Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  Back to the point: Norman Felton is an honest man who makes solid series. He had a term deal with NBC. David Dortort has done well by NBC with Bonanza and The High Chaparral on a similar deal. Sheldon Leonard’s contract with NBC produced I Spy, among others. And Lenny Freeman gives solid work for the dollar on his CBS pact. But ABC, locked in as they are with Aaron Spelling and his three and a half hours of primetime product, have made a wretched deal. But, like the network with the sadistic thief they finally canned, ABC has a sweetheart deal with Spelling, and what we, the viewing public, get from this unholy alliance is an endless gag fest (gag, as in retch and vomit) of half-witted, worn-out hack series, one more imbecilic than the last.

  Among the Spelling-originated offerings littering Channel 7 this year we have The Mod Squad returning in all its loathsomeness and success, adding to its list of crimes wasting the talent of producer-writer Harve Bennett; we have The Most Deadly Game which debuts next Saturday and which I’ll review in next week’s column; we have something like a dozen ninety-minute ABC Movie of the Week abominations (you may remember my column on The Love War, a Spelling-fostered Movie of the Week that holds, in the pantheon of tv films, the position of The Oscar in theatrical films); and—through fables and circumlocutions to The New Season, Part Two—we have:

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  THE SILENT FORCE

  (Monday, ABC, 8:30 p.m.)

  Never let it be said Mr. Spelling is one to let a tried-and-true cliché founder. He has taken The Mod Squad concept—the undercover fink as a symbol of righteous endeavor—aged the male principals by ten or fifteen years (for Michael Cole we have Ed Nelson; for Clarence Williams III, we have Percy Rodrigues), retained the young, sexy look for the female member of the law-enforcement trio (Lynda Day is so sensational just to look at that it only dawns later that she is a better actress than Peggy Lipton in a similar part)…and sent them out to “lop off the tentacles of the octopus of organized crime.” Or something.

  It was an idea that worked for The Untouchables, that flopped horribly as Cain’s Hundred, that made Mr. Spelling’s current fortunes soar with The Mod Squad, but which is so redolent of 1930s gangster films in its present incarnation, one can only assume ABC bought it because they were umbilically joined to the Spelling operation and, like paperback distributors who force newsstands to take fifty titles they don’t want and can’t sell in order to get their doles of The Love Machine and The Godfather, if they wanted those important (?) movies, they had to buy this unquestionably doggy item.

  To begin with, ennobling Mr. Mitchell’s or Mr. Hoover’s subterranean sneakos (who spend most of their time tracking longhaired student militants and teenagers smoking grass while the Mob chews ever more ravenously at the core of the American Economy) is to hype the scuttlefish into believing some genuine progress is being made against organized crime. Which is patently ridiculous.

  Further, it helps foster the know-nothing attitude of many Americans that the government knows best: that a no-knock law and wiretapping and entrapment and false arrest provisos and hideous conspiracy laws such as the one on which the Chicago Eight were indicted are in the public interest. It promulgates the impression that these incursions into civil liberties are all in the name of slaying the squid of big business crime. Which is bullshit. Extralegal outfits like the Silent Force (and the Mission: Impossible crew, while we’re about it, though the latter somehow escape censure because of the unreality of what they get into weekly) are certainly as great a threat to our freedoms as the gutter rats of the Syndicate, if for no other reason than that they constitute a secret police—and we’ve seen what such constituted “authorities” can do to anyone who does or says anything they consider not in the interest of the state. To glorify such insects is to dupe the uninformed and to validate any expediency they choose to get the job done. It is justifying the means because of the supposedly glorious ends. And that is bullshit, too. Ask Adolf Eichmann.

  On an entertainment level, the show is humiliatingly offensive. It is badly acted, moronically plotted, cheaply produced, illogical, and so hack familiar one need only watch the teaser to know the denouement. And worse, it is a bore. The time is past when any but the dullest of us believe in such derring-do by cadres of “specialists.”

  But the most irritating thing about the series—aside from the fact that it eats up valuable viewing time in the first place—is that it proffers more of the same old crap Mr. Spelling has been dispensing for years.

  Its only saving grace is that it’s a half hour long, rather than an hour. It can only be improved by making it an irregularly scheduled 0.6 of a second subliminal flash, shown after random deodorant commercials.

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  MAKE ROOM FOR GRANDDADDY

  (Wednesday, ABC, 8:00 p.m.)

  Angela Cartwright has grown up to be a lovely looking young woman, and there ceases any praise of any sort for this mothball special. I have no idea who the producers think the audience might be for such drivel. Young people will sneer at the cynical attempts at “social relevance.” Old viewers will find it all terribly familiar and inapplicable to the condition of their lives in these times of tax-bludgeoning, verbal assaults from left and right, and the terrors of a changing social order. And all but the kind of phonies who used to hang out at Sunset Strip discothèques will find Danny Thomas’ treacly sentimentality and showbiz humbleness too much for their digestive tracts. Mr. Thomas has not been watching the newspapers. He apparently still thinks it’s 1944, when that “we humble showfolk only live to entertain you good people” nonsense seemed apropos, coming from nightclub stages. It only plays in Vegas and at Friars Club dinners now. Mr. Thomas is one of a dying breed, and even though this last gasp of the species has national exposure (thereby making it the best-attended death rattle in the history of genocide), one can only suggest that he take his vast fortune, his admirable charities, his transparently phony self-effacement, his dialogue straight out of twenty-year-old segments of I Married Joan, his studio sets that look like paupers’ homes (because they’ve been used so long), and retire to whatever elegant Xanadu is reserved for outdated comedians, where he can smoke his cigars in peace and say what he really thinks about those goddamned Israelis, without worrying about the opinions of “dear Jewish friends” like Aaron Spelling. Maybe Angela Cartwright can get some worthwhile gig.

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  MATT LINCOLN

  (Thursday, ABC, 7:30 p.m.)

  After the full-length column I did before the fact on this series, I was afraid I was going to find it so evil and hurtful that it might take another full column to deal with it.

  Happily, such was not the case.

  Matt Lincoln is so dull, so uninspired, I suspect its initial audience will melt away within the first thirteen weeks, and we won’t have to worry about it again.

  And so saying, he passed on to other topics.

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  BAREFOOT IN THE PARK

  (Thursday, ABC, 9:00 p.m.)

  This is easily the most offensive show of the year. Turning Neil Simon’s thin and inoffensive little comedy into an all-black vehicle was perhaps a good idea…in concept. But the execution is as distasteful as it is witless.

  The inherent flaw is in trying to transpose white for black, item for item. Blacks and whites do not live, look, act, or think alike. We’ve spent three hundred years in this country making sure of that. And trying to pretend such is the case is dishonesty and stupidity of a rare high order. As the token black in an all-white legal firm, the hero of the series goes through all the life-style movements of a mingy little middle-class white-collar worker who has all the verve and imagination of a ribbon clerk. His aspirations and interests are those of the dullest suburban homeowner, even though he lives in a ratty under-the-eaves apartment. It is virtually The Brady Bunch sans moppets.

  The lie of all this is one blacks have been trying heroically to dispel since the first civil rights sit-ins: that blacks want to be just like whites, with cars and washing machines and all
the other garbage accouterments that have turned white living in America into a materialistic search for status and creature comfort.

  By denying the black heritage, and the wealth of black humor that has enriched it, the series literally lies to black and white alike. It pretends to a view of “negritude” that is virtually Caucasoid with Man-Tan slathered on. It is a latter-day analogue of “passing.” It is Tom to a fare-thee-well. And it stinks to high heaven.

  I understand Scoey Mitchell, who plays the lead in the series, was such a troublesome lad—whose capers and time-wasting (i.e., money-wasting) finally culminated in his punching the nose of a Paramount VP—he’s been fired off the show; and they are currently casting around for a replacement. And the odd thing about it, from what I hear in the trade, is that Mitchell wanted to play it more white. So perhaps the series will take a turn for the better, later in the year…sure it will. Yeah, sure.

  My doubts are based on the character interrelationship between Corie, the hero’s wife (played with all the ghetto soul of a DAR delegate by Tracy Reed, who is to the image of the modern black woman what Little Annie Fanny is to the image of the white woman), and a neighborhood hipster named Honey Robinson, played by Nipsey Russell, in whose few moments of street humor we have the closest approaches to black truth of which this series apparently is capable.

  Honey comes up to Paul and Corie’s apartment at regular intervals when Paul is away; he mooches around the city with Corie; at one point Paul comes to Honey’s poolroom and finds Corie with the other man instead of being at home making his dinner. Now what’s wrong with that, you may ask…if you’re white? Until last year, I would have made the same query. But one of my black students in the Open Door program of the Writers Guild drew my honky attention to the difference in black and white thinking in such matters.

  I had written a scene at a black party, in which a black man arrived with his woman, who saw an old boyfriend and dashed across the room to kiss him. It seemed right to me and it played well. Wrong, said Denny Pryor, my student. It wouldn’t be. Why? I asked.

  Because for so many years the black man has had the balls cut off him culturally by a society that lets his women work as maids and housekeepers and domestics of all sorts, while he went jobless, and he was forced into the image (if not the actuality) of an out-of-work bum. Because now black men are fighting to amass the pride they’ve always had, that has lain dormant because of the pressures on them, and their women recognize the nature of the struggle. Because when a black man enters a party, his woman is with him; she supports him; she can be friendly with other men but there must be no scintilla of doubt that she is his woman and they are strong together. In private it’s another matter, but in public—particularly at a party—her man’s appearance in the eyes of others is of paramount importance. The mickeymouse behavior of white women with other men at parties—hugging, kissing, fawning, flirting—would be anathema and deadly at a black party. That is a difference in white and black thinking and social conduct.

  Similarly, the way Corie hangs out with Honey, the way she belittles her husband in the eyes of others, would be grounds aplenty for a beating or a shoot-out. No black woman hip to her responsibilities with her man would do this kind of white bullshit, and no black man with an ounce of pride or dignity or muscle would allow it to go on past the first time. Whites put up with this kind of emasculating monstrousness week in and week out, which is why we have swap parties, plenty of divorces, and a nation of gutless men who “don’t want to get involved.”

  It is one of the things no white man can know. And for you and me, I suppose it doesn’t much matter if we aren’t hip to it. But the producers and stars of a show like Barefoot in the Park should know it, and act on it, if the series is intended to be anything but a token gesture aimed at placating the FCC’s integration edicts.

  And since everything I’ve seen so far on this series indicates that it is precisely such a gesture, I suggest the fraudulence of the concept will turn off black and white alike. Despite this, because of the hypocrisy that informs such gestures, even if Barefoot in the Park is a rating disaster, the network will keep it on. Out of a deranged and uninformed feeling that the black community or the FCC will pillory them for dropping it.

  When I suspect, in fact, that the black community despises a series in the initial segment of which a lawyer is asked to serve as a waiter for an all-white party. And the producers and network think that’s a funny situation. If that’s funny, next season we can expect the appearance of The Stepin Fetchit Natural Rhythm Shuffle Hour, brought to you by Kentucky Colonel Fried Chicken and Chiquita Watermelons.

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  THE ODD COUPLE

  (Thursday, ABC, 9:30 p.m.)

  is a delight. Neil Simon’s Broadway comedy translates exquisitely on the tiny screen. Jack Klugman as the slob, Oscar, is a rare delight, poetry and music in every word and motion. Tony Randall as the anal retentive Felix is brilliant. And the two of them together make this a half hour of joy and luminous comedy. If there are carps, they are minor…Oscar seems a little too clean and neat to be the slob we expect him to be…Felix frequently seems more petulant than prissy…we don’t see enough of the wonderful Pigeon Sisters. But these are cavils that really don’t count. And it’s sad-making in this not-best-of-all-possible worlds that there is much more to say about stinkers like Barefoot in the Park than winners like The Odd Couple, but in the final analysis, what more is there a conscientious critic can say after he’s said watch this show, you will like it enormously?

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  THE IMMORTAL

  (Thursday, ABC, 10:00 p.m.)

  I waited two weeks before reviewing this series. I wanted to be ultra-fair, for any number of reasons, not the least of which were that I wanted to like it and that the series is based on a science fiction novel by a good friend of mine. But two weeks’ airing forces the conclusion that The Immortal is a nitwit’s delight.

  Totally devoid of any reality or purpose, it is an endless video version of a Pavlovian rat-response, with the negative charisma of the hunted Christopher George serving to cast a downer pall over the labyrinthine scurryings of stalked prey through blah settings. More than half of each show I saw was devoted to mindless chase-sequences. It is The Fugitive stripped of sanity.

  On the second week’s episode even Ross Martin—whose ability to elevate the most moronic part to at least the level of craft expertise is legend after years of wallowing through The Wild, Wild West—even Ross was hopelessly bogged in the clichés and caricatures of an archetypal rural boob. Of plot there was little: just more of the first week’s vapid scampering hither and thither, with George at one end of the line, and faceless, dialogueless baddies in their Continentals at the other.

  It is so patently conceived by and for pinheads, that it must surely be a hit. But the lunacy of postulating a series based on a science fictional theme (a man whose blood produces antibodies that virtually guarantee immortality and freedom from the aging process) and then ignoring the fantasy elements, out of fear the “audience won’t accept it,” when it was precisely that acceptance that generated interest in the series to begin with, defies belief, rationality, or discussion.

  Yet, perversely, a hit it will surely be. For it offers nothing but movement and action; and in a time when young people turn off the sound to allow the screen’s multicolored images to function as moving artwork on a wall…what more could one ask than video in its purest form, stripped of impediments like plot, purpose, or preachments? For those who are catatonic, strobismic, spaced, or senile—it is a surrogate for thought or involvement.

  And if (as our sociologists ever more frequently advise us) we are a nation desperately trying to avoid involvement with life, The Immortal could easily become our New Testament.

  Subtitled, Where Are You Tonight, Catherine Genovese?

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  THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY

  (Friday, ABC, 8:30 p.m.)

  Mother of god!

  82: 30
OCTOBER 70

  If Jean-Jacques Rousseau can make a living from his confessions, I see no reason why I can’t do the same. I will confess: I have been a bad boy. I missed my deadline last week and those of you who’ve dropped me notes cursing my name because you laid out a quarter for the Freep and found no infuriating Ellisonian bullshit are well within your rights at being angry. What happened was that instead of hunkering in front of the juju box all last week, catching up with the few remaining new series unreviewed in this space—The Most Deadly Game, The Don Knotts Show, Nancy, Dan August, The Men from Shiloh—I spent my time trying to beat the recession by writing a script for Zalman King, Lee J. Cobb, and The Young Lawyers. Which is why I haven’t reviewed that one either. (I may not review the series et al. at all. Having written for it, and being a friend of Zal King, I suspect my judgment will be highly impaired; and while I can state with certainty that watching Zalman work is a delight sufficient to make the show a hit, I am by no means blind to the weak scripts that have been aired thus far. So to keep my hands relatively clean, I’ve pleaded nolo contendere—writing a legal show can do that to you—and you can make your own decisions on this one. Jesus, do I have to tell you everything!?!)