We've come to the end of another week, which means we've come to the beginning of another look at the classic TV blogosphere. Let's get started.
Cult TV Blog turns an eye across the pond this week, to Angela Lansbury's classic Murder, She Wrote - prompted by a comment from none other than our own favorite, Mike Doran. Very interesting to get John's perspective on a show my wife enjoyed very much.
There are times over the last few years when I've looked at the possibility of health-care rationing and "death panels," of the emphasis on the young and the attempted mainstreaming of assisted suicide, and thought that we were running (pardon the expression) headlong toward Logan's Run. With that in mind, take a look at Fire-Breathing Dimetrodon Time's review of the pilot episode for the Logan TV edition.
Finally, a very interesting analysis at The Ringer of the future of television in the cord-cutting, skinny-bundle era. What does it mean for classic TV fans? Well, the article sees "niche" networks as losers in all this, but as we saw some time ago, those boutique networks lost their way long, long ago. I'd like to think that our classic TV survives, because of the devotion of their fans, and their subchannel status. TV
Rush Limbaugh had a line he used to trot out whenever people used a statistic in support of a particular cause-and-effect argument. He would cite the undeniable fact that 100% of people who eat carrots will die. Rush did this not to suggest that carrots had some type of carcinogen that caused cancer or some other life-threatening condition; it was his way of pointing out the folly of taking statistics at face value without putting them in some sort of context.
This thought occurred to me while I was pondering a question for which I really don't have an answer, and perhaps some of you out there can help shed some light on it. Now, I know that it can be pointless for someone to build an entire opinion piece out of such a proposition; at the very least, it comes off as looking like the author had nothing else to write about that day, and judging by the number of words I've already typed, I'd be doing pretty good at it if that was my purpose. But it isn't; what I'm really after is to get you to think a little, as I've been forced to, to ruminate on the significance of something and see if there actually is some conclusion to which we can come, some observational truth that can be intuited. It is, after all, what cultural archaeologists do.
By the time I'd reached the age at which I could consume television with some appreciation of what was going on, Captain Kangaroo was already a national institution. The show had launched in October of 1955, and would run until 1984. I watched it when I was growing up, as I'm sure many of you did in the years before Sesame Street and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, and I loved the Captain, especially in the original years before the show got a makeover and jettisoned its famous Puffin' Billy theme. But in the years since - and this is where the question comes in - there's been something that's troubled me, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it.
The question is this: why did so many of the kids who grew up with the Captain turn out to be so rotten?
(At this point you might find the discussion turning political, so if you'd like to avoid that kind of thing, Don't worry - I won't be offended. You can come back on Friday, all will be forgiven.)
Let me explain. I'm thinking here particularly of the mid '60s through the mid '70s, when sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll were prevalent, when protests overwhelmed college campuses and riots engulfed the nation, and you had an entire generation trying to assert itself - often loudly, violently, and with an unmistakable air of self-righteous supremacy. If the show's audience was comprised primarily of preschoolers, then anyone born after 1950 would have been a potential viewer. And if you were a five-year-old viewer in 1955, you would have been about 17 in 1967 - a perfect age to be a participant in the psychedelic scene over the next few years. In fact, almost every student on a college campus in 1968 - the year of the protests at Columbia University - would have been in the demographic range to be a follower of the Captain.
Does this mean anything? Bob Keeshan himself was a political liberal, as were many of the people associated with the program, but I never got the impression, then or now, that there was a subliminally subversive message involved. Keeshan obviously loved and cared for children, so I don't think he would have been setting out to create a generation of radicals. And he was known for eschewing violence - he wouldn't even allow the cartoon character Lariat Sam* carry a gun, so he couldn't have approved of what he saw going on in the streets.
*Did you know that one of the producers of Lariat Sam was future game-show host Gene Wood? He sang the theme song as well. No, I didn't know that either.
Perhaps he created in these children a heightened sensitivity to injustice, a conviction that everyone had been created equal and should be treated the same way. Since many of the protests, such as those at Columbia, centered around civil rights, that could be one explanation. On the other hand, there wouldn't be anything in that to suggest the kids had been encouraged to join the sex-and-drugs movement. (The Captain always taught kids about responsibilities as well as rights, and that they should always be polite to their parents.) That could only be explained if you took the Captain's message to include one against materialism, one of the other things against which the young rebelled. But Captain Kangaroo was no different than any other program; it had plenty of sponsors and commercials, including the one I remember best, where the train pulls up to the station and one of the cars gets filled up with Kellogg's Corn Flakes. That wouldn't seem to be a recipe for anti-materialism.
Keeshan once said that the impetus for Captain Kangaroo was to replicate the warm relationship between children and grandparents, and as we all know, grandparents have a propensity for spoiling their grandchildren. Was that it? Were they made to feel too special, as if they were somehow privileged or pampered? I remember times in school when we all had to sit in a circle and the teacher asked each of us who the most important person in the room was. The obvious answer was "You are," since were it not for the teacher, we wouldn't be trying to answer this stupid question. But it was obvious what we were supposed to say. Each one of us said "I am," because all of us are special, or something can't happen without each member of the group being involved, or something like that. (Hopefully, you get the point.) There's no question, though, that most of the kids of the Love Generation were extraordinarily self-centered, even as they professed to be all about loving their fellow man and/or woman.
Add to that the historically awful parenting job done by the members of the Greatest Generation.* Look, I get that they wanted their kids to have everything they couldn't have, so they indulged them, spoiled them, etc., and perhaps they got caught up in the materialism of the time, which just happened to provide the target for the youthful rebellion that every generation goes through. Could that, combined with the gentle message of the Captain to his "special" friends, have had something to do with it?
*Which is not to diminish the major contributions that generation made, especially during World War II and Korea. They were indeed great in many ways - but not all.
Now, before we get to the end, I want to make sure I'm not painting with too broad a brush here. There were many, many young people of that era who never indulged in the excesses of the Love Generation, never got into sex and drugs, never took over one of their campus buildings. (Maybe they were the ones who watched Captain Kangaroo?) Likewise, there's the 'Greed is Good" generation, some of whom came from the Love Generation, while others learned the materialistic message while they were in college. Many of them would have grown up with the Captain as well, although they also had other televised influences. What about them?
What remains, after all is said and done, is the undeniable fact that here we have a show which millions of children watched over the course of nearly 30 years, one of the most famous children's shows ever, and a good many of the children in the target audience turned out to behave in a matter completely antithetical to the values and manner displayed by its beloved host. And before anyone scoffs at the idea of preschoolers being expected to retain the lessons of a television show they might not have seen in years, I'd remind you that we've always worried about the influence television has on its viewers, including children. Programs from Captain Kangaroo to Sesame Street have sought to be more than just babysitting entertainment; they try to teach children, to leave them with something that stays with them, that helps in their future development. If we're concerned that certain types of television can make children violent or hyperactive or antisocial, it means we're automatically accepting the idea that they can be - indeed, are - influenced by these shows from a very early age.
It is, therefore, foolish to look at this seeming dichotomy and dismiss out of hand the simple question as to why all of this should be. Remember I don't say that there is a relationship - I just wonder about it. It is, as the King of Siam put it, a puzzlement. It seems, however, that this is one of those questions for which there may never be an answer, at least not for simple minds like mine.
I wonder, though, if Bob Keeshan saw the irony in it, that a generation for which he cared so much, for which he worked so hard, exploded the way it did. Or was there something more he - and everyone else - could have done?
Ah, it's almost summer, and while there aren't a lot of blockbusters on television this week, there are still a few things to draw the eye. As we get deeper into the season, shows split into two different types: reruns of your favorites, and limited-run summer series, some of which get picked up for the fall, while others disappear into the ether, never to be heard from again. Today, it's just a regular day in TV land. The listings come to us courtesy of the Minnesota State Edition.
This is one of those issues that I find interesting on a number of levels, particularly since one of the main items this week is not only a reflection of the past, but a foretaste of the future.
It's the Vienna Summit between President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and television coverage reflects the importance of the summit, with all three networks covering the President's arrival in Vienna on Saturday and continuing (through specials and regular news programs) with Sunday's final communique, and a wrap up of the weekend's events on Monday.
It's not the first presidential trip covered by the networks - there was extensive coverage of President Eisenhower's goodwill world tour in 1959, for example, as well as the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway that same year, and Vice President Nixon's "Kitchen Debate" with Khrushchev in Moscow - so what makes this one different besides being Kennedy's first European trip as President*? Well, it takes place in the shadow of the Bay of Pigs fiasco just six weeks earlier, and Kennedy's performance in the meeting with Khrushchev led not only to the Berlin Wall, but the Cuban Missile Crisis. Khrushchev sized up the young American President as a lightweight - JFK called it "the worst thing in my life," and told New York Times correspondent James Reston that Khrushchev “thought that anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken. And anyone who got into it and didn’t see it through had no guts. So he just beat the hell out of me…I’ve got a real problem.”
*The trip started in Paris where Kennedy met with French President Charles de Gaulle, and concluded with a post-Vienna visit to England, and meetings with the Queen and British PM Harold Macmillan.
The emboldened Khrushchev did indeed try to "take" Kennedy, first with the August construction of the Berlin Wall, which the Russian Premier (correctly) calculated the United States would not oppose militarily, and then by moving missiles into Cuba in 1962. It's true that the Soviet action in Cuba was done surreptitiously (it's hard to build a wall without anyone noticing), but Khrushchev likely counted on Kennedy backing down again once the location of the missiles became known. This was precisely what Kennedy had feared in the wake of Vienna: "that Khrushchev, assuming that he was weak and indecisive, might engage in the sort of 'miscalculation' that could lead to the threat of nuclear war." It didn't, but as it unfolded, nobody knew that for sure. In the end, popular history holds that the result was a diplomatic triumph for Kennedy, although a minority opinion suggests that Khrushchev pulled a fast one by getting the U.S. to not only withdraw missiles in Turkey and Italy, but also promise not to invade Cuba in the future.* Ultimately, historians can hash this out.
*The U.S. didn't promise not to try and assassinate Castro, however, which means we might be able to add JFK's assassination to the fallout from Vienna as well.
All of this was in the future as viewers watched television coverage of the summit in June 1961, and as the networks poured forth their analysis, I wonder what their consensus was. Did they sense the danger Kennedy felt in the wake of his abysmal performance, or did they maintain positive coverage of the new president? It would be interesting to know, but that's for another issue.
Here's a recording of the first White House meeting regarding the Missile Crisis:
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Martin Scott has an interesting piece on Raymond Burr's threat to leave Perry Mason after four seasons. The article admits to friction between Burr and the show's producer, Gail Patrick Jackson, and while it doesn't cite any specific area in which the two have crossed swords, Scott does provide this quote from Burr, which tells us more about what he doesn't want than what he does: "I've informed them that I will not do the show next season. I don't want more money. I don't want part ownership. I don't want to produce or direct. All I want is what I've been asking for since the first six months of the show. Mrs. Jackson knows that. CBS has been trying to see Mrs. Jackson and has not been able to."
As to what it is exactly that Burr does want, "He wants some of the enormous burden of carrying the show all but singlehandedly taken off his broad shoulders. He wants better-written and more intelligent scripts. He wants some control over stories in which he must appear." Burr would seem to be negotiating from a position of strength, as Scott points out: he's won "innumerable" awards, including two Emmys and last year's TV Guide Award, and "has become perhaps the most popular actor in any dramatic series on television." Nobody really seems to think the impasse can continue; Scott concedes that the issue may be settled "by the time this magazine is in its readers' hands." But one thing seems certain: although replacing the lead actor is not unknown on television, "It is hard to think of another actor filling his shoes as Perry Mason." If you don't believe him, just ask Monte Markham.
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There's talk of a fourth television network, and while this was fairly common (until Fox came along), the end result of this discussion is a network that's not a network.
It's National Educational Television, and with 51 such stations throughout the United States in cities such as Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver, and Pittsburgh (but not New York City), there would seem to be good reason to expect success. We're talking about a potential audience of 26 million people here. The typical educational channel carries local classroom programming throughout the school day, followed by NET children's programs, shows of local interest, and then NET network programming, of which NET currently provides ten hours a week. According to John White, NET's president, NET shows are intended "to provide for the special interests of the public in the arts, sciences, humanities and public affairs" but not to compete with the big three networks. All of the programs are, of course, aired without commercial interruption.
As an example, the article cites the schedule of Boston's famed WGBH. "Wednesday night viewers this season could have watched a concert-lecture by Pablo Casals or a two-hour classical drama produced in England and televised without interruptions for commercials. The next Wednesday it might have been a ballet program featuring outstanding dancers and comments by distinguished critics."
Now, let's fast-forward to today, and see how that mission statement of White is going. I'd say you could sum it up in one word: poorly. There are no regularly scheduled programs on dance or classical music, and classical drama has for the most part been replaced by British soap operas. Pledge-week broadcasts, made up in great part by concerts from aging pop and folk singers*, show that the network is indeed in competition with commercial - and cable - broadcasters. Perhaps we should have known when the word "educational" was removed from the network's name, as NET morphed into PBS.
*And shown over and over and over - and over - again.
You could make the argument that the lack of government funding has forced PBS into this position of competition; when you depend on contributions by Viewers Like You, the first thing you need are Viewers. On the other hand, others might respond, if the network had remained true to its mission in the first place instead of veering into programming that advocated liberal political viewpoints and avant-garde "art," taxpayers might have been more willing to cough up their dollars via the government. Whatever the answer, it's brutal to look at what NET (and the first few years of PBS) aspired to, and compare it to what it has become.
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I've written several times about my enjoyment of the series Naked City, so naturally I'm going to touch on Richard Gehman's discussion of the series. You may recall a few weeks ago I mentioned a review of the series that was critical of the show's emphasis on New York City as the main character, but as Gehman points out, this is the very point - "A great metropolis, despite its seamy face, emerges as the star of an exciting TV series." For if you take the real New York out of Naked City, you're left with - well, I'm not quite sure what you're left with. A studio-bound series, for certain. Perhaps even a good series. But not Naked City.
SOURCE: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION
Lileks calls shows like this "inadvertent documentaries" - in other words, those who watch these period pieces today are treated to a story within a story, that of the city or country in which the action takes place. You get to see it unadorned, without the retrospective consideration that mars shows such as Mad Men. As even the greatest documentarians have discovered, you can never completely replicate the past; no matter how hard you try, you're never able to divorce yourself from what you already know. Route 66 is a prime example of this on a large scale, as though the course of four seasons we're treated to an intimate look at an American that no longer exists. That's not a political statement, just a fact; nearly 60 years on, great swaths of this country are virtually unrecognizable compared to what they are now. And if Route 66 provided a macro look at America, Naked City did the same on a micro scale, looking at one city among hundreds of thousands.* That it was the nation's biggest city didn't hurt, for as the closing narration reminds us each week, there are eight million stories in the Naked City.
Gehman details the various ways that producers and directors make their way around the city, and the different faces that it's captured, and that's very interesting, if not almost poetic. What I find most interesting in Gehman's article, though, is his stunning description of New York: "It sits dying of urban cancer, wracked by the violence that festers and explodes inside it. In the eyes of some there are elements of interest, even of beauty, in extreme ugliness." What this means for Naked City is simple: "if [New York] fails as a city, it succeeds spectacularly as a television personality."
If you're of a certain age, you can remember when New York nearly went bankrupt, when garbage piled up on street corners for what seemed like weeks at a time, when Times Square was one of the most depraved areas that anyone could find in the entire country. This condition reached its peak (or valley) during the hapless administration of John Lindsay, mayor and wannabe-president. But Lindsay didn't become mayor until 1966, nearly five years after this article was written. What we're seeing and reading, therefore, is a contemporaneous view of the city in the midst of a nervous breakdown, no longer great but not nearly as bad as it will become. Granted, we're looking backward at this, with that hindsight of which I wrote earlier, and so we're no more immune to contextual distortion than those who attempt to recreate the past with the knowledge of the present.
In a way, though, it is the knowledge of what is to come that makes the images of New York as seen in Naked City that much more powerful; we look for the buildings that fell victim to Robert Moses and his wrecking ball, we search for what we think of as a simpler time, even though the people of that time might look at us today and scoff.
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As we move into the summer months, it always becomes a little harder to go through the programming section and find anything new and different; the reruns are already upon us. But let's see what's on anyway.
Once again, the sports story of the week is horse racing, this time Saturday's running of the third and final jewel of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes. (3:30 p.m. CT, CBS) Carry Back,winner of the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, is a "strong favorite" to become the first Triple Crown winner since Citation in 1948, and a huge crowd (including former President Eisenhower) turns out to see history made. However, following the Preakness there were reports that Carry Back had suffered an injury; although these reports were denied by the New York Racing Association, it turns out that the horse is in fact dealing with a left front ankle injury, and he is never a factor in the Belmont, which is won by long shot Sherluck.
Interesting episode of Camera Three on Sunday morning (10:30 a.m., CBS) - Patricia Neway stars in the one-act, one-woman opera "The Accused," about the Salem witch trials. I'd never heard of this opera*, but its composer, John Strauss, did go on to some degree of success - he wrote the music for the movie Amadeus. Meanwhile, Channel 4's matinee movie is The Lady-Killers, the delightful Alec Guinness comedy; the Tom Hanks remake just reminds one of how good the original is.
*When I Googled the opera, I discovered that most websites mistakenly claimed it was broadcast on NBC Opera Theatre. Other than getting the network and the title of the program wrong, that pretty much covers it. It goes to show that this TV expert business isn't as easy as it looks. Don't try it at home.
Monday, between updates on President Kennedy's trip, KDAL runs an episode of The Twilight Zone (10:15 p.m.) that I've always liked - "The Obsolete Man," starring Burgess Meredith as a librarian in a world in which books have been banned, who goes on trial before chancellor Fritz Weaver. Some might see it as a bit heavy-handed, but Meredith makes it work (as always), and the message remains a powerful one.* I like to think of this as the flip-side of Meredith's most famous TZ episode, that of the bookworm in "Time Enough At Last" who survives a nuclear blast and can now read all the books he wants, only to have his glasses break. Seems that books and Burgess don't mix very well, do they?
*Sounds like today's college campuses, doesn't it?
An episode of Amos 'n' Andy caught my eye on Tuesday afternoon (3:30 p.m., WTCN), just because of the description: "The Kingfish tries to raise money by palming off a pair of cheap rabbits as rare chinchillas." Now, I know how controversial this series is, and while I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole (no pun intended) right now, I'll just say that this could have been an episode of any old-time radio show or TV sitcom. I can see Phil Harris and Remley doing this, or Duffy of Duffy's Tavern, or even Bob and Bing if they were desperate enough for money. What's funny is funny, no matter who does it. Wednesday evening continues the trend of looking at local shows - in this case it's the 7:00 p.m. movie on WTCN, one of the greatest film noirs of all time: Out of the Past, starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas. It hadn't even been out for 15 years when it airs tonight; I wonder if it was as heralded then as it is today? Otherwise, check out Naked City at 9:00 p.m. on ABC, as the detectives investigate the theft of industrial diamonds from a factory not long after a man vows revenge against the company for firing him.
Looking at Thursday's listings, it's fun to see shows that we get all excited about today because they've come out on DVD - and yet they were just syndicated reruns back then, filling up space. There's State Trooper on WEAU at 9:00 p.m. and Coronado 9 on KDAL at 10:15 p.m., both of which star Rod Cameron. There's Manhunt, starring Victor Jory, on WKBT at 9:00 p.m. and KSTP at 9:30 p.m. ("17 Rare Episodes!" on DVD, says one website, none of which are "The Gopher," which KSTP airs. And then there's The Third Man on KGLO at 11:00 p.m. - that stars Michael Rennie in the Orson Welles role of Harry Lime, only this time Lime's gone legit. Have I written about this before? If not, remind me to do that sometime.
And finally, here's a story I don't even want to think about: On Way Out (Friday, 8:30 p.m., CBS), Charlotte "The Facts of Life" Rae stars in "Death Wish." "Hazel Atterbury lives and breathes TV. She watches and talks about it all the time. When she asks her husband George what his favorite show was, he tells her it's the one on which the man murdered his wife because she talked too much."
At least he didn't say she talked too much about TV. TV
Since we didn't do this last week, there should be twice as much to look at this week, right? Well, if that's the case, what are we waiting for?
Hal is back at The Horn Section with another in his periodic look at the Bob Cummings sitcom Love That Bob, a slice of '50s sitcom life if ever there was one. I've admitted before that although I like Cummings' work (particularly The Twilight Zone and the Studio One version of "Twelve Angry Men"), I've never seen an episode of this, his best-known series. I should rectify that, shouldn't I?
I definitely remember reading The Twilight Zone Magazine when it first came out; I think I only had the opportunity to read one or two issues, but I don't know why I didn't keep up with it. Oh well. The Twilight Zone Vortex brings those times back to life, as Jordan begins a retrospective with Volume 1, Number 1.
If you like The Avengers - not the superhero comic book characters, but the real thing - you'll probably get a kick out of this Avengers-inspired fashion shoot from 1966, especially since it includes Steed himself, Patrick Macnee. You can thank Cult TV Blog for coming up with that, so go over and look at it now.
British TV Detectives takes a look this week at Robbie Coltrane's Cracker, which is one of those series that people either love or hate. Well, maybe "hate" is a strong word, but it does seem as if it's not everyone's cup of tea - "grim and depressing--and more character study than mystery," according to Rick. You'll have to decide for yourself.
Win a date with Batgirl? That probably wouldn't have meant much to my seven-year-old self, which speaks much for the naivety of the young, but if you're like me, you can catch up with this video clip from 1967 of Yvonne Craig on The Dating Game, courtesy of The Land of Whatever. I wonder how that one turned out.
It seems as if there's a lot of anger in the world today, doesn't it? And those who aren't angry are either depressed, or feeling like there's something missing in life. That's why it's nice to see the delightful list David compiled at Comfort TV of 53 wonderful things from the Comfort TV era. As I wrote on Wednesday, we should never lose sight that TV is, first and foremost, entertainment. David gets it. (Although he's much better behaved than I am; I'd have been likely to list anything having to do with Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman as #9 and #10...)
Finally, a word about the upcoming Mid Atlantic Nostalgia Convention, which is coming up in September - sooner than you think! There's a fabulous lineup of celebrities in store this year (Dawn Wells! Patrick Duffy! Shirley Jones! Larry Storch! And more!), and if you're lucky, you might even run into me roaming the hallways. Yes, I'll be there too - as a spectator, since the book got tied up in all the time and expenses associated with moving. (Next year will be different!) Hotel rooms have been known to go quickly, so get to the website and let it convince you that this year is the year to go! And next year as well, of course. TV
