The Glass Teat - essays of opinion on the subject of television

by Harlan Ellison

  It was the vocal statement of a man who is confused and terrified by the things young people are doing today, a statement that did not comprehend the blame lies in the venality and alienation of the older generations. It was as dense and studiedly unknowing as the grave-fears of a little old lady dying away her moments in a Beverly Boulevard convalescent home.

  One can only conjecture what effect Miller’s play had on the errant son. Were I he, it would have solidified once and finally my feelings that Dad was a phony intellectual, and a man to distrust simply because he knows not where it’s at. Nor where it’s going to be.

  * * * *

  5: 1 NOVEMBER 68

  Wags at a recent craft forum meeting of the Writers Guild suggested that the reason for the recent bombing of the Free Press was this column. I pshawed them, naturally. It’s true I received an irate call from an irate producer, whose series I’d bummed in these pages, assuring me that I was a toad and that I would never work on that series. (This, gentle readers, is a threat roughly as, imposing as telling a man who has just crawled out of the Gobi Desert on hands and knees that he cannot have a peanut butter sandwich.)

  It is also true that I received a communication from CBS News here in Los Angeles, demanding to know the names of the confidantes who had freely discussed the hypocrisy of their network and its news staff. There were implied threats. Dark and devious references to Judge Crater and Amelia Earhart and Ambrose Bierce. (I didn’t nark on my sources, gang. Bamboo shoots under the fingernails could not drag that privileged communication from me. Which brings us to an interesting sidelight that came down this week: a representative of ABC-TV, facing the Senate investigating committee on television violence, copped-out that not only was ABC clean clean clean, but that because of the effulgent brilliance of ABC’s Mod Squad—a disaster area I dealt with several weeks ago here—a teen-aged girl, a “user,” had “kicked,” and “split her scene,” and had joined forces with the LA.P.D.—like the kids in the series— to work as an undercover informer, a “stoolie.” This network rep was really h-e-p, he used all the jargon ... user, kicked, split, where it’s at . . . unfortunately, he doesn’t smell out the horror of what he’d said: that the ethical corruption of the series had miasmically drifted off the tube, and clouded that poor little chick’s mind, thereby causing her to turn on/in her contemporaries. And if it be demonstrably true that this nitwit show can cause one person to turn from “evil” to “good,” then it should conversely be true that it could turn them from “good” to “evil,” and so it probably follows that seeing violence on Mod Squad could get thousands of little teenie-boppers to run amuck and send their parents through meatgrinders. God save us from network representatives so chickenshit frightened for their jobs that they feed the witch-hunters the raw meat they need to batten and fatten.)

  So ... anyhow ... back to the point, whatever it was, originally. Oh yeah, threats, displeasure. I remember.

  This column has attracted some small attention, and not all of it dedicated to the concept that the author is a pussycat. So, before the impression is too strongly implanted that I am a bitter, cynical, rude and violent critic with a heart as mellow as a chunk of anthracite, I am sliding this column in among the contributions I make weekly in which I explain the Ethical Structure of the Universe and help Keep America Strong! A column of fun, folks. Get set for funtime! A direct appeal to your funnybone, in an effort to prove that I am a man of mellow habits and gentleness. And how do I set about proving this to all my critics? By listing those current shows that I recommend unqualifiedly as excellent TV fare, and then by making a few thoughtful suggestions as to potential series that might make it big on prime-time.

  First: the shows I recommend:

  Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In

  The Smothers Bros. Comedy Hour.

  The Ghost And Mrs. Muir

  Mission: Impossible

  Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour

  The Dan Smoot Report

  The Sign-Off Sermon

  (I also recommend the new ½-hour police series Adam-12, on Saturday evenings. Very nice, very realistic, and almost too damned good to believe from gung-ho Jack Webb.)

  Now there may be those among you who think I’m kidding when I recommend Ted Mack and Dan Smoot and the prayer just before the station signs off. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m dead serious. For sheer sustained bald humor, nothing is funnier than Mr. Smoot awakening us to the dangers of the International Communist Freako-Devo-Pervo-Sickie World Conspiracy. And if you think Laugh-In is funny, fall down on Ted Mack’s show. You don’t know what humor is till you’ve seen a boilermaker from Moline making music by rapping his skull with his knuckles. (And remind me some time to tell you about the freakout existentialist experience I had one Sunday morning with the Original Amateur Hour. Uh!)

  And if one chooses to worship Ba’al or Zoroaster, the late night psalm is refreshing, stimulating, uplifting and hysterically convulsing.

  But it must be obvious to everyone that TV has nowhere nearly approached its potentialities for comedy series. So in a constructive attempt to hip them to what can be done, I offer the following proposed series concepts, some of which are mine, some of which come from other TV writers who wish their names unknown and their homes unbombed.

  Berkowitz of Belsen! With the success of funny POW camp shows like Hogan’s Heroes, the next natural step is a funny series about a Nazi extermination camp. Our hero is Morris Berkowitz, an engaging scoundrel of the Phil Silvers-Sgt. Bilko stripe, whose hilarious exploits among the quicklime pits and gas chambers of Belsen is calculated to send you into paroxysms of joy. I can see a typical segment now: Berkowitz has flummoxed the cuddly Kommandant of Belsen into selling him half a dozen ovens for purposes of setting Berkowitz up in the pizza business. Conservative, Orthodox and Reform pizzas, all with meat.

  Johnny Basket-Case! A two-fisted western about a trouble-shooting multiple amputee who rides his great white stallion Trumbo side-saddle, in a wicker basket. He is a sensational shot, firing the six-gun with his mouth.

  Freakout! A weekly series of music and blackouts featuring kids who’ve been committed to the UCLA Intensive Care ward, acid-victims all. Their hilarious nightmares and problems being fed intravenously while in shock should help establish a necessary rapport between the generations.

  A Man Called Rex! A situation comedy about Oedipus and his Mom. Heartwarming social comment and unaffected comedy for the Love Generation.

  Chicago Signal 39! A true-to-life police show starring those two great Americans Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen, as a pair of Chicago flying squad cops assigned to the Special Riot Detail. Homespun comedy about mace and mad dogs. Will play big in the Midwest.

  This is only a sampling of the wonders modern TV could provide, if they would only carry to logical extremes what is already being delivered to the public.

  And this sampling should once and for all put an end to the base canards leveled against this column and this columnist that we view with disgust and horror what comes out of the glass teat each week.

  See, I told you. I’m a pussycat.

  * * * *

  6: 8 NOVEMBER 68

  As slanted and inept as television’s handling of the news may be, it is light-years away in integrity and lucidity from Time Magazine, a phenomenon of 20th Century life I put on a level with dog catchers, summer colds, organ music at skating rinks and the comedy of Phyllis Diller: in short, items I can well do without, I don’t read Time. Except to check them against Ramparts and gauge the degree of paranoia Mr. Luce is currently proffering. Yet the other day my secretary, Crazy June, in an attempt to destroy my mind, wafted a copy of Time under my snout (she was hellbent on reading me an item about snake-handling ministers of the Holiness Church of God in Jesus’s Name, somewhere in Virginia; don’t ask me why) and I caught a glimpse of Time’s television page.

  I was pinned to a listing of the Nielsen ratings released last week. I have to reproduce that list for you. Th
e mind flounders.

  1) Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (NBC)

  2) Mayberry R. F. D. (CBS)

  3) Gomer Pyle—U.S.M.C. (CBS) and Julia (NBC)

  5) Family Affair (CBS)

  6) Bonanza (NBC) ‘

  7) Here’s Lucy (CBS) and The CBS Thursday Night Movie (Doris Day in The

  Glass Bottom Boat)

  9) The Beverly Hillbillies (CBS)

  10) Ironside (NBC)

  Now I have to confess that I have never seen a segment of the Lucille Ball show (I Love Lucy back when I was in high school was more than enough for me), or the Mayberry R.F.D. thing (which I gather is an offshoot of Gomer Pyle which is an offshoot of the original Andy Griffith Show), or Julia, which I understand is deeply sensitive and touching. In line of work I have caught all the others—at least when they were onscreen for the first season. It’s been years since I’ve considered the peregrinations and problems of Hoss Cartwright or Ellie Mae Clampett, or wept sadly that an actor as fine as Brian Keith has to play second banana to a couple of saccharine cutesy moppets just to make a good living, but I consider myself reasonably au courant with what’s available on prime-time, and aside from thoroughly enjoying Laugh-In (you see, I love Goldie Hawn and I lust after Judy Carne), I am frozen into immobility at what the bulk of the nation is choosing to watch.

  Six of the ten leading items are wafer-thin, inane, excruciatingly banal situation comedies dealing with a view of American home life that simply does not exist save in the minds of polyannas and outpatients from the Menninger Foundation. All six of those items run only 20-some-odd minutes (minus commercials), which indicates how deeply the plot goes into any problem jury-rigged for the actors. Two more of the top ten are light comedy, the Doris Day film and Laugh-In. Miss Day fits neatly in with our first six winners, and Laugh-In manages to become consistent with the others by its escapist elements—laughter and silliness. Of the ten top shows, only two even remotely resemble drama. And both of them are—psychologically speaking— “family” shows. The Cartwright strength is in the family unit, and “Ironside” has his little family of assistants, the two white kids and the obligatory black kid.

  While their world gets ripped along the dotted line, the average middle-class consumer-slaphappy American opts for escapist entertainment of the most vapid sort. No wonder motion pictures grow wilder and further out in subject matter: audiences are getting their fill of pap on the glass teat. No wonder such umbrage and outrage by the masscult mind at the doings of the Revolution: they sit night in and night out sucking up fantasy that tells them even hillbilly idiots with billions living in Beverly Hills, are just plain folks. No wonder the country is divided down the middle; TV mythology causes polarization.

  Walking the streets these days and nights are members of the Television Generation. Kids who were born with TV, were babysat by TV, were weaned on TV, dug TV and finally rejected TV. These kids are also, oddly enough, members of the first Peace Generation in history, members of the Revolution Generation that refuses to accept the possibility that if you don’t use Nair on your legs you’ll never get laid.

  But their parents, the older folks, the ones who brought the world down whatever road it is that’s put us in this place at this time—they sit and watch situation comedies. Does this tell us something? Particularly in a week when prime-time was pre-empted for major political addresses by the gag-and-vomit boys, Humphrey and Nixon? It tells us that even in a year when the situation facing us is so politically bleak that optimists are readying their passports for Lichtenstein and pessimists are contemplating opening their veins, that the mass is still denying the facts of life. The mass is still living in a fairyland where occasionally a gripe or discouraging word is heard. The mass has packed its head with cotton. The mass has allowed its brains to be turned to lime jello. The mass sits and sucks its thumb and watches Lucy and Doris and Granny Clampett and the world burns around them.

  It goes to something stronger than merely one’s personal taste in television shows. It goes straight to the heart of an inescapable truth: if the world is going to be changed, gang, if we’re going to find out where the eternal verities have gone, if we’re going to rescue ourselves before the swine mass sends us unfeelingly and uncaringly down the trough to be slaughtered, we have to face it: they will not help us. They will applaud now that LBJ has stopped the bombing, but they see no inconsistency in having beaten and arrested all the clearsighted protesters who said it three years ago, before how many thousands of innocent cats got their brains spilled? And now that what those protesters protested for has come to pass, will they rise up and say free them, reinstate them, honor them?

  We know the answer to that.

  The answer is: they’re too busy watching Gomer Pyle cavort around in a Marine Corps that never gets anywhere near jellied gasoline and burning babies.

  Dear God, we must face the truth: for the mass in America today, the most powerful medium of education and information has become a surrogate of Linus’s blue blanket.

  A ghastly glass teat!

  * * * *

  7: 15 NOVEMBER 68

  The week was a veritable cornucopia of television-oriented goodies. It was a time when we were exposed to the incredible tunnel-vision of our public officials (or those seeking to be same) as regards the potentialities of the medium.

  Instead of recognizing that television, in its McLuhanesque fantasy/reality, can spot a phony and pin a liar, Humphrey persisted in mouthing jingoism and concealing his true personality, and lost an election.

  To our everlasting gratitude, however, the other side of the coin was exhibited by Max Rafferty, one of the few truly evil men I have encountered. He is a liar, a cunning ghoul with a nature that has apparently never been sullied by the presence of a scruple. On Wednesday morning, when he lumbered before the cameras in his campaign headquarters to concede the election to Cranston, he was asked what it was in particular that he thought cost him the race. Though I’m sure he didn’t mean it in the way I interpret it, he said it was obviously because the people dug Cranston more than him. And he was correct. Though Cranston is by no means a Great White Hope (and certainly no Great Black Hope) he was demonstrably not an insipid man, nor a brute, nor a mudslinger, nor a phony ... all of which are charges than can be laid at the feet of Rafferty with some success. The tube revealed Rafferty for what he was. And so, in a year when he had everything going for him, he lost. As he deserved to lose.

  Rafferty, thank God, failed to understand the ways in which the medium could expose him. His guru, Nixon (I gag at having to call him President Nixon), finally came to understand the nature of the beast, after the licking he took at its hands in 1960. But the word never drifted down to Rafferty. For which small thanks can be given. Would that Humphrey had been as hip to TV as was JFK.

  It became obvious this last week, inundated as we were with political “specials,” that the days of the fraud in politics are numbered. Or, more correctly, the inept fraud. The baby-kissing, slogan-mouthing hypocrite: the machine politician. TV’s eye is much too merciless, and the generations raised on TV are wise to the fraudulent; they’ve seen too many commercials to ever again be taken in by demagogues and political used car salesmen. (In this respect, I suppose we owe a helluva debt to Ralph Williams, whose hardsell parallels that of the office-seekers. Once having had one’s skull napalmed by the Ralph Williams scene, one need never fear having the wool pulled over one’s eyes by a Wallace or a Rafferty.)

  Yet the demise of the one postulates the rise of another. The Show Biz Politician. Reagan is a classic example, of course. In a way, the Kennedys are another. I think the element is charisma. If a man can look sincere on the tube, if he can seem to be honest and forthright and courageous, he can sweep an election merely by employing the visual media.

  In which case, the term “bad actor” would come to have a new, more ominous meaning.

  Another goodie from the week that was: one of the pollsters, in conjunction with one of the majo
r networks, promulgated a survey of feeling on the part of the American Public about Johnson’s bombing halt of North Viet Nam. Seventy-three per cent said it was a groove, they were nuts about the idea, oh boy, gosh-wow, simply peachy keen. Now I don’t know what boils your blood, gentle reader, but that is the same 73mother% that was out in the streets shouting “Lynch! Lynch!” at the kids who showed up at Century City, who chased the Dow recruiters, who burned their draft cards, who sat-in at a dozen universities, who marched to Washington, who got their skulls crushed in Chicago streets by the all-powerful John Laws. They are the same hypocritical 73% who refuse now to draw a line between all of that dissent, through Johnson’s vanished popularity, past Johnson’s decision (forced on him) not to run, ending with the bomb halt. Do you think there is no connection? Are they that incredibly unaware that they still think all those people with indictments against them, all those kids and old men lying-up in slammers across the country, all those girls and boys who’ve been fined or thrown out of school, are Communists? Where is the sense that we hear Nixon and Humphrey and Wallace rattle on about? Where is the awakening? At what point do those 73TVoriented% say, “Hey, wait a minute! If we agree with the bomb halt, and all those kids were demanding a bomb halt, then those kids were the same as us, only they saw it before we did! Then that means they’re okay, they’re real Americans, too. So let’s spring ‘em ... let’s erase those charges..., let’s hand them back their fines . . . let’s reinstate them in college ... let’s let Spock off the hook!” At what stage of cultural adolescence do the people assume responsibility for their mistakes? At what point does the shuck cease?