Keeping you on the edge of your seat

I had a mildly interesting experience the other night; call it a kind of epiphany, if that isn't too heavy a word to use. We were watching Jericho, the 1966-67 World War II espionage series that ran for 16 episodes on CBS*, and could be combined as a kind of cross between Mission: Impossible and Hogan's Heroes. In this particular episode, the team—code name Jericho, hence the title—is attempting to retrieve an SS safe that contains the names of leaders of the French Resistance. 

*One of the reasons you might not be familiar with it is that it ran opposite Batman on ABC and Daniel Boone on NBC.

For reasons that aren't important right now (and might not have been that important to begin with), conventional safecracking methods aren't an option. Fortunately, however, the resistance just happens to have a duplicate safe, one which they procured during a previous mission. And so, if you can't break into a safe, our heroes decide to do the next best thing: steal it, and replace it with the duplicate. This involves hauling the duplicate safe to the top of a building across the street from where the safe with the list is located, transporting it across the street via a pully, lowering down to where it can be brought in through an open window (well, at least it was open after one of the Jericho members was done with it), and switching it with the safe belonging to the SS, which is then removed from the building and brought back to resistance headquarters via the same procedure in reverse. (Where are Barney and Willy when you need them?) Got all that? 

Now, the men of Jericho have to be careful in pulling off a safe transfer of the safes (so to speak); they can't afford to make any noise, so as not to alert the SS officer in the other room. (The Rat Patrol's Hans Gudegast, whom I swear must have played a Nazi officer in every World War II TV drama that's ever been made before he changed his name to Eric Braedon and became a soap opera idol.) But it turns out that the wheels on the bottom of the safe squeak, which means it has to be placed on its side on an Oriental rug and dragged across the floor to the window, and then the duplicate safe dragged back in its place. 

It's a surprisingly tense scene, even though we know that Jericho, by virtue of being the good guys, is contractually bound to succeed. At one point, as the safe is being pushed into place, it bumps against the wall—and Gudegast's reaction tells you he hears it and almost decides to investigate, but dismisses the noise. And as I watched, I found myself unusually caught up in the drama. I was leaning forward on the couch, my muscles tensed; I might have even been holding my breath.

But why should I have felt that way? The outcome of this audacious move wasn't really in any doubt. Had the scene come earlier in the episode, when there was a time for a backup plan to be attempted in case this one failed, there might have been cause for concern. But for an experienced television viewer who knows about things like running times and four-act structures, there was no reason to be worried; there wasn't really enough time to try anything else. Oh, it could have ended in a wild shootout, I suppose, but that isn't really how Jericho operates, and it would have been kind of a letdown. 

I found myself pondering this after the episode had concluded—and, I should stress, the scene was suspenseful enough that this thought didn't interrupt me as I was watching. But as I considered the reason, I thought back to a concept I've written about before: that of false jeopardy, the idea of putting one or more of the main characters in a situation, the outcome of which is predetermined by their status as a series regular. If the show's namesake, for example, is on trial for murder, suffers from a potentially fatal illness, or is being held hostage, you know everything's going to turn out all right in the end, unless you've got reason to believe there are some nasty contract negotiations going on behind the scenes. The only valid suspense involves how the situation is going to resolve itself. It's an awful premise around which to shape an episode.

Will the men of Jericho get out of this safe-ly?

However, false jeopardy can work in a limited sense. In this case, where a genuinely suspenseful situation exists—will the safe swap succeed without Gudegast finding out about it?—a viewer can get caught up in the tension of how the scene unfolds. I mean, you knew that the Mission: Impossible team was going to pull off their incredibly intricate capers each week; the magic was in seeing them actually do it. 

But then, Mission: Impossible was an exceptionally well-written and acted series, with plots that were intricately detailed down to the nth degree and that revealed themselves only a bit at a time, so that while you knew the mission would succeed, you weren't at all sure just how it would happen. Most series aren't like that; Jericho, for instance. It had the potential to be entertaining, and the best episodes were legitimately exciting. However, it had neither the consistency nor the talent (on either side of the camera) to reassure the viewer that each week's adventure could succeed on its own merits, without suffering one of those "Oh, come on!" moments that requires said viewer to suspend disbelief beyond a certain point. 

Which brings us back to Jericho. In thinking about it, I realized that, for me at least, the tension arising from the scene was not so much about the outcome; rather, what was keeping me in suspense was whether or not the scene would pivot around something stupid happening, something so wildly implausible and illogical that I'd have to believe either the Nazi officers involved were among the most inept any military had ever seen—men who would put Sergeant Shultz to shame—or that the agents of Jericho were luckier than anyone who'd ever gotten rich playing the slots in Vegas. I think you know the kind of thing I'm talking about here; it's something that's so distracting, so beyond the realm, that it brings the entire scene to a standstill, and causes you to wonder it, perhaps, you might have a future in scriptwriting if this is the best that Hollywood has to offer.

The good news is that this episode of Jericho passed the test. Oh, the boundaries were pushed a little; the reason Gudegast doesn't go to investigate the noise he hears is that his secretary (a Belgian national who's actually a member of the resistance, with her name on that list inside the safe, and is working with Jericho) is supposed to be in the room putting on some jewelry that Gudegast has given her in an attempt at seduction, so of course a gentleman wouldn't go barging in on her at a time like that. A little weak, perhaps, but we'll give it it a pass since this part of the storyline was introduced organically and had been present from the beginning, as opposed to being dumped on us all of a sudden.

(I did wonder why none of the German soldiers guarding the building noticed a safe being pulled back-and-forth on a rope over their heads, but this was all happening at night, and I suppose it isn't exactly the kind of thing you steel yourself to be on the lookout for when you go on duty that night. Besides, you'd expect this part of the plan to be implausible, and you'd be right.)

My question to you is this: how many times have you experienced something similar, during a show you were enjoying, when you discovered that the only reason you were holding your breath was not because of the innate tension of the scene, but because you were worried that the writers or the director might ruin the moment with something stupid? Now that I think about it, it's happened to me more than a few times, and it's always a disappointment. Maybe I'm too demanding when it comes to plausibility (Maybe? you say), but this issue of false jeopardy, or whatever you want to call it, is something real, something that can diminish the quality of a episode or cheapen the suspense it's trying to generate. In this case, Jericho was able to pull it off. I wish I could say that more often about more programs. TV  

This week in TV Guide: June 25, 1966

How many times has this happened to you: you're driving through a strange town when your car breaks down. While you're waiting for repairs, you have a run-in with one of the local punks, who just happens to be the son of one of the most important men in town. Later on, the punk turns up dead, and guess who the prime suspect is? You!

I don't know about you, but that's never happened to me. I won't say that it won't ever happen, because that seems to be just the kind of person to whom it does happen. At least that's the cliche that's on display in this week's episode of Run for Your Life (Monday, 9:00 p.m. CT, NBC), starring Ben Gazzara as the doomed Paul Bryan, a man with only a few months (years?) to live.* We know Paul didn't do it, because he's the show's star; and we know he won't be convicted, because the show's called Run For Your Life and not You're Sentenced to Life. So why even bother with a storyline like this? Perhaps because it gives you a heavy you can really hate, or a heavy who reforms once he discovers the true meaning of life, or because it gives West Coast writers a chance to ridicule small-minded small-town America. Your guess is as good as mine. But with absolutely no prior knowledge of what I'm going to find, let's take a look through the listings and see if we can find any other TV cliches—or tropes, as they've come to be known—on the small screen this week.

*That hasn't happened to most of us either, I'll wager. At least not more than once.

Here's one, on Daniel Boone (Thursday, 6:30 p.m., NBC): "Daniel, the fort's best runner, sprains an ankle, which spells bad news for the settlers who have bet on him to win the hotly contested annual foot race with the Indians." Yes: whenever I get sick or come down with some debilitating ailment, I always check the calendar, because I know something important is about to happen. Don't ask me how, I just know it. Did you ever notice how you never see a listing like "Daniel sprains an ankle, and is grateful he doesn't have anything planned for the week"? Of course not; that doesn't make for very interesting television. You'd have to add the sentence "And then one thing after another seems to pop up" just to get a script out of it.

There's a rerun of Lee Marvin's M Squad (Wednesday, 12:15 a.m., KSTP) that has another typical police story: "An ex-convict, suspected of murder, is about to commit suicide by leaping from a high window. Ballinger races to get enough evidence to clear the man before he jumps to his death." Will Ballinger get the evidence, and will it be in time? What do you think? "A man suspected of murder threatens suicide. Ballinger looks into the case, but discovers the man really is guilty, and his death wouldn't change a thing." Have you seen that lately?

The Big Valley (Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., ABC) offers a slight variation on the episode from Run For Your Life: "Gil Anders comes to the Barkley ranch looking for Heath and is shot from ambush by two bounty hunters, who claim he's wanted for murder." This will, of course, come as a complete surprise to Gil, who has no idea why anyone would suspect him of murder. Whether or not you think he's guilty of the crime depends on whether or not you think Barbara Stanwyck would let her son hang around with cold-blooded killers. Heath's a lawyer, anyway, so he'll be sure to get Gil off.

In Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (Sunday, 6:00 p.m., ABC), the Seaview takes on a couple of men adrift in a lifeboat, "unaware the they're rescued a pair of escaped convicts." Because people are never what they seem to be. Look for a scene where the radio operator gets a message about two convicts on the run, and the crew gradually put two and two together. One of the escapees is Nehemiah Persoff►, which means you get two tropes for the price of one since Persoff is never who or what he appears to be either, and if you ever run into him on a dark street you're right to feel uneasy.

Petticoat Junction (Saturday, 8:30 p.m., CBS) has a storyline that's typical of what happens when misunderstandings occur: "A feud between Charley and Floyd has sidetracked the Cannonball and paralyzed Hooterville Valley." If you doubt the likelihood that the two train engineers will get their feud patched up by the end of the thirty minutes, you also probably think next week the train will be piloted by Arnold Ziffel. Besides, it just wouldn't be as romantic if the service was being run by Amtrak. 

On The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (Saturday, 6:30 p.m., ABC): "Harriet has been receiving a daily rose from a secret admirer." Will this be the end of the Nelson's marriage? Will we see Ozzie next week on Divorce Court, or perhaps it will be Perry Mason defending "The Case of the Cantankerous Crooner"? I'll bet there's a logical explanation for the whole thing, something that will be discovered in just under thirty minutes that will leave Ozzie feeling foolish, Harriet secretly pleased that Ozzie can still get jealous, and the whole family having a good laugh.

I could go on, but you get the point. There are only a handful of original stories in existence; most people use the number seven, but that could be a cliche in and of itself. And while some of them are commonplace, things that could happen to any of us, too many of them are like the one that Paul Bryan faces in Run for Your Life: ones that we scoff at for being so utterly absurd, and that keep us tuning in each week.

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During the 60s, the Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace were the premiere 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: singer Jerry Vale; Metropolitan Opera soprano Birgit Nilsson; comics London Lee and Nancy Walker; the singing Swinging Lads; the comedy team of Stiller and Meara; ballerina Joyce Cuoco; the Arirang Ballet, Korean dance and instrumental group; the Yong Brothers, balancing act; and the Berosini Chimps..

Palace: Host Ray Bolger presents singer Kay Starr; jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, accompanied by 7-year-old drummer Jim Bradley; impressionist Rich Little; comedian Norm Crosby; escape artist Michael De La Vega; and the Five Amandis, teeterboard act.

This surely must rank as an outstanding week for each show. Ed has one of the greatest opera singers ever in Birgit Nilsson, one of the most pleasant voices of the 1960s in Jerry Vale, and one of the most lasting of husband-and-wife comedy teams, Stiller and Meara. The Palace counters with one of the great song-and-dance men in Ray Bolger, the legendary Lionel Hampton, and the great jazz and pop singer Kay Starr, plus Norm Crosby and Rich Little. Perhaps those two make the crucial difference, and put The Palace over the line by a nose.

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Throughout the 60s and early 70s, TV Guide's weekly reviews were written by the witty and acerbic Cleveland Amory. Whenever we get the chance, we'll look at Cleve's latest take on the shows of the era. 

This week, it's the readers' turn to tell Cleveland Amory what they think, with the annual season-ending Letters column. As in: "I think it's a shame that you have someone like Cleveland Amory to review T.V. stories. This man hardly has anything nice to say ever. Everyone has their own taste. But this man has no taste what so ever. . . Please tell me one thing, does this man like anything? There are no two ways about it. Mr. Amory is for the birds." 

That was from Helen Rubino of Union City, New Jersey, who doesn't think Cleve likes anything. But James R. Hilt, of Milford, Connecticut, complains that "he gives a good review for an idiotic show such as Batman." Considering that I own the Blu-Ray version of Batman, I think I'm offended by that one. I feel comforted by Cynthia Neel of Villanova, Pennsylvania, who says that "It's a pleasure to see that Cleveland Amory is one of the few people who recognizes a good show." That's not to say she was talking about Batman, but still.

A "very dissatisfied ex-reader" says Amory has "a lot of nerve" to knock The Legend of Jesse James, "the best program on television, and Chris Jones is the best thing to come along since summer vacation! My grandmother used to say Jesse James had some good points to him. He wasn't all bad. She should know, she let him hide in her barn." That last fact, frankly, is more interesting than the letter, but Jesse James ran for 34 episodes in 1965-66, ending just a month before this issue. As for the real Jesse James having some good points, I suppose everyone does. Hitler liked dogs. And, like Jesse James, he was also a narcistic, psychopathic killer.

Mrs. R.A. of Manchester, Massachusetts says the best thing on TV is the news. M.G.P. of Louisville, Kentucky, says the worst thing on TV is the news. "A TV Guide reader" says that "Johnny Carson is great. Why doesn't Mr. Amory say so?" "Disgusted" replies that Johnny Carson "must think that the public patience with his repertory group is as limitless as they limited, and "can see no reason for his having the same people saying so little on so much." 

The last word goes to C.A., of The Moon, who simply says, "See, you can't win 'em all. See you next fall."

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A program that might represent some of the best that television has to offer is Cappella Paolina (Sunday, 9:00 a.m., CBS). Cappella Paolina is the Vatican's Pauline Chapel, and for the first time in history, television cameras are being allowed inside the chapel to take a closer look at two of Michelangelo's least-known frescoes: "The Conversion of St. Paul" and "The Crucifixion of St. Peter." It's too bad this program wasn't broadcast in color, because I'd imagine that the beauties and subtleties of Michelangelo's work are most appreciated that way. (To see if I'm right, check out a more recent documentary here.) It's also too bad that WCCO, the CBS affiliate in Minneapolis, didn't consider this program worth airing, but then they were committed to Business and Finance and Religious News. When I was growing up, I doubt I ever knew Lamp unto My Feet and Look Up and Live even existed.

"The Conversion of St. Paul" (left), "The Crucifixion of St. Peter." Interstingly enough, 
the TV Guide Close-Up shows "The Last Judgment,' which is located in the Sistine Chapel.

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So Henry Steele Commager says television must reform itself or else. To which you might ask, "or else what?", and who the hell is Henry Steele Commager anyway?

To answer the second question first, Commager was a noted historian, a champion of the Enlightenment, and a chronicler of modern liberalism. Insofar as Commager defined what liberalism was, he could be seen as a liberal version of William F. Buckley, Jr.* Commager's article is the fifth in TV Guide's ongoing series "assessing the effects of television on our society," which is a lot like the mission of this here blog.

*Who once wrote a letter to Commager asking if he had changed his middle name to "Steele" in admiration of Josef Stalin, the "Man of Steel."  It's that kind of cheekiness that I always admired in WFB.

Commager acknowledges the importance of television, calling it "the most important invention in the history of the communication of knowledge" since the inventions of the University and the printing press. He believes it foolish to think that, as some people put it, the only changes left for television are technical ones, such as color vs. black and white; it is a young medium, he says, continuing to evolve, which means that this look at TV should be regarded as "an interim judgment." And part of the problem that television faces is that, in its 25 years, it hasn't quite figured out what it should be.

Commager from an early '50s TV interview

Arguably it should be a medium devoted to serving the public interest, as is set out in the FCC act of 1934. And, as Commager points out, there are enough money-making enterprises out there that television shouldn't have to be one of them; "all the important contributions are to be made to the commonwealth, not the private wealth." The rub, so to speak, is that television as an industry is controlled by "men without vision or imagination in anything other than their major interests - manufacturing, marketing and finance." Yes, and it's probably also true that only men with those kinds of interests would have had the wherewithal to create the mighty networks that exist in 1966. Based on this assessment, it would seem as if the question Commager asks—is TV a form of entertainment and information, or is it a form of education similar to the University and the Foundation—has a self-ordained answer. Yes, he concedes, it can be both, but "who can doubt that the proportions are badly mixed?" And while the men who run television boast of their independence from government control, they say very little about "independence where it really counts"—freedom from the advertisers who "determine policy and content."

So we're faced with an argument that we've read and heard many times—it is the drive for profit, and the resulting lowest-common-denominator programming that results—that is responsible for the quality (or lack thereof) of television. Television, Commager laments, has failed utterly in the realm of education: "it neither transmits the knowledge of the past to the next generation, nor contributes to professional training, nor does it expand the boundaries of knowledge." It has no professional standards and practices. What "meager" contributions it has made in these areas has been more than offset by "its contributions to noneducation and to the narrowing of intellectual horizons."

As it happens, I can agree with Commager on much of this. But the question remains: what is one to do about it? We've created a public broadcasting station that is supposed to be independent of pressures created by ratings and advertising dollars, but in its effort to solicit direct financial contributions from viewers, which would be the purest way of judging a network's ability to connect with the public, it is forced to rely on the basest form of crowd-pleasing shows, with virtually no attention to the educational and cultural forces which we were assured would result from its creation.

Commager's answer to this, not surprisingly given his ideological bent, is government control, specifically an empowering of the FCC. Were television to be treated like any other utility, it would have to constantly show the ways in which it serves the public interest, lest it lose its license. An FCC reconstituted in this manner would have "authority to make findings and impose decisions with respect to such matters as content and advertising, and to refuse to license stations which fail to devote themselves to the public interest." Again, the problem with this is that Commager fails to appreciate that at least a part of the "public interest" consists of what the public is interested in. With this attitude, television soon becomes a kind of medicine that people dread taking, even though they're being told that it's good for them. And by allowing a commission—one with political appointments, no doubt, and how could anything possibly go wrong with that?—rather than the public to choose what should be broadcast, how does one truly find out the pulse of the viewers?

This much is clear: Commager is leery at best, and opposed and worst, to the idea of private ownership of television broadcasting. It may be the norm here, he states, but not in the rest of the world. Which, one would suppose, is why there's such a call for American television programs in the rest of the world, right? Or why the shows imported from Britain so closely resemble ones being shown here. Henry Steele Commager is not a stupid man, but he's something like a lumbering ox, an easy target. He makes some very good points about the problems and challenges of television, but like so many, fails to come up with many answers. I can't really fault him for that, either, though; after all, you don't see many coming from me, do you?

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On the other hand, For the Record gives us a speech by Edwin Bayley, VP of National Educational Television (NET), who says that money for educational television should come neither from federal nor state government. Once you get government involved in funding, Bayley says, "the inclination is to dictate program content." He cites various civil rights programs that were rejected by educational television stations in the South due to worries "they would offend state legislatures that had provided them with funds." The preferred source for funding, according to Bayley, is "foundations, industry and business."

Not much to see in the Teletype sections this week, other than a note that "ABC's daytime show Confidential for Women goes off the air July 8. It'll be replaced by The Newlywed Game." We all know how that turned out. CBS has a new Peanuts cartoon planned for around Halloween, and hopes that It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown will have some of the success of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

The fortunes of dramatic programming ebb and flow in TV Guide, depending on what year you read. This year it's a bull market for drama, with ABC talking about a monthly Sunday Night at the Theatre in addition to Stage 67. NBC is producing a version of "Othello," while CBS, basking in the glow from their critically acclaimed production of "Death of a Salesman," looks to duplicate the results with "The Crucible" and "The Glass Menagerie," which wind up airing on CBS Playhouse. Just wait a year or two, and the tide will turn again.

"Unlike the U.S. House and Senate," the British House of Lords is considering bringing television cameras in to the chamber. They've agreed to a trial run, over the objections of Lord Balfour, who memorably observed that televising the Lords (which would invariably lead to cameras in the House of Commons as well) might cause viewers to look at the House "rather as a zoo, and frankly I do not think the public would like all the exhibits." As he said this, notes TV Guide, "at least two members were asleep, and several front-benchers were hunched down in their seats, their feet wedged against the tables opposite them." Good thing that would never happen in this country. TV  

True-or-false jeopardy

A couple of weeks ago, we were watching an episode of 77 Sunset Strip in which Kookie (Edd Byrnes) was arrested on a trumped-up murder charge and thrown in a small-town jail. Will our hero escape the clutches of the crooked police and live to fight another day? What do you think?

The following week while we were watching an episode of Mannix, Joe (Mike Connors), in a small town investigating a murder, finds himself arrested on trumped-up charges and thrown in jail. Will our hero escape and find the real killer before the crooked cops finish him off? What do you think?

That these two episodes aired, at least in our household, on consecutive weeks, probably exacerbated my already-intense dislike of a hoary television trope that I like to call "false jeopardy." (Actually I only started calling it that a minute ago as I was typing this, but we'll let that go for the present.) 

False jeopardy—and I'm not referring to a game show hosted by someone other than Art Fleming or Alex Trebek—is what I call it when one of the lead characters in a TV series is put into an extreme life-or-death situation that is supposed to keep us in suspense. Now, I don't mean the ordinary kind of risk that private detectives or policemen encounter on a weekly basis, like being shot at, run over, beaten up, caught in a room filling up with water, being trapped between two walls of spikes closely closing in on you—well, you get the point. After all, these shows would be pretty dull without some kind of action.

No, what I'm talking about is the kind of jeopardy that serves as the catalyst for the entire episode. For at least two of the four acts, Kookie and Joe are slapped around by bully boys in blue, menaced by fellow prisoners, or threatened by corrupt officials. Their protestations of innocense are ignored; their basic constitutional rights are trampled. It's all very manipulative, designed to work the viewer into a simmering rage against the injustice of it all. And when the bad guys get their comeuppance, as they invariably do, it's seldom satisfying enough to make up for it all. 

I don't want to say that this kind of thing happens all the time, but any drama that runs for more than a season or two will have at lesat one episode involving false jeopardy, whether through imprisonment, kidnapping, a hostage situation, a life-threatening disease, or something of the sort. And for the better part of an hour, we're supposed to think that the outcome is in doubt. 

What it does is create impatience on the viewer's part; since we already know how things are going to end (at least insofar as the lead character is concerned), we just want to hurry up and get to the end so we can see the happily-ever-after ending. That's about the time when I reach for the fast-forward button on the remote. I think we're supposed to be curious as to just how things wind up the way they do; who the real killer is, how the police find out where the hostages are, what the doctor comes up with at the last minute. Maybe I'm just not that curious; I'm a cut-to-the-chase kind of guy.

Perhaps we're supposeed to put ourselves in the place of the lead, what it would feel like if we were the ones in a seemingly impossible situation. What we would do, how we might escape. If you ask me, the best series at creating that kind of atmosphere was The Fugitive; after all, the prospect of being executed for a crime you didn't commit has got to be horrible. (Think about it; you didn't even get the satisfaction of murdering someone you hated like the guilty parties in Perry Mason.) But in The Fugitive, this wasn't a gimmick; it was the premise of the whole series. There's a big difference. Sure, there were episodes that put Kimble in the same kind of false jeopardy I'm talking about, and those episodes are subject to the same criticism. But you can't use the premise of The Fugitive as an excuse for the other series that put their leads in false jeopardy.

I remember an episode of Hawaii Five-O in which McGarrett (Jack Lord) was temporarily blinded. Maybe I should say apparently temporary, because the doctors weren't sure he'd regain his sight. Now, we all know that he's going to see again, because the name of the series is Hawaii Five-O, not Longstreet. But I'd argue that the threat of permanent blindness was nothing more than a McGuffin. The suspense wasn't in whether or not McGarrett would recover; it was how he'd cope with being blind while the bad guy was out there looking to finish the job. Of course, that outcome wasn't in doubt either. The point is that this was a battle of wits, with the false jeopardy just a backdrop against which the real drama was played out.

Defenders of these plotlines would, I suppose, say that this is the point with all of these false jeopardy stories, that we're supposed to be taken in by the chess match between good and evil. But this isn't The Seventh Seal we're talking about, and it's only a superior storyline that can make the suspension of disbelief work long enough to get to the end of the episode. And the word I keep coming back to is maniuplative. 

We're supposed to hate the dirty cops that keep Kookie im jail, the corruption and the injustice in the system. That's not suspense; that's advocacy. We're supposed to hate the killers that hold Cannon and his client hostage, and thirst for the retribution that awaits when they get what's coming to them. And that's great, until you realize the writers have stacked the deck, that they're counting on you to react that way. Once you figure that out, the anger lessens. So does the suspense, though. It can't make us worry about the lead, because we already know he or she is going to be all right. (Unless we've read in the trades that their contract is up for renewal.) And the premise is too sustained, over the course of an hour, to keep the level of suspense high enough to take us along on the ride.

That leads to another kind of false jeopardy, one that's become much in vogue over the last decade or two: the season-ending cliffhanger. One of the first, and most famous, cliffhangers (I can't remember right now if it was a season-ender or not) was the "Who Shot J.R." episode of Dallas. It was a great gimmick, because it kept people all over the nation talking for months. It was also a shrewd one, one that kept the concept from slipping into the clutches of false jeopardy.

What was shrewd about it was that the purpose of the cliffhanger was not to keep us guessing as to whether or not J.R. was going to pull through; without Larry Hagman, there's no Dallas. No, what the braintrust did was to make us guess who shot him, and this created some real suspense. Nobody could be ruled out; a trial could have sent ratings shooting even higher (no pun intended). A clever team of writers could have figured out how to keep the storyline going without endangering the tenures of any of the regulars. If need be, they could even have played it all off as a dream, right?

I know that all entertainment is manipulative, to some extent. Whether it's music, literature, movies or television—they all play on our emotions, condition us to respond. That's OK; we like being manipulated, just as we like being scared. We don't want it to be too obvious, though; we don't like knowing that it's happening. And that's how I feel when I see the lead in false jeopardy. 

It doesn't have to be that way, of course, and next week we'll look at a series that understood how to play the inevitable outcome for all it's worth, and succeed spectacularly. TV  

This week in TV Guide: June 25, 1966

How many times has this happened to you: you're driving through a strange town when your car breaks down.  While you're waiting for repairs, you have a run-in with one of the local punks, who just happens to be the son of one of the most important men in town.  Later on, the punk turns up dead, and guess who the prime suspect is?  You!

I don't know about you, but that's never happened to me.  I won't say that I don't expect it ever will, because that seems to be just the kind of person to whom it does happen.  At least that's the trope that's on display in this week's episode of Run For Your Life, starring Ben Gazzara as the doomed Paul Bryan, a man with only a few months (years?) to live.  We know Paul didn't do it, because he's the show's star; and we know he won't be convicted, because the show's called Run For Your Life and not You're Sentenced to Life.  So why even bother with a storyline like this?  Perhaps because it gives you a heavy you can really hate, or a heavy who reforms once he discovers the true meaning of life, or because it gives West Coast writers a chance to ridicule small-minded small-town America.  Your guess is as good as mine.  But with absolutely no prior knowledge of what I'm going to find, let's take a look through the listings and see if we can find any other TV cliches - or tropes, as they've come to be known - on the small screen this week.

Here's one, on Daniel Boone: "Daniel, the fort's best runner, sprains an ankle, which spells bad news for the settlers who have bet on him to win the hotly contested annual foot race with the Indians."  Yes: whenever I get sick or otherwise come up with some debilitating ailment, I always check the calendar, because I just know something important is about to happen.  Did you ever notice how you never see a listing like "Daniel sprains an ankle, and is grateful he doesn't have anything planned for the week"?  No, of course not - that doesn't make for very interesting television.  You'd have to add the sentence "And then one thing after another seems to pop up" to get a script out of it.

There's a rerun of Lee Marvin's M Squad latenight on Channel 5 that has another typical police story: "An ex-convict, suspected of murder, is about to commit suicide by leaping from a high window.  Ballinger races to get enough evidence to clear the man before he jumps to his death."  Will Ballinger get the evidence, and will it be in time?  What do you think?  "A man suspected of murder threatens suicide.  Ballinger looks into the case, but discovers the man really is guilty, and his death wouldn't change a thing."  Have you seen that lately?

The Big Valley offers a slight variation on the episode from Run For Your Life: "Gil Anders comes to the Barkley ranch looking for Heath and is shot from ambush by two bounty hunters, who claim he's wanted for murder."  This will, of course, come as a complete surprise to Gil, who has no idea why anyone would suspect him of murder.  Whether or not you think he's guilty of the crime depends on whether or not you think Barbara Stanwyck would let her son hang around with cold-blodded killers.  Heath's a lawyer, anyway, so he'll be sure to get Gil off.

In Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, the Seaview takes on a couple of men adrift in a lifeboat, "unaware the they're rescued a pair of escaped convicts."  Because people are never what they seem to be.  Look for a scene where the radio operator gets a message about two convicts on the run, and the crew gradually put two and two together.  One of the escapees is Nehemiah Persoff, which means you get two tropes for the price of one since Persoff is never who or what he appears to be either, and if you ever run into him on a dark street you're right to feel uneasy.

Petticoat Junction has a storyline that's typical of what happens when misunderstandings occur:  "A feud between Charley and Floyd has sidetracked the Cannonball and paralyzed Hooterville Valley."  If you doubt the likelihood that the two train engineers will get their feud patched up by the end of the thirty minutes, you also probably think next week the train will be piloted by Arnold Ziffel.

On The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, "Harriet has been receiving a daily rose from a secret admirer."  Will this be the end of the Nelson's marriage?  Will we see Ozzie next week on Divorce Court, or Perry Mason, in "The Case of the Cantankerous Crooner"?  I'll bet there's a logical explanation for the whole thing, something that will be discovered in just under thirty minutes that will leave Ozzie feeling foolish, Harriet secretly pleased that Ozzie can still get jealous, and the whole family having a good laugh.

I could go on, but you get the point.  There are only a handful of original stories in existence; most people use the number seven, but that could be a cliche in and of itself.  And while some of them are commonplace, things that could happen to any of us, too many of them are like the one that Paul Bryan faces in Run For Your Life: ones that we scoff at for being so utterly absurd, and that keep us tuning in each week.

***

During the 60s, the Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace were the premiere 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: singer Jerry Vale; Metropolitan Opera soprano Birgit Nilsson; comics London Lee and Nancy Walker; the singing Swinging Lads; the comedy team of Stiller and Meara; ballerina Joyce Cuoco; the Arirang Ballet, Korean dance and instrumental group; the Yong Brothers, balancing act; and the Berosini Chimps..

Palace: Host Ray Bolger presents singer Kay Starr; jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, accompanied by 7-year-old drummer Jim Bradley; impressionist Rich Little; comedian Norm Crosby; escape artist Michael De La Vega; and the Five Amandis, teeterboard act.

As I was typing this, I thought to myself, "that Palace episode looked awfully familiar," and it turns out I was right:  I reviewed it back on July 9, 1966, two weeks after this issue.  It was a broadcast airing on a station that presented Palace on a delay - KCMT, the dreaded Channel 7 of my teenage years, which had a split affiliation and ran several ABC series on a delay of a week or two.  At that time it was going up against a Sullivan program that featured Ethel Merman, the Rolling Stones and Wayne Newton.  I gave it a push back then, and I'm tempted to do the same this week.  But even though Ed has Birgit Nilsson, one of the greatest opera stars who ever lived, the supporting cast for Palace is a little stronger: Kay Starr is as good as Jerry Vale, Norm Crosby is much funnier than Stiller and Meara (Anne Meara, of recently happy memory), and Lionel Hampton is a legend.  On that basis, the winner is Palace by a nose.

***

So Henry Steele Commager says television must reform itself or else.  To which you might ask, "or else what?", and who the hell is Henry Steele Commager anyway?

To answer the second question first, Commager was a noted historian, a champion of the Enlightenment, and a chronicler of modern liberalism.  Insofar as Commager defined what liberalism was, he could be seen as a liberal version of William F. Buckley, Jr.*  Commager's article is the fifth in TV Guide's ongoing series "assessing the effects of television on our society," which is a lot like the mission of this here blog.

*Who once wrote a letter to Commager asking if he had changed his middle name to "Steele" in admiration of Josef Stalin, the "Man of Steel."  It's that kind of cheekiness that I always admired in WFB.

Commager acknowledges the importance of television, calling it "the most important invention in the history of the communication of knowledge" since the inventions of the University and the printing press.  He believes it foolish to think that, as some people put it, the only changes left for television are technical ones, such as color vs. black and white; it is a young medium, he says, continuing to evolve, which means that this look at TV should be regarded as "an interim judgment."  And part of the problem that television faces is that, in its 25 years, it hasn't quite figured out what it should be.

Commager from an early '50s TV interview

Arguably it should be a medium devoted to serving the public interest, as is set out in the FCC act of 1934.  And, as Commager points out, there are enough money-making enterprises out there that television shouldn't have to be one of them; "all the important contributions are to be made to the commonwealth, not the private wealth."  The rub, so to speak, is that television as an industry is controlled by "men without vision or imagination in anything other than their major interests - manufacturing, marketing and finance."  Yes, and it's probably also true that only men with those kinds of interests would have had the wherewithal to create the mighty networks that exist in 1966. Based on this assessment, it would seem as if the question Commager asks - is TV a form of entertainment and information, or is it a form of education similar to the University and the Foundation - has a self-ordained answer.  Yes, he concedes, it can be both, but "who can doubt that the proportions are badly mixed?"  And while the men who run television boast of their independence from government control, they say very little about "independence where it really counts" - freedom from the advertisers who "determine policy and content."

So we're faced with an argument that we've read and heard many times - it is the drive for profit, and the resulting lowest-common-denominator programming that results - that is responsible for the quality (or lack thereof) of television.  Television, Commager laments, has failed utterly in the realm of education: "it neither transmits the knowledge of the past to the next generation, nor contributes to professional training, nor does it expand the boundaries of knowledge."  It has no professional standards and practices.  What "meager" contributions it has made in these areas has been more than offset by "its contributions to noneducation and to the narrowing of intellectual horizons."

As it happens, I can agree with Commager on much of this.  But the question remains: what is one to do about it?  We've created a public broadcasting station that is supposed to be independent of pressures created by ratings and advertising dollars, but in its effort to solicit direct financial contributions from viewers - which would be the purest way of judging a network's ability to connect with the public - it is forced to rely on the basest form of crowd-pleasing shows, with virtually no attention to the educational and cultural forces which we were assured would result from its creation.

Commager's answer to this, not surprisingly given his ideological bent, is government control, specifically an empowering of the FCC.  Were television to be treated like any other utility, it would have to constantly show the ways in which it serves the public interest, lest it lose its license.  An FCC reconstituted in this manner would have "authority to make findings and impose decisions with respect to such matters as content and advertising, and to refuse to license stations which fail to devote themselves to the public interest."  Again, the problem with this is that Commager fails to appreciate that at least a part of the "public interest" consists of what the public is interested in.  With this attitude, television soon becomes a kind of medicine that people dread taking, even though they're being told that it's good for them.  And by allowing a commission - one with political appointments, no doubt, and how could anything possibly go wrong with that? - rather than the public to choose what should be broadcast, how does one truly find out the pulse of the viewers?

This much is clear: Commager is leery at best, and opposed and worst, to the idea of private ownership of television broadcasting.  It may be the norm here, he states, but not in the rest of the world.  Which, one would suppose, is why there's such a call for American television programs in the rest of the world, right?  Or why the shows imported from Britain so closely resemble ones being shown here.  Henry Steele Commager is not a stupid man, but he's something like a lumbering ox, an easy target.  He makes some very good points about the problems and challenges of television, but like so many, fails to come up with many answers.  I can't really fault him for that, either, though - after all, you don't see many coming from me, do you?

***

On the other hand, For the Record gives us a speech by Edwin Bayley, VP of National Educational Television (NET), who says that money for educational television should come neither from federal nor state government.  Once you get government involved in funding, Bayley says, "the inclination is to dictate program content."  He cites various civil rights programs that were rejected by educational television stations in the South due to worries "they would offend state legislatures that had provided them with funds."  The preferred source for funding, according to Bayley, is "foundations, industry and business."

Not much to see in the Teletype sections this week, other than a note that "ABC's daytime show Confidential for Women goes off the air July 8.  It'll be replaced by The Newlywed Game."  We all know how that turned out.  CBS has a new Peanuts cartoon planned for around Halloween, and hopes that It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown will have some of the success of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

The fortunes of dramatic programming ebb and flow in TV Guide, depending on what year you read.  This year it's a bull market for drama, with ABC talking about a monthly Sunday Night at the Theatre in addition to Stage 67.  NBC is producing a version of "Othello," while CBS, basking in the glow from their critically acclaimed production of "Death of a Salesman," looks to duplicate the results with "The Crucible" and "The Glass Menagerie," which wind up airing on CBS Playhouse.  Just wait a year or two, and the tide will turn again.

"Unlike the U.S. House and Senate," the British House of Lords is considering bringing television cameras in to the chamber.  They've agreed to a trial run, over the objections of Lord Balfour, who memorably observed that televising the Lords (which would invariably lead to cameras in the House of Commons as well) might cause viewers to look at the House "rather as a zoo, and frankly I do not think the public would like all the exhibits."  As he said this, notes TV Guide, "at least two members were asleep, and several front-benchers were hunched down in their seats, their feet wedged against the tables opposite them."  Good thing that would never happen in this country.

***

We're in the summer rerun season now, and it's quite possible the stories for the next couple of months might be shorter, concentrating on fewer topics.  There's not a lot to be gained from reviewing a rerun, and I've written about many of the summer replacement shows in the past, so I may wind up with two- or three-topic stories from time to time, a bit of a change from what we're used to.  On the other hand, I may not - the only way you'll know for sure is to keep tuning in. TV  

The dirty dozen things I hate about TV today

It occurs to me that I haven't gone off on a good toot for a while, and if you're not in the mood for one now, I'll see you back here later.  You might like this one, though; I have no way of knowing until I put it out there and wait for responses.

I've been spending a fair amount of time lately thinking about some of the reasons why I don't like most of today's TV shows. There are some very annoying cliches out there, ones that have long-since worn out their welcome on television, the kind that make you mutter, "Give me a break" - or words to that effect.

So in no particular order here's my advice, freely given, on what today's television shows can do without. And as I said, if you're not in the mood for bitter ravings of a curmudgeonly TV critic, feel free to come back on Saturday for another TV Guide story.

#1: Slow motion.  There are several different uses of slow-mo in television today: the "cataclysmic event," when everything slows down while the bullets fly or the bodies fall or the buildings explode, accompanied by muffled cries, poignantly exchanged glances, and desperate attempts to reach someone before it's too late; the "attitude walk," when the protagonists walk, side-by-side-by-side down the street after having solved yet another case, just daring someone to try and get between them*; the "blast and strut," which combines the worst of the previous two, where people walk away from the scene of the explosion, fire billowing and shrapnel flying through the air, without even flinching, their very demeanor that this could happen to you too if you don't watch out.  I don't care who you are, when bombs explode fifty feet behind you, you're going to flinch.

*Also used by local news teams in terrible commercials.

What all of these have in common is that the scenes unfold at a speed that gives the viewer time to bake a peach cobbler, do their taxes, and take a nap before our protagonists get to where they're going.  The use of slow-mo, in addition to being unnecessary and overdone, is terribly pretentious.

#2: Cops who need a good shrink.  Is there anyone out there who joined the police force simply to try and keep the public safe?  Watch today's police procedurals and you'll see, as one online commentator notes, "every cop being 'rogue,' 'on the edge' or only on the job because he/she is attempting to avenge the murder/disappearance of a spouse/parent/sibling from years ago. Or it's a manic-depressive/bipolar/insert your favorite psychological disorder FBI or CIA agent.”  Nowadays everyone has to have a backstory, often a tragic one, that motivates them in the direction their life has taken.  Does anyone know why The FBI's Inspector Lewis Erskine (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.) became a Fed?  Or, aside from a brief mention in the pilot, how he became a widower or why he's never remarried?*  Apparently they were able to come up with enough stories back then that they didn't have to use the "out of the past" trope.

*And if you ever get a chance, ask Lynn Loring what happened to Erskine's daughter.

#3: The latest pop single.  Remember how it used to be said that "a picture tells a thousand words"?  That was supposed to be the magic of television, that it could show us things.  Radio, with only sound to fall back on, could never compete with that, could they?  And yet you can hardly find a popular show today that doesn't contain a scene (often at the end of an episode) in which the characters take time to look introspectively at what's happened their lives, all accompanied by the latest pop single from someone who sounds a lot like Norah Jones, with lyrics that describe the travails of the hero(s) in words far more meaningful than any dialog that the writers could come up with.  An added bonus is that the artist will be able to sell many downloads of that song to the fans of the show, who will look around their homes meaningfully while listening to it on their laptops.  This can be used to good effect, but most of the time it's lazy and overused.  

#4: Romance.  Is it at all possible for co-workers of the opposite sex to work together without enough undercurrents of sexual attraction to make an office feel like a electrical way station?  If it's not, then every argument ever made against having women in the workplace can just go right out the window.  Along with the idea of us all being adults.  But then, what would fans have left to them if they weren't able to combine the names of the cute couple into one adorable hybrid that speaks to how they were destined to be soul partners from before they were born.  (Yes, NCIS, I'm talking to you.)

#5: Uninterrupted (and often pretentious) speeches.  As befits this one, I'll keep it short.  Gilmore Girls. As my friend Jim once said, "I don't know about you, but every time I'm in an argument, I always get the chance to make long impassioned speeches without ever being interrupted, and then let the other person do the same."

#6: Fake season-ending cliffhangers.  I wouldn't know this from personal experience, but apparently Richard Castle, the star character in the eponymously-named series, was involved in a crash of some sort on the way to his wedding to the woman he's worked with all these seasons.  (See #4.)  Will he survive or won't he?  Gee, since the name of the series is Castle, and his name is Castle, I wonder how it all turns out?  I can't stand these fake cliffhangers - we all know that things work out in the end, unless we're industry-savvy enough that we've kept appraised on the contract disputes that the stars are having with the series producers.  If your favorite character hasn't reached an agreement yet, or is said to be a pain in the ass on set, watch out.  Otherwise, put in a wake-up call about halfway through the next season's opener.  This particular devise turned me against Leverage, a show I once enjoyed, as much as anything ever did, although it also suffered from #4, and a share of #5 as well.

#7: Quirky characters.  You all know them - the goths, the nerds, the studs, the brainy sex symbols, the attitudes - it seems that every ensemble today has to be carefully comprised of characters who are just caricatures.  In fact, you can hardly find a normal person on TV today.  I blame this on lazy writing; in lieu of giving a character real depth (without the annoying backstory), it's much easier to just make them quirky.  Frankly, more than half of the characters you see on series TV today would have been locked up back in the day.

#8: Endless backstories.  Continued from above.  Do we really have to learn all about a character's life in drips and drops, spread out over several seasons, culminating in the revelation that often explains the attitude found in #2?  A little of this can be a good thing, and when used correctly it can be a great thing.*  But again, it just seems as if it gives the writers an excuse to come up with a "very special episode."

*And then there's Danger Man, the entire run of which could be seen as the backstory to The Prisoner if you really believe that John Drake is Number 6.

#9: Ensemble casts.  Not new, but nowadays virtually the only thing you get on dramatic television.  Can you imaging Columbo as an ensemble?  Neither can I.*    Of course, there's a good explanation for this: the salaries of TV stars.  Considering how much the leads already get paid per episode, can you imagine how much it would cost to have a star that was in almost every scene, clearly dominating the show?  (Aside from Orphan Black, that is.)  It also gives the writers more people who can be exploited via #8.)

*And his quirkiness (#7) was not contrived, but was an integral part of his character - not to mention, in the opinions of many, something of a ruse.

#10: Limp dick commercials.  All right, this is kind of crude, and it isn't a trope of TV drama, but it irritates me all the same.  You can't watch more than about fifteen minutes of a golf tournament or programming on one of the cable niche stations without being bombarded with "male enhancement" commercials.  Sometimes they're cast as commercials for low-T.  Whatever they're selling, sex is never far from the surface.  The limp dick commercial features plenty of romance (#4), and montage scenes that almost cross the line into slow-mo (#1).  I know there have always been stupid commercials, but they didn't used to be so offensive.  What bothers me the most is that they're shown when children could be watching, and it's really not the kind of thing they should be exposed to (no pun intended).  My friend Gary expressed his disgust succinctly, saying that he didn't want to be watching golf with his son and have him ask, "Daddy, what's an erection?"

#11: Mockumentaries.  I don't watch any of them, although I readily admit to enjoying the Christopher Guest versions on the big screen.  But a little cleverness goes a long way, and while The Office might have been fresh once, by the time we get to Almost Royal, it's long since past almost too much.

#12: Police state wet-dreams.  Not to be confused with #2, #4 and/or #10.  I wrote an entire article on this one time, which means you should go read that instead.  The prime examples are pretty much every police procedural on television today.

I'm sure you can add cliches of your own to this list, but the one thing that most of them have in common is that they're unique to today's television.  OK, there's always been romance on TV (The Farmer's Daughter), and it wouldn't have been any more palatable to me then than it is now.  Pretentious speeches have been around since before Sterling Silliphant wrote his first script.  And slow motion would have been a difficult concept to introduce into live television.  But cliffhangers were much less common before television became so serialized, and prior to the advent of Miami Vice popular music was seldom used in television to the extent it is today.  Police officers were usually men who believed in helping the community, and the ones trying to settle a grudge or work out a past trauma were generally portrayed as the bad apples in the bunch, the renegades who give other cops a bad name.  As for Viagra - well, never mind.

This is also not to say that classic television was perfect - as a matter of fact, one of the message boards I read is in the midst of a lively discussion about TV cliches of the '50s and '60s.  But when someone asks me why I don't watch much current TV, I don't usually have to go far outside the lines of this list to explain why. Maybe this is a controversial list, maybe not - if you have any thoughts, let's hear them.