Recently I was browsing through a bookstore that I’ve been known to frequent from time to time, doing what I usually do when I’m in a bookstore: looking for television shows on DVD. To be clear, that’s not all I do in a bookstore; I look for books as well, and not just books about TV. (After all, if you're not watching classic television, the next best thing is reading about classic television.) However, considering people apparently don’t read much anymore, you’re apt to find all kinds of different things in bookstores nowadays, including jigsaw puzzles.
On this particular trip, I saw one puzzle that billed itself as a booklover’s puzzle, with various sayings and mottoes pronouncing the joy of reading. One of them, though, caught my attention. It said, “Kill Your TV.” Setting aside the fact that your television isn’t a living, breathing thing (Alexa notwithstanding), this seemed unduly harsh to me. I mean, I understand the sentiment behind it: there’s a natural tendency for people to look at television (or video games, or movies) as the enemy of reading, as if the whole thing was some type of zero-sum game, with us all being lulled into a form of somnambulism through the aphrodisiac of mindless viewing. (Of course, if we really were somnambulists, we wouldn’t be couch potatoes, but we’ll let that slide for awhile.) And I'll admit I've been tempted to impart destruction on my television a time or two hundred, but that usually has to do with the banality of what I'm watching, not the medium itself.
So I’ll grant you the possibility, but it seems to me that if you’re predisposed to sit on a comfy couch starring inertly at a lighted screen, whether it’s your TV, your laptop, your phone, or something else, then you’ve got a problem to begin with, one that has to do with neither television nor books. We used to call this “sloth,” which has since been replaced with “lazy bum,” but the point is the same; if you’re so inclined to begin with, you’re probably not going to pick up a volume of Aristophanes, or even Danielle Steele, just because someone tells you to turn off the electronics.
Setting up this false dichotomy, this zero-sum with television and books as polar ends of a magnet, is unfortunate for two reasons: first, because it reinforces this snobbish idea that television is for some reason not deserving of serious consideration as a creative form (something I'm constantly fighting against); and second, because both really serve the same purpose: to augment the quality of one’s life. As you probably know, when it comes to the number of hours of television I’ve watching in my lifetime—especially during my adolescence—I consider myself second to none. And yet I never saw television and books as competing for my attention. Often, after watching something on TV, I’d find myself, in the words of the old CBS campaign, wanting to “read more about it.”*
*And, lest we forget, even in the early days of TV, when many were worrying about its negative effect on children, some teachers and librarians were reporting an increase in children reading more about the things they were seeing on TV.
Over the years, I’ve stocked my shelves with volumes on subjects ranging from the Titanic to Howard Hughes to space exploration to politics, all because of something I saw on television. Likewise, I’ve found hours of pleasure watching programs that I sought out because of something I’d read, with the opportunity to learn more, to see for myself what the author had written about. (And of course it helps when one has the ability, as I do, to watch TV and read at the same time.)
The point is that reading and watching television exist as symbiotic forms of media. They both provide the opportunity to be educated, entertained, and enlightened. That old aphorism I keep pulling out about how television can’t be all dessert applies to books as well; a steady diet of romance novels and cheap detective thrillers isn’t likely to do much more for you than constantly watching sitcoms and reality shows. True, it might make you a little more literate, or more than a little more if you’re reading Chandler or Hammett, but a discriminating lineup of television shows and books can work together to make you a more well-rounded person.
You can learn about the history of ancient Greece, or learn how to build a sunroom for your house. You can read a biography of Mozart, or watch—and listen to—one of his operas. You can cheer for your team on the weekend, and during the week find out how that team’s owners are fleecing the public. Anthony Bourdain and Eugene Fodor may no longer be with us, but their works still have the ability to take us to other lands, and Carl Sagan can take us right out of the universe, in either medium. They can even encourage you to contemplation. (It’s true that there are a lot of bad things out there, both on television and in books, so you need to make sure your choices enrich your own personal code of ethics and morals, but you can say that about any form of entertainment or education.)
So, as someone with a foot in each camp, I urge book lovers to show television some love as well. It’s not an either-or proposition; we’re creatures of images as well as words. And as for those who keep throwing potshots at TV—well, that’s little more than being a couch potato of the mind. TV
Does anyone care about the World Series anymore? More to the point of this site, does anyone watch it anymore? The first three games of this year’s series between Texas and Arizona were three of the four least-viewed World Series games in history, with Monday’s Game 3 the rock-bottom lowest of all time. Granted, the two games were still the most-watched sporting events of the weekend, and that’s a story in itself; witness this report on how sports fans are increasingly having trouble finding the games they want to watch, what with how they’re all spread out on different services—completely unlike the days of classic TV, I might add.
Be that as it may, there’s still something kind of sad about how irrelevant the World Series appears to have become, and this from someone who stopped watching baseball a decade ago. Are there others like me, others in such significant numbers as to cause these plummeting ratings? (Others like me? You’d better hope not.) Is it that young people consume sports differently, or haven’t been brought up as fans of the sport? And don't forget the role that baseball's management has played in all this, from a tin-eared commissioner to greedy owners and players, the sport seems to have done everything it can to alienate long-time fans while simultaneously failing to attract younger viewers. (And why should I even be writing about baseball on November 1?)
I've heard it said that baseball has become a regional rather than national sport, and that it's still popular at that level, but it's hardly part of the national zeitgeist anymore, and I think that's unfortunate. I know times have changed; there's very little about pop culture than hasn't changed in the last couple of decades. But that doesn't mean we can't mourn its passing, does it? TV
Xere's a little class to liven up your Wednesday—a hilarious spoof of the opera Pagliacci by Sid Caesar and his merry band of crazies, as seen on NBC's Caesar's Hour broadcast of October 10, 1955. Don't worry; you don't have to understand opera to appreciate it; you don't even have to speak Italian. Sid certainly didn't.
The thing of it is, I don't know that Caesar was considered a highbrow, elitist comedian. Literate and intelligent to be sure, but at the same time there's a lot of slapstick involved in his bits. As well, you probably remember his famous send-up of This Is Your Lifethat he did on his previous series, Your Show of Shows with Imogene Coca, which indicates his proclivity to satirize conventions with which the audience would be familiar.
And that brings me to my point, which is that the costume, the pathos of the story, all the trappings we see in this skit—they're all as iconic to opera as the image of a large woman with pigtails, a horned helmet, and a breastplate and shield. What's more, they're images that people know even if they don't know much of anything else about opera. The television audience—the "middlebrow" audience of which Terry Teachout frequently writes—would have been expected to recognize these images, to know the gist of what Caesar is lampooning. Far from being incomprehensible, the skit was written and performed in order to entertain, to make people laugh: and that entertainment quotient depends on a general familiarity with the premise. The television audience of the mid-'50s would have had that familiarity. Would mainstream audiences today? I doubt it. That's unfortunate; not only do we lose a good amount of comedy because of that, the topical comedy we do get comes from an incredibly fragmented society, targeted not to a general audience (I don't think such a thing exists anymore) but to a very small niche. And today's niche for opera humor—well, you've heard the one about the number of angels on the head of a pin, right?
The writeup of this skit at by the person who posted it at YouTube is very good; take a minute to read it if you can, as it shows just how it matches up with the actual opera. And if you're interested in seeing the actual Pagliacci, you can see it in its entirety here—it's a short opera. TV
Recently I was browsing through a bookstore that I’ve been known to frequent from time to time, doing what I usually do when I’m in a bookstore: looking for television shows on DVD. To be clear, that’s not all I do in a bookstore; I look for books as well, and not just books about TV. However, considering people apparently don’t read much anymore, you’re apt to find all kinds of different things in bookstores nowadays, including jigsaw puzzles.
On this particular trip, I saw one puzzle that billed itself as a booklover’s puzzle, with various sayings and mottoes pronouncing the joy of reading. One of them, though, caught my attention. It said, “Kill Your TV.” Setting aside the fact that your television isn’t a living, breathing thing (Alexa notwithstanding), this seemed unduly harsh to me. I mean, I understand the sentiment behind it: there’s a natural tendency for people to look at television (or video games, or movies) as the enemy of reading, as if the whole thing was some type of zero-sum game, with us all being lulled into a form of somnambulism through the aphrodisiac of mindless viewing. (Of course, if we really were somnambulists, we wouldn’t be couch potatoes, but we’ll let that slide for awhile.) And I'll admit I've been tempted to impart destruction on my television a time or two hundred, but that usually has to do with the banality of what I'm watching, not the medium itself.
So I’ll grant you the possibility, but it seems to me that if you’re predisposed to sit on a comfy couch starring inertly at a lighted screen, whether it’s your TV, your laptop, your phone, or something else, then you’ve got a problem to begin with, one that has to do with neither television nor books. We used to call this “sloth,” which has since been replaced with “lazy bum,” but the point is the same; if you’re so inclined to begin with, you’re probably not going to pick up a volume of Aristophanes, or even Danielle Steele, just because someone tells you to turn off the electronics.
Setting up this false dichotomy, this zero-sum with television and books as polar ends of a magnet, is unfortunate for two reasons: first, because it reinforces this snobbish idea that television is for some reason not deserving of serious consideration as a creative form (something I'm constantly fighting against); and second, because both really serve the same purpose: to augment the quality of one’s life. As you probably know, when it comes to the number of hours of television I’ve watching in my lifetime—especially during my adolescence—I consider myself second to none. And yet I never saw television and books as competing for my attention. Often, after watching something on TV, I’d find myself, in the words of the old CBS campaign, wanting to “read more about it.” Over the years, I’ve stocked my shelves with volumes on subjects ranging from the Titanic to Howard Hughes to space exploration to politics, all because of something I saw on television. Likewise, I’ve found hours of pleasure watching programs that I sought out because of something I’d read, with the opportunity to learn more, to see for myself what the author had written about. (And of course it helps when one has the ability, as I do, to watch TV and read at the same time.)
The point is that reading and watching television exist as complimentary forms of media. They both provide the opportunity to be educated, entertained, and enlightened. That old aphorism I keep pulling out about how television can’t be all dessert applies to books as well; a steady diet of romance novels and cheap detective thrillers isn’t likely to do much more for you than constantly watching sitcoms and reality shows. True, it might make you a little more literate, or more than a little more if you’re reading Chandler or Hammett, but a discriminating lineup of television shows and books can work together to make you a more well-rounded person. You can learn about the history of ancient Greece, or learn how to build a sunroom for your house. You can read a biography of Mozart, or watch—and listen to—one of his operas. You can cheer for your team on the weekend, and during the week find out how that team’s owners are fleecing the public. Anthony Bourdain and Eugene Fodor may no longer be with us, but their works still have the ability to take us to other lands, and Carl Sagan can take us right out of the universe, in either medium. They can even encourage you to contemplation. (It’s true that there are a lot of bad things out there, both on television and in books, so you need to make sure your choices compliment your own personal code of ethics and morals, but you can say that about any form of entertainment or education.)
So, as someone with a foot in each camp, I urge book lovers to show television some love as well. It’s not an either-or proposition; we’re creatures of images as well as words. And as for those who keep throwing potshots at TV—well, that’s little more than being a couch potato of the mind. TV
We all know that television is nothing if not derivative. From the beginning of the industry, successful programming has bred copycats; at the outset, it was Westerns, police dramas and private eyes, while in recent decades we've been deluged with shows about nothing (Seinfeld), shows about friends who all seem to live next to each other (Friends), shows about strangers thrown together (The Real World), singers trying to make it big (American Idol), and so on. Most of the time, the imitations are just that, pale knockoffs of the original, and many of them fail miserably. Sometimes, as was the case after the wave of shows imitating National Lampoon's Animal House, they all bomb.
Using this as a starting point, let's consider an intriguing article that appeared recently at The Ringer. The premise, based on Danny Boyle's upcoming movie Yesterday: what if the Beatles had never existed? Would another group have picked up the slack? Would rock music have evolved differently? Would their music still be successful if it were introduced today? It's an interesting exercise, the kind of question that fans love to hash out for hours in a restaurant while the server gives them dark sideways looks, or late night on social media. (Hint, hint!)
(There's a TV angle to this as well; how might The Ed Sullivan Show, for example, have been impacted? The Fab Four's four Sullivan appearances not only created a sensation, they ushered in an alliance between Sullivan and some of the biggest rock acts of the day, geared to appeal to younger viewers. Would this still have been the case if the Beatles never had been, or had this ship already sailed the night Ed welcomed Elvis to the stage?)
Anyway, here's the question before the court, and I'd like to open it up to all of you. Which TV show's absence, in your opinion, would have had the greatest impact on television's history, and on pop culture's history as well? Dragnet? I Love Lucy? All in the Family? Monday Night Football? Survivor? And what is it about this show that changes everything if you wipe it from our collective memory banks? Television is an enormously influential medium; there's hardly a corner of American culture that hasn't been touched by it. Surely the absence of a given show might have enormous ramifications on how the future evolved.
So fill in the blank, as Match Game might have put it: "How would television be different if _________ had never existed?" Use the comments section, and tell us why you feel that way. The possibilities are endless! TV
For some reason—because I seldom remember having watched it when I was growing up—I found myself immersed in watching this clip from American Bandstand. It's an episode from the end of 1967, and it serves as a fascinating snapshot of the time. For instance, we learn that a coat and tie are still acceptable dance clothes for young men, at least when you're dancing on television. I suspect we won't be seeing that many more years.
And look at the songs in the top 40. Yes, "Light My Fire" by The Doors is #1 (at least according to AB, but there's also Frank Sinatra (albeit with help from daughter Nancy, singling "Something Stupid"), Aretha Franklin demanding "Respect," The Seekers looking for "Georgy Girl," and songs from Bobby Vee, Lulu, Frankie Valli, and Bobbie Gentry. In fact, there's just about every kind of genre listed there that you could ask for in 1967, and you wouldn't see anything remotely that eclectic in 2018. It's an astonishing commentary not only on the music industry, but on how Balkanized we've all become. If you listened to a Top 40 radio station in 1967, this kind of mix wouldn't have been surprising at all—in fact, you could probably see it most weeks on The Ed Sullivan Show. In today's world where we're our own programmers, our own storytellers, the author of our own lives—well, it's no wonder that the country's in the shape that it's in, when we have so little in common. No wonder loneliness is becoming a public health problem.
I don't know why I didn't think to dive into these archives before; Bandstand offers an excellent sample (albeit perhaps a unique one) of American pop culture at any given time. Here's a snippet of the show. "Fascinating" is a good word for it—after all, Mr. Spock has made that a very trendy word.
Here's another timeless headline for you: why television turns off college students – and vice versa. Today, we’d ascribe this phenomenon to cord-cutting, streaming, game-playing. In a way, we’ve now come full-circle, to the first generations to not really live with television since – well, since the before World War II, I suppose. The Boomers would all know it well, would grow up and grow old with it, and so you’d really have to look at the generation that died out in the ‘50s, perhaps the early ‘60s, to find people who didn’t really know TV.
Until now.
This week we have part one of a five-part series by Neil Hickey, whom TV Guide often turned to when they wanted a serious article, and since we’ve only got part one here, his analysis is going to necessarily be incomplete. But that hasn’t stopped us before, so let’s see what the problem is.
It isn’t necessarily what you think it might be. In 1971, one of “the most dangerous problems” facing America, according to pollsters, is campus unrest.* With the nation still in the throws of Vietnam, and student protests frequently ending in violence, is it any wonder that Americans harbor concerns about college campuses? “The lines of communication between students and the adult population are almost nonexistent,” writes Hickey, and the divide has caused consternation for groups ranging from “most parents, to law enforcers, to many in the blue-collar class who never had the opportunity of attending college, and to large segments of the press, including television.”
*The previous spring it had been rated the most dangerous problem, ahead of Vietnam, crime, inflation, racial unrest, the environment, and everything else.
Indeed, in many ways this divide resembles the one existing today, although we use different terms to describe it: “undesirables vs. social justice warriors” might be one way of doing so. In fact, with one exception the battle lines, if you want to call them that, are arrayed on almost exactly the same fault line. That one exception, I think, is television. Back in 1971, TV newsmen saw the protesting students as “snobbish elitists with a ‘line of goods’ they’re avid to force upon the American public by whatever terrorist means they can muster.” Personally, I happen to think that’s the case today as well, but I don’t think the media would describe it that way. Today’s portrayal of student activism is often sympathetic if not favorable, in the ”conscience of the nation” vein, and the more sordid incidents are given nuanced treatment, if not ignored altogether. I’d be happy to entertain anyone with an opposite opinion, but to this writer it appears to be the most dramatic difference between then and now, a cultural sea change to be sure.
For their part, Hickey notes, students view television with deep suspicion, unresponsive and obtuse. TV represents the Establishment, the “pig press” as they call it, “a financial dependent of the materialistic ‘consumer culture’: a cog in the great machine of interlocking power blocs” which has resulted in war, racism, environmental decay, and polarization – all while lulling viewers to sleep with its soothing, meaningless drivel. Again, it’s difficult to know how this contrasts with student feelings today, or if students think much about television at all.
Which brings us back to the original premise of the article. Many students see TV as a hopeless medium, too entrenched with the establishment. Any coverage they give of the issues important to the students is likely to be “ingenious, superficial and ultimately distorted” if not ignored altogether, and that the students themselves are misrepresented. Students with a more moderate bent aren’t ready to write off the medium yet; they’d like to use it as “a forum to improve understanding between themselves, the administration, and the people of the community in which the university exists.” The minute something happens on campus, they claim, television sensationalizes it without trying to find out the root cause, the motivation behind student acts. Their problem is lack of access, and they know it’s only when things get violent that TV gets interested.
Riots at the University of Wisconsin
The reaction from the media is varied. Vic Burton, news director of KRON in San Francisco, acknowledges the station could do a better job with its coverage, but complains he doesn’t have the resources. “We need people to cover campus militancy before it erupts in violence,” he says. “Did I say we could use 30 [reporters]? Hell, we could use a hundred.” On the other hand, Reuven Frank, head of NBC news, is far less sympathetic. “These students think of themselves as an elite,” he says. “So why don’t they just talk to each other? Why do they want to press their opinions on people they detest? I don’t owe them anything. I refuse to believe they are of any significance.” Brave words -unthinkable, in today’s day and age. Were a network news head to say such things today, he’d be branded with several different -phobes, compared to Trump and Hitler (likely in that order), and forced out of his position by nervous executives and sponsors concerned about selling their products to that demographic.
Yet another school of thought is that the students aren’t media-savvy, that they haven’t learned how to use the power of television in the same way that, say, civil rights groups have. “Students think they’re well organized,” according to Thomas Dorsey, news director at WBNS in Columbus, “but they’re not.” His station’s refusal to be dragged into the unrest at Ohio State was met with opposition from many of Dorsey’s own reporters, who accused him of “a form of news distortion.” Nevertheless, “a virtual news blackout from Ohio State was in effect while the demonstrations grew in intensity.” When the inevitable riots did occur, says Dorsey, it was “without any help from us whatsoever.”
Some experts think that students need to “meld their efforts with the needs of television,” while others feel the students have given up on any hope of changing the media. As student demands escalate beyond issues of campus reform to merge with the general political unrest of the times, as the students get angrier and angrier with everything including, it would seem, life itself. But with next year’s presidential election set to be the first in which 18 year-olds can cast votes, it becomes more important, in Hickey’s words, “that what America thinks is going on in the universities coincides with what is really going on there.”
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Throughout the 60s and early 70s, TV Guide's 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 series of the era.
This week’s show is a dog. I mean that – an actual dog. It can only be Lassie, of course, which has now been on for 17 years – “through thick and thin, through war and peace, through fire and flood, through good guys and bad guys, through the Golden Age and the Vast Wasteland, through Milton Berle and Marshall McLuhan, through great critics like ourself and terrible critics like other people, through good plots, bad plots and no plots at all,” as Cleveland Amory puts it.
Now, we know about Amory’s career as an animal-rights activist, so we shouldn’t be surprised that his ultimate assessment of the series is a positive one. He loves the humanity and warmth the good-naturedness of it “in a cold and cynical world where on the one hand articles are written that we must get rid of all of the dogs in the cities and, on the other, where the ‘use’ of dogs is discussed only in terms of research laboratories.” Even so, there are some things that are just too much – too much fighting, for example. And throughout the history of the show, the kid actors have been “awful,” often because of the shortcomings of the scripts they’re given to work with. He cites an early season episode about a child who was a mute, due to a psychological block. At least that’s one theory. “It was our theory that the kid could talk fine – he just wouldn’t talk. He’d seen the script.”
That rundown that Amory gives at the start of the review – that’s pretty much the entire history of television, and although Lassie might not have been there at the very beginning, it wasn’t far off. And for a show to have continued for that length of time, with an audience base consisting of kids from 2 to 13, along with parents who’d watched the show when they were that age, well, that’s pretty good. I don’t know that there’s room for a series like Lassie today; it often ran late on Sunday afternoons, time that’s now taken by sports or infomercials, and that’s too bad. As Amory says, “somehow it’s reassuring to have Lassie on television every Sunday night year after year standing guard – not only over all dogs and all animals but also, and just as vigilantly over our better selves.”
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In sports, it’s an all-star weekend, starting on Saturday afternoon with CBS’s coverage of the American Basketball Association All-Star Game, from Greensboro, NC. Don Criqui and Pat Summerall are on hand to call the action, and while not all of the names would be familiar to casual fans, I think everyone of the time would agree that the New York Nets’ Rick Barry belongs there.
On Sunday, the same network presents what they call the “NFL All-Star Game.” In this first year of the NFL-AFL merger, it’s the inaugural matchup of stars from the NFC and AFC. In the past, when this was an NFL-only contest, it was called the Pro Bowl, just as it is today. Perhaps they thought a new name might be in order considering the new format, and this was just a tryout to see if the name would stick. Or it’s possible that TV Guide was just lazy with its listings; after all, other sports called it an All-Star game, why not football? The venue isn’t even listed, although it had been the same since the game started – the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Maybe TVG thought we already knew that as well. And that it was called the Pro Bowl.
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It appears that CBS’s gamble with All in the Family has paid off. The “bias-bating” show is being applauded by views as “a breath of fresh air,” with more than 60% of viewer feedback being positive, although some have complained about what the ethnic slurs. The critics have been positive as well.
ABC’s announced that Joseph Campanella, Arthur Hill, and Tim Matheson will be starring in their upcoming Movie of the Week “Owen Marshall, Counselor-at-Law.” No hint that the movie’s serving as a pilot, but Hill and the series will return in September for the start of a three-season run.
Pearl Bailey’s new variety series begins at 8:30 (ET) Saturday on ABC. I’d actually forgotten that Pearlie Mae had her own show at one time, and I can’t even blame it on having lived in The World’s Worst Town™ (where we surely wouldn’t have gotten it) because we hadn’t moved there yet. Pearl pulls out all the stops for that first show, with Louis Armstrong, Andy Williams, and Bing Crosby as the guests; unfortunately, the show still only lasts 15 weeks. Here’s a sample:
Even though we don’t have The Hollywood Palace for comparison, that’s no reason why we can’t take a look at Ed Sullivan’s lineup for the week. Ed’s guests on Sunday night are Godfrey Cambridge, Nancy Ames, Sergio Franchi, B.J. Thomas, dancer-choreographer Peter Gennaro, jazz musician Fahsaan Roland Kirk, and the Texas A&M Singing Cadets. (Doing “The Ballad of the Green Berets”?) Not a bad show, but certainly beatable – I’d take Pearl Bailey over Ed this week, for example.
And Lucille Ball’s series is set to return on CBS next season – she’ll be joining Ed in logging 20 seasons with the network. Can you imagine? When I look at today’s series, I’m often stunned by how long some of them have run – Grey’s Anatomy, for example, or NCIS. It’s not the quality of the shows that I’m complaining about, at least at this time – it’s that with the smaller number of episodes produced each year, there just seems to be less gravitas to their longevity. That, perhaps, and the endless times you can see these shows rerun on multiple cable networks, which I’m sure is what TV reformers had in mind.
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A couple of weeks ago I promised you Flip Wilson, and now you’re going to get Flip Wilson. He’s the hot new thing on television, and that fact is “one of the miracles of this current TV season.” It isn’t just that he’s black, although that can’t be overlooked: no black performer has ever had a successful comedy-variety series, and that includes notables from Nat King Cole to Leslie Uggams. (With Pearl Bailey to follow.) It’s a touchy subject in 1971, but no less true. Also true is that the comedy-variety format is itself the most volatile - 16 of them currently grace the airwaves, with all but Hee Haw competing for the same guest stars. It's a battleground that's claimed its share of big names, including Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and Jerry Lewis, to name just a few.
In fact, it's one of the reasons why NBC was reluctant to throw Wilson into the variety show maelstrom. "We were determined to give him his own show this year," NBC's West Coast programming chief Herb Schlosser tells writer Bill Davidson, "but we were afraid of tackling that terrible variety-hour competition with him." They worked out a half-hour sitcom for him, one that might have worked. But "[w]e looked at that and then we looked at Flip and we said, 'The hell with it. Let's go for broke with the variety show.' It was a last-minute decision and we haven't regretted it."
What Flip Wilson brings to the variety show game is a charm and good cheer that, according to the show's producer Bob Henry, makes him attractive to audiences of both races. "Black people love Flip because he revives their old favorite Negro comedy routines from the Apollo Theater, without Uncle Tomming it. White people love Flip because even though his early life was bittersweet, he seems to be able to tone town the bitter and retain the sweet - unlike many other black comedians." No less than Bill Cosby, visiting the set, says that "Old Flip here might just be the one cat to put across black feelings through comedy."
That "bittersweet" early life is both blessing and curse to Wilson, though. His storytelling style and characters (Geraldine, Reverend Leroy) all come from that hardscrabble life, but so does the loneliness that often plagues him, "the moods and the faraway trances afflict him in the midst of his triumphs," causing him to try remedies such as biorhythm and hypnotism, and take "long, lonely journeys out into the desert in his car 'to find the funny.'"
Flip Wilson's series runs for four seasons, winning him two Emmys and a Golden Globe, and next year he'll appear on the cover of Time as "TV's first black superstar." After his show ends, he's a regular on other television shows and in movies, but it's probably safe to say his career never again reached the heights that he scaled in the early '70s. No matter; the historicity of his accomplishments, not to mention the enjoyment they brought people, is enough.
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And finally, an inside look at the workings of this blog provides an ironic coincidence.
It's the Sunday evening before the Saturday on which this piece appears. NBC's Bell System Family Theatre presents an hour of highlights of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, hosted by Jack Cassidy. This morning, the news carried the story that after 146 years, the circus is closing down, victim of a changing culture - video games, short attention spans, fewer kids' TV show on which they can run commercials - and increasing political pressure from PETA and the Humane Society. Without having read the news this morning, I doubt I would even have noticed the listing.
I suppose it's yet more evidence of how things inevitably change over time, but regardless of how you might feel about it, there's something bittersweet about the whole thing. Television shows of the '50s and '60s, warm family comedies and variety shows, would always have at least one episode in which a young boy would be running away to join the circus. It was a synonym for excitement and adventure, the thrill of the exotic, of thinking about what you wanted to do when you grew up. Most of all, it had to do with the power of dreams, of lying in bed at night and thinking of that big, exotic, wide, wonderful, unknown world out there.
What do kids dream of nowadays? What captures their imagination, where would they go if they wanted to see the world? Do they even want to grow up anymore? It doesn't seem to be such a big deal.
The world of the circus, the world of hopes and dreams. As my wife said, "Catch it while you can."
I posted this at the other blog a couple of weeks ago, but thought it might be appreciated over here as well. It's a wonderful spoof of the opera Pagliacci by Sid Caesar and his merry band of crazies, as seen on NBC's Caesar's Hour broadcast of October 10, 1955. Don't worry; you don't have to understand opera to appreciate it; you don't even have to speak Italian. Sid sure isn't!
I just saw Pagliacci last month on one of the Metropolitan Opera's HD presentations, so this is particularly timely. The thing of it is, I don't believe Caesar was considered a highbrow, elitist comedian. Literate and intelligent to be sure, but at the same time there's a lot of slapstick involved in his bits. As well, you probably remember his famous send-up of This Is Your Lifethat he did on his previous series, Your Show of Shows with Imogene Coca, which indicates his proclivity to satirize conventions with which the audience would be familiar.
And that brings me to my point, which is that the costume, the pathos of the story, all the trappings we see in this skit - they're as iconic to opera as the image of a large woman with pigtails, a horned helmet, and a breastplate and shield. What's more, they're images that people know even if they don't know much of anything else about opera. The television audience - the "middlebrow" audience of which Terry Teachout frequently writes - would have been expected to recognize these images, to know the gist of what Caesar is lampooning. Far from being incomprehensible, the skit was written and performed in order to entertain, to make people laugh - and that entertainment quotient depends on a general familiarity with the premise. The television audience of the mid-'50s would have had that familiarity. Would mainstream audiences today? I doubt it. That's unfortunate; not only do we lose a good amount of comedy because of that, the topical comedy we do get comes from an incredibly fragmented society, targeted not to a general audience (I don't think such a thing exists anymore) but to a very small niche. And today's niche for opera humor - well, you've heard the one about the number of angels on the head of a pin, right?
The writeup of this skit at by the person who posted it at YouTube is very good; take a minute to read it if you can, as it shows just how it matches up with the actual opera. And if you're interested in seeing the actual Pagliacci (a wonderful piece, by the way; I don't think the Met production did it justice), you can see it in its entirety here. Don't be afraid - it's a short opera.
It seems inconceivable that a blog dedicated in large part to culture can let the end of The Sopranos go by without comment. Indeed, though I’ve never seen an episode of the series, I’m certainly well aware of it, particularly the fireworks surrounding last Sunday’s final episode. (Obligatory warning on spoilers, etc.)
With this, I want to call your attention to this fine article by Joshua Treviño at NRO, because I think Treviño illustrates the kind of in-depth analysis of the content of pop culture in a way that I find very appealing.
Treviño follows the course of events in the final episode and traces the connection between The Sopranos, the classic Western, and the iconic meaning of America itself:
Chase titled the final episode “Made in America,” and the easy inference is that the milieu of The Sopranos is just that. This is untrue, of course: Organized crime as such exists in nearly all cultures. On a deeper level, the idea of a society run by kinship ties and otherwise anarchic violence is deeply pre-democratic, and hence fundamentally anti-American. Some, including John Marini, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nevada-Reno, have said that the Western film genre is essentially a retelling of the story of America itself: the bringing of order into the wilderness, and the concurrent decline of the rough code of vengeance and force as law and true justice emerge. From this comes democracy, and America. If the Western genre is the making of America, then the mob genre is its unmaking: the subversion of law and justice, and the replacement of order with the family and tribe. Indeed, in an unconscious bit of irony, the tribe — the mob, this thing of ours — is itself called family.
And what does famly mean? With the following passage, Treviño gets to the heart of the philosophical difference that shows itself so many times in the creations of our pop culture.
What, then, is “Made in America” in Chase’s telling? Tony Soprano’s children give the answer. The classic Jeffersonian concern, beyond the rule of the people, is for the new generation, lest it be chained by the dead to things past. It is a concept born of Rousseau and his “state of nature,” an Enlightenment trope that holds that the young are inherently uncorrupted. This is not, surely, a belief shared by any orthodox Christian who believes in Original Sin; nor is it shared by the conservative who thinks man needs institutions to guide his course. When children are corrupted, the Jeffersonian/Rousseauian view holds that family has done it, and the Christian/conservative view holds that it was intrinsic from the start. Neither is the more American, we being a Whitmanesque container of multitudes, but David Chase’s fictional world comes down on the Jeffersonian side. What is made in America is the unmaking of America: not merely the regression from democracy, but the children of the generation who rule, who themselves are unfit to sustain the existing order.
“The young are inherently uncorrupted…when children are corrupted, the Jeffersonian/Rousseauian view holds that the family has done it.” Now, that’s a very provocative argument, because of what it may tell us about ourselves. The desire of parents to provide for their children, to see to it that the children don’t have to suffer as the parents did – this is very much seen in the post-World War II era. Do we then view the “Greatest Generation” as primarily a product of the Enlightenment? And would that in some way not be quintessentially American, the Founders having been men of the Enlightenment as well?
And the constant pampering and protecting of children nowadays, to the point that many exist in a quasi-permanent state of adolescence – is this an outgrowth of the idea that the family causes the corruption of the child? That parents so fear being thought of as the cause of a child’s failure as to render them incapable of denying that child anything?
(Provide for them in all ways, lest something possibly be lacking that could come back to haunt you. It’s almost a paranoid, fear of the unknown that, in many ways, is the anthesis of what America stands for – or used to stand for, at any rate.)
It then could be said that pop culture affects our way of thinking in deep ways – molding some ideas, affirming others, shaping our self image and the ways in which we view such things as family, friends, loyalty, duty. Whereas television might in the past have mirrored who we are, could it be that we now mirror what television says we are?
Trevino doesn’t make this argument, or at least not directly. But he says about all that needs to be said concerning his topic, which means that I have to have something original to offer. But the conclusions are similar, and stark:
Moral ruin comes to the Soprano children, and continued infamy to the Soprano line, because of their father’s chosen course and his other “family”; but the terror beneath it lies in the recognition that countless American youths suffer the same ruin under the tutelage of perfectly ordinary parents with respectable jobs, and without fictionalized mob ties. Here the genius of David Chase shines through, not in cinematic tricks or narrative twists, but in the stark exposition of cause and effect. At first glance, the downfall of Meadow and A.J. is the result of an upbringing tinged with extraordinary violence and theft. But when we turn off the television and look around us, we see that we have their like among us without the mobster parentage. Instead, they grow up in utterly ordinary homes in utterly ordinary neighborhoods. If daughter and son on television can emerge as recognizable inheritors of their father’s worst traits, then what does it say of us when we produce the same without that father? The inescapable conclusion is that the fall is intrinsic to us. If David Chase’s fictional world is Jeffersonian or Rousseauian, then his real world is Christian or conservative. Watching Tony Soprano cut to black is a sobering and tremendous reminder not only of why this show was great — but also of why it is a warning.
I wonder Рdoes Trevi̱o suggest here that television has, in effect, become the father, passing down the values to the children, who Рinfused by the values of their foster father Рbecome the sons and daughters of television and what it portrays?
At any rate, we ask: does the warning inherent in The Sopranos come too late for us? We’ll have to see. But we’ll return to this idea of the effect of television and its popular culture on us – how we mirror it, how it mirrors us.
[Note: and so we did - in fact, I created this entire blog to do just that.] Originally published at In Other Words on June 12, 2007
