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What's on TV? Tuesday, July 7, 1964

As I mentioned on Saturday, this is the second look at this TV Guide, but the first time we've done an in-depth on the listings. The date is Tuesday, July 7, the place is the Twin Cities, and here's your programming for the day.

This week in TV Guide: July 4, 1964

Hello there everyone, and Happy Fourth of July.  It being the holiday weekend and all, I'm going to do something a little different for today - I don't have a new issue for us to look at, so we're going to go back three years to an issue that I've previously covered.  The difference is that back then, when this feature was fairly new, I didn't go as in-depth as I do now, so we've actually got lots of material to cover.  In addition, since I wasn't doing the program listings at the time, Monday's feature will still be brand new.

Enough with the talk, though.  Let's see some action.

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In case you're curious, when we first visited this issue, the focus was on Perry Mason, and the cover profile of Erle Stanley Gardner.  So let's skip to the president's changing approach to television.

It was Lyndon Johnson's eternal misfortune that he followed John Kennedy into the White House.  As we've seen before, JFK was one of the first politicians to realize how the right candidate could exploit television to his advantage.  LBJ was possibly the best-prepared man to ever become president, save George Washington himself; he was a master of parliamentary procedure, knew how the House and Senate operated, knew how to get things done.  His early record as president shows he was much better than JFK at getting legislation through the Byzantine labyrinth of Congressional procedure and ego. In another era, one before television, he might well have been elected to two terms of his own, and could be thought of today as one of the nation's most successful presidents.

However, Johnson lacked much of what had made Kennedy a success on the tube. Although he was a relatively young man himself, he was not photogenic, the camera did not flatter him, he did not have an easy presence with the audience.  As Vietnam progressed, this would become a real Achilles heel for him.  Robert Goralski, author of this article and NBC's longtime White House correspondent, notes that in Johnson's first presidential press conference, "He is still not wholly comfortable, his answers are sometimes imprecise, and he is often given to answering questions with previously stated homilies."  Goralski's opinion was that Johnson had "just survived," although Johnson's own assessment was that he was "adequate."

Johnson has always depended on the intimate, informal gathering where control of the situation is his, and it is in this environment that you see his charm, his humor, his authority.  So it's no surprise that it's taking him some time to get used to this new routine.  Indeed, only one of four press conferences have been televised life, but he does plan to ramp up his appearances on TV.  In preparation for this, the White House Fish Room is being converted to a television studio, from which the President will be able to address the nation any time he has a major announcement to make.

Perhaps the biggest innovation, though, is an "ingenious device" that Johnson has come to depend on for his formal statements, both at the White House and when he's on the road.  Goralski describes this new technology as consisting of  "pieces of glass, about the size of a sheet of music, [which] are positioned on either side of the lectern.  From the camera-eye view, the glass pieces are invisible.  From Mr. Johnson's point of vantage, however, they act as mirrors, reflecting the text which is printed on scrolls that unroll on the platform below."  Yes - although it's not identified as such, it's the TelePrompTer, and this "ingenious device" will come to change completely the way people appear on television - not just politicians but newsreaders, actors, sportscasters, anyone having to project "sincerity" and make eye contact with the viewers, rather than a sheaf of notes.  Because, as we all know, if you can fake sincerity, you can fake anything.

***

It's been a while since we've had a "Sullivan vs. The Palace" matchup, and I was hopeful we were going to see one this week.  Alas, ABC has other ideas, and they've preempted the Palacd for the Olympic Track and Field Trials, taped earlier in the day at Randalls Island in New York.  It's the first round in the process of choosing the Americans who'll be travelling to Tokyo later in the Summer for the Games.

Well, let's take a look at Ed's lineup anyway, since it's one of the few shows that isn't a rerun.  His guests include songstress Kay Stevens; comic Myron Cohen; pop singer Jerry Vale; comics Allen and Rossi; the dance team of Brascia and Tybee; the Neiman Brothers, tumblers; The Four Amigos, vocal and instrumental group; and comic Ronnie Martin.  Too bad for the Palace; this was a good, but hardly unbeatable week.

That's not all for variety shows for the week, though.  The apparently ageless Rudy Vallee, whose major stardom came in the '20s and '30s but never completely went away, is back with a 13-week summer replacement series on CBS.  In the debut episode he welcomes Paul Anka, Rich Little, vocalist Ketty Lester, singers Mitzi Welch and Jerry Holmes, comic Jackie Clark, and dance theme Thealbees.  What an interesting contrast - Vallee, Anka and Little.  Donald O'Connor's 1960 special, also on CBS, is repeated, with Mitzi Gaynor, Andre Previn and comedian Sid Miller.  Meanwhile, ABC's Hootenanny comes to us on location from West Point, with host Jack Linkletter and The Brothers Four, the Second City Troupe, the Bluegrass Dalton Boys, the Brandywine Singers, Anita Sheer, Bob Carey, the Paul Winter Jazz Sextet, and the Serendipity Singers.  In case you're keeping score at home, Hootenanny's rival, NBC's Shindig!, won't be along until September.

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SOURCE: HADLEY TV GUIDE

This week's starlet (because you knew there had to be one) is Donna Higgins, aka Dee Hartford,* described as "a great, big, beautiful model and actress."  Her TV credentials to date are skimpy but growing, thanks to bit parts in The Defenders, Perry Mason and Burke's Law, and a recent appearance in a skit on Hollywood Palace.  She sees herself as the "second woman," someone like Eve Arden, rather than a lead in the Sandra Dee/Tuesday Weld mold.  Probably her bigger claim to fame is that she was married for a time to movie director Howard Hawks, and made her transition from modeling to movies courtesy of Howard Hughes.  Her biggest fame will remain her modeling, however; despite a fair number of TV credits, she'll never become a big, big star.

*Her sister Eden was also a model of some success.

***

Some news from the Teletype: Tina Louise has been signed as the seventh castaway to star in CBS' upcoming sitcom Gilligan's Island.  Paul Burke, formerly of Naked City, has been signed as a guest-star on ABC's new Twelve O'Clock High series; he'll wind up as the star when Robert Lansing is sacked after the first season.

Inger Stevens will dream that she's dead in an episode of The Farmer's Daughter this fall - kind of grim, when you consider she committed suicide at age 35 in 1970.  NBC has a documentary, JFK Remembered, planned for November, the first anniversary of his death.  Shirl Conway, star of CBS' The Nurses (who's in next week's TV Guide, although I don't write about her), is on a one-woman campaign to establish medical scholarships in every country where the show is aired.

In For the Record, we hear that NBC's going to try again in its efforts to air the first made-for-TV movie.  Their initial product, The Killers*, was famously determined to be too violent for television, and wound up being released in the theaters.  This time it's The Widow Makers, with John Forsythe, and it does make it to the small screen, aired on October 7 under the name See How They Run.  It says that NBC's plan is to show it first on their Wednesday or Saturday movie show, then to release it to theaters.  I never quite understood that strategy - if you saw it for free, why would you pay for it?  Does it have the kind of scenery or color that screams out for the big screen experience?  And if you weren't interested enough to watch it on TV, what would make you change your mind?

*Which was originally named Johnny North after the man (John Cassavetes) who was the target of the killers.

***

A while back I got to see an episode of ABC's 1963-64 psychological drama Breaking Point, which starred Paul Richards and Eduard Franz as psychiatrists.  It was a very good show, I thought, the kind of program that isn't on TV nowadays.  And this week there's a profile of Franz, a man whose profile has defined many of his TV and movie appearances.  He's got this Roman profile that holds him in good stead when it comes to casting noble Indian chiefs, noble Viennese doctors, noble Supreme Court justices - you know.

Franz in a familiar role (left); as Dr. Edward Raymer (right)

He's also a very good actor, and something of an anomaly in Hollywood.  For one thing, he's very secure, with an ego that's among the smallest around.  He's exceedingly calm, so much so that Ethel Barrymore, "who did not particularly like him," insisted on having him in three of her plays.  He appeared in The Great Caruso with Mario Lanza, who was making the transition to movies from the opera stage; "Lanza was so comforted  by the spectacle of a man largely emancipated from torment that he wanted Franz to be in every picture he made."  He's not in therapy, he doesn't go to the tracks or make demands for fancy dressing rooms, and a publicist complains that he's so dull, "After you've told 'em Eddie has a cat who subsists largely on a diet of doughnuts, where do you go from there?"  As a friend points out, "Eddie has that calm, and there isn't anybody, especially among actors, who isn't drawn to it."

Like the show that gave it birth, Ben Casey, the structure of Breaking Point is the young doctor-older mentor, which was fine with Franz as long as it was a good part, and not a subordinate one.  About the role of Dr. Edward Raymer, he says, "I didn't really want to do it, but we have to face the fact that this is the only way an actor makes a good living these days.  And I thought I could make something of it."  Somewhere along the line, though, the network decided to deemphasize Franz in favor of the younger Richards, and at that point Franz reminded him that the show was about two doctors, and demanded his release.  Instead, his profile (that word again!) was raised, to the good of the show.

Breaking Point only lasts one season, but if you watch movies or television shows from the era, you shouldn't have any trouble picking out Eduard Franz, the high-profile supporting actor.

***

Finally, a note on one more variety show, Jack Paar's Friday night program, which replaced his beat on Tonight.  This format allowed him to do more in-depth programs, and this week is a repeat of the March 13 program that featured the first public appearance of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy since the death of his brother.  Paar has said that he found out about it only that afternoon; Bobby had called him that it was time for him to finally appear in public, and he'd decided that Paar's show was the place to do it.  It's quite an appearance, and the reaction from the audience serves as a preview of the massive ovation Kennedy will receive at the Democratic Convention in August, when he introduces the tribute film to the late President.  Here's a look at the interview as it originally aired.

***

So what do you think?  We certainly had more to look at than what was in the initial review.  Do you like this "second look" at certain issues?  Should we continue to do this every once in a while?

If you're playing with fireworks today, be careful.  If you're doing a picnic, watch out for the ants.  If you're just enjoying a peaceful Saturday, as I will be, make it a good one and come back Monday for the listings! TV  

Around the dial

It's been a couple of weeks since we've taken a spin around the dial, so let's see what the latest is as we begin this holiday weekend.

A nice little piece on Charles Osgood over at the University of Maryland's Broadcast Archives.  I remember when he was primarily known for his radio commentaries, long before he took over on Sunday Morning; "There's plenty of it to be had/and some is good and some is bad/and some is barely worth the price./I speak, of course, of free advice."

Joanna Wilson at Christmas TV History has been doing her Christmas TV Party again this summer; doofus that I am, I didn't get anything of mine to her this year, but fortunately she's gone right on without me.  Check back from the past month; some wonderful Christmas TV memories to be had.

The Last Drive In has a birthday tribute to the great Charles Laughton, who's known primarily for his movie roles, but classic TV fans will certainly remember him for his wonderful performance in Witness for the Prosecution, which airs regularly on TCM. 

I want to thank Cult TV for the very kind mention of my Patrick Macnee obituary last week, and I'd like to return the favor by pointing to his very good piece on the Paul Temple movies, in which he sees the echoes of The Avengers.  I always appreciate his tips, and this series, which I hadn't heard of until now, looks like it could be quite fun.  (And the Secret Sanctum of Captain Video is quite right; Patrick Macnee will be missed.)

A fun piece over at an unlikely place for classic TV: Wayfair.com.  You'd usually go there for home furnishings and accessories, (and I think you should!), but definitely go there for this piece on real world TV home prices.  That should answer any questions you've ever had, no?

I don't think I'm stretching the definition of "classic TV" when I talk about the old CNN Headline News channel - you remember, when they actually had news instead of features and puff pieces?  One of their best anchors, Lynne **sigh** Russell, was back in the news this week when her husband shot and killed an armed intruder who threatened them in their hotel room.  Considering that she's pretty handy with a gun herself (from what I can remember), I wasn't surprised a bit.  Hope her hubby gets better soon!

Staying with current television but harking back to some of the complaints of the Golden Age, I see rumor has it that ESPN is putting pressure on Keith Olbermann to stop ragging on the NFL during his commentaries.  They had the same problem with Bill Simmons, of course, and word was that the league had something to do with the network pulling out of that concussion documentary a few years ago.  Of course, producers and writers have complained for decades about content interference by networks and sponsors (e.g. Rod Serling), so I guess it's indeed true that some things don't change.

I trust you're keeping up with Television Obscurities' TV Guide reviews, so I'll direct your attention to another post, on a more dubious note: the 74th anniversary of television's first commercial.  It's funny, isn't it - we can buy DVD sets of classic commercials of the past that the viewers of the day probably cursed (and missed because they were going to the bathroom or the kitchen), and many years the ones on the Super Bowl probably get more attention than the game itself.  And yet there's one thing that's always consistent: we always complain about commercials. TV  

The Senator, and the problem with politics as part of series TV

HAL HOLBROOK, BLEEDING HIS HEART UNTIL THERE'S NO BLOOD LEFT, IN THE SENATOR

The arrival on DVD of the 1970-71 series The Senator, one of the multiple parts of the wheel series The Bold Ones, has caused a certain amount of discussion among classic television viewers. Although there were only nine episodes made, the series made its mark primarily due to the fine performance of the always-stellar Hal Holbrook in the title role of Hays Stone, the idealistic young man turned U.S. Senator, and a number of well-written scripts.

You can find any number of articles that give you a comprehensive overview of The Senator (such as this excellent one), but that's not really what I'm interested in here.  No, what I'm interested in is the show's politics, and specifically, the partisan liberal advocacy - or, as Stephen Bowie puts in when talking about The Senator, the "unapologetically didactic scenes"  - that is pretty much taken for granted as television's default position.

Now, before we go any further, understand that I don't want this to come of as a political screed of my own.  I think most of you regular readers can guess where I fall on the political spectrum, but I really do try hard to keep that out of the discussions here unless there's a very specific reason for doing so, and those reasons don't come up very often.  My point is that hearing one side of the political issue, whether it be liberal or conservative, gets very tiresome after a time, and I don't think it does the audience any favors to hear such a monolithic viewpoint week after week.  If I were being hammered by a conservative political viewpoint on a regular basis, rest assured I'd feel the same way - I'd turn that series off as well, or at least turn to Fox News.

I had the opportunity to see part of an episode of The Senator on Antenna TV a while back, and I found it somewhat less than compelling.  Yes, the acting was top-notch, the filmmaking (though unmistakably sporting the dated shooting style of the '70s) was well done, and the writing was literate.  What bothered me about the show was its very earnestness, its preachiness, its assumption that the liberal position was the only one that could possibly be reasonable.  As one commentator remarked, "people watching the programs of that era might assume that every right-thinking person voted for the guy who got 39% of the vote and lost 49 states in 1972."  The guy to which the commentator was referring was George McGovern, the abysmal Democratic presidential nominee, about whom the critic Pauline Kael is famously* quoted as saying, "How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him."

*And perhaps apocryphally.

And it's not just shows that are explicitly political - take a show such as Quincy, for example.  When it was simply Jack Klugman's medical examiner helping to solve crimes, it was a tolerable piece of fluff, albeit hampered by Klugman's one-note intensity.  But in its last seasons, when Quincy began to emerge as a crusading advocate for one social issue after another, the show became virtually unwatchable.  And this doesn't begin to touch on other shows of the era, from The Defenders to East Side/West Side.

Now, we shouldn't be surprised by any of this; after all, Hollywood is liberal, actors are liberals, writers are liberals.  I don't mean that everyone in Hollywood is a liberal, nor do I mean that every show coming out of Hollywood comes from the playbook of Saul Alinsky; we all know of conservative actors and writers out there, some of them very successful.  But when it comes to the actual portrayal of competitive, partisan politics, there's generally only one way to play it, and that's from the left.

I can't speak to shows such as The West Wing and how they handled the political side of things, but the problem with political shows in general is that even though we're always saying "nothing ever changes," the issues discussed in a series such as The Senator do tend to be dated. What doesn't change is the Golden Rule of Politics: whoever has the gold rules.  And it is power - the accumulation and exercise of it, and the success which derives from it - that is really what politics is all about.  It's the part of the equation that television seldom understands, because those who create the political series often do so in order to advocate for a series of partisan political positions.

As an alternative to this, I'd cite two of my favorite British series - Yes Minister/Yes Primer Minister and House of Cards.  (The superior original version, as opposed to the American Netflix remake.)  Both of them focus on the Machiavellian side of politics, rather than the issues themselves.  In the case of the hilarious Yes Minister/Yes Primer Minister, it's the absurdity that's intrinsic to politics; with House of Cards, it's the brutal ruthlessness.  It's true that, being specifically British, the issues raised may be less obvious to a non-British audience; nonetheless, it's very difficult for a viewer to identify which party the principal characters belong to, and in the end it's not very important.  Because the nature of each series tends to skewer politics, we don't care what the issues are; we're more interested in the machinations that accompany the efforts of the principal actors to accumulate power than we are with the success or failure of a specific point of view.   Neither of them really emerge as partisan programs.

Am I saying that there's no place in scripted television for an intelligent discussion of political issues?  Not at all.  Am I saying that partisan advocacy for a particular point of view should never be shown?  Again, no, although it should be done sparingly.  What I am saying is that you don't have to be political to write about politics; the men and women involved, and their internal struggles, are often more interesting that the issues they debate.  (The current show Veep is often cited as an example of this, though from what I've read about it it I'm not quite so sure how successful they've been at keeping ideology out of it.)

We all know that Rod Serling started The Twilight Zone in part because of the interference of networks and sponsors in his attempt to discuss current events.  He was absolutely right that the television writer needs to be free from this sort of interference.  But Serling was a very clever man, and at times a brilliant writer; given the opportunity to write about politics in the same way he discussed business in his excellent teleplay Patterns, he would be more than up to the task.  Take his screenplay for Seven Days in May - although nuclear disarmament and the question of how far we can trust the Soviets is the central political issue, a much larger one - the constitutional guarantee of civilian control over the military, and the possibility of a military coup - is what really drives the story.  It's a position that liberals and conservatives can both agree on (I think), and the telling of it makes for a riveting story.  The same can be said for the much sudsier Advise and Consent, or the thriller Fail Safe.  Yes, there are partisan issues in each one, but they take a backseat to a different, human, type of drama.

Doubtless there are programs, then and now, that I'm overlooking, including the current House of Cards.  But for all that the '70 were a time when serious adult themes could be discussed head-on, it was also the beginning of a partisan liberal activism that became de rigueur on television, and remains so to this day.  Viewers, I am convinced, still want to see quality programming, but perhaps they'd rather save the preaching for church.  And if they don't want to hear it there, maybe they don't want to hear it on TV either.  Could be that's why The Senator never made it to a second season.