Around the dial

At Comfort TV, David talks about a different kind of reality television: the times when real world events intrude on weekly series. Hint: remember the time when Lucy broke her leg?

You never really need an excuse to watch Phil Silvers play Bilko, but Hal at The Horn Section has a good one anyway, contributing to the 2nd Favourite TV Episode Blogathon with the "Hollywood" episode of The Phil Silvers Show. For more episodes on that blogathon, check out all the contributions at A Shroud of Thoughts.

One of the many great things about Carol Ford's fine Bob Crane biography is that she reminds us of Bob's career in radio prior to Hogan's Heroes. This week, Carol looks at some articles from his early radio show, and gives us a glimpse at a star in the making. I'll have a review of this book shortly, but I'll tell you now that I can't recommend it highly enough!

Comedy writer Ken Levine has another of his "Friday Questions" feature, and it's worth investing some time. As usual, some very good questions from readers, and some fascinating answers from Ken.

At The Lucky Strike Papers, Andrew gives us a heads-up on Martin Grams Jr.'s upcoming books - one on Truth or Consequences (the TV show, not the city in New Mexico), and the other on The Big Show, Tallulah Bankhead's early '50s NBC radio show. He's hoping to have them out by this year's Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention this September. I'd like to be able to go to that some year, but if I didn't make it when we lived in North Carolina (it's held in Maryland), what chance to I have to rouse myself to go when I live in Texas?

Speaking of Martin, his own blog has a very good article on the origins of This is Your Life. I'm sorry, but every time I see that show, I think of the hilarious parody Sid Caesar did on Your Show of Shows - still funny every time I see it.

Recap Retro reminds me of a show I used to watch in the early '70s - Ghost Story, aka Circle of Fear. It wasn't a bad show, wasn't a great one, but was enjoyable enough. This recap is of the episode "Alter-Ego."

I don't want to do all your work for you, so be sure to check the blogs on the sidebar for more good stuff, and come back here tomorrow for another TV Guide, OK? TV  

It's a jungle out there

HERBERT LOM AS DR. ROGER CORDER, WITH A PAINFULLY YOUNG JOAN COLLINS, IN THE HUMAN JUNGLE

Since I have a contrarian nature that frequently manifests itself in a healthy suspicion of authority (not to mention a dislike of being told what to do), it's probably no surprise that I have an affinity for medical series featuring psychiatrists.* Think about it - the centerpiece of many a story of this type involves debunking the conventional wisdom, disproving the convenient explanation, and redefining the casual slur, tossed off without second thought, that a person "must be crazy." A couple of weeks ago, we looked at one such show, Breaking Point, and this week we go overseas for a second example: the ITV series The Human Jungle, which ran between 1963 and 1965.

*And no, it's not because I feel myself in need of one.

The star of The Human Jungle is Herbert Lom, and if you've only seen him as the anxiety-ridden Chief Inspector Dreyfus in the Pink Panther series of movies, you're going to be in for a surprise. Lom is brilliant as Dr. Roger Corder, projecting an air of confidence bordering on arrogance but with the ability to back it up. He works out of St. Damian's Hospital* in London, but also has an office in his home, where he often sees his patients. He is precise, somewhat quirky, doesn't suffer fools (including patients who don't level with him), appears humorless but in fact has a very dry sense of humor. He is dedicated to the health of his patients and often resembles a detective in his determination to get to the root of their problems, interrogating (I don't think that's too strong a word) family members and others in an effort to find out more about his patient's past life.

*The names aren't spelled the same, and St. Damien (as opposed to St. Damian) had not yet been canonized at the time of the series, but St. Damien was the famous priest who tended to the lepers on Molokai. An interesting parallel, had it been intentional, since people who suffer from mental illness - like lepers - are often outcasts from society.

We know a little more about him than we do the doctors of Breaking Point, but not by much: we are told that he is a widower whose wife died in a car accident, and we know he has a teenage daughter, Jennifer, who displays much of her father's perceptiveness about people and problems - enough that she can occasionally act as a sounding board, but not so much that she intrudes on her father's practice, and though she doubtless has her share of teenage dramas, they never serve as a B story in an episode.* Corder has a young colleague, Jimmy, but aside from their collaborations on cases the mentor/apprentice relationship of other doctor shows seems to be absent; he has a personal assistant, Jane, and a secretary, Nancy, who occasionally become involved in his cases, but there's never even the hint that either one of them play a role in Corder's private life.

*Unlike, say, Castle, but I don't want to point any fingers.

Like Breaking Point, The Human Jungle makes no promises, although the episodes suggest a more definite sense of closure. There is also a difference in personalities; whereas Breaking Point's Drs. Thompson and Raymer demonstrate a quiet patience, letting the patient come to them at his own pace, Dr. Roger Corder is relentless, always probing to find answers, refusing to let anyone take the easy way out. The stories, though, are similar - desperate people, pushed to the edge, in the hands of dedicated professionals determined to see them through their crises.

One episode offers us a young figure skating champion. thought to be lazy because she insists a serious fall has left her unable to skate. but Corder discovers she is actually rebelling against not being allowed the life of a normal teenager, and has convinced herself the fall has left her physically unable to skate. It sounds like a Freudian cliche on paper, but the description neglects the subtle inflections that Corder notices, the glances that the girl gives when answering questions, the offhand remarks by her mother about not letting her attend public school with "normal" girls, the way her father tries to exploit her "injury" in order to sue her skating coach for damages.

In another case, a well-to-do woman is arrested for shoplifting, but while the authorities figure her to be a simple kleptomaniac, Corder discovers that her "devoted" husband turns out to be a martinet, demanding perfection from everyone, including her. Simple enough: another case where the husband is clearly the bad guy, but that's only until we discover the truth behind his perfectionism: as a young man during the war, his negligence caused several of his colleagues to be killed by a gas attack, and ever since he has blamed himself, continually punishing himself for an act so horrid that he feels he does not deserve to be forgiven. And so Corder, who starts out treating the woman, winds up trying to save a man who is utterly defeated and broken.

Most of Corder's cases fall along these lines, and in this vein, perhaps my favorite story is one that actually is not the series' best, but it gives us perhaps the best look at Corder's techniques. An aging stage actress comes under Corder's care after being hospitalized for a suicide attempt. She professes to be sick and tired of the stage and wants to get away from it all, but at the same time she calls reporters to give them her story from inside the hospital, and she bristles at her director's suggestion (at Corder's prompting) that another actress, the woman for whom her husband left her, be cast in her role.

Corder gives her the rough truth: there is little he can do for her, because this is simply the way she is. She will always have this performance anxiety, but it is a vital part of her makeup; she needs it in order to give life to her acting. He can give her pills to help with the anxiety, but she will never be able to walk away from the stage, and it is up to her to come to terms with the side effects, if you will, of her career. She can walk away from the stage, but if she does so she will be desperately unhappy. At one point during their sessions she makes a perceptive comment. "You frighten me," she tells Corder, "because you have all the answers."

Come opening night the fears have struck again, and she's retreated to the bottle. Even after Corder has sobered her up, she tells him she can't do it: she can't remember her lines, she can't face the public. "I've already used all my tricks," an apparently exasperated Corder tells her, and then drops a bomb, telling her how it had been his idea, not her directors, that she be replaced. Enraged, she strides out onto the stage as if to prove to Corder that she can still deliver the goods. Corder, it turns out, was not out of tricks after all; he knew telling her this would provoke the expected response, probably the only thing that would get her beyond the roadblocks she kept setting for herself. He knows it is a gamble and doesn't take it without considerable thought, but in the end he judges the risk to be worth it to save his patient.

What I like is that this story works on so many levels. We may see Corder as cold and calculating, but at the same time we understand his dedication to treating his patient. That patient tells him he has all the answers, but in reality his tactics are a calculated gamble and he knows it. However, he also knows that acting is this woman's life, by her own choice, and the anxiety which it causes, unpleasant as it is, is part of that process. To remove it will be akin to performing a lobotomy on her personality - she simply would not be the same.

It is this last that highlights not only why The Human Jungle is good, it demonstrates vividly the paradox that so many people forget is an essential part of life, that to be fully human means taking risks, with no guarantee of their success, and that life without some type of pain, some measure of sacrifice, isn't really living at all. Without the valleys of life, there can be no peaks; without the pain that comes from failure, there is no way to measure the intense joy that comes from . success, and the satisfaction of accomplishment. In Shakespeare's immortal words, "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?" This is what it means to be human.

When Bishop Sheen's Life is Worth Living left the air, it removed the humanity from television. With the disappearance of programs like The Human Jungle, it removes the mind from television. Without the opportunity to probe the interior life, we are left with characters, not people, who are essentially nothing more than robots, puppets that exist only as plot devices to satisfy the whims of their creators. They operate on the fuel of pure emotion, without intellect or reason, without humanity.

The tragedy of this is that art is the most creative of human pursuits, and you'd think in our current eagerness to replace God with man, we'd leap at the chance to usurp from Him the final, crowning achievement: the creation of life from nothingness. Instead, we seem content to ask only for easy answers, rather than demanding, as do Roger Corder and his psychiatric colleagues, that we look under the surface, searching for the humanity that can only be found by navigating the human jungle.

What's on TV? Friday, April 7, 1972

This week we make (I believe) our first visit to the Bay Area in California. With more than a few stations to choose from, I've decided to go with the listings for San Francisco-Oakland, with Sacramento thrown in as a bonus. It's an area that, broadcasting-wise, I know absolutely nothing about, although I can tell you from having spent a vacation there once that there's nothing like watching a live sporting event starting in the morning to remind you that you're not in Kansas - or Texas - anymore. Let's get to it, and if any of you out there have some added details to offer, by all means please do!

This week in TV Guide: April 1, 1972

An interesting article this week on the spade of new series featuring big-name movie stars, and why so many of them have been failures. Today, with the proliferation of high-quality cable dramas, expanded time in which to tell a story, and opportunities to produce and/or direct*, it's no surprise to see an actor or actress make the transition from the big screen to television. However, in the first few decades of the medium the trend was just the opposite: after having "served time" (as Lee Marvin once put it) doing a series or succession of guest spots on various anthology series, the next step on the career ladder was movie stardom. In addition to Marvin, Charlton Heston and Clint Eastwood are just some of the many who made the leap from small to big screen success.

*Not to mention, especially for women, the chance to act in juicy, quality roles long after you've been portrayed as "too old" to carry a motion picture.

The 1971-72 television season is filled with such crossovers from movies to television: Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Shirley MacLaine, Anthony Quinn, James Stewart, George Kennedy, James Garner, Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda are some of the stars who've headed new series, and with the exceptions of Hudson and Ford, all of them have failed. These are all very, very big stars, with a long line of movie hits to prove it - how can this be?

It seems as if everyone you ask has a different explanation. According to Freddie Fields, president of the mega-agency CMA, it comes down to "prostitution." "Too many peole were concerned about the deal rather than the show," he says. "Their failure has to do with that." Martin Starger, head of programming at ABC, offers a different hypothesis: the reason for such spectacular (and expensive) failure "has simply been a matter of the concept not being good enough." No matter how good the money is, he thinks, no star sells out just for the money - "it's an incalculable blow to their prestige." No matter how big the star, nobody - even John Wayne - can last week after week with bad material.

Les Brown, author of Televi$ion: The Business Behind the Box thinks the networks are to blame for signing the wrong stars. Networks and their advertisers, then as now, are most interested in the young demographic, and to that end "they should have been trying to sign Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Robert Redford and Jack Nicholson." Shirley MacLaine, whose series Shirley's World was cancelled after 17 episodes, accuses Hollywood executives of being "out of touch with the culture," while others who worked on the show say MacLaine had "a major say" in the stories and directors, proving she might be as out of touch as anyone.

Indeed, Anthony Quinn's political drama The Man and the City tried to be so "in touch," it lost touch with what the viewers might have been interested in. As one critic said, "They were so busy making social points that they forgot to make television stories."  Aaron Spelling, who knows a hit when he sees one, thinks that there has to be a connection between the star and the story; "The right star in the right series can take off, but a good star in a bad series can be a disaster."

There's likely an element of truth in all of these theories, but the one that may come closest to the truth is the importance of putting the right star in the right role. Glenn Ford, whose Western police series Cade's County has been a moderate success for CBS, points out that his type of character has been refined through 128 movies, to the point where audiences know what to expect from him. "I would never have gone in without at least a general concept that appealed to me." (A separate article on Ford focuses on how CBS President Robert Wood and Fred Silverman, director of programming, "meticulously tailored" the role of Sam Cade to "conform to Ford's Western image." That, plus Ford's easygoing reputation on the set, has helped Cade's County to succeed where others have failed.) The same could be said of Rock Hudson, star of McMillian & Wife on NBC; Hudson's flirtatious banter with TV-wife Susan Saint James gains much from the credit Hudson built up with all those Doris Day movies.

The networks say they aren't going to make this mistake again, and they mean it! but only time will tell. CBS is asking Yul Brynner to reprise his role as the king in a weekly version of The King and I, but that series, which will debut in September 1972, will only run for 13 weeks. Julie Andrews will star in her own variety series on ABC, which should be right up her alley, but that show only makes it to 24 episodes before disappearing. Richard Boone has Heck coming up, which winds up being called Hec Ramsey; it will run for two seasons as part of NBC's Sunday Mystery Movie. Likewise, George Peppard's Banacek  is on the network's Wednesday Mystery Movie rotation for two years and does well, playing off Peppard's established smooth-character persona.

Television has a way of making minor characters into major stars - take Denzel Washington in St. Elsewhere, for example - and can humble big stars, as in just about every example above. As more than one so-called expert puts it, who knows why some shows succeed and others bomb?

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Speaking of bombs - well, you can't really say that Emergency!was as a bomb. It did, after all, run for six seasons, and even after it left the regular schedule it returned for a half-dozen TV-movies. You wouldn't be able to prove that by Cleveland Amory's review, though; while he acknowledges that real-life paramedics do very good work, he adds that "To say Emergency! is a good show about the, though - well, for that you should try a paracritic."

The show's exceptional at outdoor shots: from tops of buildings, bottoms of mine shafts, mountain ledges, etc., but the dialogue is pedestrian to say the least - every single medical situation, no matter what, seems to involve Dr. Brackett barking out, "I want an i.v. and an EKG. Start the i.v. with the Ringers' lactate. Wide open." - and the situations are awfully contrived. There are so many rescues in each hour-long show that "there's never time to get interested in the victims," who exist mainly as human props for the rescue attempts. There are signs of desperation in the way the producers try to build the "human" angle with the regulars, particularly Kevin Tighe and Randolph Mantooth as Roy DeSoto and John Gage. Shows such as NCIS and CSI have come to perfect this kind of formula (emphasizing human interaction between the regulars at the expense of guest stars), but I guess writers and directors have learned a lot more about how to do this than they did at the time. It's possible that a couple of today's quirkbots - a Goth firefighter, for example - might have meant Emergency! would still be running today, to which we can only ask: WWAW. What Would Amory Write? I think we all know the answer to that one.

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In the feature story above, you got a glimpse of some of next season's new shows, and there's more to come in other parts of the issue. The Doan Report mentions Cousin Maude, which we all know simply as Maude, and the question Richard Doan asks is "Can funny bigots pay off for CBS the way funny hillbillies did?" I hadn't thought of it that way actually, but that's about right. And the answer appears to be, "Yes." Other possibilities for CBS: "a new Bob Newhart show and a TV adaptation of the hit movie 'M*A*S*H'." Right on both counts, I'd say.

TV Teletype notes that Karl Malden will be making his TV series debut this fall, co-starring with Kirk Douglas' son Michael in The Streets of San Francisco. The Teletype also mentions that George Schlatter has signed on to produce Bill Cosby's new comedy-variety show on CBS, and that Gene Rayburn is the host of CBS' new daytime game show The Amateur's Guide to Love. I actually remember this show, which must be saying something since it only ran for three months. Primarily I remembered Gene Rayburn as the guy who used to host The Match Game. Hang in there, Gene - better times are just around the corner.

We know that the ever-present threat of government regulation of television is always hanging over the decisions coming from the networks. This time, as is usually the case, the focus is on violence, with powerful Rhode Island Senator John Pastore, head of the Communications Subcommittee, sending out hints that the government may be ready to step in, with ideas such as confining action shows into late-evening timeslots and instituting a ratings guide for parents, similar to the movie ratings system.

Those network concerns are reflected in the new fall schedules as well, with NBC talking about a medical comedy called The Little People with Brian Keith and Shelley Fabares (which produced 48 episodes, many of them under the name The Brian Keith Show, during a run of just under two seasons) and a '30s private eye series called Banyon, starring Robert Forster (15 episodes). The true test of the threat from Washington, Richard Doan writes, will come from how many Hawaii Five-O/Mission: Impossible-type genre shows are cancelled. Not to worry, though: although Mission: Impossible is on its penultimate season, Hawaii Five-O still has eight seasons to go.

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I know it's hard to believe, but come April 1 the pro basketball playoffs are here, and ABC and CBS are tipping off coverage with a weekend doubleheader.

On CBS, which covers the American Basketball Association, the matchup features the Virginia Squires taking on The (Miami) Floridians, a series the Squires will sweep in four games. In case you're wondering why neither of these teams sound familiar (except to us hard-core fans), that's because the Squires* folded one month before the rest of the ABA, thus losing out on the merger. The Floridians, on the other hand, would go under two months after this issue of TV Guide went to press. The ABA playoffs are set for the next six Saturdays on CBS.

*Fun fact: the Virginia Squires started out life as the Oakland Oaks, where one of their co-owners was Pat Boone.

The next day, the NBA takes center stage with the Los Angeles Lakers facing off against the Chicago Bulls. Chicago, a very tough team in the early '70s (their record for 71-72 was 57-25) are no match for the Lakers, who earlier in the season had a 33-game winning streak and finished up with a then-record 69 regular season victories; the Lakers sweep the Bulls en route to the NBA title. NBA games are set for Sunday afternoons on ABC, along with prime-time coverage of the finals if they go beyond four games.

Baseball predictions from Melvin Durslag, with the new season just around the corner: American League division winners will be Baltimore and Oakland, while the National League pennants go to St. Louis and Cincinnati. The really big news coming out of spring training is the advent of the Designated Hitter as one of the experimental features being tried out in the Class A and Rookie Leagues; it's being tested along with ideas that didn't catch on, such as designated and temporary runners, and allowing a pinch hitter to hit more than once in a game. As such, this is seen as the last season of baseball as it has been.

However, it's the first season of baseball as it's going to be - for the first time, games are cancelled as the result of a player strike, with the first ten or so days wiped out, not to be made up later in the season. That's a bummer for the Boston Red Sox, who lose out to the Detroit Tigers in the American League East because they wind up playing one fewer game than the Tigers. That's one pick that Durslag misses (Baltimore finishes third, five games back), and his St.Louis Cardinals wind up in fourth, nearly 22 games behind the NL East-winning New York Mets, but he's right on with his picks of Oakland and Cincinnati, with the A's winning a thrilling seven-game World Series.

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How about the rest of the week?

If you like Sherlock Holmes, Saturday is the night for you on local Bay Area television, with Sacramento's KCRA showing Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon at 12:45 am, starring the unforgettable combo of Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as his Watson. Those two also star in the double-feature on San Jose's KNTV at 1:00 am, with Sherlock Holmes and the House of Fear followed by Terror at Night. If you're not a Holmes fan, your choice is elementary: the fiery IRA terrorist Bernadette Devlin is William F. Buckley Jr.'s guest on Firing Line - that should have been an interesting matchup. 

Easter Sunday features the network television debut of the 1968 Hollywood spectacular The Shoes of the Fisherman on CBS, and one of Judith Crist's very best reviews, suggesting that the film was "apparently designed to do for the papacy what "The Sound of Music" did for family chorales," and summarizes the movie as a "disjointed, dull, dismally attenuated, pretentious and preposterous piece of pop-piety" that "puts a veneer of banality" on the essential sincerity of the story. I take it she didn't like it, then?

SOURCE ALL: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION

On Monday, PBS' Hollywood Television Theatre presents the acclaimed Civil War drama "The Andersonville Trial," directed by George C. Scott, with William Shatner in one of his best, and best-known, dramatic roles as the prosecutor in a Confederate war-crimes trial. Richard Basehart, Jack Cassidy, Buddy Ebsen, Albert Salmi, Cameron Mitchell and Martin Sheen are among the other members of a star-studded cast.

Tuesday brings PBS' distinguished series The Advocates, debating an issue that still remains unsettled over 40 years later: should prostitution be considered a moral threat to society or a victimless crime? That's followed by the first of a two-part Black Journal commemorating the fourth anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. It must have been hard to imagine, in 1972, that it had already been four years. There's also an episode of The Outer Limits on the Bay Area's KBHK, Channel 44 that I just saw on DVD a couple of weeks ago - Henry Silva, very good as a condemned prisoner given a chance for freedom by volunteering for an interplanetary inhabitant exchange.

Taking a look at Wednesday, San Francisco's ABC affiliate KGO has a moving documentary tribute to MLK, King: A Filmed Record. . . Montgomery to Memphis. Meaning no disrespect, I wonder why the flurry of four-year anniversary tributes, when it would have made more sense to wait until 1973, the fifth anniversary. Perhaps because 1972 is an election year? For something a little more lighthearted, let's go with KNTV's Ocean's 11; the original has an unbeatable cast, what with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop, not to mention Henry Silva, Richard Conte and Caesar Romero (who steals the movie) thrown in as part of the bargain.

Bill Bixby hosts KGO's 11th annual spring musicale on Thursday, entitled "The Young Sound of Spring," with various Bay Area schools participating in the hour-long show, broadcast without commercial interruption. It preempts the regular ABC fare, Alias Smith and Jones, which guest-stars the great Walter Brennan and includes a cameo by Dick Cavett (!) as the sheriff. Hmm.

To round out the week, a movie that my friend Peter and I talked about over lunch many years ago, remembering the plot vividly but trying to recall the movie's title. I can tell you that now - it's Colossus: The Forbin Project, starring Eric Braeden, which shows on NBC and tells the story of computers linking together in an attempt to take over the world. Purely science fiction, though - right? TV  

TV Jibe: Play Ball!