(I should interject right here that I seldom preview the series’ offerings. What I report is what I’ve actually seen. I realize in this way you don’t get the word beforehand, as you do with Time or TV Guide, but since this column is for readers and not network executives, it seems to me I serve the commonweal more effectively by keeping myself as divorced from the PR aspects of the industry as possible. I see the new shows at the same time you do, and in this way we can compare ruminations. And I don’t have to feel guilty about lambasting some show written or produced by a friend of mine. Distance, in this case, breeds honesty.)
THE YEAR TV EXPLOITED SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND YOUTH. Yes. That’s the tag. And, brother, it is rampant.
No more perfect example offers itself than the debut of the new Andy Griffith show, called Headmaster (Friday, CBS, 8:30 p.m.).
Griffith’s new incarnation is that of the headmaster of a private coed high school, with Jerry Van Dyke as the football coach, and Parker Fennelly (octogenarians may remember him as Titus Moody on the Fred Allen radio show) as the custodian. First of all, we have a private high school. In this time of turmoil over school integration and bussing, of bigoted and frightened parents rushing their tender little urchins into private schools before they can learn black is as good as white, a private high school assumes special meaning—particularly when the pigmentation of the students in Griffith’s school is overwhelmingly Caucasoid.
But I may be stretching the point. I’m sure CBS would deny any appeal to beleaguered middle-class Americans forced to bus their kids a mile or two, all in the name of destroying racial prejudice. It just happens to be a private high school.
And it just happens the opening segment of the series dealt with dope. Even as it just happens that The Name of the Game dealt with kids who dope, that same evening. But it just happens that the manner in which it dealt with the topic highlights and keynotes the ludicrousness of tv’s blatant attempt to cash in on the 18–35-year-old market by exploiting youth and the concerns of youth today.
The plot was simple (it’s a half-hour show). Young teens at a party in the home of a kid whose parents are always conveniently away. (Incorrect Assumption About Youth #1: parents who don’t oversee their kids’ habits are inviting trouble, ergo, the parents are at fault.) Host comes up with a box filled with reds, yellows, whites, uppers, downers, sidewayers. Everybody starts dropping the caps, except one kid, Ritchie. He’s afraid.
So everybody starts to chill him. (Incorrect Assumption About Youth #2: since it was always the case for past generations that if you didn’t follow fashion or the group you were an outcast, old-timers writing these scripts believe it is still the case today. But there are so many different lifestyles for kids today, and for the most part all but the most loutish prize their individuality, so they wouldn’t be as ripped up as this show indicates, if one of their number chose not to indulge. It’s true, dopers—like drinkers—try to get everybody at a party involved—on the theory that anyone who doesn’t drink or turn on is a “downer”—but if you say no, and mean it, and aren’t disapproving of what others are doing, nobody puts you down for it. Scriptwriters and producers continue to use the idiot argot “doing his thing,” but they don’t seem to understand what it means, in just such cases as this.)
So Headmaster Andy gives them a lecture on dope. And he uses all
the cornball, square, cliché remarks to make his case. The kids don’t listen. They think Andy is square. They’re right: he is. His manner, his holier-
than-thou, sanctimonious, doom-crying manner, is square and hideously counterproductive.
Upshot is that Ritchie doesn’t want to be an outsider, so instead of swinging with Andy’s admonitions to stay away from pills, he goes to a party, turns on, and gets an overdose. He’s in the hospital, and Andy lectures the class again…something maudlin about we have to live together on this planet and we can’t do it by dumping alien substances into our bloodstreams, et cetera.
The credits hadn’t even rolled before reader Ed Granzow called from downstate, to say the show was stupid and I should put it down in this column. Well, I’ll put it down, but for artlessness and stupidity, not for its position on drugs.
As readers of my words know, I am far from a praiser of the drug culture. I’ve lost too damned many friends—o.d.’d in bathtubs, the hair streaming out like seaweed; locked away in violent wards in three states; dead in public toilets, the spike still hanging out of the big artery—to say anything other than that those who drop or do or turn on are assholes. But I also say everyone is entitled to go to hell in his own way. Better they should commit violence on their own bodies and minds than that the systematized and legalized violence of the Establishment screw them into early graves. But that’s another story.
I know Ritchie’s plight. I don’t get invited to as many parties as I used to. Not because I’m not liked (in point of fact, I’ve become a lovelier human being than I ever was) but because my friends know I don’t turn on, and they choose to spare themselves and me the awkwardness of being at a bash where everyone is using and I’m still straight. That doesn’t bother me…even as I know it would not bother a real-life Ritchie. When my friends want to see me, they get together with me, and we all know the ground rules. I don’t do their thing, but I don’t pin them for it. The reverse is true for them, of me.
And so, knowing the attitudes of those who use drugs, I know that Headmaster (ironic title in the context of this commentary) was written by an older man, speaking to older men. It was certainly not addressed to kids, who need most to hear it. Because it was square. It reinforced all the dumb arguments against dope that kids have heard spouted by hypocritical politicians and ignorant parents since the evil was corn silk smoked behind the barn. Kids see their parents poisoning not only the world, the atmosphere, and the environment, but also their own systems with nicotine and alcohol; and the maudlin arguments an Andy Griffith spouts are one with these. Kids laugh at that kind of bullshit…if they even watch it. It is a manifestation of the lip service adults and tv as their voice pay to the problems of our society. Look, they say, we are talking about the drug problem!
But to illustrate just how far off the target such attacks must be, consider this, from the current, October 1970, issue of Psychology Today (page 12):
“To be able to treat the country’s growing ‘drug problem,’ you first have to admit that most young people don’t think drugs are a problem, say the directors of Number Nine, a multi-purpose help house at 649 State Street, New Haven, Connecticut. Among the first 3000 youths who asked Number Nine for help after it opened a year ago, 85% had used drugs, but only a handful identified drugs as their problem. ‘They see drugs as a solution to a given set of variables,’ says Ted Clark, one of the center’s three young nonprofessional directors, ‘and if you treat the solution as a problem or as a symptom, you won’t get anywhere.’”
More clearly than anything I’ve heard or read on the subject, that brief comment sums it up. We’ve brought into being a couple of generations of Americans who believe there is a chemical answer to everything, from acne to cancer. So how dare we pillory kids for thinking pills and acid and smack are chemical answers to the worries and pressures that assail them? You can’t stock drugstore after drugstore with pharmaceutical goodies guaranteed to ease tension, straighten heads, and improve one’s complexion, without suckering kids into believing they’re entitled to the same benefits by the use of Mother’s Little Helpers.
And to attempt answering this lie with more lies, with hypocritical, uninformed, sanctimonious finger-wagglings by the likes of Andy Griffith, is compounding the felony.
Headmaster tried to say something heavy about drugs. But if it had any weight, the force was applied to already-panicking adults. The kids—like Ed Granzow—laugh at it. The horror of it was that that show might have had significant impact, had it been thought out and written by someone who knew.
That Friday night, September 18, the kids would have be
en receptive. It was the night we all heard Jimi Hendrix had died from an overdose, before he’d reached the age of thirty.
CBS, Andy Griffith, and the Adult Establishment had chosen, however, to exploit the young, had chosen to pay parlor-liberal lip service to its social conscience…and so, once again, no one heard what was blowin’ on the wind.
—
THE SENATOR segment of The Bold Ones
(NBC, Sunday, 10:00 p.m.)
This one had good vibes going for it as early as the pilot, last season, played as an NBC movie-for-tv—A Clear and Present Danger. It had Hal Holbrook (best known for his incredibly adroit “evenings” as Mark Twain) in a masterfully underplayed re-creation of his sensational role in Robert Thom’s/Barry Shear’s film, Wild in the Streets. The promise was kept with the opening installment of this new addition to The Bold Ones’ rotation plan. (Hari Rhodes and Leslie Nielsen as The Protectors are gone; The Doctors and The Advocates remain.)
The script was heaven: intelligent, informed, au courant without recourse to jargon, simplification, or sensationalism, unencumbered by trivial formula accouterments, and best of all it spoke to an audience I thought Universal and television in general would never acknowledge: the thoughtful viewer.
Without even a tinge of the yellowleg cheap-jack writing that characterizes so much current video fare, “The Senator” told the story of an assassination threat on Senator Hays Stowe, and his determination (for ethical and sensible reasons) to speak at a college despite the warning. Holbrook portrayed Stowe with such devotion and care that I found myself wishing nature would once again imitate art and all our legislators would take him as their model. In supporting roles Michael Tolan, Sharon Acker, and Cindy Eilbacher were so good they elevated the word competent to the Olympian level of craft perfection.
A noteworthy element of the show—and one I sincerely trust will obtain in every segment—were the serendipitous discussions of current social and constitutional concerns. In this script, for instance, we were treated to an honest (if inconclusive) scene between Senator Stowe and a cop (outstandingly rendered with shades of perception by Gerald S. O’Loughlin in one of his several memorable appearances on various shows this week) anent the relative merits of the no-knock provision of the criminal control bill.
If all television was this thoroughly decent and rewarding, it would put critics like me out of business and I would rejoice at the loss of employment. I cannot recommend Holbrook and his show highly enough. They are a wonder and a joy.
—
THE NEW RED SKELTON SHOW
(Monday, NBC, 7:30 p.m.)
CBS, heeding demographic studies in praise of the 18–35-year-old purchasing dollar (and the consumer-viewers in whose pink little fists said Yankee dollahz are clutchened), dumped Red Skelton. NBC, believing (quite rightly) that older members of the audience also deserve to be able to see their favorites, picked up the aging gentleman. I will not comment on the enormity of ego that convinces a 57-year-old man that The Show (meaning him) Must Go On! I won’t comment, because it’s the same insanity that motivates me. This similarity notwithstanding, I have never been a Skelton fan. His humor is a trifle too coarse for my taste—David Steinberg sits somewhat better, gourmetically speaking. But I watched Mr. Skelton in hopes that twenty seasons on tv and all those high-paid comedy writers he uses would have led him to realize his humor has become distinctly mildewed. Hope rises eternal as (apparently) does Red. And his gags.
Old, old, incredibly old. Pratfalls, the perennial sea-gull jokes, that moronic Silent Spot, his unfailing phony laughter at his own jokes, and in case no stone of low comedy was left unturned, the abominable Jerry Lewis (fresh from new horrors on his telethon) added a maudlin show-biz note of cheap sentimental homage à la Danny Thomas.
It was a half hour appropriately introduced by Spiro—like Skelton, one of the great clowns of our time—at least that’s what they keep telling us—for it demonstrated more of that middle-class, middle-brow anti-intellectualism about which I ranted several columns ago, to wit, portraying scientists as loonies (a stereotype that went out with “Miss Jones, with your glasses off you’re beautiful!” and all Jews have big noses and all blacks salivate for fried chicken and Latins are lousy lovers; that whole crowd of nitwit clichés from the Keith Circuit) and telling a dumb lab assistant, “Keep that up and you’ll be back at Berkeley next year.”
There was also an embarrassingly bad female singer named Robin Something, who ought to learn to at least lip-synch properly before she tries network tv again.
I’d give the same advice to Red, but what the hell does a young punk like me know about the living legends of entertainment? Hell, I even thought the Ed Sullivan AGVA show was a monumental pain in the ass.
—
THE STOREFRONT LAWYERS
(Wednesday, CBS, 7:30 p.m.)
Despite the flagrancy of the exploitive uses to which the liver-spotted moguls of videoland are putting youthful passion this season, it cannot be denied: dealing with contemporary problems, no matter how simplistically or slickly, has improved the caliber of scriptwriting. Denied the easy avenues of raw violence and pulp-fiction plotting that held sway for so many years in the idiom, scenarists are now finding they must get to the heart of characterization (well, into the neighborhood of the spleen at any rate, if not actually all the way to the pulmonary artery), and they must substitute genuine plot for mindless chases only a notch above Tom and Jerry (a comparison unfortunately invidious to those noble cartoon creatures). So The Storefront Lawyers reap this benefit. Which is to say that, aside from a marvelous A-B-C revelation of how interlocking corporations fleece innocent consumers, the opening segment of this series didn’t show much more than a standard Perry Mason episode. The lawyers are younger, the courtroom theatrics a bit more current and flashy, but essentially it’s another of those series so dear to the bar associations. It makes attorneys look like Mr. Clean, like nobility incarnate.
Fierce, committed (gawd, that word, that weary, overworked, invalidated, and corrupted word: again again again and again), incorruptible—they work within the Establishment to bring justice to the poor, the lost, the underdogged. Nothing wrong with that, and nothing really wrong with the series opener…just that it seemed to lack…well, for want of a better word…soul. I suppose that’s praising with faint damns, and I don’t mean it to do that, but the three whey-faced attorneys (played by Robert Foxworth—dominating the show with little more than one change of expression—and Sheila Larken—who is marvelously lovely but didn’t have much of a part to work with—and David Arkin—whose talents were wasted entirely with chiming in straight lines for Foxworth) seemed so humorless, so rigidly devoted to inscrutable ethic, that I kept wishing someone would rerun one of those Peter Falk Trials of O’Brien shows of several years ago, just to show them that attorneys are human, too. As Barry Bernstein continues to tell me.
—
McCLOUD segment of Four-In-One
(Wednesday, NBC, 10:00 p.m.)
Every critic in the country will be saying this is Dennis Weaver without the limp, with the dusty drawl less nasal, so I won’t. What I will say is that this one is a clear winner. After years playing second banana to the Colossus of Rhodes and a dopey bear, Weaver has found his forte. Sam McCloud, deputy marshal from Taos, New Mexico, on detached duty to the NYPD, is a boot in the butt. It is a joy to watch Weaver work. The rolling gait is just right for a man wearing goat-roper boots on those Manhattan sidewalks. The funky Stetson is a signifying fraud, but such a delightfully irreverent put-on that it is wholly in tune and acceptable. With his shirt off, Weaver is a little soft in the gut and that’s real. And though they’re cautious about showing it on camera, he is a whorer, a rakehell, and a flouter of authority. It’s merely Coogan’s Bluff (the Clint Eastwood starrer of last year, also from Universal) with a different leading man, but it is so correct, so damnably entertaining, and the scripting is so tight only a wimp would find fault. (Except, would someone point out to t
he producer that once the killer had McCloud at gunpoint in the barren wastes of Long Island at five in the morning, he wouldn’t do that “put your hands up, turn around, you drive the car” routine that only works in bad men’s magazine fiction…he would simply s-h-o-o-t him on the spot. Said the wimp.)
It’s a shame we’ll only be getting six weeks of Weaver as McCloud before they rotate to the second of the Four-in-One programs. I’d like to see lots more of Diana Muldaur, who acts as memorably as she looks, of J. D. Cannon as the irascible chief of detectives, and they might even give Terry Carter a little more script to play with. But Universal being the catbird it is, I suspect they’ll be hip to what they’ve got going soon enough, and McCloud may turn into a weekly. It can’t be soon enough for me.
—
THE FLIP WILSON SHOW
(Thursday, NBC, 7:30 p.m.)
I’m reminded of the few times Lenny Bruce was allowed to work network tv and how even his irreverent, armor-piercing humor was softened, downgraded, cleaned up if you will. And Lenny was a comedic genius. If it could happen to the likes of Lenny, what right do I have to hector Flip Wilson, who is simply blah? As tonstant weaders of this column may recall, I am hardly a fan of Mr. Wilson and his humor. He seems to me terribly white in what he does, but again—as I’ve been reminded by my betters—I have no right to put the man down for not doing a black thing onstage. Maybe they’re right. It just seems a shame with so few black comedians making it, that one of them should opt for all the mannerisms of a hundred other paler jokers.
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