Future episodes refined the series’ already distinctive vibe, which presented the hardness and cruelty of frontier life but also celebrated the resilience of people strong enough to live in it. As Dave wandered the show’s lovely monochrome landscapes in the company of his dog Brown (and sometimes his best friend Burgundy Smith, played by John Dehner), The Westerner cast an empathetic but often merciless eye on all of its characters, including Dave, who often comes across as a forerunner of the antiheroes who distinguished TV’s post-Sopranos era. One of the better examples is the episode “Treasure,” in which Dave finds a buried stash of coins only to be disputed by an old and feeble prospector (played by Arthur Hunnicutt, but unnamed and identified only as “Old Man”). Dave eventually has to kill the man in self-defense, but there’s no glory in it; it’s just sad. The genre’s “do what a man’s gotta do” ethos is constantly questioned and found lacking, never more so than in “Hand on the Gun,” which finds Dave trying to persuade a young “greenhorn” cowhand (Ben Cooper) not to fetishize guns and gunfighting; the episode ends with Cooper being gunned down in the street by an older, meaner gunslinger whose dead expression testifies to what killing can do to the soul. Throughout, Keith’s appealingly naturalistic performance makes Dave seem like a fundamentally decent man made hard and nearly unreachable by his environment and upbringing. (He’s illiterate, too. “I know all the letters already, most of ’em, and I can mark some,” he tells the doomed cowhand in “Hand on the Gun,” “but I just don’t know how to put them together to make words.”)
The Westerner was canceled after thirteen episodes due to low ratings (it got crushed by The Flintstones on ABC and Route 66 on CBS) and made little impression on the general public (although the plot of one installment was reworked as the Charlton Heston Western Will Penny). It’s one of the few nearly perfect things Peckinpah was involved with, and deserves to be considered alongside his theatrical masterpieces Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch.
—MZS
BEST HOUSES
1. Stately Wayne Manor, Batman
2. Southfork Ranch, Dallas
3. Ingalls residence, Little House on the Prairie
4. The Addams Family mansion
5. The Munsters house
6. Stratton mansion, Silver Spoons
7. Fisher residence/Fisher & Sons Funeral Home, Six Feet Under
8. Huxtable brownstone, The Cosby Show
9. Cleaver household, Leave It to Beaver
10. Andy Taylor’s house, The Andy Griffith Show
11. The Waltons house
12. Don and Betty Draper’s house, Mad Men
13. Cunningham house, Happy Days
14. Forman house, That ’70s Show
15. Governor’s mansion, Benson
BEST APARTMENTS
1. Monica and Rachel’s apartment, Friends (an illegal sublet that was still insanely big)
2. Drummond family’s Park Avenue residence, Diff’rent Strokes
3. Mary Richards’s apartment, The Mary Tyler Moore Show
4. Findlay condo, Maude
5. Don and Megan Draper’s apartment, Mad Men (amazing view, but perpetually stained carpet)
6. Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment, Sex and the City (probably the most unrealistic columnist’s apartment since Margot Kidder’s penthouse in the first Superman)
7. Felix and Oscar’s apartment, The Odd Couple
8. Jerry’s apartment, Seinfeld (Kramer built his entire life around being in that kitchen)
9. Ricardo apartment, I Love Lucy
10. Evans apartment, Good Times
MINISERIES
(TV’s dominant prestige format from the mid-’70s through the early ’90s, and still an exciting alternative to the ongoing narratives of traditional series)
1. Roots (ABC, 1977); and Roots: The Next Generations (ABC, 1979)
Roots is the most important scripted program in broadcast network history. It aired across eight consecutive nights in January 1977—a go-for-broke gesture by ABC, which made the miniseries out of a sense of social obligation and wanted to “burn off” the entire run quickly in a mostly dead programming month. The producer was David L. Wolper, who specialized in blockbuster documentaries and miniseries (including 1982’s The Thorn Birds). The source was a book by Alex Haley, coauthor of The Autobiography of Malcolm X; it was described as nonfiction until the 1990s, when African American historians and genealogists checked Haley’s account of his family’s experiences as slaves in North Carolina and Virginia and decided that it was filled with conjecture, inaccuracies, and plagiarized material.
The revelations cast a pall over the program’s reputation, which is a shame. Nearly forty years haven’t dimmed its ability to illuminate one of the grimmest aspects of US history: its two-hundred-year participation in the transatlantic slave trade and the racism that became institutionalized throughout the country up until the 1960s, barely a decade before Roots aired. When you consider Roots’ timeline proximity to the civil rights marches and riots of the sixties, the intraracial arguments about nonviolent-versus-violent resistance to oppression, and the overall whiteness of popular culture at that time, its very existence seems remarkable. Once you actually watch it, it seems still more remarkable. The episodes’ scripts indict white viewers in a meticulous, unrelenting way, showing that the entire nation was complicit in this horror, which ripped indigenous people from one continent and transplanted them in another, taking away language and religion and ritual and replacing it with the practices of oppressors, then insisting that they graciously accept servitude as a fact of life, or worse, as the manifestation of an alien Christian God’s will. Unknown or underappreciated black actors played slaves and former slaves. Famous, and in some cases beloved, white TV stars played plantation owners, slave traffickers, overseers, and the wives and children and hired hands who benefited from the slave-based economy even though they didn’t think of themselves as active participants in it.
The face of the production was young LeVar Burton, who played the Mandinka tribesman Kunta Kinte, the earliest known descendant of the author. In an iconic opening sequence that was later appropriated by Disney’s The Lion King, we see the newborn Kunta being held aloft by his father, an image of freedom and possibility that will be ground into dirt when the teenage version of the character is kidnapped by African slavers, carried across the ocean in the hold of a slave ship, and sold into bondage in Maryland, where a fellow slave named Fiddler (Louis Gossett Jr.) teaches him to speak English and advises him to accept his new “American” name, Toby, give up his Mandinka heritage, and accept his lot in life. Kunta tries to escape anyway—the first of several attempts—and is savagely whipped by an overseer. As a middle-aged slave (now played by John Amos), he tries to escape again and has part of his foot amputated with an ax as punishment. He was given a choice between that or castration. “What kind of man would do that to another man, Fiddler?” Kunta asks his friend. “Why they don’t just kill me?”
The entire production is dotted with moments of savagery this extreme, including beatings, whippings, lynchings, forced sexual relationships between female slaves and their white bosses or owners, and the separation of families whose members have been sold off to different masters. Every one of these horrific moments is justified, because the intent of Roots is to affirm the shared trauma of generations of blacks and make whites who had never really contemplated the visceral reality of it feel at least some small part of its sting. Viewers who had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and were aware of the realities of slavery knew about the brutality, as well as the countless daily degradations, and the overall sense of despair that afflicted people who had been reduced to the status of glorified livestock to be worked, bred, sold, and put down. As in a silent melodrama (a mode that might have inspired parts of Roots), every scene is conceived in very broad strokes, and there’s no ambiguity about what’s happening or what it means for the characters; but the bedrock of Roots is still a historical vision of considerable so
phistication. It’s showing us an inverted form of colonialism: Rather than going to another country to superimpose their culture, the miniseries’ European-descended whites have brought Africans to North America, then systematically beaten and bred their indigenous culture out of them over the course of several generations. The casually doled-out whippings, the almost lordly indifference of the plantation owners, the repeated insistences that the slaves speak English and worship the Christian God, all testify to the mass brainwashing that was necessary to maintain the slave economy. As early as episode 2, the sound of fiddle-dependent European folk music, which replaced the Mandinka drums of the opening section, starts to seem psychically oppressive: aural shackles.
Roots brought it all into American living rooms, night after night, and dramatized it through well-written characters portrayed by actors with imagination and empathy. For many white viewers, the miniseries amounted to the first prolonged instance of not merely being asked to identify with cultural experiences that were alien to them but to actually feel them—by watching Kunta and his fellow slaves struggle to be free, either physically or emotionally, only to realize that in a country that had institutionalized white supremacy and had no compelling reason to change its ways, it just wasn’t possible.
The bulk of Roots’ messages and meanings were transmitted through its black actors: Burton; Gossett; Amos; Cicely Tyson (as Kunta’s mother, Binta); Madge Sinclair (as Belle Reynolds, who falls in love with the middle-aged, maimed Kunta); Leslie Uggams (as Kizzy Reynolds, a slave secretly taught to read and write); Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs (as Kizzy’s lover Noah, who tries to escape as Kunta did before him); and Ben Vereen (as the future cockfighting impresario “Chicken” George Moore, Kizzy’s son by a white slaveholder). Many of the performances are as saddening as they are revelatory: Hilton-Jacobs, who was stuck playing a smooth-talking clown on Welcome Back, Kotter, is heroically righteous as Noah, and Amos and Sinclair’s tenderness in love scenes reminds us of how rarely African American performers were allowed to play romantic, sexual beings on national TV in the ’70s. (When Kunta and Belle meet secretly in a barn, she strokes his shoulders and cradles his face, then removes his shirt and caresses the whip scars on his back, and he speaks to her in their native language, home at last.)
But the show’s casting masterstroke occurred in the white roles. They were filled by actors who had usually played sympathetic, adorable, or noble characters. Ed Asner, best known as the curmudgeonly but honorable Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, played the hired captain of the ship that brought Kunta and other kidnapped Africans to the United States. The moment when he’s shown the blueprint of the ship and realizes what those cramped berths and shackles are for, then accepts the job anyway, might be the most damning statement TV had yet made about the white man’s ability to compartmentalize revulsion when there is money to be made. The overseer on the voyage who assures the captain that the slaves aren’t really human is played by Ralph Waite, the crinkly-eyed dad from The Waltons. Chuck Connors, the righteous widowered rancher from The Rifleman, plays Tom Moore, a planter who rapes and impregnates Kizzy. Dr. William Reynolds, portrayed by Robert Reed, the father from The Brady Bunch, at first seems like a fairly benign master, at least compared to some of the openly sadistic characters we’d met up until that point; he assures his slaves that he won’t splinter blood ties by selling any of them off. But when Noah tries to escape, he changes his mind and sells Noah and Kizzy to separate plantations. Kizzy turns to Missy Anne Reynolds (played by Broadway’s Peter Pan, Sandy Duncan) for help because they’ve always been close; but when Kizzy’s carted off, screaming, “No, no, I don’t want to go!” Missy Anne watches through an upstairs window, her face a cold mask. The political and emotional reality of Roots’ drama is still stunning. Nothing happens that would not have happened. There is no hand-holding of white viewers, no dog-whistle assurances that if they were in this situation, they would not have behaved abominably. Time and again, the white characters are faced with a stark choice: Do the morally right thing and set themselves in opposition to slave culture, or maintain the status quo and hold on to their privileges. They always go with the second option.
Roots was produced on the cheap, with blandly lit interior scenes, unconvincing old-age makeup, and scrub-dotted California locations standing in for the humid greenness of the former Confederate States, and the physical continuity in the casting is sometimes laughable (in no universe does LeVar Burton grow up to become John Amos). But for all its missteps and faults, and there are many, it is distinguished by its moral and political clarity about what slavery was and what it meant to US history and African and African American identity. A sequel, Roots: The Next Generations, followed in 1979, and was nearly as good, following the family’s story through Reconstruction, the Northern migration, Prohibition, World War II, and the 1960s. It featured Marlon Brando in a cameo as Ku Klux Klan leader George Lincoln Rockwell, and culminated with Alex Haley (James Earl Jones) meeting his first great subject, Malcolm X (Al Freeman Jr.), then returning to his family’s ancestral village in Jufureh, the Gambia, Africa. The saga ends with a griot telling Haley the story of a young man named Kunta Kinte. The power of this moment, like so many others in Roots, is overwhelming, and it renders the questions of historical accuracy largely moot. This is not the story of one man’s family, but the story of a nation’s secret history, a tale that hasn’t yet been fully engaged with and understood, and that still lacks a satisfying ending.
—MZS
2. Angels in America (HBO, 2003)
The thesis of Tony Kushner’s drama, brilliantly adapted by stage and screen director Mike Nichols, goes like this: Before AIDS, it was possible for straight Americans to either ignore homosexuals or accept them as personalities without dwelling on the one aspect of their lives that defined them as different—what they did in the bedroom. After AIDS, such a reaction became impossible, but the compassion demonstrated by many straight people was met with an equal or greater rise in public, virulent homophobia, which treated AIDS sufferers as pariahs and harbingers of death. Angels is acutely sensitive to this phenomenon, and captures it in both graceful language and simple but striking moments of observed behavior. The entire miniseries is filled with philosophically minded soliloquies. Nichols visualizes them by splitting the difference between theater and cinema—opening Kushner’s adaptation out, but not so much that you lose sight of the fact that it derived from a play of ideas. The alternately sprightly and haunting score is by Thomas Newman, and the special effects by Richard Edlund, who worked on the original Star Wars trilogy. Meryl Streep plays four roles: AIDS researcher Hannah Pitt, convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg, a rabbi, and an angel.
“We’re just a bad dream the real world’s having,” says Prior Walter (Justin Kirk), a gay man afflicted with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. “The rest of the world is waking up.” It’s a key line because it summarizes two of Kushner’s more provocative assertions: first, that a large section of American society was secretly or not-so-secretly thrilled that AIDS hit gays so hard; second, that if the spread of HIV hadn’t slowed, it might have decimated entire demographic groups that the white, heterosexual middle class and upper class considers threatening—not just gay men, but drug users, people of color, the poor, and others who were disproportionately harmed by the plague.
Nobody embodies this intolerance like New York lawyer and Republican political fixer Roy Cohn (played with demented charisma by Al Pacino, who chews through Kushner’s elaborate soliloquies with a chainsaw tongue). As a gay man diagnosed with HIV, Cohn could have used his famous name and his clout with the Reagan administration to help afflicted people gain access to experimental medicine—or at least be treated with dignity. Instead, he protected his own health and reputation; in Angels, he’s shown bulldozing a government health official into giving him a stockpile of AZT, a then-experimental drug, while intimidating his own physician (James Cromwell) into treating his condition secretly so that his public image as a s
traight man wouldn’t be damaged. “AIDS is what homosexuals have,” Cohn instructs his doctor. “I have liver cancer.” Cohn hates the word “homosexual” because, he says, it reduces the complexity of human life to a single characteristic.
In a roundabout way, Angels endorses Cohn’s philosophy even as it condemns his treachery. In a scene that ironically echoes Cohn’s rant about labels, Walter’s boyfriend Louis Ironson (Ben Shenkman) insists that in human relationships, it is necessary to look beyond labels, beyond snap judgments, beyond absolutism of all sorts, because “it is the shape of a life, the total complexity, gathered, arranged, and considered in the end, that matters, not some stamp of salvation which disperses all the complexity in some unsatisfying decision. The balancing of the scales.”
—MZS
3. Lonesome Dove (CBS, 1989)
Larry McMurtry wrote the novel Lonesome Dove at a time when he was fed up with the romanticization of the American West and the books and films inspired by it. It’s an epic with a bleak, cynical tone, about a cattle drive from Texas to Montana where the heroes tend to die in the most stubborn or embarrassing ways possible, while the chief villain is captured offscreen by other characters.
What’s impressive about the miniseries, directed by Simon Wincer and written by Bill Wittliff, is the way it changes almost nothing of McMurtry’s story or dialogue, yet manages to find the sentimentality within it in a way that coexists with the despair, rather than undermining it.
TV (The Book) Page 45