This week in TV Guide: December 17, 1955

This is one of my oldest TV Guides, and one of the reasons I'm so fond of it is this week's cover story, in which Robert Montgomery says TV ain't what it used to be.

We read that and we laugh. In 1955 television has been around for less than ten years, although it's been around longer than we think, and from today's perspective we look back at the years that are affectionately called Golden, and we wonder what Robert Montgomery can possibly be thinking of.

He knows of what he speaks, though. Montgomery is truly one of the pioneers of television, "the first top name movie personality to enter TV full-scale," as host and occasional star of Robert Montgomery Presents, a show which premiered in January, 1950. It is, therefore, winding up its sixth year on TV, and if there is anyone with the right to say "TV's not what it used to be," it's him. His memories constitute an encyclopedia of what can go wrong on live television (the only kind, back then): an actor who muffs his lines, forcing his co-stars to ad-lib for 10 minutes before he gets back on track; a ladder left on stage by a sloppy stagehand, requiring the cast to dodge around it for the entire act, until the next commercial; Montgomery himself muffing an interview with actress Teresa Wright, repeatedly calling her "Martha" instead.

With the logistics involved in early television, it's a wonder any of these shows ever got on the air. "We produced our show at 67th St. and Central Park West," Montgomery says; "our music came from Rockefeller Center, half a mile away; the commercials came in from Columbus Circle. We figured we were lucky if we got them all on the air the same night." Cameras quit working, lights burn out, actors freeze - and yet the only time the show failed to make it to airtime, it was because of a studio strike. Compared to those early days, the show today is "as slick and smooth as the wax made by one of its sponsors." And we'd probably consider it primitive.

Montgomery is definitely a populist when it comes to programming - "Let's let the audiences - and not just the critics - decide what's good and what's bad on TV," he says. And for the most part, there aren't any problems that a few good scripts won't cure. In other words, this is television - thus has it been, thus shall it be.

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With one week to go before Christmas, I'll bet we can find some shows on TV - what do you think? Why yes! This is the week that many series have their Christmas episodes, and we'll run by some of them along the way.

Few entertainers are more associated with Christmas than Perry Como, thanks to his '70s-era specials from all over the world. In 1955 Perry has his own weekly program on NBC, and since next Saturday is Christmas Eve, I'm betting that's when all the holiday trimmings come out. Even so, he manages to work in a couple of Yuletide songs this week: "The Christmas Song" and "Jingle Bells." Doesn't get much better than that.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that not every program has to be Christmas-themed in order to be the kind of special that's only shown at special times of the year. Just check out this ad for Saturday's Ford Star Jubilee, on CBS, with Eddie Fisher, Red Skelton, and Ella Fitzgerald. (Oh, and Nat King Cole makes an appearance, too.) There are a couple of Christmas pieces in the 90-minute program, but for the most part, it's just songs. And I'll bet it was a pretty good show, too. It does prove one thing, though: if it's near Christmas and you're showing a special, just throw some decorations on the ads. It never fails.

Sunday is where it really starts to look a lot like Christmas, starting with the afternoon program Wide Wide World at 3:00 p.m. CT on NBC. During the 90-minute program, host Dave Garroway takes us around the world to see how different cultures celebrate the season, including choirboys singing hymns in Quebec and New York, decorations at the Tropicana night club in Havana, the Posada Christmas processing in Mexico, and decorated department store windows in New York, Dallas, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Washington.* A little after an hour into the program, they'll cut away for live coverage of President Eisenhower lighting the White House Christmas tree, from his home in Gettysburg.

*Do they still do that nowadays? Do they still have department stores nowadays?

At 8:00 p.m., the husband-and-wife team of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy star in the Goodyear Television Playhouse production of "Christmas 'til Closing," which ponders the question of "whether the Yule season's emphasis has not become far more material than spiritual." In a twist, it's the couple's children, not the parents, who wonder if there's too much of a fuss being made over it all.

The Today show spends the entire week before Christmas touring various churches, most of which will have their choirs performing appropriate pieces. Garry Moore's CBS morning show has the spirit as well, featuring Christmas-themed entertainment all week, including an appearance by the famous Trapp Family Singers (The Sound of Music) on Monday. And on NBC's Home, host Arlene Francis tours the department store windows along 5th Avenue in New York. Voice of Firestone's Christmas program is Monday night (7:30 p.m., ABC), with opera star Eleanor Steber joining the Firestone orchestra for a predominantly classical Christmas.

On Tuesday Dinah Shore sings "White Christmas" on her 15-minute program that precedes the NBC evening news program, while on CBS Red Skelton celebrates the season with his traditional Freddie the Freeloader skit, in which the tramp tries to get arrested so that he can spend the night in a nice warm jail cell. And speaking of jail cells, DuPont Cavalcade Theater tells a tale of Christmas in a POW camp. Later that night, on Steve Allen's Tonight, an extraordinary program featuring survivors from the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. They're appearing with Walter Lord, whose universally acclaimed book A Night to Remember, written this very year, was predominantly responsible for the resurgence of interest in the disaster - although, as the 1953 movie with Barbara Stanwyck demonstrates, it never completely went away. Think about it, though: it had only been 43 years since the disaster (which would be like 1973 to us), so it wouldn't have been all that remarkable to have had survivors still living. And technology, the great god that failed everyone in the design of the ship, leaving them alone and isolated in the darkness, is what makes it possible for viewers to see them on television this night.

Bing Crosby's brother Bob hosts his own music program afternoons at 2:30 p.m. CT on CBS. He's been playing Christmas music all week, and Wednesday is no exception, including one of his brother's favorites - "Christmas in Killarney." Howdy Doody's celebrating Christmas this week as well, and this afternoon he takes the NBC cameras to Santa's workshop at the North Pole. Santa's also part of The Mickey Mouse Club on ABC, in the cartoon "Midnight in the Toy Shop," and the Mousketeers also see a film on Christmas around the world. MGM Parade, about which more later, has clips from some of the studio's holiday offerings, and Father Knows Best, Kraft Television Theater, Studio 57, Waterfront, and The Millionaire have Yuletide-themed episodes of their own.

On Thursday it's one of the most famous of all traditional Christmas episodes, Dragnet's "The Big Little Jesus" (left) at 8:00 p.m. on NBC, as Friday and Smith investigate the theft of the Child from a church Nativity. Babies are also the theme on tonight's episode of Climax (CBS, 7:30 p.m.), which tells the true story of a 12-year old orphan who spends Christmas Eve finding homes for his five younger brothers and sisters. Brandon de Wilde, Barbara Hale and Joan Evans star. Before that, Bob Cummings plays his own grandfather in an episode of his show (CBS, 7:00 p.m.) called "Grandpa's Christmas Visit." Even Johnny Carson gets into the act, on his CBS variety show (9:00 p.m.), where a fairy godfather grants him three holiday wishes.

By the time we get to Friday, practically everybody's doing Christmas: Rin Tin Tin, Ozzie and Harriet, and The Patti Page Show on ABC; Mama, Our Miss Brooks, Crusader, and Playhouse of Stars on CBS; and The Big Story on NBC. I particularly like the Patti Page touch; her program ends at 11:30 p.m. out East, just a half-hour before midnight rings in Christmas Eve.

And of course, this doesn't include all the other episodic series, Burns and Allen, Medic, and the like, that have their Christmas-themed stories. Yes, it's true that at Christmastime, everything comes to a halt.

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There's an interesting article by Dan Jenkins (not the sportswriter) about how, in the wake of Walt Disney's spectacular television success, the rest of Hollywood finds this TV business isn't as easy as it looks.

Take Warner Bros.'s foray into the small screen. They've got a series called Warner Brothers Presents, featuring a rotating trio of shows, each of which runs for 45 minutes, followed by a nine-minute "behind the scenes" film "designed to sell Warner Brothers pictures." Of the three - Kings Row, Casablanca, and Cheyenne - only the third, with Clint Walker in the lead role, will have any staying power. However, it won't be long before WB gets it figured out, and their cookie-cutter style of replicating successful shows - for example, 77 Sunset Strip, Bourbon Street Beat, Hawaiian Eye, and Surfside 6 - prove successful, even though many critics accuse Warners of sacrificing quality in the process.

20th Century Fox, long before they it starts its own network, makes its first stride with The 20th Century Fox Hour which, like Warner Brothers, features a nine-minute behind-the-scenes piece to accompany its anthology format. It alternates every week on CBS with The United States Steel Hour, and while the series isn't bad, it lags behind both boxing and This Is Your Life in its time period. A similar series, M-G-M Parade (which you can see occasionally on Saturday mornings on TCM), has been a disappointment for that studio. In fact, even Alfred Hitchcock Presents has fallen short of "setting the TV audience on its ear," although it winds up being one of the most venerable, and loved, of mystery series.

One of the problems, says an ad executive, is that studios have yet to figure out that television isn't the movies. Says another executive, "Wed' like to pitch in with our own people who know television" in order to improve the quality of the shows. In fact, Otto Lang, executive producer of The 20th Century Fox Hour, acknowledges that "We have a lot to learn, I guess," and M-G-M's executive producer Les Petersen points out some of the differences the studio has already learned. "A hilarious scene from a movie is suddenly not very funny when seen by just two or three people in a living room," which has led them to experiment with the use of a laugh track. They're also not sure how to lead into and out of commercials, since those aren't found on the big screen, but he knows they'll figure it out - eventually.

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TV Teletype has some fun items for us to look at this week.

For instance, we get the scoop that "Twelve Angry Men," the award-winning Studio One presentation from last year, is headed for the big screen. Henry Fonda's going to play the lead role, which Bob Cummings played on TV. I seem to recall that movie was pretty good...

And then there's this note that "TV actor PAUL NEWMAN, who played the part of a prize fighter in Playwrights 56's 'The Battler,' has won the big role in MGM's Somebody Up There Likes Me, the Rocky Graziano biography." That Newman fellow turned out to make the transition to movies without too much trouble...

In an effort to get consumers interested in color TV, CBS-Columbia is offering up to $400 for New Yorkers who want to exchange their B&W sets for an $895 color set. They say they'll expand the promotion nationwide if it's successful, but I think this color TV business is just a fad...

Finally, CBS is trying to pep up its Morning Show, competing against NBC's Today, by sending its host "on quickie weekend trips to foreign cities," where he'll shoot films that can be shown on the show when he returns the next Monday. The host is a guy named Dick Van Dyke - wonder what happened to him?...

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Last but not least, As We See It has yet another story for its collection of "doctors who blame television for practically anything." In this case the doctor is Salmon Halpern, who says that "children who watch television while lying on a rug may contract an 'allergic' type of cold." He doesn't recommend, for example, that parents tell their children to get up off the floor; rather, he recommends spraying the rugs with a special solution. Methinks that the doctor might well have some kind of financial interest in that special solution, but who am I to judge?

Merrill Panitt compares Dr. Halpern to "the dentist who said children's teeth get out of whack because they lean on their chins while watching TV, the chiropractor who insists TV causes back trouble because people slump in their chairs before TV screens and the doctor who blames TV for obesity because viewers keep nibbling at snacks." These videochondricacs, as Panitt calls them, probably won't be satisfied until they've "blamed television for scurvy; that is, scurvy in children who refuse to touch food except the cereal advertised on television."

Now, I've grown up as a child of television; TV and I have been constant companions as long as I can remember. I do have allergies, although they owe more to cats than watching TV; the fillings in my otherwise excellent teeth are more the result of failing to brush than leaning on my chin; and the only way in which my chronic back problems could be related to television would be if I twisted my back reaching for the remote. I will allow as to how my weight is higher than it should; but since I can watch television on my iPhone while working out, it's probably laziness more than TV that keeps me from getting in better shape.

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It's Christmas next week - bet there'll be some special content just waiting for you! TV  

TV Jibe: Loyal fans

Remember when - $995.00 for a VCR, 1977

SOURCE: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION

Although to be fair, this isn't just a VCR - no, it's got a 24-hour timer, so you can record your favorite shows whenever you want! (As long as it's not more than 24 hours from now.) Just take a look at that digital clock!

After so many years of talk about the ability of the average person to record a television show, the VCR is now a reality. But there's so much more - record one show while watching another! Produce your own home sound movies! You can even use it to monitor the baby's room! And it's BETA, so you know it will never go out of style.

I wonder if, back in 1977, people had any idea how this would revolutionize the television experience? Not the VCR itself, as anyone who ever walked into someone's home and saw the blinking clock can attest. No, the VCR was just a waystation, the first, on a journey that would include the DVD player, the DVR (with the ability to pause and replay live television), watching TV on your computer, watching TV on your phone, going from renting a VHS cassette to streaming online video, and the list goes on. Perhaps its most significant impact was what it did to viewing habits: thanks to the VCR and its successors, we no longer have shared experiences; we don't watch shows at the same time, we binge watch entire seasons at one sitting - we have, in fact, become very much a separated people.

All this is true, and yet I can't tell you how grateful I am for this technology. (Even though I wrote an entire story trying to explain it.) I'm old enough to remember before VCRs even existed, and the idea you could watch a program you'd missed, or watch it over again - well, there are no words.

Considering how much a top-of-the-line blu-ray player costs today, considering how much a DVR cost as recently as a few years ago, a thousand dollars for a pioneer machine like this, one that even seems a bit crude, makes you laugh. And yet, if people back then had known the revolution it would have spawn, things they couldn't even imagine - well, they probably would have considered it cheap at double the price.

What's on TV? Monday, December 12, 1977

This week we're in the Baltimore-Washington area; as I wrote on Saturday, there are some Christmas programs tonight, but not many; I wanted to try and present a more representative example of Monday night programming, so it's only CBS preempting their first hour of prime time. Logan's Run. To be frank, I don't think anyone really noticed.

This week in TV Guide: December 10, 1977

Steady now, everyone. Before you get too excited, this week's cover story does not go into explicit detail on lewd and salacious scenes being trimmed for home consumption. There's no discussion about how much bare skin is appropriate, or whether or not a thrust under the sheets is acceptable. In observing the actions of CBS's Office of Program Practices, Eric Levin finds that the actual job of network censor is far more dry, and far less fascinating, than we at home might think.

What do we know about network censors? Well, if the team at CBS is any indication, they wear beards, they don't wear ties, they're relaxed, and they laugh a lot. They also spend a lot of time reviewing banal lines such as the following:

In the first script, a convict being taken to jail in leg irons tells his captor to go get a good meal and afterward pick him up, waiting at the roadside. "You can't miss me," he says. "I'll be the one with the dangling cuff." "And that ain't all," the cop quips. This, the group agreed, was a lewd reference to the convict's sexual organ. Not much had to be said. Here is the sum of it:

"Page five. Is it just my dirty mind?"

"No, we couldn't figure anything else that would be dangling."

"OK, that's going, going, gone."

Next, they looked at a scene in which several characters are discussing the remote possibility of an earthquake when suddenly the ground begins to shake. When the tremor passes, one man says to another, who has frozen in his tracks, "I thought you had to go to the bathroom." He responds, "I just did."

There was one sentence spoken about this line. "That's a little more bathroom than we want to go."

Other lines involve jokes about rape and prostitution, which they deem "not a valid source of humor." Adds one team member, "You make the jokes, you diminish the seriousness of the issue."

One problem, department director Jim Revard points out, is that "A lot of the producers seem to think their show is the only one on the air." It's true; "the department is responsible for the integrity of everything that appears on CBS, except news. Everything else, down to and including commercials." While one show might be able to get away with one joke about a hooker, say, if you multiply that joke by the number of shows on the network, all of a sudden CBS would be literally swimming in hooker jokes. It's also true that not all shows are judged the same; take the aforementioned hooker joke. If multiple shows do come up with similar angles, "we will often decide to give it to the show where we think it is most appropriate or natural, or where we have the most faith that the writers and directors will handle it well."

Violence is the other prime area of concern for Program Practices, and here it's typical to see a lot of give-and-take. A producer submitting a script with four acts of violence might be asked to "lose" one of them; if the plot makes that impossible, then they might have the next episode go lighter on violence. Even this counting system is going the way of the passenger pigeon, being retained only for the network's established action/adventure series, according to VP Van Gordon Sauter (future head of CBS News*). "It's misleading. It equates a pie in the face with a slap in the face with a bullet in the face. It's too inflexible." What's important, he says, is not the count, but the "overall tone of the program."

*And, in the small world that it is, brother-in-law of California Governor Jerry Brown.

When asked what the ideal qualifications for a censor are, director Paul Bogrow says the most important is intelligence. Zealous, supercharged prudes are rejected immediately,. "We don't want anyone who is eager to go out swinging a club on behalf of some personal, absolute moral standard," he says.

I'm sure there must still be network censors around today, and while I suspect their jobs are just as dry as they were back in 1977, it's a good bet that there are some dramatic differences as well. The allowable degree of permissiveness is far greater now than it was then, and they're probably being asked to make judgments that would have been unthinkable 40 years ago. Still, although it may be a dirty job (no pun intended), someone still has to do it.

***

This week's editorial, "As We See It," consists of a guest column written by the late Bing Crosby for his friend, columnist James Bacon, shortly before his death. It seems to tie in nicely with the week's cover story, in that Crosby writes about the state of television today.

"I was laid up for five or six weeks lately - hospitalized - and, of course, I saw lots and lots of TV. It became apparent to me that very slowly and very subtly writers and producers are working in nudity, permissiveness, irresponsibility, profanity, scenes of semiexplicit sex, provocative dialogue, smutty innuendos and situations into their shows. Moral responsibility is almost indiscernible."

The First Amendment doesn't apply in cases like this, Crosby says. "A citizen can say or do anything he wants out on the street unless he breaks the law, but he shouldn't be allowed to come into a man's house and fill his TV set with prurient material." Crosby's fear is for the effect such programming will have on children, who are susceptible to "anything they see in a film done by attractive, famous people."

He then makes a point that I bring up here, a political point. Crosby, as you may know, was politically a liberal, a supporter of FDR, a fervent proponent of equality. As a Catholic, he was educated by the Jesuits, not the most conservative of Catholic orders.* And yet what follows would undeniably be classified as right-wing in today's culture wars, perhaps even categorized as hate speech. "I happen to believe that the family is the basis for a strong society," Crosby writes. "A good strong society makes for a good strong community, and you get enough good strong communities and you've got a strong nation."

*As we see with the current pope.

Many people, when they find out I write about television and its relationship to culture, ask me about what I see as the eternal chicken-egg question: does culture influence what we see on TV, or does TV shape what we see in culture? Crosby's conclusion is as good an answer to that as anything. When he raised all of these concerns with a TV executive, the man replied, "We're only depicting life as it is." Says Crosby, "I fear that they are depicting life as it is going to be if they are not diverted."

***

There are only 15 days until Christmas as the week begins, which means the holiday programming season is in full swing - in fact, it's probably starting to wind down by the end of the week. What good is a Christmas program, after all, if it's too late to purchase the products being advertised on it?

Ah, that was cynical, wasn't it?

On Saturday, CBS hauls out two of it's venerable traditions, the animated specials How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Frosty the Snowman, beginning at 8:00 p.m. ET. It simply would not be December without them, even though I'm not exactly sure who broadcasts them nowadays.

Saturday's highlight is ABC's broadcast of Rudolph's Shiny New Year, which strictly speaking isn't a Christmas program at all, even if Billie Richards is back to reprise her role as the voice of Rudolph. In fact, it's all about Rudolph's search for Happy, the Baby New Year - and if this sounds a little lame to you, keep in mind that it's the best ABC can do, seeing as how CBS has the rights to the original Rudolph, which was broadcast last week. That's followed by the made-for-TV premiere of It Happened One Christmas, a retelling of the It's a Wonderful Life story with the sexes flipped. Marlo Thomas stars in the Jimmy Stewart role, with Cloris Leachman as her guardian angel, and since the original movie isn't a favorite of mine to begin with, it sounds perfectly dreadful to me. The only exception is the casting of Orson Welles as Potter - inspired, to say the least, as long as Welles brings as much enthusiasm to the role as he does when he's hawking Paul Masson wine.

Perhaps the quintessential Christmas cartoon, A Charlie Brown Christmas, takes center stage on Monday. (8:00 p.m., CBS) My ardor for Charles Schulz and the Peanuts gang has faded somewhat over the years, but no matter how many times I see this cartoon, I never get tired of it. It's followed by 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, a cartoon narrated by Joel Grey, featuring the mice who weren't stirring in Clement Moore's poem. Meanwhile, the independent WDCA runs one of the more underrated Christmas movies, The Bishop's Wife, with Cary Grant oozing charm as an angel sent to help out the harrassed bishop David Nivel (who's almost as thick-headed as George Bailey, truth be told), and the bishop's wife, Loretta Young. Watch for a scene-stealing performance by Monty Woolley. NBC counters with Sunshine Christmas, a TV-move based on the 1975 series of the same name, starring Cliff DeYoung.

WDCA is back at 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday with my favorite Christmas movie, Miracle on 34th Street. You can read why I feel this way here; be sure to also read this, where I show what happens when the movies intersect with real life. And Wednesday's highlight is Perry Como's annual Christmas show (10:00 p.m., ABC); this year, the globe-trotting star does an "Olde English Christmas" with Petula Clark, Leo Sayer, Olympic figure skater John Curry, and the Boys Choir of St. Paul's Cathedral. However, in order to get to Perry, you'll first have to sit through the Bradford clan in the two-hour Eight is Enough Christmas special. You might be all right with that, though.

On Thursday, The Waltons, Welcome Back Kotter, and Jackie Gleason (on WBAL) all have Christmas-themed episodes, and Friday rounds out the week with Mikhail Baryshnokov's staging of The Nutcracker at 8:00 p.m. on PBS, going head-to-head with the Hallmark Hall of Fame's annual Christmas appearance - this time, "Have I Got a Christmas for You," the story of how members of a synagogue volunteer to fill in at jobs for Christians who would otherwise have to work on Christmas Eve. It stars Milton Berle, Harold Gould, Jim Backus, Adrienne Barbeau, Sheree North, and Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows, and compared to some of their more recent showings it sounds rather charming. CBS responds with a movie of its own, House Without a Christmas Tree, starring Jason Robards and Mildred Natwick, and sounds a bit too precious for my taste.

***

I mentioned a few movies above, but I really have to share with you Judith Crist's take on the week's major features, and she's in rare form this week. Take, for example, her review of W.C. Fields and Me (Saturday, NBC), the 1976 movie based on the book by Fields' mistress Carlotta Monti, and starring Rod Steiger as Fields, with Valerie Perrine as Carlotta. "The result," says Crist, "is a silly fiction," in which "Steiger emerges as 10th-rate Rich Little, with makeup - of the death-mask-and-Pan-Cake variety - that makes him look like an aged Van Johnson with a clown nose. Not only is the real Fields available to us on film, but also the facts of his life are better than any fiction the exploitation boys might concoct. The one they've come up with is a stupid and pointless slander."

Up next: "Stupidity is the hallmark of 1976's The Next Man (Wednesday, CBS), a Sean Connery thriller in which the erstwhile James Bond plays a Saudi Arabian (with a Scottish brogue!) who's signed a mutual assistance pact with Israel. The powers-that-be want him dead because of this, and dispatch an international hit woman, "a Bryn Mawr grad, a ruthless killer and a sexpot. Corneila Sharpe is the last, all right, though her nude scenes, alas, will be cut. Everything else in this mindless mess should have been." Ouch.

Then, there's The Golden Voyage of Sinbad from 1974 (Friday, ABC), a movie "that should be run on Saturday mornings for the little ones." Morning, because if you run it in the evening, not even Ray Harryhausen's special effects will keep them awake. "And the wisdom of the sages, including 'Trust in Allah but tie up your camel,' is highly missable."

The good news is that she had nothing bad to say about either It Happened One Christmas or Sunshine Christmas. Possible reason: they were unavailable for preview.

***

Edith Efron has a News Watch feature this week that was probably controversial then, and in light of this year's presidential campaign, would surely be so now. Her target: "the liberal feminist fiction of the Helpless Wife," and how nobody on television is challenging this absurd claptrap.

What Efron notes is the epidemic of abused women striking back at the men abusing them, in most cases their husbands. She draws a distinction between the Helpless Wife and the other favorite of news, talk shows and dramas: the rape victim. "Women assaulted by rapists are helpless and unwilling victims of male abuse," she says. "But wives of brutal husbands are not helpless and unwilling victims - they are voluntary victims."

All of them live in houses with front doors. They can walk out those doors at any moment. If they lack friends, family and funds, if they have children, and if, to boot, they are total incompetents, they can go to charities or welfare agencies, any one of which is preferable to being routinely beaten to a bloody pulp. But such women have not walked out their front doors. They've clung to the male brutes like limpets, often for years, consenting to bestial abuse, concealing it, lying about it. They've covered up appalling cruelty to children. They complicity of such women in their own victimization, their genuine guilt, is enormous. But on the "reality" shows I've seen, that point is not made.

That's a very stern indictment. Efron goes on to discuss the psychology of women in this situation, many of whom suffer from a fear of independence, of standing on their own two feet. Anything, including brutal assault, is preferable to that. The problem, she writes, is that only once has she seen this portrayed on television - in the drama Family. It never comes up in any of those "serious" programs, and there's a good reason why. "The liberal feminists want us to believe that the land is burstling with oppressed females who cannot help themselves and need huge new social programs and bureaucracies that the feminists, of course, will run. Whenever such a campaign is on, TV becomes the megaphone."

Efron recalls a recent Phil Donahue show in which a woman who had been abused by her husband for years - had even left him, only to return - had finally had enough, whereupon she burned her husband to death. At this revelation, "the audience of middle-class Philadelphia ladies gave her an explosive hand of applause." Even Donahue seemed taken aback by this, reminding that audience that they were applauding murder, at which a second ovation resulted. "Not only did they applaud murder, but they were hostile to the very notion that the woman had ever had any conscious choice or responsibility in the matter."

This idea, she stresses, is incredibly offensive and derogatory to women, suggesting that they are incapable of independent thought, unable to take any form of proactive action, save when they're pushed beyond the point of no return, and Efron wonders if they're being programmed, in a sense, to behave that way. "However wretched 'battered wives' may be, that has not been an act of compassion but an act of corruption. And signs of that corruption are now showing up in the culture."

It is time, Efron concludes, for TV to "make immaculately clear the difference between an authentic feminine victim of male oppression and a woman who has cooperated every step of the way in her own victimization." To deny that there is such a thing as female responsibility, she says, "is to dehumanize women."

I'm sure that today Edith Efron would be pilloried on college campuses as a self-loathing woman guilty of hate speech. That's only one reason I doubt we'd ever read anything like this in TV Guide today.

***

I realize, friends, that you might be tired of politics. It seems as if that's all we've lived with these last few months, and with Christmas almost upon us, you probably think it's time to give it a rest. As you know, I try not to dip into politics too much here, and when I do I usually give you forewarning.

I thought this issue was different, because in Crosby's editorial, Levin's article about censorship, and Efron's essay, we see a kind of issue-wide theme being developed, one that's more important than the weekly programming. In addition, all three of these articles touch on issues that remain part of the political dialogue today. In looking at them, we see how things change, and how they stay the same; I sometimes use this phrase in jest, but not here. This is a time capsule issue in a way, because it shows us with specificity what the issues of the time were, and how people thought about them back then. With our perspective, we can see how things have evolved - or devolved - since then. TV