This week in TV Guide: August 30, 1969

His name, he reminds you at the start of every show, is Johnny Cash. He's been around since 1955, and he's recognized as one of the biggest names in American country music, the successor to JImmie Rodgers and Hank Williams. But, as Neil Hickey writes in this week's cover story, it's only been in the last year that he's become a major figure in non-country America; first, with his epic live album from Folsom Prison in California, and now with his ABC summer series, The Johnny Cash Show. He is, in fact, well on the way to becoming not just a music superstar, but an American legend. 

Hickey calls him "television's roughest diamond," and it's no surprise, considering that he sings about lost loves and jail time, poverty and homecoming and Bible stories offering redemption. A child of the depression, he began writing and recording songs after a sting in the Air Force; in 1955, Sun Records finally took a chance on him with "Hey, Porter" and "Cry! Cry! Cry!" He'd become a major star by the next year ("with deceptive ease"), performing with the Grand Ole Opry and doing one-night-stands throughout the South; his hit "I Walk the Line" was high on the charts. 

His success hid a darker side, though. His first marriage was crumbling, and combined with the stress and strain of his constant touring, he soon was on "a psysiological roller-coaster ride," taking as many as 100 pep pills a day to get him through his work, followed by fistfulls of tranquilizers to calm him down. Even as recently as two years ago, he was known as the "biggest no-show" in the business, either missing concerts completely or showing up missing his voice. He was arrested for drug possession in 1965 (and given a suspended sentence), he'd lost 100 pounds, and his family had decided to commit him at one point to save him from himself. 

That he has come back from all this, unlike Rodgers and Williams, both of whom succumbed to their darker demons, is a testament to the love of family and friends, and particularly his second wife, June Carter, herself from a legendary country music family. He got off the pills and settled down to a life of hard work, crowned by a successful 1967 concert to a sold-out audience at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Says actor Dale Robertson, "He's to country music what John Wayne is to Westerns." Whereas he once picked cotton and hauled water for work ganges, he's now a millionaire from his recordings and concerts, Says Cash, "I’m happy to be alive—lucky to be alive. I know damn well I'm a good man."

The Johnny Cash Show runs from 1969 to 1971, hosting some of the biggest names in the country music world, not to mention stars such as Louis Armstrong, Jose Feliciano, Liza Minnelli, and Joni Mitchell; surely, on a per-show basis it has to be considered one of the most star-studded variety series ever seen on television, hosted by one of the biggest stars to ever host a series while still in his prime. It fell victim to the double-barrelled challenge of the Prime-Time Access rule, eliminating a half-hour per night of network programming, and the Rural Purge. For Johnny Cash, though, the star continued to shine, adding some acclaimed acting roles to his portfolio, working with U2, and covering songs by Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode. His troubles did not end; he went through additional stints of drug addiction and rehab. He remained, in many ways, a rough diamond, as I suspect he'd have been the first to admit, and I don't think he'd have been embarrased to admit it.

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This week, the Doan Report updates us on what is now a three-way battle for late-night supremacy, what with Merv Griffin's August 18 debut on CBS. Insiders agree that it's "much too early to tell" how this race is going to end (it is, after all, a marathon, not a sprint), but the early returns auger well for Johnny holding on to his crown. CBS boasted that the Griffin show won opening night, with a 31 percent share compared to Carson's 25 and Bishop's 8; NBC, however, was equally quick to throw cold water on that boast, pointing out that "while Griffin opened with a big lead, by the end fo the 90-minute heat Carson had the larger audience." Said one NBC vice president, "I guess a lot of people sampled Griffin, then when back to their old favorite." 

One factor that might have contributed to the early ratings: the quality of guest lineups. Griffin was plagued by no-shows, including New York Major John Lindsay and New York Jets star quarterback Joe Namath; meanwhile, Carson, broadcasting that week from Hollywood, countered with "TV's biggest draw," Bob Hope. (Interestingly enough, Bishop's lineup that night included the Smothers Brothers, to no ratings avail; fame is fleeting, isn't it?)

Which leads us to this week's feature. Back in the day, I used to enjoy going through TV Guide, looking at the lineups for the talk shows and seeing who had the best guests, even though I couldn't stay up and watch them. What with this being Merv's third week on the job, it and having seen the importance of booking big-name guests when it comes to ratings, it seemed like it might be kind of interesting to resume the practice, at least for one week. Let's see who's got the strongest lineup, and whether Johnny really has become the King of Late Night, or if he's just a comfortable habit.

Now, the guest list in TV Guide has always been full of caveats, with clauses like "tentatively scheduled guests," and the like. And we know how Merv was victimized by no-shows on his opening night. So, in the interests of providing you, the loyal reader, with the most accurate information possible, I've augmented the guest list found in this week's issue with info from sources ranging from the IMDb to the TV listings of various newspapers. In addition, since a lot of you may not recognize the names here, I've linked to their bios on Wikipedia and other places. (Rather than running the risk of insulting your intelligence, I've just gone ahead and linked all of them, even though you probably know who Tony Randall and William Holden are.) So have a go at it, and see what you think.

		JOHNNY	MERV	JOEY
	MON.	• Tony Randall • William Holden • Pat Morita • Marilyn Maye • Turley Richards	• Hermione Gingold • Bobby Sherman • George Carlin • Barbara Tai-Sing • The Free Design • Gwen Davis	• Polly Bergen (guest host) • Laurindo Almeida • Arlene Golonka • Robert Goulet • Nick Ullett
	TUES.	• Jaye P. Morgan • John Byner • Orson Bean • Adela Rogers St. Johns	• David Susskind • Hugh O'Brian • Polly Bergen • Lily Tomlin • Dr. Roger O. Egeberg • Eloise Haws • Slappy White and Steve Rossi • Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Armstrong	• Art Linkletter • Dino, Desi & Billy • Jeannie C. Riley
	WED.	• Phyllis Newman • Corbett Monica • Mel Tormé • The People Tree	• Tommy Smothers • Theodore H. White • Phil Ford and Mimi Hines • Katie Drew-Wllkinson • Virginia Graham • Rip Taylor • The Checkmates	• Merle Haggard and the Strangers • Bobbi Martin
	THURS.	• Dana Valery • The Youngbloods • Jimmie Rodgers	• Soupy Sales • Phil Leeds • Dr. James Brussel • Eddy Arnold • Terry O'Mara • Children's fashion show featuring Merv's son	• Charo • Hedgemon Lewis • Ryan O'Neal • Smokey Robinson • Leigh Taylor-Young
	FRI.	• David Frye • Linda Bennett • Gary Lewis & the Playboys	• Zsa Zsa Gabor • Madeline Kahn • Robert Klein • Hubert Humphrey • Harry Hershfield • Oliver	• Abbe Lane • Norm Crosby • Pierre Salinger • Chris and Peter Allen

In the meantime, Dick Cavett has yet to become part of the late-night troika; having started out with a five-day-a-week daytime show on ABC, he's now been moved to prime time for the summer, where he airs each Monday, Tuesday, and Friday at 10:00 p.m. (He'll be in the Joey Bishop timeslot before the end of the year, though.) Nonetheless, he might have the best guest lineup of the week: Monday, it's actor Sal Mineo, B.B. King, and journalist I.F. Stone; Tuesday features William Holden, Eartha Kitt, and Nero Wolfe author Rex Stout; and Friday he spends the entire hour with Groucho Marx. Yes, I'd call that lineup a winner.

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But as we all know, television does not live by late-night alone. Amid the reruns that populate the waning weeks of summer, Saturday's Get Smart repeat bears watching (8:00 p.m. PT, NBC). It's a spoof of Rear Window, with Max taking on the Jimmy Stewart role (and who had that phrase on their TV Guide bingo card?), watching through binoculars as 99 takes on KAOS. I suspect she'll be able to handle herself, don't you? If you're looking for the real Jimmy Stewart though, you'll find him in brilliant form in Anatomy of a Murder (midnight, KPIX in San Francisco), with George C. Scott, Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick, Eve Arden, and Arthur O'Connell all in equally top form. It's an adult movie in the classic sense of the word, in that it deals with mature themes in a serious manner, but it was also controversial in its time for the sexual frankness of the dialog; it's said to be the first movie in which the words ""contraceptive," "climax," and "spermatogenesis" were used. I wonder if they made it on TV in 1969?

Culture, both highbrow and middlebrow, is on display Sunday; with no Hollywood Palace to go up against, Ed Sullivan has the field to himself (8:00 p.m., CBS), and he comes through in style, with Metropolitan Opera soprano Anna Moffo, singers Sandler and Young, Sam and Dave, and Roslyn Kind; the Ballet America; comics Jackie Mason and Pat Cooper; and clown Charlie Cairoli. At the same time, NET's Sounds of Summer presents the farewell concert of legendary conductor Erich Leinsdorf, retiring from the Boston Symphony. A star-studded lineup, including Beverly Sills and Justino Diaz, is on hand for the finale from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. At the intermission, Leinsdorf is interviewed by host Steve Allen.

Vivian Vance returns to The Lucy Show on Monday (8:30 p.m., CBS), in a flashback-filled show that has the two recalling past adventures while Lucy recovers from a broken leg. Meanwhile, Jimmie Rodgers finishes up his stint as summer replacement for Carol Burnett with a show featuring pianist Roger Williams and comic Scoey Mitchell, along with two of Carol's regulars, Vicki Lawrence and Lyle Waggoner. 

You remember a few paragraphs ago, when we learned that Ryan O'Neal and his wife, Leigh Taylor-Young, were guests on The Joey Bishop Show? There's probably a good reason for that; on Tuesday, the couple stars in an unsold pilot, Under the Yum Yum Tree (Tuesday, 9:00 p.m., ABC), based on the 1963 movie of the same name, which starred Jack Lemmon and Carol Lynley. It's no criticism of O'Neal to note that he's no Jack Lemmon.

Helen Hayes makes a rare television appearance on Wednesday's episode of Tarzan (7:30 p.m., CBS), along with her son, James MacArthur, whom we all know and love as Danno on Hawaii Five-O. For those of you who thought Tarzan was an NBC series, you're right; its original run was from 1966-68, and CBS aired reruns during the 1969 summer. And Darren McGavin's unjustly-forgotten private detective series The Outsider comes to an end with an episode involvung a millionaire "who has never been photographed." (10:00 p.m., NBC) The reclusive Howard Hughes, anyone? 

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was cancelled after a single season on NBC, but it's been picked up by ABC for the coming season, and to celebrate, the show's stars, Hope Lange and Edward Mulhare, host an hour-long special previewing the network's Super Saturday morning cartoon lineup. (Thursday, 7:30 p.m.) Not everyone will agree with me on this—it depends a lot on your childhood memories—but the new Saturday schedule is far from the glory days of cartoons, with a scheule that includes "Smokey the Bear, a cartoon with a conservation message; The Cattanooga Cats, an hour hosted by five soft-rock felines; Hot Wheels, the adventures of a car club; The Hardy Boys, based on the mystery-book series; and Sky Hawks, the saga of a flying family." Jonathan Frid is along for the ride, along with the regulars from Ghost.

The John Davidson Show ends its summer run on Friday, and his final show features a fine cast, including the Moody Blues, Rich Little (impersonating W.C. Fields), the Committee, and Mireille Mathieu. (8:00 p.m., ABC) To be perfectly frank, the weakest link in the show is the host himself. Opposite this is a Bell Telephone Hour special on the life and art of the legendary pianist Arthur Rubinstein (8:30 p.m. NBC). And Dick Powell gives the definitive interpretation of Raymond Chandler's fabled private detective Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (9:00 p.m., KTXL in Sacramento). A good way to close out the week.

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Judith Crist, TV Guide's movie critic, has a thing or two to say about TV-movies. Movies on television, as we know, have been big business for some time, and ever since the studios loosened their grip and began to allow newer films to grace the small screen, the "sad truth" has been that "the worst of the Hollywood product would pull in more viewers than the best of creative television could." Lesson learned, network executives determined that "anything that Hollywood could do badly for itself, it could do worse for television, and in color yet."

It's long been accepted that Hollywood's backlog of movies has been drying up, and that there aren't enough movies being made to fill the insatiable demand from television. It's now been three years, and 31 telemovies, since the first "world premiere" movie made its appearance. And, says Crist, the "cold fact" is that "for the most part, and emphasize the 'most' part, the public’s been offered a series of pilot and pseudo-pilot films, the vast majority of which wouldn’t have earned a B rating on any theatrical movie meter bill." They stand out from their theatrical bretheren in that they generally feature cheap production values, stars "who have not quite retained their place at the top or not quite found it," and plots that are clearly shaped around the needs for commercials at set times. But people watch them—their ratings have been very close to those of theatrical premieres—and so we can count on more of them.

A major selling point to TV-movies, one that makes the positive ratings even more attractive, is that they're relatively cheap to make. The costs run anywhere between $800,000 and $1.3 million, for which the network gets to show the movie twice during the season, sell it off in a syndicated package with other movies, and then sell it again for foreign theatrical release. At that rate, she says, the expenditures have not only been recouped, but doubled. And that doesn't even begin to include the benefits if the movie is made into a successful series. It is, therefore, profitable junk 

Not all of it is junk; stars of the calibur of Henry Fonda and Anne Baxter can give telemovies a veneer of quality. Still, Crist can point to "perhaps three our four" of the past season's movies had a claim to special interest: Something for a Lonely Man, a Western starring Dan Blocker, and two courtroom dramas that would become the basis for "The Lawyers" segment of The Bold Ones, "The Sound of Anger" and "The Whole World is Watching." Interestingly enough, Crist is unimpressed by Prescription: Murder, the first movie to feature Peter Falk's Lieutenant Columbo, calling it "one of those how-to-kill-your-wife" bores." (She notes that NBC speculates that "The Falk character could return annually"; in truth, it was the second Columbo movie, Ransom for a Dead Man, that sold the concept as part of the Mystery Movie wheel. 

One observation is that many TV-movies have the feel of a regular series episode that's been padded out to fill a larger timeslot; the answer to that lies in shorter movies (ABC's Movie of the Week famously runs for 75 minutes plus commercials) or movies with multiple, distinct stories (such as NBC's Night Gallery pilot). In the long run, Crist feels, TV-movies will improve with experience, but much depends on the industry's ability to attract good writers, which itself will depend on whether television goes the route of "factory productions" (think of the Warner Bros. assembly line method) or the "workshop" way of thinking, in which writers are invited to write about whatever interests them. 

Today, despite Crist's criticisms, many people have fond memories from this era of TV-movies, particularly the ABC Movie of the Week, which wasn't afraid to tackle controversial issues as well as making frequent foray into horror movies. I don't think it's the case that these movies have improve in retrospect, either; many of them were highly-rated and critically reviewed at the time. It's likely that Crist's standards were high, as they were for theatrical movies, and that she was inherently inclined to look down at these movies. What she's right about, though, is that eventually the quality of the TV-movie would improve in time; by the time of prestige television, many of them surpass theatrical movies in quality.

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MST3K alert: 12 to the Moon (1960) Moon beings fear that earthmen are bringing greed and destruction to their world. Ken Clark, Michi Kobi. (Wednesday, 6:30 p.m., KTXL) This is one of those MST3K occasions where the short is actually more disturbing than the feature. In the musical short "Design for Living," "a woman dreams of a mysterious masked man who takes her to see the future." It's actuallySa an ad for the 1956 General Motors Motorama, but to borrrow a phrase from Tom Servo, "This has all the markings of a Clay Shaw party!" TV  

Around the dial

You're probably all familiar by now with the Hitchcock Project that Jack posts every other week at bare•bones e-zine; it's a don't-miss feature for me. Jack's not quite done covering every episode of the Hitchcock series, but he's getting close, and this week he provides his annual list of all the episodes he's reviewed so far. Click to your heart's content.

At Cult TV Blog, John returns to Barlow at Large, a British police procedural that ran from 1971 to 1975, starring Stratford Johns as Detective Chief Superintendent Charlie Barlow, a role he'd previously played in three other series. This week's episode, "Sect," involves an investigation of a cult, and makes a strong case for being a series worth following.

David's always-interesting series at Comfort TV, in which he journeys through prime time TV of the 1970s, and he's now reached Thursday nights in 1974. What was on the dial? Some familiar faces, to be sure: The Waltons, Harry O, The Streets of San Francisco, The Odd Couple, Ironside, Movin' On, and more. Find out what David has to say about them.

Few things strike us as being more disturbing than the idea that someone else could be controlling your mind. It's a popular trope for television shows, and at The View from the Junkyard, Roger and Mike investigate the Avengers episode "My Wildest Dream," with Steed and Tara, to see how well the series handles it. 

Do you remember Charles Rocket? Or, more specifically, do you remember the moment Charles Rocket launched the F-bomb on Saturday Night Live? I do; I can honestly say that I saw the event as it happened, live on national TV. It was truly one of those "did I just hear what I think I heard?" events, and not surprisingly it features big time in Travalanche's look at Rocket's not-so-gleaming career.

Does the new fall TV season do anything for you? If it does (and sadly, for me it does not), then you're in luck, because both CBS and Fox have produced half-hour specials touting their new shows. This was a staple of the schedule when I was growing up, and even though I'm not interested in them, I'm glad they still do it. Television Obscurities has the 411 on their availability.

Garry Berman looks back on the book that launched his career as a professional writer 25 years ago: Best of the Britcoms - From Fawlty Towers to Absolutely Fabulous. It would later receive an update to take it through The Office, but no matter which version you look at, it's an informative—and highly entertaining—look at one of the most endearingly quirky generes on TV. TV  

Labor Day and the Jerry Lewis Telethon

Labor Day is coming up this weekend, in case you hadn't noticed, and for me the unofficial end to summer always meant two things: it was time to go back to school (something I found profoundly depressing at the time, and which still triggers PTSD in me today; you should see me twitch when the first Back to School sales start); and it was time for the Jerry Lewis Telethon.

I first saw the telethon back in 1971 (it was also the first time it had been shown in the Twin Cities), and it quickly became something to whch I'd look forward each year, even if it did mean going back to school. It also became a personal challenge, as I tried each year to make it through the 20+ hours of the show. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't. Now, in my doddering old age, I probably wouldn't be able to make it to midnight, but b ack then I was always good to go at least to 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, even in the years when I didn't watch the whole thing. 

I had to look it up; it's been 14 years since the last time Jerry hosted the telethon. After he was ousted, I not only quit watching it, I stopped donating to MDA altogether. (There was more to it than that, but that's for another day.) Even in those last years, though, it had changed from when I'd first started watching. There weren't as many big stars anymore; the variety show was a thing of the past, the big names in the music industry were mostly rock acts that didn't do television, and more and more of the guests seemed to be of the lounge lizard variety. As the big names began to fade from the scene, and as more stations went to 24-hour broadcasting, the magic that made the telethon dimmed, even if it never went out completely.

I say all this as a preface to some video that I think you'll find interesting, even if you've already seen it. It's the opening 16 minutes from 1967, only the second year of the telethon, back when the show still originated from the Americana Hotel in New York City. It's the second year for the telethon, and you'll notice that the toteboard only registers seven figures; the final total for that year was $1,126,846. (Since I know you were going to ask, the record amount, set in 2008, was over $65 million.) This is in no way meant as a criticism—after all, the more money raised, the better—but from a purely dramatic standpoint, there was real tension, almost desperation, in that fight to raise just one more dollar. The first million often didn't come until sometime overnight, and the last hour was especially dramatic, when it seemed as if everyone was in a mad rush to contribute before the show ended. Things were less polished then, less sophisticated, and was all quite exciting, especially for an impressionable kid like me. 

Anyway, here's to simpler times; I hope you enjoy this blast from the past, and that it brings back some pleasant memories!

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What's on TV? Wednesday, August 28, 1968

The one thing of which you can be absolutely certain regarding today's listings is that even after looking at it, you'll still have no idea what was actually on TV that day. Not all of that is this Northern California edition's fault; the convention's most anticipated moment, the debate and vote on the platform's Vietnam plank, was originally scheduled for primetime on Tueday but was rescheduled to noon CT Wednesday when Tuesday's session ran past 1 a.m. That would wipe out all late morning and early afternoon programming on the networks, or at least CBS and NBC. That evening, the presidential balloting takes place, interspersed with footage of the rioting in downtown Chicago, and the live coverage runs well past the scheduled end time, pre-empting more programming. Speaking of which, you'll notice I haven't mentioned ABC; their magazine-style summary of the evening's events, offered on tape-delay to West Coast affiliates, isn't scheduled to begin until 9:00 p.m. I wonder if any of those affiliates decided to take the live feed, or stick with things on a tape-delay basis. It's questions like this that keep me awake nights.

This week in TV Guide: August 24, 1968

This week we've got a miniseries filled with just about everything television has to offer, a star-studded event featuring high drama and low comedy, tragedy and pathos, suspense, violence, and even theater of the absurd. It runs for four consecutive nights, Monday through Thursday, and it's while two networks will be showing it unabridged, a third plans to present a condensed, Cliff's Notes version. It's the water-cooler show of the year, guaranteed to leave viewers shocked and breathless. 

Welcome to Chicago, and the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

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It's not as if the chaos of the convention just snuck up on people. You can see it right there in the full-page add for KCRA's convention coverage; referring to the location of the convention, at the International Amphitheatre near the Union Stock Yards, the headline shouts, "Tempest Near the Stockyards," with the body of the ad containing either a promise or a warning: "The Democrats are facing what may be the stormiest convention fight of the century." 

We probably don't need to rehash it all: police on the convention floor; reporters being assulted; delegates taken into custody; a telecommunications strike that hampered media efforts to provide coverage of protests devolving into riots in Grant Park; contentious debates about delegate selection and the Vietnam War plank in the party platform; and more. Media coverage of the convention, and the public's response to that coverage, would be hashed and rehashed in TV Guide (and other publications) in the ensuing weeks and months, and continues to be analyzed to this day. But why wait for that? There's already a lot of second-guessing regarding network coverage of last month's Republican Convention, if the Letters section is any indication.

NBC was the big winner in the ratings race, and so it's no surprise that many of the letters, both positive and negative, refer to the Peacock Network's coverage in Miami Beach. Jean Ward of Kimberton, Pennsylvania, chastises NBC as "saboteurs for the Democratic Party," and says their editorial remarks, "presented as news, were highly improper and, to me, highly objectionable." Tim Johnson, writing from Los Angeles, and D. Sherwood, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, both single out Sander Vanocur; the former calls his reporting "sophomoric cynicism," and the latter found him "highly biased and generally unprofessional." Mr. Johnson adds that, thanks to Vanocur, "I have discovered what a truly remarkable reporting team the CBS Network has." [Nonetheless, I always enjoyed Sander Vanocur myself.] Not everyone was so negative, however; Helene Shalotsky of Parsippany, New Jersey, praises coverage that "vividly uncovered to the American people the hoopla and ludicrous expenditure involved in selecting a Presidential candidate," and James Kusiak, of Wildwood, New Jersey, thanks the networks "for their devoted service to the nation in their coverage of issues as important as the respective conventions."

And then there's ABC, which eschewed the traditional gavel-to-gavel convention coverage in Miami Beach (and the estimated $5 million that CBS and NBC each spent) in favor of a 90-minute nightly summary of each night's session at less than half the cost, while still retaining much of their nightly entertainment revenue. Pam Hornung, of St. Louis, found that this suited her just fine, writing that "I have never enjoyed a convention more or felt more well-informed as to what had happened during the day." Mrs. Cal Heathman, from Champaign, Illinois, extends "My compliments to ABC News. They needed only an hour and a half to tell us what had happened at the Republican Convention; it took CBS and NBC all evening long." She also takes a moment to mention "Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley [who] added a great deal of interest and, in most cases, understanding."

Buckley on the left, Vidal on the right: 
the only time you'd identify them that way.

For coverage of both the Republican and Democratic conventions, ABC signed Buckley and Vidal to provide their own take on things, from, respectively, the conservative and liberal points of view. Their contentious clashes became so famous that, years later, they would become the subject of a documentary. The highlight of their interactions (or lowlight, if you prefer) unquestionably comes on Wednesday, August 28, an infamous night that saw Hubert Humphrey's nomination for president, interspersed with tape-delayed coverage of the clashes between police and protestors in Grant Park. 

Anchorman Howard K. Smith, referring to a clip they had just viewed, had suggested that the raising of the Vietcong flag by antiwar protestors, an act which triggered a violent response from police, could be considered akin to raising a Nazi flag during World War II; Buckley nodded his agreement with Smith. Addressing Buckley, Vidal replied that "As far as I’m concerned, the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that, I will only say that if we can’t have the right of assembly –" at which point Buckley interrupted, "Now listen, you queer—stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered!" A decade later, New York magazine would rank the debates as one of the greatest moments in the history of television to date, right up there with the moon landing and the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show; august company indeed. 

That's all in the future, though. For the present, the Doan Report wonders if ABC's limited coverage may be the wave of the future. Looking back to last month, Doan notes that, on average, "nearly 13 million Americans" chose ABC's alternative programming (including reruns of The Rat Patrol and The Flying Nun and an old Jerry Lews movie) instead of watching convention coverage on NBC and CBS. Were they, Doan wonders, "mostly distinterested Democrats? Or were they, regardless of political persuasion, simply switched off by the tedium of 90 percent of the Miami Beach proceedings?" Even worse was the possibility that "a great swatch of the public" has become "so disenchanted with the Old Politics . . .that many people are permanently turned-off to this sort of televised razzmatazz?" The Democrats are taking last-minute steps to streamline some of their proceedings in hopes viewers will find it all less boring; ironically, "TV’s millions may be switching en masse to CBS and NBC if trouble breaks out outside Chicago’s International Amphitheatre. Huge protest demonstrations are in the making." In Miami, NBC and ABC were the clear ratings winners, with CBS finishing in third place for the first time in history. What Chicago has in store, nobody knows for sure. 

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It may be an odd thing to say, given how countercultural 1968 was, but there's a certain innocence to it all at the same time, particularly the idea that a political party was willing to debate important issues and air out its differences right there in front of everyone on live television. You look at those poor suckers on the convention floor, thinking that what they're doing really makes a difference, and yet somewhere in the back of your mind you envy their naïvety, their commitment to something that matters. You look at the motto emblazoned in the convention hall, "Promises Made, Promises Kept," and you wonder how anyone could ever believe such hoke, let alone something like, "Make America Great Again." It may have been the worst of times, but there was somethiung eminently human about it all, something that we've lost in the deIt cades since. 

The Democrats didn't plan it that way, but it happened nonetheless, and the idea that anything like it could happen again today is laughable. As we read a couple of weeks ago, by 1980 conventions were being scripted down to the minute, and today they scan more like cheap infomercials, except those infomercials usually have more substance to them. It's hard to shake the feeling sometimes that we're all just going through the motions, playing the roles that have been assigned to us, while we wait to see what happens next. We wait, and we wonder.

 

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That innocence isn't on display only in the convention hall. You can see it on the Elysian fields of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where the championship game of the Little League World Series is being contested Saturday afternoon on ABC's Wide World of Sports (5:00 p.m., tape-delayed). It used to be that the only other time you'd see a Little League game was if you walked down to a local playground, and in that way it's more of a slice of Americana, something you'd see in a picture book along with parades and church socials, than an actual sporting event. Today, the entire tournament is televised; even the regional rounds wind up on ESPN (in primetime, no less!), and Little League baseball seems more of a commodity, another source of programming for a machine. Even the between-innings segments featured in 1968, with all-stars Carl Yastrzemski, Sam McDowell, and Dave Giusti offering "tips for the youngsters," would seem corny today; the only tips they're interested in are the best home run celebrations for the cameras. 

Apropos of a convention week, some of the best alternative programming comes from exhibition football, where the hitting is only slightly harder than it is in Chicago. On Saturday, two of the oldest and fiercest rivals in the AFL, the Oakland Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs, face off in KC (5:30 p.m., KNEW), while the teams in the last two NFL championship games, the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys, go at it in Big D (6:30 p.m., CBS). The AFL season begins in earnest on September 6, the NFL follows suit on September 15.

Even non-political programming has its tangentially-political side; on Sunday morning, Discovery '68, which Cleveland Amory praised last week, presents a poignant rerun from last November featuring the late Robert F. Kennedy in a program that explores ways to preserve and enjoy "The Vanishing Wilderness." (11:30 a.m.) Among a montage of Americans enjoying hiking, fishing, and camping, Kennedy and his family are seen shooting the rapids on the Colorado River, and RFK later discusses government projects designed to protect these areas. It is an interesting choice by the netw, Aork to replay this particular episode on the eve of the Democratic Convention (just as it was to telecast it last November, a year out from the election); although Discovery is primarily a children's show, I'd imagine this one might have produced a tear or two from grown-up viewers. 

Also on Sunday, Glen Campbell's summer replacement series airs its final episode. (Don't worry; thanks to the dispute between CBS and the Smothers Brothers, he'll be back soon enough.) For the finale (9:00 p.m., CBS), Glen presents a country-music concert with Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three, the Stoneman Family, and regulars Leigh French and John Hartford; Pat Paulsen features in his mock-presidential campaign, advocating for increased gun-control laws. 

Monday illustrates the challenges faced by West Coast stations when it comes to covering live events. CBS and NBC both begin their live, gavel-to-gavel convention coverage at 4:30 p.m.; if things go as planned (which they never do), their affiliates should have an hour or two to fill before their late local news (and, in the case of NBC, The Tonight Show, with Bob Newhart as guest host for the week). It's pretty much business as usual for ABC, though, with the Chuck Connors series Cowboy in Africa (7:30 p.m., The Rat Patrol (8:30 p.m.), and Howard Duff and Dennis Cole in Felony Squad (9:00 p.m.), followed by their nightly convention wrap-up at 9:30 p.m. (about three hours after its live broadcast).

On Tuesday, ABC continues its counter-programming offensive with Garrison's Gorillas (7:30 p.m., although with all the explosions and whatnot, viewers might have been forgiven for thinking the network was interrupting things for live footage from downtown Chicago), followed by It Takes a Thief, with guest star Susan Saint James. Tonight the convention runs late, ending after 10:00 p.m. in the West, so weary viewers might have opted for a special Merv Griffin broadcast from the streets of Harlem, in support of New York's "Give a Damn" program to benefit ghetto youth (8:30 p.m., Channel 36). Following opening remarks from NYC's mayor John Lindsay, Merv presents performances by James Brown, Joe Tex, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Spanky and Our Gang, Willie Tyler and Lester, the Pied Piper Drummers and Dancers (doing a tribal dance), and a fashion show of African-style clothes. There are also appearances by former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali and actor Burt Lancaster, who grew up in the neighborhood. 

Wednesday, ABC's alternate reality reaches its peak, when the network puts Elvis up against the politicians; Blue Hawaii (7:30 p.m.) is, says Judith Crist, "bearable to the non-[Elvis] fans as well," with "pretty views of Hawaii, has the usual quota of pretty girls on hand, has a couple of tidy tunes in its repertoire and even has Angela Lansbury to brighten the screen as Elvis's mother." Of course, Angela Lansbury also played the evil mother in The Manchurian Candidate, one of the great political thrillers of all time, so she's got you covered either way. Keep in mind, though, that the presidential balloting takes place on Wednesday, which also features rough stuff inside the convention hall and rioting outside it, so the network may have decided to go live earlier in the night.

If ABC continues its minimalist convention coverage, its Thursday night lineup is made up of comedies (make of that what you will): The Second Hundred Years (7:30 p.m.), The Flying Nun (8:00 p.m.), Bewitched (8:30 p.m.), and That Girl (9:00 p.m.) However, Channel 2 has Portrait: James Mason (9:00 p.m.), which includes clips from The Seventh Veil, Odd Man Out, I Met a Murderer, A Star Is Born, and Georgy Girl; his career is discussed by those who have worked with him, including Stephen Boyd, Sue Lyon, Omar Sharif and director Sidney Lumet. Following that, NET Playhouse (10:00 p.m.) presents an adaptation of Georges Simenon's "The Suspect," a dark, non-Maigret story of terrorism and revolutionary fervor.

We're finally back to normal on Friday, and tonight's choice is the very funny Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action" (8:30 p.m., NBC), featuring Kirk and Spock as a couple of Chicagoland gangsters, and introducing to the world the game whose rules never end, Fizbin. And this leads us to the week's unbylined cover story, a profile of DeForest Kelley, the erstwhile Dr. Bones McCoy. Kelley comes across, to me at least, as a man of contradictions: a minister's son who eschews religion in favor of the New Age-y Science of Mind; a quiet, droll man who nonetheless has become something of a "teen-age sex symbol," serenated by Sunset Strip hippies who offer him love beads; one of the three stars of a successful TV series who still has to "fight for everything I've gotten at Star Trek, from a parking space at the studio to an unshared dressing room," and once found himself left out of an episode entirely. 

He's immensely popular with the crew and his fellow actors; "De really cares about people," says Leonard Nimoy, who also calls him "truly the most human of all the actors I've ever known," while William Shatner cites "a simple, unassuming niceness about this man that's rare in any business." He doesn't deny the disappointments of his career, the stardom that seemed close but always remained just out of reach, but of course he attains an immortality that few actors ever reach. And not only that—earlier this year he found himself, for the first time, part of a TV Guide crossword puzzle, which hs wife clipped out and framed. "It's not an Oscar or an Emmy," he says, "but to an actor it's something."

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It was just a couple of weeks ago that we were discussing, in this very space, how frequently TV Guide looks at children's programming. And so what do we have this week? Another article on children's programming! And, somewhat appropriately, this, too, has a tangental relationship to the week's festivities in Chicago, as Dr. Joyce Brothers asks the question: "Are the seeds of violence nurtured through the public's airwaves?" 

She starts out with a sobering statistic: "Without changing the dial, a child of our electronic age can watch some 50 near or actual violent 'deaths' on his television set in a day’s time." He's also going to spend as many hours in front of the TV over the course of a year as they do in front of a schoolteacher. No wonder that mothers "worry more about the effect of tele-violence on their children's souls than they do abou tthe effect of television on their eyes and posture." And, "in the wake of Sen. Robert Kennedy's assassination, everybody has been worrying with them."

Following Kennedy's assassination, there was a wave of self-censorship on television, with networks pulling the more violent episodes of various series (only to air them later, after things had died down), but Dr. Brothers is skeptical of such moves, viewing them more as a quest to find a scapegoat. "History,' she quotes William James, "is a bath of blood. To hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living."

Not surprisingly, there's no real consensus on the topic among those who study such things. "There are as many opinions as there are experts," says Brothers, "and their disagreement is often as violent as our television fare. Not all the opinions are based on facts, for there are very few of these. Research on television’s influence on our lives has barely begun. And many of the findings are contradictory." 

For example, one expert says there's no such thing as something too violent for kids, that violent television serves the same purpose as Grimm's Fairy Tales; "Children still need these hair-raising stories that end happily if they are not to be terrified by their own unresolved and frightening fantasies." Another replies that television is "a school for violence that most of our children attend regularly," and that kids wind up learning that "violence is the great adventure and the sure solution, and he who is best at it wins. We are training not only a peace corps but also a violence corps." 

Brothers cites the results of a questionnaire completed by over 300 psychiatrists at a recent American Psychiatric Association meeting; 30 percent beleved fictional violence (TV shows, movies, comic books) teaches actual violence to children, while 24 percent believe it helps dissipate aggression. "The rest were undecided." Studies run on children produce results that differ dramatically. 

If there's any clarity at all, it might come from a Stanford University study that found that "children are less affected by the violence they witness on their TV screens than they are by their parents’ attitudes toward violence." In other words, happy children with loving parents tend to focus more on the struggle between good and evil, between hero and villain, while those who have been neglected, mistreated, or underprivileged often bring their existing frustrations to their viewing, where what they see on TV adds fuel to the fire. 

Marshall McLuhan, one of the most influential of media watchers, offers some interesting observations of his own. According to McLuhan, children actually look at the faces of actors much more than they do the weapons or the action. What they really fear, he says, is the unknown. Children (and most adults) don't watch Westerns or detective stories for their violent content; rather, it's "for the pleasure of participating in the solution of a crime or in building a frontier town." Violence in that detective show or Western is familiar to them, and less upsetting than stories like 1984 or Jane Eyre. Which, to me, suggests that something like, say, the Three Stooges, or the Road Runner cartoons, is so formulaic, so predictable, that the violent content would have little effect on children watching them. 

Perhaps most interesting, and most sobering, is a finding that juvenile viewers are far more disturbed by verbal aggression on TV than by physical violence. "They were least upset by shooting, more upset by knives and most upset 'when grownups are angry with one another and shout.'" And maybe that's the lesson we take from all this: that what's important is not what children see on television, but what they see in their own households, from their own parents. Television, Joyce Brothers says, is not a chief motivating force; rather, it's "a mirror in which we see the reflections of ourselves and the world in which we live." And changing the mirror image doesn't change the world. 

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I think we could all do with something a little lighthearted to round things out, and that comes to us courtesy of Joseph Finnigan's article on those "long-gone TV luminaries" who've found their fame—and fortune—working in Europe. Stars like George Nader, Ty Hardin, Edd Byrnes, Ray Danton, and others, who may have disappeared from American televisions but now grace the marquees of foreign theaters. 

    George Nader, king of the
    sauerkraut spy circuit.

Their role model, of course, is Clint Eastwood, who headed to Italy after the cancellation of Rawhide to make a spaghetti-Western called A Fistfull of Dollars. Two more movies followed—For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—and Eastwood emerged a bona fide movie star, one whose fame and acclaim have grown exponentially larger in the decades since this issue of TV Guide was published. George Nader, who starred in the forgettable single-season series Shannon among other series, is no Clint Eastwood. However, he's the star of a series of secret-agent movies in Germany, where he's now a celebrity. "I make my living in Europe now," he tells Finnigan. Even after years in Hollywood, "I hadn't had any offers." But now, "I look at my counterparts in Hollywood and they’re playing guest roles. In my pictures, I’m the leading man."*

*He also starred, with Richard Kiel in a sci-fi flick called The Human Duplicators, which aired on MST3K. Maybe we'll see that here someday.

Edd Byrnes, who captured the hearts and minds of viewers as Kookie on 77 Sunset Strip, travelled to Europe to keep things rolling after they stopped on the Strip. He calls Europe "a gold mine, It bought me a Rolls-Royce, a big house in Hollywood—and I still keep my apartment in Rome." He cautions though, that in the shady world of European movie-making, it's best to get paid up-front, "before yu shoot the last week of the picture." He was paid $100,000 for one Western; the going rate for most Hollywood émigrés is about $25,000 per picture.

Adam West is another veteran of the spaghetti-Western circuit, declaiming there after the end of the Robert Taylor series The Detectives, in which he played one of the titular characters. "I was offered five more pictures over there," he says, "but I didn't want to get involved in Italian film. Then Batman came along." He, too, says there are drawbacks to working in Italy or Spain. "We filmed our picture in the desert outside of Almeria, Spain, where Lawrence of Arabia was made. It was so hot that after a few hours your horse would lie down and roll over in slow motion." European actors, reluctant to be upstaged by the big American star, didn't pull their punches, either. "Ali of those villains wanted to be the hero, wouldn’t settle for being the bad guy," he recalls, remembering one who "put his spur through my left shin in a fight one day."

The American expats acknowledge that their European stardom might not be quite the same as if it were Hollywood. But, as one Hollywood agent puts it, "they can make three or four pictures a year abroad at $25,000 a shot. In what other industry can a guy make $100,000 a year and still be called a failure?" And, as George Nader said, be called the star of the movie?

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MST3K alert: Invasion of the Neptune Men (Japanese; 1962) A group of youngsters have difficulty convincing anyone they were attacked by a spaceship. Shinichi Chiba, Kappel Matsumoto. (Friday, 9:00 p.m., KEMO in San Francisco) There are really only two recommendations for this movie: a very early appearance by famed Japanese martial arts actor Sonny Chiba; and the return of Phantom of Krankor (Bill Corbett), the villain of a similar (and much better) MST3K flick, Prince of Space. For the SOL crew, it's a rare bright spot in one of the worst movies they've had to endure. TV