How old is "old"?

I've long since become accustomed to the idea that nothing of much value comes from the BBC, including the letters "B" and "C." I'm not here, though, to rag on the BBC. Instead, I'm going to rag on an article I bookmarked from the BBC website about four years ago.

The article, by David Renshaw, asks the question: Is Watching Old TV Good For the Soul? For those of us who hang out here, the answer is obviously yes. It is, in the words of my friend David Hofstede, Comfort TV. It's something of an existential question, getting to the heart not only of what old television purports to be, but how it intersects with the increasingly fluid values displayed in today's pop culture. I suppose you could describe it as the basis for everything this website is about, and in fact I did describe it that way in the first chapter of The Electronic Mirror, which is pretty much all about the question of what classic television is. The only question that concerns me right now, however, is how you define the word old. 

I've used the words old and classic more or less interchangeably in that paragraph, because that's how I've always thought of it myself. Maybe I've been wrong about that, though. Someone once suggested using the word "vintage" instead of "classic," since classic implies a certain quality that doesn't necessarily depend on age; hence the otherwise oxymoronic term "instant classic." (I suppose one could say that "instant classic" is as oxymoronic as "instant coffee," but since I don't drink coffee, I don't have a horse in that race.) Anyway, it was a good suggestion, but I was already too far down the road I've taken to change, and so the term remains "classic television."*

*Or, as I call it in Darkness in Primetime, "Classic-Era Television." 

But this Renshaw article redefines old in a way that isn't familiar to me. Some of the "old" television programs mentioned in the article include:

• The Sopranos
• The Office
• Seinfeld
• The West Wing

Depending on what you think of them, these shows (and others from their era) could, I suppose, be considered classic, but would you consider them old? I don't; to me, "old" means the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps the 1970s. I suppose, though, today's viewers would consider them not old, but ancient. Maybe that's what bothers me about this article; after all, if shows from less than 30 years ago can be considered old, what does that make me, in the early years of my seventh decade? Am I ancient too? Hell, I'm not even eligible for Medicare yet. 

It gets worse. Renshaw quotes Daniel D'Addario, Variety's head TV critic: "'The sea-change I'm really expecting is that there will come a point where we're so far past Friends and The Office that future generations cannot relate to them,' he says, pointing to I Love Lucy as an example of a classic TV show that no longer chimes with modern audiences."

Not chime with modern audiences? What planet is he living on? I Love Lucy remains one of the most beloved sitcoms in TV history, with a shelf life that I suspect is far longer than most of the "classic" shows that people like him cite. And think about it; the last original episode of I Love Lucy was made in 1957, nearly 70 years ago. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president then, and the flag only had 48 stars. If the show had the same durability as today's programs, if what D'Addario is saying was true, nobody would even remember it, and anyone watching it would be unable to relate to it. 

Yet, as is the case with Lawrence Welk, I Love Lucy continues to regenerate its audience generation after generation. in the time since then, the show has never been out of circulation; even today, the FAST stations have entire channels dedicated to I Love Lucy. Whenever CBS colorizes one of the episodes and shows it over the air, often to coincide with a holiday, it gets huge viewership. And that's not out of curiosity, either; it's because people who weren't even born when the show's original run ended have become fans of the crazy redhead, and have continued to pass that love on to subsequent generations. Long after Daniel D'Addario has departed these mortal coils, even after his columns have been relegated to the Wayback Machine, people will be watching I Love Lucy, and laughing as they do.

And I say all that as someone who's nbever been much of a Lucy fan. It's true that the world populated by Lucy and Ricky Ricardo is one that might appear foreign to modern audiences, unless they grew up watching Mad Men (another "old" program). And yet, I have to ask why Lucy wouldn't chime with them? The show's humor, much of it rooted in the human condition, is timeless, and often laugh-out-loud funny. Love, friendship, misunderstandings, couples getting mad and making up—these are things that have tickled the funny bones of people for generations. And as for slapstick, someone once said that nothing was funnier than a man slipping on a banana peel, because the anticipation was half of the fun. Isn't that how we feel when Lucy and Ethel are trying to keep up with the chocolates on the assembly line in the candy factory? And I'm not just talking about comedy; is there any who can really say, with a straight face, that a show like The Twilight Zone doesn't have something to say to us today?

No, you know what kinds of shows I think future generations won't be able to relate to? Shows that traffic in political proselytizing in the guise of entertainment. These shows don't even attempt to be timeless; they're geared to appeal to others of similar beliefs, a kind of secret handshake that welcomes like-minded viewers into an exclusive club, from which they can laugh at and ridicule those outside their clubhouse walls. I suppose these shows, like so many other things in our modern economy, are designed to be disposable; considering the number of programs viewers can choose from (532 original scripted television series were created last year), maybe they don't need to have any shelf life at all. We watch them, and when we're done with them, we just throw them away. Maybe it's just me, but I doubt that in twenty years, very many people are going to be laughing at jokes about presidents with orange hair.

The best part of this article, by far, is D'Addario's explanation of why people turn to old shows, and it's as David Hofstede says: for comfort. "[T]here is the comfort of familiarity. The things people are binging are not deeply experimental, you know the rhythms of these shows very well. It's about knowing what you're getting and letting it wash over you." And for people who feel alienated from today's world that seems to say that right is wrong, left is right, up is down—well, for them (and there are a lot of them), that familiarity is not going to be found exclusively in the shows of the last thirty years; they're going to find it in shows like Leave it to Beaver, Andy Griffith, and, yes, I Love Lucy.

It is, I think, alarming that we've come to the point that we consider something from thirty years ago as old. It really doesn't have anything to do with television at all, you know. It's a disregard for experience, for history, for tradition; it's a scorn for values that were accepted and lived out for centuries, if not millennia. It's the mark of a society that thinks only the now is important and that values are transitory, that crucifies people for the sin of having been products of their time, that views the past and those from it as being as disposable as, well, those TV shows I was talking about. 

So that brings us back to the question I posed at the beginning: how old is old? It's a question we all struggle to answer; we keep coming up with trite phrases like "60 is the new 40"* and then plaster them on wooden plaques we hang on our walls to make ourselves feel better as the birthdays ramp up; we keep talking and dressing and living as if we're still twenty years younger than we are. We don't want to grow up, let alone grow old.

*Being half a decade past 60, I can assure you that I do not feel 40. In many ways, my life is much better; nevertheless, my body says otherwise.

There are those who say that seeking comfort in nostalgia is an attempt to escape the world of today, but maybe it's also a way of acknowledging that we're all growing older, at the rate of 60 minutes per hour, and that we've come to terms with it. Watching television from the 1950s and 1960s isn't a way of trying to recapture our youth—it's admitting that, like these shows, we are old, and we accept it. As Harry Reasoner (a really old TV guy, and therefore of no importance) once said, no matter how a man tries to avoid risk or grasp for youth, "he may get one day extra or none; he never gets eternity." Not in this world, anyway. TV

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Aristophanes comes to Hooterville

What does it mean to be a "classic television historian"? It's a question I've had cause to ask myself during the course of promoting Darkness in Primetime. Back in the day, I coined the term "cultural archaeologist" to describe what I do—in other words, one who looks at the remnants of a particular time in television history and drew conclusions from it that I could relate to our own times, much as an actual archaeologist looks at artifacts and bones and tells us what life was like in 100 B.C. It is often said by historians that it can take decades before one can accurately assess the overall effect of a particular era; therefore, the time should be ripe for us to look at the classic television era (for our purposes, primarily the 1950s through the 1970s) and find out what it tells us about life, and how it's changed (or hasn't changed) in the interval. Television, as much as—if not more than—other sources of the time (history books, newspapers, Time, Life and Newsweek), functions as a sort of time capsule, a description of what life was like then.

This week, what we have on tap is what I like to call a "time capsule moment," when we come across something—a clip from a television show, an article from a magazine—that teaches us a fundamental truth about the era. It happened one morning some time ago, when, while perusing the various classic TV channels on the various Roku/Pluto/Tubi offerings, I ran across an episode of Petticoat Junction. It's been a long time since I watched Junction with any regularity, although thanks to my friend Dan Budnick's excellent book I have more than a passing acquaintance with it. 

The moment in question comes from the series' final season in 1970, an episode called "Susan B. Anthony, I Love You." In it, "Billie Jo returns from Chicago with a visionary zeal for the women's liberation movement, and enlists her sisters in 'the cause.' " It's a product of its time; women's lib is all the rage, no-fault divorce was passed by California the year before, Ms. will start publication the year after, the Equal Rights Amendment is already in the works and will be passed by Congress in 1972. As we join the episode, Billie Jo is in high dudgeon, reciting various statistics illustrating the various states of inequality that exist between women and men, and urging her sisters and Dr. Janet Craig (June Lockhart) to fight. (When Betty Jo says that doesn't sound very "ladylike," Billie Jo reminds her that they're women, not ladies, and that "ladies" is a term coined by men to render women subservient.)*

*Lest you wonder how I was able to amass this kind of detail while only catching a glimpse of the episode, I won't lie to you: I looked it up.

The key line, the one that ensures this episode a spot in the time capsule, is when Billie Jo insists that the way to fight back is to have nothing to do with men: "complete segregation," including sex and marriage. In response, the doubtful Bobbie Jo, replies,  "If we're not going to marry men, who else is there?" The line gets a huge response from the laugh track*, and Billie Jo assures her sister this isn't going to happen, that they're just going to let men know that "we're invading their world."

*Ironic line number one.

If anything, the episode is probably a Hooterville (i.e. G-rated) take on Aristophanes' famous play Lysistrata, in which Greek women withhold sex from their men to force them to stop warring. It's an old and venerable story, one which has been adapted endlessly, and I suspect this had to be at least in the back of the minds of writers Charles Stewart and Dick Conway. (As perhaps a concession to the sign of the times, Dr. Craig asks Billie Jo about what happens to "sex and marriage," subtly suggesting the two might exist separately*.)

*Ironic line number two.

Now, you have to keep in mind that by this time in the series, Bobbie Jo has come to represent, as the always-reliable Wikipedia puts it, the "humorous scatterbrain." In other words, someone who often states the obvious. And in this case, the obvious is reduced to: duh, women marry men. Billie Jo's answer is equally obvious; she doesn't suggest that women marry each other, or live together communally in a community that excludes men. No, it's to get men to accept women as equals, to redefine the relationship rather than eradicate it.

There's no doubt that the institution of marriage had already been battered by the revolution of the '60s; remember the joke about "who wants to live in an institution"? It's an era of free love, of shunning the shackles of marriage in favor of open relationships. Gay rights protests were hardly unknown at the time; Stonewall had happened just the year before.

This tells us a great deal about how marriage is seen in its time. While Dr. Craig's comment does suggest sex can exist outside of marriage, Bobbie Jo's question about who else they could marry—well, it certainly shows that same-sex marriage isn't on anyone's radar screen at the time. It's a punch line, a statement so utterly obvious that it's put in the mouth of the resident scatterbrain to prove its point. It's a perfect representation of popular culture at that moment in time, far more so than picture one might see of a lavish wedding in Life. Second, it tells us something about the fight for equal rights in 1970, the thought that such a revolutionary idea could even come to Hooterville. Even while presenting serious statistics, however, it leavens the moment by leaning heavily on the naivete and earnestness of the equality movement's less dogmatic members. It is, after all, a comedy, not a dramedy.

Again, this is not an essay about politics or moral beliefs; what I'm interested in with this time capsule moment is what it tells us about the culture that conceived and aired it. And in this episode, "Susan B. Anthony, I Love You," Petticoat Junction presents the perfect time capsule moment, the clip that I'd show someone if they asked me what we thought about marriage way back in 1970. TV

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Bringing the past to life

It isn't often that I use one of your comments as the focal point for an article of my own (also known as "theft" in some corners, but we're all friends here), but last week a reader named "Toad" left a comment on something I'd written five years ago, and I was afraid it wouldn't be seen by enough people if I didn't bring it to your attention.*

*I'll bet many of you didn't know I actually pay attention to your comments. I don't respond to them often enough, but I do read them. 

There's another reason I want to share Toad's comment with you, though. He'd read my 2016 story about ABC's as-it-happened coverage of Robert F. Kennedy's shooting. It brought back a lot of memories for him, in a way that books, movies, and even newspapers aren't able to. "Watching this particular non-stop footage puts you in the moment, almost as if it is still happening live somehow, on a continuous loop," he wrote. "I had the feeling I get while watching actual live moments, like if you wished hard enough, you could help control the outcome."

Ever since I started this website, I've maintained that television should be regarded as an original source document, a form of entertainment that serves to place events in context, to give the viewer an idea of how things were "back then." Programs made in the 1950s and 1960s show what those decades were like in a way that period pieces like Mad Men are incapable of doing. Watching the final game of the 1965 World Series, played in the afternoon with the shadows acting as an hourglass, creeping across the diamond as the innings wear on, you're transported back in time, and things come alive. And when you watch breaking news, as was the case with Toad, you allow yourself a few moments to hope, that this time events might end differently. 

In short, Toad, you've justified the reason I've spent more than ten years writing "It's About TV." It's the nicest thing anyone's done for me in a long time.

Here's what Toad had to say:

I watched all 7 hours of the ABC footage throughout the week upon hearing the news that Sirhan Sirhan may be released from prison soon. I was born in 1969 so I have only heard or seen things associated with the Kennedy assassinations way after the fact. My grandparents loved the Kennedys so I learned a lot about them growing up. And I have always sought out new documentaries or footage I hadn't yet seen. Watching this particular non-stop footage puts you in the moment, almost as if it is still happening live somehow, on a continuous loop. I had the feeling I get while watching actual live moments, like if you wished hard enough, you could help control the outcome. Even knowing that RFK would be dead in a number of hours, I got a feeling of hopefulness watching the doctor tell us that all was not lost. Kennedy was shot in the head, sure. But it was the best possible spot to be shot if one had to be shot in the brain. This particular location of the brain was a non-vital area. Perhaps Bobby could be out of the hospital and back on the campaign trail in a week or two. After all, his pulse was strong and he had a good heart. He was not unconscious right after being shot and he said a few words and squeezed hard on the rosary beads that were placed in his hand.

After watching the ABC broadcast, I found color footage from inside the Ambassador Hotel. This CBS footage was recorded but I guess it wasn't broadcast live when the shooting occurred. But while watching this on a big TV and with all surround sound speakers going, I did FEEL what some of the attendees described: that immediate shift in mood. "Kennedy, Kennedy, Rah Rah Rah! Kennedy, Kennedy Sis Boom Bah!" Then everything SUDDENLY and disturbingly turned to horrific screams and it seemed like the entire ballroom was shaking and on the verge of exploding. People OUTSIDE the kitchen seemed to realize instantly that their world just caved in on itself. The TV cameras didn't pick up the sound of the shots. ABC thought they did. But it must have been balloons popping or some other noises. On the CBS tape, nothing resembling gunshots was heard. And reading descriptions of the shooting by the ABC newsman that was also shot, actually made me chuckle. He said he thought he was dying. He was bleeding a lot from his wound and what he said he distinctly remembers most vividly was looking up and seeing how the kitchen door would open up to reveal a hysterical woman standing in the doorway, screaming a blood-curdling scream, only to shut and then be opened up again by a whole different woman, screaming in the same disturbing way. Then the door would shut again, open again, new woman, same scream, over and over and over again. I pictured his description in Looney Tunes animation and found it amusing. But of course there is nothing funny about any of this. Our minds need to go someplace absurd because the weight of this tragedy really drives home the fact that no matter how happy you are one moment, everything can be turned upside down the next. And there is no way to predict it or to prepare yourself for it. And the course of history is irreversibly changed forever. Nixon, more Vietnam, Watergate, and on and on.

I'm only sorry we weren't able to watch it together, Toad. We could have talked about it for hours.

If you haven't watched it yet, take some time over the course of a few days and do so. Does it bring back the same kind of memories? Does it help you appreciate what it was like to be alive during those days? History books and documentaries may wind up being more accurate, with access to information that wasn't available at the time—but can they make you feel, in the words of Walter Cronkite's old program, that "You Are There"? What a magnificent time machine it is. TV  

How old is old?

I've long since become accustomed to the idea that nothing of much value comes from the BBC; it is, after all, the network that got rid of the Jeremy Clarkson version of Top Gear. I'm not here, though, to rag on the BBC. Instead, I'm going to rag on a recent article at the BBC website.

The article, by David Renshaw, asks the question: Is Watching Old TV Good For the Soul? For those of us who hang out here, the answer is obviously yes. It is, in the words of my friend David Hofstede, Comfort TV. It's something of an existential question, getting to the heart not only of what old television purports to be, but how it intersects with the increasingly fluid values displayed in today's pop culture. I suppose you could describe it as the basis for everything this website is about, and in fact I did describe it that way in the first chapter of my book The Electronic Mirror, which is pretty much all about the question of what classic television is. The only question that concerns me right now, however, is how you define the word old. 

I've used the words old and classic more or less interchangeably in that paragraph, because that's how I've always thought of it myself. Maybe I've been wrong about that, though. One of my favorite commentators, Mike Doran, once suggested using the word "vintage" instead of "classic," since classic implies a certain quality that doesn't necessarily depend on age; hence the otherwise oxymoronic term "instant classic." (I suppose one could say that "instant classic" is as oxymoronic as "instant coffee," but since I don't drink coffee, I don't have a horse in that race.) Anyway, it was a good suggestion, but I was already too far down the road I've taken to change, and so the term remains "classic television." 

But this Renshaw article redefines old in a way that isn't familar to me. Some of the "old" television programs mentioned in the article include:

• The Sopranos
• The Office
• Seinfeld
• The West Wing

Depending on what you think of them, these shows (and others from their era) could, I suppose, be considered classic, but would you consider them old? I don't; to me, "old" means the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps the 1970s. I suppose, though, today's viewers would consider them not old, but ancient. Maybe that's what bothers me about this article; after all, if shows from less than 30 years ago can be considered old, what does that make me, in the early years of my seventh decade? Am I ancient too? Hell, I'm not even eligible for Medicare yet. 

It gets worse. Renshaw quotes Daniel D'Addario, Variety's head TV critic: "'The sea-change I'm really expecting is that there will come a point where we're so far past Friends and The Office that future generations cannot relate to them,' he says, pointing to I Love Lucy as an example of a classic TV show that no longer chimes with modern audiences."

It's true that I've never been much of a fan of Lucy, but I'm going to take a stand on her behalf here. Yes, the world populated by Lucy and Ricky Ricardo is one that might appear foreign to modern audiences, unless they grew up watching Mad Men (another "old" program). And yet, I have to ask why Lucy wouldn't chime with them? The show's humor, much of it rooted in the human condition, is timeless, and often laugh-out-loud funny. Love, friendship, misunderstandings, couples getting mad and making up—these are things that have tickled the funny bones of people for generations. And as for slapstick, someone once said that nothing was funnier than a man slipping on a banana peel, because the anticipation was half of the fun. Isn't that how we feel when Lucy and Ethel are trying to keep up with the chocolates on the assembly line in the candy factory? And I'm not just talking about comedy; is there any who can really say, with a straight face, that a show like The Twilight Zone doesn't have something to say to us today?

No, you know what kinds of shows I think future generations won't be able to relate to? Shows that traffic in political proselytizing in the guise of entertainment. These shows don't even attempt to be timeless; they're geared to appeal to others of similar beliefs, a kind of secret handshake that welcomes like-minded viewers into an exclusive club, from which they can laugh at and ridicule those outside their clubhouse walls. I suppose these shows, like so many other things in our modern economy, are designed to be disposable; considering the number of programs viewers can choose from (532 original scripted television series were created last year), maybe they don't need to have any shelf life at all. We watch them, and when we're done with them we just throw them away. Maybe it's just me, but I doubt that in twenty years very many people are going to be laughing at jokes about presidents with orange hair.

The best part of this article, by far, is D'Addario's explanation of why people turn to old shows, and it's as David Hofstede says: for comfort. "[T]here is the comfort of familiarity. The things people are binging are not deeply experimental, you know the rhythms of these shows very well. It's about knowing what you're getting and letting it wash over you." And for people who feel alienated from today's world that seems to say that right is wrong, left is right, up is down—well, for them (and there are a lot of them), that familiarity is not going to be found exclusively in the shows of the last thirty years; they're going to find it in shows like Leave it to Beaver, Andy Griffith, and, yes, I Love Lucy.

It is, I think, alarming that we've come to the point that we consider something from thirty years ago as old. It really doesn't have anything to do with television at all, you know. It's a disregard for experience, for history, for tradition; it's a scorn for values that were accepted and lived out for centuries, if not millennia. It's the mark of a society that thinks only the now is important and that values are transitory, that crucifies people for the sin of having been products of their time, that views the past and those from it as being as disposable as, well, those TV shows I was talking about. 

So that brings us back to the question I posed at the beginning: how old is old? It's a question we all struggle to answer; we keep coming up with trite phrases like 60 is the new 40 and then plaster them on wooden plaques we hang on our walls to make ourselves feel better as the birthdays ramp up; we keep talking and dressing and living as if we're still twenty years younger than we are. We don't want to grow up, let alone grow old.

There are those who say that seeking comfort in nostalgia is an attempt to escape the world of today, but maybe it's also a way of acknowledging that we're all growing older, at the rate of 60 minutes per hour, and that we've come to terms with it. Watching television from the 1950s and 1960s isn't a way of trying to recapture our youth—it's admitting that, like these shows, we are old, and we accept it. As Harry Reasoner (a really old TV guy, and therefore of no importance) once said, no matter how a man tries to avoid risk or grasp for youth, "he may get one day extra or none; he never gets eternity." Not in this world, anyway. TV  

The once and future College Bowl

What with the story that NBC is bringing back the venerable College Bowl next month, I thought it might be nice to recall this show, which was a staple of Saturday and Sunday afternoons for so many years and made so many of us feel so stupid. 

It won't be called G-E College Bowl, the name it carried from 1959 to 1970, this time around; that would probably have been too much to hope for. It will have a corporate sponsor, though: Capital One, which has had a long involvement with college sports, will be—well, they won't exactly be lending their name, will they? Among other things, they'll be paying out $1 million in scholarships. But I imagine it'll be a wise investment for them. Former pro quarterback Peyton Manning is the emcee, continuing the apparent trend of quarterbacks hosting game shows.

Anyway, here are clips from a couple of shows. As usual, we'll have a few observations afterwards.

The first is from October 9, 1960, when the series ran on CBS and was hosted by Allen Ludden.  The contest pits two undefeated sides, Rutgers and Colgate. Enjoy the commercials!


The second match is later, from March 9, 1966. The show has moved from CBS to NBC, from black and white to color, and from Alan Ludden as host to Robert Earle. Our competitors this time are Princeton University and tiny Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia; it's remembered aslo one of the most dramatic and famous contests in College Bowl history. 


As one might expect, there's more to see here than a simple nostalgia for old television. From the purely technical side, the latter show is, as you would expect, a more polished and compelling production. The addition of color makes the graphics pop, and the repeated focus on the clock, with the sweep second hand approaching zero, enhances the sense of urgency and drama in the cliffhanger ending.

Robert Earle was, in my opinion, a far more compelling choice as host than the slightly smarmy Ludden, who just can't resist calling attention to himself in the best tradition of game show hosts.* Earle never lets his role detract from that of the students, and unlike Ludden seems far more at ease with the academic nature of the questions. One gets the idea that Earle might have been able to answer a few of the questions himself, whereas Ludden comes across as more condescending, reminding you that he's the host, whether he knows the answers or not—kind of like he was on Password, come to think of it.

*Rather like the difference between Bill Cullen and, say, Richard Dawson.

The questions themselves are challenging enough on their own, let alone having to answer them quickly, on live television in front of a studio audience, and before someone on the other side buzzes in. I always feel fortunate when I can answer even one or two of them. True, you could make the argument that the knowledge required to win is too specific, not as relevant to modern life, but that makes sense only when you look at college as a vocational tool rather than what it originally was, a place where the individual's knowledge is burnished and the student himself comes out as a more well-rounded person.*

*In fact, this spawns an entirely new question: the role of a college education in modern society.  In an era when college degrees seem to be a requirement for all but the most menial jobs, with advanced degrees often preferred, have we gotten away from the original intent of higher education?  Should we revisit the difference between a vocational college and one specializing in liberal arts?  Do we put too much of a premium on college degrees, with the result a milieu of entitlement, debt and political indoctrination?  Interesting questions all, ones that can easily be considered in the context of television's portrayal through the years, from a program like College Bowl to series such as Halls of Ivy, Hank and The Paper Chase.

Furthermore, the eternal struggle over college has always been a staple of family dramas and sitcoms, particularly in the mid-part of the century, when so many first generation Americans were under pressure to become the first in their family to attend college.  At that point it was a mark not only of achievement but assimilation into the American way.  Even then the tension existed between parents who wanted their children to do better than they did, to get that degree and then become a professional, a doctor or a lawyer, and children who wanted to follow their hearts and be a mechanic, a singer or an actress; in later years, we'd see those same children rebel against the system and become dropouts, peace activists, or non-profit advocates, much to the consternation of their parents.  And except in the most frothy comedies, college is often portrayed as a struggle of pressure to achieve, measured against either the expectations of others or the student's own expectation.

In the end, do we perhaps see in television's portrayal of higher education an evolution in the depiction of college life, as the quest for knowledge becomes, instead, the quest for a better, higher-paying and more prestigious job?

Alas, probably a topic for another day.

And look at the students on College Bowl; my wife commented on how mature and poised they were, particularly the girls of Barnard. Cherry White*, for example, has a lot more moxie than people I've seen in the business world. Nerdish overtones, of course, but still very polished for college students. Even in 1966, when knowledge was becoming a weapon that students would use against the establishment, there's still something clean-cut and adult about the players. I remember my wife wondering, as we watched the episode, whether or not any of them wound up involved in campus riots or antiwar protests, or if any of the males died in Vietnam. The point is, would young people today be as poised, as adult, in a culture that seems to adore perpetual adolescence? Would they look as if they were headed for success, a cocktail party, or back to their parents' basements? (For that matter, would today's adults come across that way?) 

*Whose actual first name, by the way, was "Heritage."

According to one source, General Electric dropped their sponsorship of College Bowl due to that very college unrest, after which the show disappeared from weekly airwaves. If that's true, then it's a sure a sign as any of the cultural upheavals enveloping the country, and a reminder of how that manifests itself on television. I wonder if there could be any kind of backlash like that today, or if it will just be seen as entertainment by the niche audience that all of TV has become? 

Anyway, one thing's for sure: if Peyton Manning can't cut it, the producers can always turn to Aaron Rodgers. Right? TV  

This week in TV Guide: January 29, 1966

I'm generally not one to make hay of other people's misfortunes—at least not most of the time—but there's a line in Robert De Roos' cover story profile of Pat Crowley that shouts out for contextualization.

The actress, currently starring with Mark Miller in NBC's Please Don't Eat the Daisies, is talking about her marriage to attorney Ed Hookstratten. De Roos asks her if the marriage, now eight years long, will last now that she's working on a weekly series. "It sure is," she tells him. "We are Catholics and there is a little solidity there."

That sounded like such a refreshing attitude to me that I immediately went to Google, only to find that the Hookstrattens had divorced sometime in the 70s or 80s—Crowley remarried in 1986, to producer Andy Friendly.*

*Fun fact: Andy Friendly's father is legendary TV newsman Fred Friendly; his brother, David Friendly, was nominated for an Oscar in 2006 as producer of Little Miss Sunshine.

I hasten to say here that I have no knowledge of why Crowley and Hookstratten divorced*, and I don't want to play either a pop psychologist, a pop marriage counselor, or a pop theologian. After all, I haven't stayed at a Holiday Inn Express lately. But one of the many tragedies of the Catholic Church in the latter half of the 20th Century—particularly the post-Vatican II turmoil, which reached a peak in 1968 with Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae—is the breakdown of basic Catholic beliefs. By the late '60s, Catholic doctrine had become a smorgasbord; if you didn't like what one priest had to say on birth control, for example, you could shop around and find a priest who would readily sanction it. Similar situations existed for everything from premarital sex to divorce and remarriage to a whole host of previous elements of Catholic teaching that had rarely been questioned. Inevitably, this kind of confusion among the faithful led many to doubt the Church's sincerity, authority, what have you. Bottom line: no solidity.

*Hookstratten, Elvis Presley's personal attorney, represented The King in his divorce from Priscilla, which certainly suggests mixed feelings regarding divorce.

  
Again, I have no reason to think that this might have had any role to play in Pat Crowley's divorce from Ed Hookstratten. But I do think it's part of this blog's narrative to fit these kinds of things into the larger cultural environment. The 1960s were already a period of flux by now, and they were headed toward even more cataclysmic change. (Of course, considering the utter chaos of the Church today, the '60s look like a model of stability by comparison.) Understanding the climate of the times (even though the insufficient space here hardly scratches the surface) puts little moments like this into some sense of context. It even adds, I think, a note of poignancy. 

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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: Dinah Shore; puppet Topo Gigio; comic Jackie Vernon; the rock'n' rolling Four Tops; Les Feux Follets, Canadian folk dancers; guitarist José Feliciano; comic Dick Capri; Markworth and Mayana, trick bow-and-arrow act; and Army sergeant Barry Sadler, who sings "The Ballad of the Green Berets."  In a special film segment, Sir Laurence Olivier is seen in excerpts from his film of Shakespeare's Othello.
  
Palace: Host Arthur Godfrey presents comedian Sid Caesar; singer Abbe Lane; The Mamas and the Papas, rock 'n' roll group; comic Corbett Monica; the Berosinis, Czechoslovakian acrobats; and Les Apollos, balancing act.

Now, it's true that nothing could be finer than Dinah, and you can't beat Olivier doing Shakespeare (nor the beat of "The Ballad of the Green Berets"), but it's offset by The Old Readhead and and Sid Caesar, with a little help from Abbe Lane. I almost went with the Palace, but this time the only fair decision is to call it a Push.

Now, as sometimes occurs, it just so happens that we have access to another Palace episode in this week's issue; if you lived in LaCrosse, Wisconsin and were so inclined to tune to WKBT, Channel 8 (the NBC affiliate, but Western Wisconsin lacked an ABC affiliate at the time), you would have been able to catch last week's episode of Palace at 10:30 p.m. CT on Tuesday night. Fred Astaire hosts this night at the Palace making a rare TV appearance with dancer Barrie Chase. Guests include Mickey Rooney and his nightclub partner Bobby Van; British singer Petula Clark; the Nitwits, musical cutups; the Lenz Chimps; and comedian Ray Hastings.

Yes. It definitely does make for a better show. See?

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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. 

Mister Roberts started out life as a book, became an enormously successful Broadway play and movie, and has now made it to the small screen in a weekly series of its own on NBC. And Cleveland Amory has a suggestion for you: if you liked the book, play or movie, do not under any circumstances watch the series. "In fact you're probably better off not even reading this—it will just make you mad."

Mister Roberts—book, play, movie and series—tells the story of the men onboard the USS Reluctant, a naval cargo ship, during World War II. True, the ship performs a vital function, but it is far from the battle, and the executive officer, Doug Roberts, itches to see action—however, to his dismay, his transfer requests are never approved. All well and good, and one would think this, combined with the popularity of the various versions, would make for a decent series. One vital ingredient missing is, of course, the star; and in both the play and the movie, that star was Henry Fonda, and while the absense of Henry does not make the heart grow fonda*, even with 77 Sunset Strip's Roger Smith in the title role, Cleve acknowledges that the likeable Smith does grow on you. And Steve Harmon, who plays Ensign Pulver, has pretty big shoes to fill, (David Wayne on Broadway, Oscar winner Jack Lemmon in the movie) as does Richard X. Slattery, who takes over from James Cagney as Captain. But Harmon does well, and Slattery is at least equally funny. 

*I'll bet you thought Amory came up with that one, but no—I take the credit or the blame for it myself.

No, the cast isn't the problem here; there's more to it than that, something elemental about the story itself, as Amory shrewdly understands. The strength of the original story lies in the fact that these men are in war but not at war; they're apparently condemned, for the duration, to suffocating boredom, "all of the frustration and none of the action; all of the tensions and none of the release." Men with nothing else to do create their own dramas, and the ensuing interactions within that shipboard family—the incident of the captain's palm tree being the most famous—mean nothing without the attendant boredom as the backdrop. "And it was there—in the book, in the two-and-a-half hour play, in the two-hour movie. In the TV show it is not there. An hour's show might have had a chance. This half-hour job has none."

Recent episodes have given Amory hope that the producers might have figured out, if not the solution to their problems, at least a way to make them more bearable. It isn't the real Mister Roberts, Cleve notes, "but then, these days what is?"

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In the early days of this blog, I did a piece on the short-lived Sammy Davis, Jr. Show, which featured the oddity of its star having to sit out nearly a month's worth of shows immediately following the premiere, due to a no-compete clause. Seems that Sammy had done a special for ABC, and the terms of that contract prohibited him from appearing on any other network for the three weeks immediately preceding the show. The Sammy Davis, Jr. show was on NBC. You can, of course, see the problems coming a mile away.

Well, this is the week that Sammy and His Friends, the ABC special in question, airs, and he hangs out with a pretty cool bunch of people: Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Edie Adams and Joey Heatherton. It's on Tuesday night at 7:30 p.m., up against Red Skelton on CBS (with guests George Gobel and The Hollies) and Dr. Kildare on NBC.* As for Sammy's own show, it airs its fourth episode on Friday night, the third to feature a guest host—this week it's Sammy's old friend Jerry Lewis, who welcomes Peggy Lee, the comic Weire Brothers, singer Danny Costello, and The Skylarks. Debuting your own show and then having to follow it up with three weeks' worth of guest hosts doesn't seem to me to be a successful formula, but to each its own. I said it before and I'll say it again here: what a strange, strange situation.

*I wonder how NBC felt about all this? On the one hand, a ratings win for Sammy could bode well for the ratings of his NBC series; on the other, the network  probably wanted to see Kildare beat Red Skelton. Should such an absurd thing happen nowadays, I wonder if the network would consider airing a Kildare rerun in order to preserve its Davis investment?

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Sammy's show probably didn't stand much of a chance anyway; it's opposition was Hogan's Heroes and Gomer Pyle on CBS, The Addams Family and Honey West on ABC. But later on that Friday night, we'll see another oddity: Garry Moore on a network other than CBS.

Moore had been a fixture on the network since his radio show debuted in 1949; from 1950 on he'd had both morning and evening variety programs, as well as his long-running emcee duties on I've Got a Secret. But Moore's prime-time show had been cancelled by the network in 1964, after which he'd left Secret and the network. Now, a year and a half later, Moore's ready to come back. There's only one problem: CBS, to whom he's still under contract, doesn't want him. Or, to be precise, they don't want what he has to offer.

Moore acknowledges that the variety format he'd been so successful with has seen better days, and he's ready for something new and different. He thought he'd found the answer when CBS news chief Fred Friendly approached him about working on some public affairs programs, but the network's policy forbade entertainers from working in news or public affairs. In later years, Moore will talk with TV Guide about his desire to move into news and "people" programming, even becoming a news reporter, and his immense frustration at CBS's reluctance to see him in that light. You can see the seeds of that disappointment here, as Moore chafes at being paid "to sit around and do nothing." His exclusive contract with CBS, which prevents him from doing a series for any other network and requires him to give CBS first refusal on any one-shot special, still has nine years to run. He's asked the network to release him from the contract, but they refuse to do so. His only recourse is to sue, an option he says he'd consider.

In the meantime, an agency came up with an idea right up Moore's alley—Garry Moore's People Poll, a special in which he gets to travel around the country interviewing ordinary people and asking them basic questions: Do you kiss your wife when you get up in the morning? Are you stricter than your own parents? Are you satisfied with your life—and what changes would you make if you could start over? Things like that. Per the provisions of the contract, the show is first offered to CBS, which turns it down. So he turned elsewhere. "We were delighted," Moore says, "to find a more flexible policy at ABC." It airs Friday at 9:00 p.m.

Earlier in the article, Moore mentions a project he and Jay Ward are working on for CBS, a comedy-variety program. It debuts in the fall, and is quickly wiped out by Bonanza. Moore will eventually come back to regular television as host of the syndicated To Tell the Truth (with CBS's approval) in 1969, and will host it until 1977, after which, suffering from throat cancer, he'll retire for good, dying in 1993. It is, really, kind of a sad story for a man who was once one of the biggest stars on television.

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There are still a few days we haven't looked at yet, so let's get to it. Sir John Gielgud stars in part two of Ages of Man (CBS, Sunday, 3:30 p.m.), in which he gives dramatic readings from Shakespeare's works. CBS split the original two-hour version of Gielgud's one-man Broadway show into two parts and broadcast them on Sunday afternoons, presumably because they worried viewers wouldn't be able to sit still long enough to listen to a longer show, and wouldn't tune in if it were on prime-time. At least they showed it at all; I doubt they would today. 

Andy Williams and Friend.

Monday night it's the Golden Globe Awards, presented on The Andy Williams Show (NBC, 8:00 p.m.) and hosted by Andy himself. The Golden Globes have always had something of a checkered past, with a longstanding reputation for awarding performances based on suspicious criteria. (See: Pia Zadora.) At this point very few nominees appeared for the show, and those who did were invariably the winners, which led more than one person to suspect that the only way to induce stars to show up was to promise they would win; in 1968, the FCC ruled that this practice constituted "mis[leading] the public as to how the winners were determined," which in turn led NBC to drop coverage of the show until 1975.

Wednesday, Eddie Albert does double duty; on his own Green Acres (CBS. 8:00 p.m.), he falls through the roof while attempting to put up a TV antenna; I hate to see anyone injured while trying to promote television. Then, after a half-hour break for The Dick Van Dyke Show, Albert returns as a guest on The Danny Kaye Show (9:00 p.m., CBS), where he's joined by singer Morgana King. If that doesn't do it for you, switch to Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater (NBC, 8:00 p.m.), as Jane Wyman makes a rare network TV appearance in "When Hell Froze," a drama that co-stars Leslie Nielsen and Martin Milner. 

 
And on Thursday night, NBC's Hallmark Hall of Fame presents a rerun of "The Magnificent Yankee" (7:30 p.m.), a biography of the Washington years of Supreme Count justice Oliver Wendell Holmes starring the husband-and-wife team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, two of the greats of the theater. "The Magnificent Yankee" won five Emmy awards when it was originally broadcast in 1965, including Best Actor (Lunt), Best Actress (Fontanne) and Best Drama. (As you can see, this is back when Hallmark cared enough to show the very best.) It also features Eduard Franz, Robert Emhardt and James Daly. 

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John Schneider, president of CBS, had this to say at the recent convention of the Association of National Advertisers:

By 1975 virtually every television home in the United States will be capable of receiving programming from six times as many sources as today!. . .
By 1975 it looks as if three out of four homes will own at least two sets. . . No longer will every member of the family be forced to look at the same program.  Viewing will become fractionalized and selective. . . 
The teen-ager, the intellectual, the tired businessman, the housewife - each will be able to tune in the particular kind of entertainment, information, music or discussion that suits his or her respective desires.

Now, I don't know how things were by 1975, but his predictions become very interesting when viewed in light of today's cultural norms. For example, every home today has at least six times as many programming sources, but Schneider couldn't have anticipated how they would shake out. Anyone can stream video on devices from laptops and tablets to iPhones; they can subscribe to services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney+ and HBO Max that allow them to catch original programming as well as classics; they can binge-watch an entire season of a series over a weekend if they want, or watch their favorites whenever they choose; they can even utilize old school medial like DVDs. Cord-cutting has become commonplace, and cable subscriptions continue to plummet. 

But even more, technology has forever changed the impact of television viewing. Because people can watch whatever they want whenever they want, the shared experience of watching television has virtually disappeared, except for the Super Bowl. Schneider did indeed foresee this kind of individual viewing, with the concurrent result that programs no longer had to appeal to a broad audience, but could he have predicted the kind of Balkanization that resulted?

In "As We See It," TV Guide wonders about this vision of the future. The author (probably Merrill Panitt) looks at the current state of television in Los Angeles, where numerous multi-TV homes and ten stations have merely produced programming "given over to hundreds of old movies and old TV series." And isn't that what we have today? I've made this complaint before so I won't belabor the point, but who can tell TNT from TBS from USA from FX from Bravo from Sundance from Hallmark? What's the difference between A&E and History and TLC and Discovery?

Reality programming of one kind or another dominates networks as diverse as E! and HGTV MTV is all about lifestyle, and news networks spend their time on opinionated shoutfests geared toward satisfying their particular ideological niche. Cultural programming, which used to be seen at least occasionally on some of these networks, is all but gone. And overnight hours (on both cable and OTA stations) is dominated by informercials and replays of previously broadcast shows. Is this really what the future was supposed to give us?

Panitt compares Schneider's view of TV's future to the state of radio in 1966, "which long since has become fractionalized (several sets per home) and selective (there's a choice of many stations everywhere). In most areas these days, once you've heard the news, radio offers records, talking disc jockeys and very little else." Is TV today any more diverse than that?

TV Guide's conclusion is this: "Improvement and variety in programming will not just happen in television any more than they happened in radio. There must be planning. There must be direction. So far we have neither." I'll end by asking the question: is there any evidence that television executives are doing any planning today? Or are they simply waiting for things to happen? TV  

Around the dial

Some interesting food for thought this week - at least I thought it was interesting, but as always YMMV.

In his article about the current series Mozart in the Jungle, Brian Phillips at The Ringer makes the comment that "TV shows at this moment are so often interested in participating in a larger cultural discourse," something that has frustrated me no end. Yes, it's true that my interest in classic television extends to what it says about the culture at the time it was made, but that is as often due to its inadvertent role as a time capsule, and our retroactive analysis of what it all meant. Phillips looks at a specific episode of Girls, for example, "the way it plugged into an existing conversation about male power and the nature of consent."

This is a good segue to David's recent piece at Comfort TV, in which he looks back at the Brady Bunch episode in which Marcia tries to join an organization that's a thinly-disguised version of the Boy Scouts. You might be reminded of that episode in light of the news (old news, now - must be at least a couple of weeks ago) that the Boy Scouts will now accept girls. David's point - one which he's made in the past, and quite well - is that "classic TV – even those series that are deemed the most simplistic by our ‘sophisticated’ modern standards, can do more than just provide 30 or 60 minutes of entertaining diversion. They teach us something about the times in which they were made – and might even teach us something about the times we live in now." The Brady Bunch does that in this episode; Marcia isn't trying to make some sort of grand political statement, not really. She just wants to prove that "women should have the same opportunities if they have the requisite skills." Nowadays, says David, the same episode might be interpreted to mean "that everyone should be allowed to do everything on their terms, regardless of any preexisting criterion." A bit of a difference there, don't you think? The point is that sometimes (most times?) you can make your point without turning your program into some kind of grand political manifesto. Just let the action develop organically - it will do the rest.

Elsewhere, at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Ivan reviews Where's My Fortune Cookie?, Phil Proctor's autobiography, in which we learn what it was like being a part of the great Firesign Theatre group. Having mentioned Bob Cummings a time or two, I was particularly amused by Phil's recollection of working with Cummings in the theater. I won't spoil that for you - go over there and read the whole thing.

At Made for TV Mayhem, Amanda interviews Lisa Holmes from Music Box Films/Doppleganger Releasing, regarding the release of made-for-TV movies on Blu-Ray, including Summer of Fear, with Lee Purcell and Linda Blair. Amanda's so right - the telefilm is a genre that continues to be interesting; for the many bad ones that may have come along, it's clear that the filmmakers were really trying to do something with this type of movie.

If you like The Twilight Zone, you're in luck, as The Twilight Zone Vortex's Jordan gives us a list of the best TZ podcasts. It can be hard knowing where to start with all the casts out there; getting a roadmap from someone who knows what he's talking about helps.

Speaking of both Amanda and podcasts, you won't want to miss this week's Eventually Supertrain, in which she and Dan discuss two late-'80s slasher movies, Iced and Moonstalker. (Nice segue, don't you think? I'm full of them this week.)

At Cult TV Blog, John brings up the British children's show The Feathered Serpent as a jumping-off point for a discussion of children's TV in general, and how it works (or doesn't work) as a means of imparting knowledge on its young viewers.

I really like Jodie's entry at Garroway at Large this week, not just because of its discussion of Dave's Wide Wide World program, but because it reminds us of what a wonder television was in the beginning, and how we could still be wowed by this big, wonderful world and the technology that brought it to us.

Terry Teachout taps into the wonderful Archive of American Television for this interview with composer Fred Steiner, who talks about composing the immortal theme to Perry Mason.

If you have any others we should know about, let me know. Otherwise, back tomorrow with some more fun. Right? Right!   TV  

This week in TV Guide: October 21, 1961

Do commercials actually have to be offensive? According to Martin Abramson's article, there's a school of thought that says this is precisely the case. (Then again, there was a school of thought that believed Hello, Larry was a good idea, too.)

What we have, apparently, is a situation akin to that which we find in political commercials today - namely, that obnoxious commercials are often the most effective ones. Commercials for pharmaceuticals generate the most complaints, but as Robert Robb, executive VP of the Reach, McClinton ad agency, points out, it's a case where you "sell through irritation." "When people suffer an attack of gas or a splitting pain, they run out for the remedy whose TV message they associate with their pain or discomfort. Some commercials - like the one for a headache tablet that had hammers banging in the brain - actually give many people the headache that the tablet will subsequently cure." Nice work if you can get it.

Rosser Reeves is seen as the hottest new voice in the ad business, and he's recently made waves with his comment that originality is "the most dangerous word in advertising." For Reeves, nothing succeeds like hitting the viewers over the head with the same commercial over and over and over again. (Now we know who to thank for the invention of the mute button.) It's not a universally-accepted thesis; Sylvia Dowling, VP of Benton and Bowles, says that the reason clever commercials often have bad track records is "because you can't sell on entertainment alone." No matter how fresh, how clever, how humorous the commercial, you have to be "getting across one strong simple selling idea in each commercial" in order to move the product.

Charles Kebbe, who runs a school for commercial performers, explains how the philosophy of people like Rosser Reeves came to be. Originally, he says, TV commercials were pretty clever. "But then as costs zoomed, the print-minded and print-trained agency heads and sponsor representatives too control of everything, and now 90 percent of the commercials you see are wrong for this unique, visual medium. They're static and they're as imitative as rabbits. The people turning them out are scared to take chances. And most of the performers they hire to deliver commercial messages are peas-in-a-pod, model-pretty girls and all-American boys who have no conviction or interest in what they're doing."

There is hope, however; CBS has started to crack down on the "more odious commercials," and the American TV Commercials Festival has started handing out awards to the best commercials of the year. Referring to those commercials for antacid and headaches, one ad agency executive says that because of steps like these, "There'll be fewer stomach arrows and explosions in people's heads in the future." And yet...

Let's look back at today's political commercials again for a moment. One of the comments that jumps out in this article is that the most effective commercials are those in which people remember the name of the product. "If their recall doesn't indicate a sales message is getting through, the commercial is dropped." We know everyone hates those negative political attack ads, and yet polls consistently indicate they're the most effective form of advertising when it comes to getting across a candidate's message.

People tend to give more negative feedback than positive; they're more likely to write a letter of complaint than one of praise. Perhaps, then, Rosser Reeves is right - the more irritated the viewer, the more likely they are to remember the message. And if they remember that it's the other candidate they're supposed to be irritated at, then you're home free.

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One of Ed Sullivan's first great on-air challenges came from Steve Allen, who left Tonight to take over an NBC variety show which, at the beginning, aired opposite Ed. It didn't run as long as Ed's, of course, but then Allen said his goal was never to conquer Ed, but to coexist with him, which he did for three seasons. Let's see who gets the best of the contest this week.

Sullivan: Ed's guests include Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker, who present songs and scenes from their musical comedy "Do Re Mi"; comedy teams Wayne and Shuster and Antone and Curtiss; singer Matt Monro; and the winners of the Harvest Moon Ball dance. .

Allen: Vocalists Jennie Smith and Jack Jones and a group of singing comics called the Characters (Charles Hunt, Carmen and Champ Baccari, Johnny Rico and Jack Kent) are Steve's guests.

This is kind of hard to tell, because aside from Jack Jones I don't really know any of Allen's guests. However, Matt Monro had a long and successful careeer; bet you'll recognize him from his 1963 hit "From Russia With Love," from the movie of the same title. Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker ought to be able to carry Ed past the finish line, so the verdict goes to  Sullivan.

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In sports, television coverage of the 1961-62 NBA season tips off on Saturday as the New York Knickerbockers take on the Philadelphia Warriors. The Warriors coach, Frank McGuire, came to Philadelphia from North Carolina, where his Tar Heels won the 1957 NCAA championship by defeating Kansas, led by Wilt Chamberlain. Chamberlain is now the center for McGuire's Warriors, and in March of the following year he'll score 100 points for Philadelphia against the Knicks. For the year, Wilt averages 50 points a game, the all-time single season record. It's interesting that NBC starts their basketball coverage in October; with rare exceptions, it will become customary for the networks to wait until January to begin with the weekly broadcasts.

Football's in full swing, and you can take your pick of games. On Saturday, ABC has future Heisman winner Ernie Davis leading Syracuse against Penn State (Penn State wins 14-10), while Sunday's pro games include the once and future Los Angeles Rams playing the New York Giants at Yankee Stadium on CBS, the Cleveland Browns playing the Pittsburgh Steelers on NBC, and the AFL game between the Houston Oilers and Dallas Texans on ABC.

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We haven't had a starlet for awhile, so what better than to go across the ocean to get one? It's Ulla Jacobsson, who will be making her American acting debut on Wednesday night's episode of Naked City. It isn't her first time acting, though; she started off on the stage before moving into Ingmar Bergman's stock company, appearing in Smiles of a Summer Night.* It was that performance that attracted the attention of Naked City producer Bert Leonard, who asked her to come to America just to do this one episode. She's known for her "sensitive, subtle quality," which proves particularly effective in her role as a maid who conspires with her boss (David Janssen) to murder his wife (Constance Ford).

*According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, she's perhaps best-known  internationally for her nude scenes in the 1951 movie One Summer of Happiness. How appropriate that she'd be appearing in Naked City, don't you think?

After that, there are other roles, but she never does make it big in America (if she even wanted to), and she dies of bone cancer at the painfully young age of 53.

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Mrs. J.L. Waybourn, of Farmington, New Mexico, writes to remind TV Guide that "there are still many people in these United States who find such words as "hell" and "damn" used in television shows objectionable - especially coming from teen-agers as on last week's Bus Stop."

The program to which Mrs. Waybourn refers is based on the 1956 romantic comedy starring Marilyn Monroe, which in turn was (very) loosely based on the Tony-nominated 1955 play by William Inge. Bus Stop the television series, which debuted October 1 on ABC, boasts Roy Huggins (The Fugitive, Run For Your Life) as creator and producer, stars Marilyn Maxwell, and credits Inge as a script consultant, which may or may not mean anything.

Regardless of its pedigree, though, there's no doubt the series has created quite a stir. The network ws "deluged" with protests, so much so that network president Ollie Treyz banns all such words from future network programming. Typical of the letters is another that found its way to TV Guide, from Judy Vogel of Rochester, NY, who found Bus Stop "sadly disappointing. I shall never be able to understand why I cannot watch an adult program without hearing language like "damn" and "hell." Some of our writers must indeed be in a very serious situation if they can find no better way to get their ideas across to an audience than by the use of this coarse language." The simple answer to Ms. Vogel's question, according to Huggins, is that you can't watch an adult program without hearing that kind of language because that's the way adults talk. "The words . . . are genuine and realistic," he tells TV Guide, "but they are not essential for adult drama at all."

I think Huggins' last point is the crucial one. Quite soon the same type of question will be asked by movies, only there it will pertain to nudity rather than profanity. The essence is the same, though: is it essential to the story? Starting with the 1964 film The Pawnbroker, Hollywood's Production Code will begin to grapple with the situation; by the end of the decade, the Code is gone altogether, replaced with a ratings system that acknowledges that there is in fact a time and place for profanity, nudity, and violence in movies. Eventually, the debate will move to extremities; the words in question are no longer "hell" and "damn," but "s***" and "f***," and many of the same objections will arise, to be met with the same answers.

I completely agree with Ms. Vogel in that the use of profanity can often be seen as the mark of a lazy writer, just as nudity is, far often than not, used for gratuitous titillation. The fact remains, sad though it may be, that one has only to stand on the corner to hear language far worse than what most television shows contain today. For that matter, most of us probably hear it at work.

I don't know how old either of these women were, but one has to wonder if they lived to see the works of Steven Bochco, or Martin Scorsese, or HBO, and what they though of it.

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On Saturday, one of Ernie Kovacs' lesser-remembered programs, Silents Please, presents the first part of D.W. Griffith's 1916 spectacular "Intolerance." I can't imagine condensing even part of this movie to a half-hour, but there you go. Kovacs doesn't do much more than introduce each program, and considering the tax problems he was known to have, I suspect he might have done this for the money more than any love of silent films. It's the last show of the series, at any rate. Here's a sample:


On Sunday, we have Car 54, Where Are You, which stars this week's cover boys, Fred Gwyne and Joe E. Ross, and the aforementioned Bus Stop, which had better not have any swear words tonight, dammit.

Monday you can catch an episode from a Robert Young series that doesn't work - Window on Main Street (8:30 p.m. ET, CBS), in which Young plays an author writing about the people he meets in his small hometown. It's 34 episodes and out, allowing Young to go to medical school and change his name to Marcus Welby. Also, what was probably a provocative episode of Ben Casey, in which brilliant young surgeon George C. Scott hides the fact that he's also a drug addict.

On Tuesday, Milton Berle makes a rare dramatic appearance on The Dick Powell Show (9:00 p.m., NBC), playing a blackjack dealer who finds himself badly in need of money for his daughter's operation. I've seen Berle in a few dramatic roles; like many comedians, he's really quite good. His biggest obstacle is getting you to take him seriously; once you're by that, his character portrayals are often powerful. After that, on CBS's Westinghouse Presents (which sounds a lot like Westinghouse's Studio One), Ralph Bellamy, Earl Holliman and Dina Merrill star in "The Dispossessed," the story of American Indians hoping to live outside their reservation.

Wednesday gives us dueling cartoons, starting with The Alvin Show on CBS at 7:30 p.m.; in this week's episode, "David Seville and the Chipmunks are shopping for a foreign car. THey find one that an ostrich has mistaken for its egg - and is desperately trying to hatch." If that's not to your liking, try Top Cat on ABC at 8:30; "Benny the Ball is 'discovered' when a famous impresario named Gutenbad hears him play the violin. That is, Gutenbad things he hears Benny play - actually the music comes from a nearby record shop."

Eliot Ness and the rest of The Untouchables (10:00 p.m., ABC) go after heroin dealers on Thursday's episode; Martin Balsam stars as one of the pushers, while the incomparable Bruce Gordon probably steals the episode as Frank Nitti.

On Friday, The Flintstones (ABC, 8:30 p.m.) parodies The Untouchables with an episode called "The Soft Touchables," in which Fred and Barney go into the detective business. What could possibly go wrong? If you like music, it's not likely you can do better than The Bell Telephone Hour at 10:00 p.m. on NBC. The theme is trios, and to prove it we have Benny Goodman and his jazz trio, the three McGuire Sisters, the Kingston Trio, folk singers Margaret Mercier, Eric Hyrst and Vernique Landary, and opera stars Phyllis Curtin, Nicolai Gedda and Theodor Uppman.

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And finally, Jack Paar has announced he's leaving The Tonight Show next March after a five-year run. He'll be back in the fall, however, with a once-a-week hour-long prime time variety show, which plays much as his late-night program. Unmentioned is the $64,000 question: who will be his replacement?


Thanks to Jon Hobden for this week's issue! TV