All right, Cybill Shepherd, we’ll say it. You’re sexy. Satisfied now? Sheesh.
Cybill Shepherd, current star of NBC’s The Yellow Rose, future star of ABC’s Moonlighting, is this week’s cover story. We’ll be back later to find out if there’s anything else worth discussing, but in the meantime here’s the rest of the issue.
One of the constant features of dyspeptic, apocalyptic police state stories has been the ability of governments to spy on their citizens through the television, looking out at you as you look at it. Stories of early television viewers worried that the characters on the tube could actually see them are legion, although you’d like to think most of them are urban legends. Still, the thought of moving pictures actually appearing in your living room, some of them being broadcast live as they happened, had to have been a pretty radical concept. Seen from today’s perspective, when we watch television on the same phones with which we have video chats with friends, maybe it wasn’t so far out after all.
This week, in another of the cautionary stories that marked this era of TV Guide, James Morrow commemorates the first month of 1984 by looking at just how close we are to the world of George Orwell’s book, and it turns out we’re pretty close—just not the way you might think.
For example, Morrow points out that to Orwell, "language is the blood of the mind. To abuse language is to abuse the human spirit." What better example of the power to abuse language, he says, than the television commercial? Consider the use of the word "natural." "It seems pretty straightforward, until you hear someone say, " 'Change your hair color. It’s the 'natural' thing to do.' " Orwell called this trait "doublethink," as in "War is Peace" and "Freedom is Slavery." Television does this kind of thing all the time.
American television, writes Morrow, may have developed a "dominion over human consciousness" similar to that existing in Winston Smith’s world. Viewers turn to fictional TV doctors for medical advice, they accept without question documentaries that portray American society as far riskier and dangerous than it really is. Some people might substitute Dr. Phil for Dr. Marcus Welby, while others would see either global warming (on the right) or Donald Trump (on the left) as evidence of American television viewers' willingness to be taken in by The Big Hoax.
And yet, a question remains: "[I]s the right to be stupid not one of the most fundamental freedoms afforded by a nontotalitarian government?" It reminds me of a comment by CBS news chief Richard Salant that the job of TV news was to provide "what people ought to know, rather than what people want to hear." As Morrow notes, nobody forces you to watch television. You don’t have to "abandon" your children to it or use it as your only source of knowledge. To do so, to suggest that the truth, or anything else worth knowing, comes from TV and only TV, "is to lower one’s guard against the day when somebody decides to chisel away your set’s on-off switch or to install a spy-camera adjacent to the picture tube, or to attempt some other truly Orwellian innovation."
For all of American television’s faults, Morrow thinks that Orwell might well have liked it, or at least parts of it. Orwell, says Morrow, "believed in the common sense of common humanity" and might well have seen TV’s "populist nature" as protection against the all-encompassing state. Orwell believed that "it was among the intellectuals, not among the working classes, that you found society’s villains": he probably would have loved Cheers.
So how close are we to the nightmare telescreen world of 1984. We’re not there, at least not yet. But, as Morrow concludes, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen to those who seem to be crying wolf about TV's power and influence. "The boy who cried wolf was wrong—and the townspeople who ultimately ignored him were also wrong. Theirs was the sin of complacency."
Cleveland Amory’s successor as TV Guide’s critic was Robert MacKenzie, and in a week where we’re looking for worthy information to assess, his review is probably as good a place as any. This week’s show is ABC’s Hardcastle and McCormick, a buddy comedy-adventure starring Brian Keith and Daniel Hugh-Kelly as, respectively, a retired judge hunting down scoundrels who escaped his justice via technicalities, and a young rascal paroled to Hardcastle’s custody because the judge "saw good in the lad."
It’s a preposterous premise, on many levels. Neither of them work, for example, yet they pay their bills every month. There are a lot of car chases and crashes, and McCormick drives so fast and so well that in real life he’d probably be a professional racing driver, thus solving the problem of where the two find the money to pay bills. Keith is fine as Hardcastle; MacKenzie believes he "can do better work, and has, but he likes steady employment." Hugh-Kelly is "cute" and has great hair, which puts him in competition with NBC's Knight Rider, which features David Hasselhoff, "who also drives fast and has even more hair."
Sometimes, after a long day of work, you just want to turn on the television and relax instead of thinking about the world’s troubles or having some talking head shout at you all evening long. The problem, as Orwell might have put it, is that this can lead to complacency, or at least laziness. Like so much of television in 1984, Hardcastle and McCormick "seems designed for workingmen who dream about hot cars but can’t afford them, who can flake out in from of a TV world in which the good guys have the fastest cars and the hardest fists." It’s a nice world to visit from time to time, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
We’re now on to sports, and this is the early stages of the cable era, that unregulated free-for-all before sports governing boards figured out the power of collective negotiating, when leagues and conferences signed contracts with just about any cable network that would have them. This week there are no less than 26 college basketball games on, for example, and that’s only counting NBC, CBS, ESPN, WGN, and USA. There's still the impression of scarcity, though—we're just emerging from that time when we were lucky to get more than two or three games over the weekend—which makes them all feel a little more important, a little more exciting, than they otherwise would be. The atmosphere also hasn't been polluted by what I'd call the ESPNification of sports, meaning that the players were still more interested in playing the game than in winding up on a highlight reel posterizing their opponents.
On the professional side, the stars are out this week, with basketball, football, and hockey all playing their all-star games, and in a sign of the times, the NBA All-Star Game, from Denver. (Sunday, 1:00 p.m. CT, CBS) That's right: it’s not on cable, it’s not on in prime time, there are no slam dunk or 3-point contests. All we get is a bunch of pretty good players playing basketball: Julius Erving, Larry Bird, Isaiah Thomas, Kevin McHale, Moses Malone, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, George Gervin. Not bad, I’d say. The NFL counters with the NFC-AFC Pro Bowl from Honolulu (3:00 p.m., ABC), which also manages to find some pretty good players to take part: Dan Fouts, Earl Campbell Joe Theismann, Eric Dickerson. The NHL version is on USA Tuesday night at 7:00 p.m. from East Rutherford, New Jersey. No indication as to the players taking part, although a quick spin through the league stats tells us there were a few Hall-of-Famers on hand, names like Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Ray Bourque, Grant Fuhr, Steve Yzerman, and Gilbert Perrault. Back in the days before fans could see just about any game they wanted just about any time they wanted, these contests were rare treats, the one time you could see some of the game’s greats in action. I do miss those times.
And speaking of ESPN as we were, it looks much different in 1984 than it does today. For instance, I had completely forgotten that it used to carry business programming in the early morning hours, but before it became a lifestyle network, it had to have something to show during the week at 5:00 a.m., and that was Business Times, which ran until 7:00 a.m. Frankly, I think it was an improvement over what it carries now. (No Stephen A. Smith, for one thing.) And the network had a children's program on Wednesday afternoons, if you can believe it: Vic's Vacant Lot, in which famed tennis instructor Vic Braden (whose students included two-time U.S. Open champion Tracy Austin*) worked with groups of children showing them how to organize competitive sports on a vacant lot. It ran for two seasons; who knew? In 1984, ESPN covered sports such as Australian Rules Football and the Canadian Football League, while still having time for serious interview shows and weekly fishing programs. I miss those times as well.
*Fun fact: Tracy Austin's sister-in-law is fitness author Denise Austin, who also had a show on ESPN.
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Coming to your TV screens Saturday night on NBC—it’s World War III! Or, to be more accurate, World War III! (8:00 p.m.) It’s actually a rerun from 1982, when this kind of speculation, in the Ronald Reagan-Evil Empire era, was all-too-real for some. It boasts an all-star cast including Rock Hudson as the American President, Brian Keith as the Soviet Leader, David Soul as "an American colonel trying to hold off a war,” and Cathy Lee Crosby as “an intelligence officer craving one last moment of love," among others. It runs both tonight and Sunday night, and since Judith Crist calls it a "dandy," I’m inclined to give it a pass instead of saying something even snarkier. You might prefer heading over to CBS, where two new series debut tonight: Airwolf (8:00 p.m.), with Jan-Michael Vincent and Ernest Borgnine; and Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (9:00 p.m.), starring Stacy Keach as the legendary private detective whose gun is quick and whose fists are even quicker.
Sunday night at 6:00 p.m., NBC Reports presents a profile of a man very much in the American bloodstream: Lee Iacocca. The man who saved Chrysler (among other things) and became a ubiquitous television pitchman and best-selling author visits with Tom Brokaw, who finds him "an emotional, sensitive and religious family man, who talks on the phone with his grown daughters at least twice a day." There’s no greater American success story in the early '80s than Iacocca, whose name is occasionally bandied about as a possible presidential candidate, though the idea of a successful businessman with no political experience running for office seems ridiculous…
On Monday (8:00 p.m.), NBC airs a live special from Hawaii as the aforementioned David Hasselhoff and Jayne Kennedy invite viewers to vote for The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, chosen from "21 international beauties." Entertainment comes from Air Supply and Engelbert Humperdinck. Opposite that, it’s the ABC Monday Night Movie “When She Says No,” examining the case of a woman who claims she was raped, and the men who insist she led them on. Crist calls it a “cogent and sensitive” movie, free from the leering exploitation that one often sees in such fare.
The Hallmark Hall of Fame has made its complete transition to movie format, but it hasn’t yet descended to saccharine Oprah-style greeting cards expanded to feature length. On Tuesday it presents a rip-roaring adventure, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae (8:00 p.m., CBS), starring Michael York and Richard Thomas, and Crist views it as “first-class romantic adventure despite the final sugarcoat” which gives it a happy ending
Live From the Met headlines the PBS schedule on Wednesday, with the remarkable Plácido Domingo headlining an all-star cast in Verdi’s masterpiece Don Carlo. I’m not shy in using the word "remarkable" to describe Domingo, still wowing audiences 40 years later; and it’s not a case of him having been a young unknown back then, either; he was already a star, and has remained one since. It's a four-hour investment of time that opera fans won't regret.
This Thursday we get a look at one of CBS’s most successful programming nights of the 80s, starting at 7:00 p.m. with Magnum, P.I.: it’s the episode where he gets trapped in a bank vault with Carol Burnett. At 8:00 p.m. the detective-brothers Simon & Simon look after a flashdancer (a trendy thing back then) who’s a target for an assassin. Rounding off the evening, more suds with Knotts Landing, the venerable nighttime soap. Now, I ought to note that WCCO, the Twin Cities CBS affiliate, isn’t showing Simon at all this week due to a University of Minnesota basketball game, and they’re tape-delaying Knotts to 10:30 p.m., after the late local news, so if basketball isn’t your thing, you might instead watch Hill Street Blues (9:00 p.m., NBC), the most celebrated drama of the time, which tonight deals with the death of the much-loved actor Michael Conrad, who played Sgt. Esterhaus. ("Let’s be careful out there!") Or you could just forget it all and watch Grease on ABC.
Friday night has a cast of familiar programs, unless you’re last-place NBC—The Dukes of Hazzard, Dallas, and Falcon Crest on CBS, Benson, Webster, and Matt Houston on ABC, even Washington Week in Review and Wall $treet Week on PBS. Stick with KTCA, the PBS affiliate, for the best of the night: Monty Python's Flying Circus, including "The Attila the Hun Show" (10:00 p.m.) and Doctor Who, with Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor and Lalla Ward as Romana II in "The Creature from the Pit." (10:30 p.m.)
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With co-star Sam Elliott |
Along the way we learn about her start in The Last Picture Show, her romance with the movie’s director Peter Bogdanovich, who viewed her in the same category as Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. Although her acting ability is often overshadowed by her looks, she’s learned the craft over the last few years, taking acting classes from Stella Adler; says John Wilder "We’ve put some real demands on her dramatically in the first couple of weeks, and she’s really come through."
She’s also learned more about herself, that marriage is "a male invention to control women," but that she still loves it; that childbirth is the most incredible experience, one that men envy because "women create life"; that even through adversity "we can’t be afraid of making mistakes." The Yellow Rose only lasts for 22 episodes, but it leads next to Moonlighting, which can hardly be said to be a mistake.
Longtime readers of the blog will recognize that in another era of TV Guide, her declaration of being sexy would probably have been seen by Richard Gehman as expressing a basic insecurity in both her physical appearance and her limited acting ability, resulting in an aggressive assertion of self as an attempt to legitimize her value as an actress and convince herself that she is, in fact, sexy. Am I not right?
MST3K alert: The Master (1984) Max and the Master hel a woman trying to unionize a cannery in a small town where troblemakers tend to disappear. Lee Van Cleef, Timothy Van Patten, Crystal Bernard. (Friday, 8:00 p.m., NBC) The Master was a 13-week series that appeared on NBC, starring Van Cleef (who certainly deserved better) as a ninja master, with Van Patten as his annoying sidekick. This episode, "State of the Union," was one of two episodes stitched together to form the movie Master Ninja II. In this case, double the bad is still bad. TV
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