We lead off this week's lesson in television and sociology with Leonard Gross's meditation on why television has been reluctant to offer women in strong, heroic roles. The impetus for this discussion comes from an ABC Movie of the Week entitled The Bait, starring Donna Mills as a policewoman, which aired last January. It received positive reviews from the critics and terrific ratings. The Movie of the Week franchise itself was known as a proving ground for future series, such as The Night Stalker, Kung Fu, and The Six Million Dollar Man.
And yet, when it came to the new fall season, The Bait remained on the shelf, just one of many series featuring strong female leads that failed to make it to series status. As far as prime time is concerned, says Gross, "women continued to be portrayed as they had been through the years: at best as professional auxiliaries, at worst as self-denigrating, if amusing, idiots in the tradition of Lucille Ball." The closest thing we've seen to an "emancipated" woman may well be Mary Tyler Moore, and we never see her character in front of the camera on her series.
Lee Rich, producer of The Waltons, looks back at the history of strong women on television, actresses such as Barbara Stanwyck, Loretta Young, and Jane Wyman. "I think there are some fantastic actresses who could carry dramatic TV shows today," he says. "But the networks aren't buying women." He points to a proposal for a series that would have starred Stella Stevens as a nurse. "Who wants to see a prime-time series about a woman," he was told by a network official. A similar proposal for a legal drama starring Susan Hayward met a similar fate.
So what gives? Martin Antonowsky, director of research for ABC, says that males always score higher than females in the testing done by the network. And keep in mind, he says, that women outnumber men 52 percent to 48 (no additional genders in those days), which can only mean that women prefer seeing heroic men as well. In fact, he points out, although The Bait scored very high marks from test audiences, their response when asked if they'd like to see it as a series was only "marginally above average." "People tend to accept situations that they consider real," Antonowski says. "When people think of a doctor, lawyer, or detective, they don't tend to think of women. The change has to be a social phenomenon before you can accept it on television."
Aaron Spelling, who made The Bait, and would go on to offer Charlie's Angels, in which women were unquestionable heroic figures (even though the program itself fell somewhat short on the prestige drama meter), speculates that "for me there's something threatening about watching women in lead roles." This is a viewpoint seconded by writer Fay Kanin: "You can be strong in a comedy show as long as you're funny, but when you're serious, it seems to disturb the men who make the decisions."
Ethel Winant, director for talent and casting at CBS, counters that this is a concern that women share as well as men, looking at the post-war period when women viewed themselves as "perfect mothers" and were inclined to view with resentment heroic female figures on television. "There was a whole period when we created this monster—and we resented the woman who didn't believe in all this. Women of this generation found women leads bossy, unfeminine and not concerned about the things that concerned them." Women, by nature and cultural custom, tend to project a certain vulnerability, something that falls flat with many viewers. "They want a hero who is invulnerable," Winant says. "When Jim Arness walks on in Gunsmoke, you know that all will be OK. The Marshal will always work it out. In daytime, women can relate to mistakes. I could look at my heroine and say, 'She's going through the same things I am.'"
This all makes for a fascinating discussion, particularly when viewed in retrospect. We've become accustomed to strong woman on the screen, taking on roles ranging from police enforcer to political schemer. Antonowski's point, that viewers see these things through a plausibility filter, makes for an interesting proposition, because it seems to run counter to today's view that television itself can—and, in many cases, should—act as an advocate in shaping societal convention. In other words, television could help society as a whole view women as strong figures in traditionally male-dominated positions.
This sounds very much like what Fay Kanin is getting at with her insistence that "You don't ask people questions about what they're going to like. You give them what you believe in. You can very often create your hit that way." It sounds, at least to me, as if she's also suggsting that you can create the environment in which your show not only becomes successful, but helps to change and shape a society in which this viewpoint will become more acceptable, more common.
The discussion strikes at the heart of the conundrum regarding television, which I've written about many times, as to whether it reflects society's attitudes or molds them. The answer is both, but I don't think you can dispute the fact that the pendulum has swung over the years, from a quasi-Lincolnesque attitude that television can't get too far ahead of what the viewer is willing to accept, to one based on advocacy, in which television forcefully demonstrates a particular viewpoint as to how things should be, and continues to beat the drum accordingly.
The reason we enjoy these kinds of discussions is because we've seen what has happened in the half-century that followed this article. Think about Angie Dickinson in Police Woman, Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect, Susan Dey in L.A. Law, Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly in Cagney & Lacey, Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Robin Wright in House of Cards (and her counterpoint in the superior British version, Susannah Harker)—well, those just pop off the top of my head, but there are many, many more. In fact, one might argue that television today features more strong female characters than it does male.
Whether or not this is a good thing is not something I'm about to discuss right here, right now. However, I'd mention one character we haven't discussed here: Donna Reed in The Donna Reed Show. Her character managed a busy household, took on the primary responsibility for successfully raising her children, was an influential partner to her husband as well as a supportive one, and did it all while wearing dresses and pearls and looking glamorous. If that isn't heroic, I don't know what is. And considering the role that Reed played behind the scenes in the production and shaping of the show, I'd say that was pretty strong as well. Which, perhaps, means that strong and heroic female characters come in all kinds.
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Midnight: Comedian Richard Pryor (host), Cajun musician Doug Kershaw, blues singer Albert King, the Electric Light Orchestra, rock singer Joe Walsh, and pop singers Melissa Manchester and Joe Hicks.
Concert: The gentle sounds of singer-songwriter John Sebastian, complimented by rock from Black Oak Arkansas, Lee Michaels, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and the Electric Light Orchestra.
Ordinarily, I'd automatically give the edge to whichever show featured ELO, but unfortunately that isn't an option, as Jeff Lynne and company do double duty this week. So, we'll see how deep the benches are, and since I'm in the mood for something a little harder, I think I'll stay away from John Sebastian and his granny glasses, and throw my hat in the ring with Richard Pryor, et al. This week, the Special hits all the right notes.
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TV Guide's occasional feature, "The Way It Was," which we last saw in this March 1973 article by Robert Alan Aurthur, returns this week to commemorate the twenty-first anniversary of the premiere of Omnibus, one of the most fascinating and creative programs seen on American television, in an article written by the show's producer, Robert Saudek. The contents of that first program are indicitave of the variety displayed on the series: Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn; excerpts from a play by William Saroyan and the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Mikado; x-rays demonstrating "human innards at work"; Haitian dancer Jean Leon Destine in a witch-doctor dance; and a slow motion look at a giant jack rabbit in mid flight. All in one 90-minute program, broadcast live on a Sunday afternoon.
I've made the point before, but it bears repeating: Omnibus, like NBC Opera Theatre and G-E College Bowl, was the kind of program networks used to show on Sunday afternoons before they became dominated by sports and infomercials. It was often referred to as the cultural graveyard, because Sunday afternoon was a time when networks could afford to air programs that attracted small, if loyal, audiences, but what these also offered was culture, entertainment, and programs that were interesting as well as educational. They were, as I mentioned on Wednesday while talking about Ayn Rand's appearance on The Tonight Show, the mark of middlebrow culture, something that has disappeared from the scene as surely as the middle-class has followed along.
Live television was its own breed of cat, as it were, and in the case of Omnibus, which proved particularly challenging considering its multiple segments, things could become especially dicey. Saudek recalls one particular occasion during a production of Boswell's "Life of Samuel Johnson" when, following an execution scene, the technicians and extras rushed to another corner of the studio for the next scene, leaving the actor playing the villain hanging from a harness that was intended to hold his weight while his head was in the noose. Soon enough, he felt the harness give way, and only the quick actions of a stagehand who happened to see the unfolding drama prevented some extra excitement in the studio.
Omnibus was a true variety show in every sense of the word. Leonard Bernstein made several apperances on the program, prefiguring his Young People's Concerts, including a never-before-seen look at various sketches of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony that the conductor had rejected, while Jack Benny reprised his role in a television version of his movie The Horn Blows at Midnight, (which I write about in Darkness in Primetime), and the then-husband and wife team of James and Pamela Mason read a series of letters between Napoleon and Josephine. A series of episodes portrayed various events in the life of Abraham Lincoln, dramatized by playwright James Agee. (Stanley Kubrick was one of the second-unit directors on that project.) Not every Omnibus was bent on culture; one episode, included in anoter DVD collection from the show, featured a behind-the-scenes look at a meeting of the editorial board of The New York Times, showing what goes into the preparation of the next day's edition; another show presented the young comedic couple of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, launching them to stardom in the process.
Omnibus, in Saudek's words, "served its drinks straight"—it was not "a TV reporter giving you secondhand samples of 'newsworthy' performances," but the performances themselves; "theater as theater; music as music; dance, history, literature, athletics as living ideas and shows and people. It left journalism to others, and pursued first-generation, 200-proof performance for its own sake." It remains one of the shining monuments of American television, and the fact that we have nothing to compare to it today says much—about the television networks, about the evolution of our culture, about us ourselves. Because those who make television and those who watch it all come from the same gene pool, so to speak: if the fault lies not with ourselves, then where?
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The final major golf tournament of the year, the PGA Championship, wraps up this weekend from the Canterbury Golf Club in Cleveland, and ABC is on hand for coverage of the final two rounds, Saturday at 5:00 p.m., and Sunday at 4:30 p.m. The winner? Ohio's own Jack Nicklaus, who finishes at -7, for a four-stroke victory over Bruce Crampton. Also on Saturday is one of those pilots featuring strong women that was "left on the shelf": Partners in Crime (9:30 p.m., NBC), starring Lee Grant as a former judge-turned-private detective who's on the search for a cool $750,000 stolen in a robbery. Lou Antonio, Harry Guardino, Richard Jaeckel, and Bob Cummings (!) co-star.
Sunday night's treat is a delightful Columbo episode (8:30 p.m., NBC) featuring Martin Landau in a dual role, as twins suspected of murder. They've implemented an ingenious plan, but do you think it's going to fool the good lieutenant? Not a chance. That's followed by the final episode of Night Gallery (9:30 p.m., NBC) featuring Chuck Connors and Gary Lockwood in a story that bears a passing resemblance to The Twilight Zone's "A Game of Pool." At least, I think so.
With the NFL season opener a month away, it may be too early for Monday Night Football, but that doesn't mean we're rid of Howard Cosell; Monday's late-night feature on ABC is Howard Cosell with the Miami Dolphins, a two-part look at the defending Super Bowl champions (11:30 p.m.; part two airs tomorrow night at the same time). Among the features are interviews with head coach Don Shula and members of his staff, plus key players and their wives. It'll have to be some preview to fill three hours over two nights.
Tuesday has a little something for everyone, beginning with a repeat of part one of the controversial two-part Maude in which the titular character deals with an unwanted pregnancy. (8:00 p.m., CBS) Opposite that is part one of John Wayne's sprawling Oscar-nominated The Alamo (8:00 p.m., NBC, with part two on Friday). Judith Crist, not surprisingly, isn't that impressed, although she does concede that Wayne makes for a better movie star than director, and "at most it builds to excitement in the last half of the second half." Marginally preferable, in her eyes, is the Rowan and Martin feature The Maltese Bippy (9:30 p.m., CBS), "intended for the pair's insatiable addicts," but highlighted by Mildred Natwick and Martin as Mary Astor and Humphrey Bogart, which justifies "that tolerance, if not the drear in between." And PBS chimes in with a concert by Pink Floyd from the Fillmore East in San Francisco (9:00 p.m.) I must admit, however, that as a Floyd admirer, I've never heard them referred to as "Acid rock."
I mentioned on Monday that we aren't to the beginning of the NFL season, but that doesn't mean we're without football: on Wednesday, we're treated to some north-of-the-border CFL action, as the Montreal Alouettes take on Joe Theismann and the Toronto Argonauts (8:00 p.m., WKBG in Boston). But the highlight of the night, if not the week, is the repeat of the acclaimed 1971 TV movie Duel (8:30 p.m., ABC), directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Dennis Weaver. Interestingly, Judith Crist isn't overwhelmed by it, saying that it "builds to moderately good suspense, enough to make up for the surplus of voice-over interior thinking." It's since gone on to be considered one of the greatest thrillers of the decade.
Marty Allen and Steve Rossi were one of the more successful comedy teams of the 1960s, but they were no Rowan and Martin, and their 1966 movie The Last of the Secret Agents? (Thursday, 9:00 p.m., CBS) proves it. The plot, such as it is, involves a plan to steal the Venus de Milo, and Crist allows as to how the duo aren't completely to blame for the fiasco; "one should note that they were given pure sow's ear to play with." Elsewhere, Chief Dan George stars in a topical episode of Kung Fu (9:00 p.m., ABC) involving Indian land rights, and any resemblance to contemporary issues of the 1970s is, I'm sure, purely intentional.
As CBS demonstrated with Tuesday's Maude repeat, the summer is a terrific time to bury those controversial programs that the network may be contractually obligated to repeat, and another example is David Rabe's Tony Award-winning play "Sticks and Bones" (Friday, 9:00 p.m., CBS). I wrote about this anti-Vietnam play here, so there's no point in going over it again; suffice it to say that a Friday night during the dog days of summer is a perfect place to hide it.
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One of the most storied records in all of sports is Babe Ruth's record of 714 home runs. The number itself is burned in the mind of the most casual baseball fan, and for generations, the record seemed so far out of reach that it was unthinkable it would ever be broken. But as we enter the final two months of the baseball season, it's not only thinkable, it's a virtual certainty that the record will fall, at the hands of Atlanta's Hank Aaron. And when it happens, as Marty Ralbovsky tells us, NBC will be there.
NBC is, of course, the network of record for Major League Baseball, and Til Ferdenzi, sports publicity manager of NBC, says that the network will have crews following Aaron full-time once he reaches 710. "He's going to break the greatest record in sports," Ferdenzi says. "After 713, we might broadcast all Atlanta games live. . . We could pull in an audience of 50 million people for those games. Everybody wants to see history when it happens."
Well, not everybody; Ralbovsky does make mention of the hate mail which Aaron receives, the most threatening of which have been turned over to the Atlanta PD. An example: "You can hit all dem home runs over dem short fences but you can't take dat black off yo face." Fortunately, since the publc learned of the volume and viciousness of the mail, things have turned around; Carla Koplan, assigned by the Braves to serve as Aaron's personal secretary, reports that up to 99 percent of recent mail has been positive, particularly among young people.
At the beginning of the season, Aaron needed 42 home runs to break Ruth's record; after a season in which he finished with 40 home runs and a .301 batting average, he wound up, incredibly, one short of tying the Babe. When it comes time for the 1974 season to begin, a comedy of errors threatens to overshadow the chase; despite Aaron being tantalizingly close, and with the Braves hoping the historic moment can take place at home, the league inexplicably schedules them to begin the season on the road, in Cincinnati. Aaron promptly homers on Opening Day to tie the record, but with the team talking about keeping him on the bench until they return to Atlanta, commissioner Bowie Kuhn threatens the Braves with disciplinary action unless they agree to play Aaron. Fortunately for all concerned, he goes homerless in the remaining games in Cincy, and then breaks the record in the Braves home opener—carried on NBC. For some of us, he's still the all-time home run champion.
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MST3K alert: War of the Monsters, aka Gamera vs. Barugon (Japanese; 1966) Previously shot to Mars in a rocket, but now back for an encore, the monstrous reptile Gamera effects a fateful meeting with the horrible Barugon. Result: civic chaos. Kojiro Hongo. (Thursday, 11:00 p.m., WSBK in Boston) It's the long-awaited sequel to 1965's Gamera, the Giant Monster, and the 13th movie in the epic saga of the flying, flame-spewing turtle who started out as a monster determined to wreak havoc on Tokyo but morphed into "a protector of humanity especially children, nature, and the Earth from extraterrestrial races and other giant monsters." The lesson, I suppose, is to be good to giant monsters, and they'll be good to you. TV