Written by Edward Hume (Cannon, The Streets of San Francisco), directed by Nicholas Meyer (Time After Time, Star Trek II and VI), and broadcast during an especially hot period toward the end of the Cold War, The Day After is a drama about the effects of nuclear fallout on a single city. It remains the highest-rated stand-alone TV-movie broadcast in network history, drawing an audience of more than 100 million people. Although the film provides a detailed geopolitical backstory explaining the origins of World War III—it starts with a rebellion by the East German army, then escalates into a Soviet blockade of West Germany—the film is mainly concerned with the immediate effects of atomic war on two communities, Lawrenceville, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, as well as rural communities near area missile silos.
The story is broken into three acts: the lead-up to the attack, the attack itself, and the protracted, hideous aftermath. Very possibly the bleakest TV-movie ever broadcast, The Day After is an explicitly antiwar statement dedicated entirely to showing audiences what would happen if nuclear weapons were used on civilian populations in the United States. JoBeth Williams, Steve Guttenberg, Jason Robards, William Allen Young, and Bibi Besch head the ensemble cast of Midwestern characters who all respond to this nightmare scenario with varying degrees of denial, despair, and resourcefulness; in the end, though, there is no hope for any of them, only the certainty of sickness and death. The film’s existence was greeted with howls of outrage by conservatives who thought it was liberal propaganda meant to compromise President Ronald Reagan’s administration’s hard-line stance against the Soviet Union’s expansionist policies (the New York Post called Meyer “a traitor”). The movie’s final form was compromised: ABC made the filmmakers cut a sequence that showed a child waking up from a nightmare about nuclear war for fear that it would traumatize young viewers (as if the rest of the film weren’t traumatizing already, and as if young children should have been allowed to view it in the first place), as well as scenes that showed flesh being melted by nuclear fire, looters tearing apart cities, and the scene in which Williams dies from radiation poisoning after stating that the dead are much better off than the survivors.
5. Brian’s Song (ABC, 1971)
For at least two generations, this TV-movie about the friendship between two football players, one of them terminally ill, spawned tens of thousands of gallons of male tears throughout North America. James Caan plays Brian Piccolo, a football player diagnosed with terminal cancer early in his pro career, who dies at age twenty-six; Billy Dee Williams plays Chicago Bears running back and future Hall of Famer Gale Sayers, who supported Piccolo throughout his medical struggles and dedicated a “most courageous player” award to his friend, saying that Brian’s the one who really deserved it. “I love Brian Piccolo,” he said, “and I’d like all of you to love him, too. And tonight, when you hit your knees, please ask God to love him.” The dramatic and emotional template for a good number of sports films and male weepies (categories that tend to overlap quite a bit), Brian’s Song was also an influential early example of the interracial buddy movie. It was remade, admirably though without as much impact, as a 2001 TV-movie starring Sean Maher and Mekhi Phifer.
6. Path to War (HBO, 2002)
The final film by director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Ronin), this nearly three-hour epic plays like the greatest political drama that Oliver Stone never made. Michael Gambon plays President Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose sincere attempts to improve civil rights and create a safety net through his Great Society initiative were damaged by the quagmire of US military involvement in Vietnam. Daniel Giat’s script reconfigures a talk-heavy story into a kinetic play of ideas, filled with ping-pong-edited policy arguments in the Oval Office and the US Congress, and psychologically and visually intense scenes that transform history into a waking nightmare (as when Alec Baldwin’s Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara watches a Vietnamese monk immolating himself in protest against US intervention in his country). This is easily the greatest of Frankenheimer’s late-period TV work, which equals his finest work from the 1960s: the TNT miniseries Andersonville (1995) and George Wallace (1997) and the HBO films The Burning Season and Against the Wall (both 1994).
7. The Burning Bed (CBS, 1984)
Directed by Robert Greenwald (Steal This Movie) from a script by Rose Leiman Goldemberg, this harrowing film dramatizes the true story of homemaker Francine Hughes (Farrah Fawcett), who in 1977 ended the abuse she’d suffered at the hands of her controlling husband, Mickey (Paul LeMat), by burning him to death in his bed as he slept. Hughes was eventually found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity. The film was a landmark in terms of content, depicting domestic violence as an unambiguous horror and a human rights violation; this point of view might seem obvious from the supposedly enlightened perspective of present-day Western values, but at the time the film’s broadcast hit viewers like a thunderbolt, prompting frank discussions about the law’s inability to protect women and children trapped in a situation like Francine’s. Fawcett’s performance in the lead role is one of the finest in the history of TV-movies (she would play a somewhat similar role in the 1986 feature film Extremities, based on the stage play about a rape victim getting revenge on her attacker).
8. And the Band Played On (HBO, 1993)
Based on Randy Shilts’s 1987 best seller, this sprawling ensemble drama shows how governmental incompetence and homophobia abetted the spread of the HIV virus; it doubles as a medical thriller, tracking the spread of the disease that causes AIDS from its presumed source, a sexually indiscriminate flight attendant named Gaetan Dugas (Jeffrey Nordling). Matthew Modine plays epidemiologist Don Francis, who wants to investigate the mysterious illness and deaths of gay men in San Francisco in the early ’80s but is thwarted by fears of privacy invasion (not unfounded, the film admits) and competing medical experts (including Alan Alda as American biomedical researcher Robert Gallo), who have their own theories about the disease’s origins and want to be the first to effectively deal with it and claim credit. Few American films, television or theatrical, have taken such a sweeping view of the ethical, political, and financial aspects of combating an epidemic.
9. James Dean (TNT, 2001)
James Dean started out as a feature film project in the 1990s, with Michael Mann slated to direct and Leonardo DiCaprio to star. It passed through several sets of hands before landing with director Mark Rydell (The Rose), a former actor who studied with Dean at the Actors Studio in New York and competed with him for live TV parts. The title role went to James Franco, who had an almost eerie physical resemblance to Dean but was unknown outside of his role as the dreamy burnout Daniel Desario on Freaks and Geeks. The result, scripted by playwright Israel Horovitz, was a cut above the typical “and then he went here, and then he did that” highlight reel mishmash that usually passes for a showbiz biopic.
It was with this project that Franco, the future autodidact and postmodern celebrity, first removed any doubt that he was more than a skinny, dark-haired hunk with the smile of an adorable mutt. He beat out five hundred actors for the role not just by capturing Dean’s posture, voice, and mannerisms but by connecting with the chameleonic fluidity that defined his personal life as well as his all-too-brief screen career. Mightily assisted by Rydell, who knew Dean as something other than a poster image or screen dream, Franco plays Dean as a searching young man who constructed a volatile, needling, curious character for himself, the better to keep from facing his own pain. The script delves into Dean’s flightiness and insecurity, his considerable power over young women, the partly playacted machismo that tamped down his bisexuality, and his resentment of the father (Michael Moriarty) who abandoned him; it also suggests that Dean suffered from undiagnosed mental illness. The result is a thoughtful portrait of a complicated young man who never got to experience the acclaim that greeted his only three films, Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, and Giant.
10. The Lathe of Heaven (PBS, 1980)
Directed by David Loxton
and Fred Barzyk from a script by Diane English (Murphy Brown) and Roger Swaybill, this low-budget adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel is one of the few examples of a made-for-TV science-fiction movie demonstrating a genuine interest in exploring the ideas it presents. Bruce Davison plays George Orr, a young man whose dreams come true, though rarely in the way that he might wish. Kevin Conway plays Dr. William Haber, who promises to help George harness his power for the good of humanity but ends up manipulating him in order to play God-by-proxy. Margaret Avery, who would later play a memorable supporting role in the film version of The Color Purple, is George’s lawyer and eventual lover, Heather LeLache, who tries to help him escape Haber’s clutches. Set in Portland, Oregon, but shot mainly in Dallas, Texas (whose 1970s brutalist architecture stands in for a “futuristic” city), The Lathe of Heaven is a sterling example of how to substitute storytelling acumen and purity of feeling for production values. It packs a miniseries’ worth of story into 120 minutes but never forgets to appreciate its characters as well-rounded individuals rather than plot-delivery devices (even the power-mad Haber ultimately seems more deluded and pitiful than evil), and throughout, there are surprising and marvelous lyrical touches, such as the use of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends” as the score for a dry ice–choked dream-sex scene that features a cameo appearance by a benevolent turtle-shelled extraterrestrial with a blinking lightbulb for a face. Le Guin’s novel was adapted again for the A&E network in 2002 with Lukas Haas, James Caan, and Lisa Bonet in the lead roles, with more production values, a vastly larger special-effects budget, and a lovely score by Angelo Badalamenti (Twin Peaks), but not as much charm or soulfulness.
BOSSES YOU’D MOST WANT TO WORK FOR
1. Andy Taylor, The Andy Griffith Show
2. Frank Furillo, Hill Street Blues
3. Arnold Takahashi / Al Delvecchio, Happy Days (wisely let Fonzie set up office in the men’s room)
4. Lorelai Gilmore, Gilmore Girls
5. Lou Grant, The Mary Tyler Moore Show / Lou Grant
6. Leslie Knope, Parks and Recreation
7. Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
8. William Adama, Battlestar Galactica
9. Charlie Townsend, Charlie’s Angels
10. Oscar Goldman, The Six Million Dollar Man / The Bionic Woman
11. Leo McGarry, The West Wing
12. Al Giardello, Homicide: Life on the Street
13. Angela Bower, Who’s the Boss?
BOSSES YOU’D LEAST WANT TO WORK FOR
1. Montgomery Burns, The Simpsons
2. Don Draper, Mad Men
3. Ari Gold, Entourage
4. Amanda Woodward, Melrose Place
5. Michael Scott, The Office
6. J. Peterman, Seinfeld
7. Tony Soprano, The Sopranos
8. Miles Drentell, thirtysomething / Once and Again
9. Annalise Keating, How to Get Away with Murder
10. James T. Kirk, Star Trek
11. Skipper Jonas Grumby, Gilligan’s Island
12. Leslie Stevens, Black-ish
13. Tony Micelli, Who’s the Boss?
LIVE PLAYS MADE FOR TELEVISION
(Hundreds of live plays were produced during the 1950s and early 1960s, garnering large popular audiences and serious critical scrutiny. They aired on such anthology series as The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse, The Kraft Television Theater, Robert Montgomery Presents, Westinghouse Studio One, and Playhouse 90, and they served as valuable launching programs for significant American directors [including John Frankenheimer and Arthur Penn], writers [including Reginald Rose, Paddy Chayefsky, and Rod Serling], and pretty much every significant movie and TV actor of the next twenty years. Some of the most popular programs were remade as feature films, in some cases more than once.
Unfortunately, little of this output is readily available to the public now. Some were recorded on film via the kinescope process, and others [from the late 1950s] were produced on videotape, but many more do not exist in any conveniently viewable form. It’s possible to track down some of the more obscure material through the Paley Centers in New York and Los Angeles and through assorted private collectors, but because most people don’t have the time or money to do that, the following list is intended as a sampler, focusing on titles that were milestones in the genre and that [as of this book’s publication] were viewable via streaming services, YouTube, and DVD collections.—MZS)
12 Angry Men (Westinghouse Studio One, CBS, 1954)
This single-set play about jurors deliberating a murder trial might be the single most durable production to come out of TV’s live-play era. Reginald Rose scripted it for television (where it was directed by Patton’s Franklin Schaffner and starred Robert Cummings); it was adapted for the stage the following year and has been performed ever since, both in its original incarnation and in revisionist versions with all-black, Latino, or female casts. The 1957 film version, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Henry Fonda, is a classic; William Friedkin (The Exorcist) directed a 1997 version for Showtime starring Jack Lemmon.
Bang the Drum Slowly (The US Steel Hour, ABC, 1956)
Novelist Mark Harris adapted his own same-titled novel to create this drama starring Paul Newman as a pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths baseball team who is stricken with Hodgkin’s disease. It’s perhaps the earliest example of the sports weepie, a subgenre that reached its apotheosis in the 1971 TV-movie Brian’s Song (see “TV-Movies” section). Remade as a 1971 film starring Robert De Niro.
The Comedian (Playhouse 90, CBS, 1957)
Adapted by Rod Serling from Ernest Lehman’s novella, and directed by John Frankenheimer, this searing drama starred Mickey Rooney as a once-beloved but miserable and fading vaudeville comic taking out his frustrations on his younger brother/assistant (Mel Tormé) and a writer (Edmond O’Brien). Claustrophobic and ruthless.
Days of Wine and Roses (Playhouse 90, CBS, 1958)
Written by J. P. Miller and directed by John Frankenheimer, this drama about two alcoholics (Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie) was remade as a 1962 Blake Edwards film starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick, but in a much softer and more likable incarnation that lost the desperate edge of the original.
Judgment at Nuremberg (Playhouse 90, CBS, 1959)
Written by Abby Mann, this account of the Nuremberg tribunals reopened some of the deepest wounds of World War II, examining bureaucratic and civilian complicity in the Holocaust. Remade as a theatrical film in 1961.
Marty (Philco TV Playhouse, NBC, 1953)
The earliest smash hit from the live TV era, this low-key urban drama about a couple of “losers” who gain dignity through love starred Rod Steiger (On the Waterfront) as the title character, a Bronx butcher, and Nancy Marchand (The Sopranos) as Clara, the object of his affection. Paddy Chayefsky (Network) wrote it, Delbert Mann (The Bachelor Party) directed. Mann and Chayefsky remade Marty as a 1955 film starring Ernest Borgnine (who won an Oscar in the part) and Betsy Blair. Its central relationship was an influence for many more screen couples, including Rocky and Adrian Balboa.
No Time for Sergeants (The US Steel Hour, ABC, 1955)
Based on Mac Hyman’s 1954 best seller, this is one of the few notable live-TV productions that was essentially a comedy, and a farce at that. It made a star of Andy Griffith, who plays Will Stockdale, a free spirit who rebels against the constraints of Army life, inspires his comrades, and makes life hell for his superior officer (Robert Emhardt). Griffith reprised his role on Broadway (opposite his future Andy Griffith Show costar Don Knotts as Corporal Manual Dexterity), then again for a 1958 film.
Old Man (Playhouse 90, CBS, 1958)
Adapted by Horton Foote (The Trip to Bountiful) from a portion of William Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, this drama about the effect of the 1927 flood on a small town is one of the most elaborately produced stories ever to air on a live theater program. Directed by John Frankenheimer, the production involved the c
onstruction of enormous sets with tanks containing thousands of gallons of water; when a crew member nearly drowned in one of them during rehearsals, the network decided it was too dangerous to do live, which meant that Old Man became the first “live” production to actually be produced in advance and videotaped (although other supposedly live plays had used previously taped material before). Its ratings and critical success are ironically credited with hastening the end of the live theater production on network TV.
Patterns (Kraft Television Theater, NBC, 1955)
Rod Serling’s breakthrough as a television writer, this bleak, somewhat satirical drama about executives jockeying to control a corporation and undermine one another’s careers might be the origin point for what we now think of as “quality TV.” Richard Kiley, Everett Sloane, and Ed Begley star. An uncharacteristically excoriating look at what capitalism does to human dignity, Patterns was so talked about that it became the first live drama to be performed a second time three weeks after its initial broadcast. Emboldened by this, Serling wrote more socially conscious teleplays, but encountered so much network resistance that he ultimately abandoned the genre in favor of allegorical horror and science fiction, including The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, and the original 1968 film adaptation of Planet of the Apes.
Requiem for a Heavyweight (Playhouse 90, CBS, 1956)
Written by Rod Serling and directed by Ralph Nelson, this is an existential exercise about a boxer named Mountain McClintock (Jack Palance) contemplating the end of his career after being beaten by a younger opponent. Almost unbearably sad at times, the drama stars Keenan Wynn as the boxer’s manager and his father, Ed Wynn, as the cutman. Requiem struck such a chord with audiences that it was made for English, Dutch, and Yugoslav TV and as a theatrical feature starring Anthony Quinn in Palance’s role.
TV (The Book) Page 48