things go a little too far: somehow or other, a lion has wound up on the island. Don't ask me; I just write these things. After that, one of my favorites, Leon "General Burkhalter" Askin, is secret agent U-45 in the short-lived spy spoof The Double Life of Henry Phyfe (8:30 p.m., ABC), starring Red Buttons. Secret Agent it ain't; I'm not even sure it even measures up to My Favorite Spy. 

On Friday Britt Ekland, aka Mrs. Peter Sellers, makes her U.S. TV debut on Trials of O'Brien (10:00 p.m., CBS). We mentioned a while back that one of O'Brien's low-ratings problems was its lack of clearance on CBS affiliates, and this is a good example: of the four CBS affiliates that appear in the Northern California edition, only one of them carries O'Brien. Meanwhile, The Sammy Davis Jr. Show (8:30 p.m., NBC), a show that ought to have been much, much better than it was, features Jonathan Winters, the Supremes, the Andrews Sisters, and singer Johnny Hartman. And Johnny Carson wraps up yet another week off on The Tonight Show (11:30 p.m., NBC); his guest hosts this week are Bob Barker (Monday), Alan King (Tuesday and Wednesday), Hugh Downs (Thursday) and Henry Morgan (Friday). 

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Didn't we just do a profile of Debbie Watson? By golly, you're right; if you're a regular reader, you'll recognize her from just two weeks ago. No matter, here she is in an earlier phase of her career, doing a fashion layout. Apparently, in 1966, women are just panting for pants. Speak for yourself, I say.  

We've also got a profile of Dick Kallman, the young star of NBC's sitcom Hank, who first came to attention in the national touring company of the smash musical "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying." Kallman comes across in Michael Fessier Jr.'s article as a good guy with endless energy and ambition, who hopes that someday people will feel about him as a comedian the way he does about Sir Laurence Olivier. Alas, he never quite makes it in showbiz, but becomes a very successful antiques dealer before he and his partner are murdered in a robbery attempt in 1980.

Of course, how can we leave without at least a word about Barbara Stanwyck? Missy, she's called on the set (mostly affectionately) comes across as confident yet insecure, an accomplished actress who feels she still has something to prove, a strong woman who still hasn't found what (or who) she wants in life. A woman of contradictions, a puzzle, but leaving absolutely no doubt that she's a star. And when you're a star the magnitude of Barbara Stanwyck, you don't get that way simply by telling people you're a star, or acting like a star. You just are. Her anthology series of the early '60s was, she hoped, a way to be able to play a strong character on television, and although that failed, I think you can say that as Victoria Barkley, the matriarch of The Big Valley, she's tougher than all of her sons put together. I like that woman.

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MST3K alert: The Amazing Transparent Man (1959) A crazed master spy hopes to build an army of invisible men. Marguerite Chapman, Douglas Kennedy (Sunday, 6:00 p.m., KGO in San Francisco). This movie runs only about an hour, and you're really not missing too much. It's very predictable, in a way; stories like this are so transparent. 

I'll show myself out now. TV

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