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

by Harlan Ellison

  How about explorers? No one can deny that a series about Marco Polo or Lewis & Clark or Cortez is built-in with more heroics than that of a modern physician. And while I know I’m not only building dream castles, but trying to furnish them and move in first of the month, a series about a student militant, a series about a Congressional investigator, a series about a civil rights worker, or a series about a university psychiatrist experimenting with LSD, would be genuine stoppers. And if you choose to take any other position than that of the Center or the Right, these are Heroes in the truest sense of the world.

  The bottom line, I suppose, is that TV’s conception of what it takes to be a Hero is—like much of the posturing on television—intellectually fifty years out-of-date. TV, in declaring heroes only those who work at occupations considered noble by the mass, remain safe, and remain bland. Doctors, veterinarians, spies for the U.S., cops, people in the world of show biz (That Girl), or just-plain-folks (Mayberry, RFD, Beverly Hillbillies, The Good guys) are certainly non-violent, inoffensive and safe, but they are also predictable, bland and rapidly boring.

  The Hero is not the man who looks good while risking nothing. Which is why Hogan’s Heroes has no Heroes in it. The Hero is the man who can stand to lose something heavy is he commits himself.

  And what I suppose I’m getting at is that in these times of fence-sitters, hemmers and hawers, bet-hedgers, what we need to see on our TV screens are men and women who have something at stake, something to lose, something that can ennoble them for us. We need guidelines today, and those guidelines are hardly evident in fare such as Here Come The Brides.

  A doctor is a good thing, I can dig it. But he sure as hell isn’t my idea of a man in a position to become a Hero. His job isn’t dangerous enough. Not nearly as dangerous as, say, that of a television critic.

  * * * *

  27: 2 MAY 69

  The only no-talent “second lead” in the history of television series programming who crossed them up and turned out to be a star was Bill Cosby. That was because Culp was a beautiful loving cat who shared what he knew about acting, and Cosby’d be the first to confirm that.

  But can you dig all the bright young jocks bopping around the screen these days, who simply don’t cut it, and never will, because they’re overshadowed by name leads with more clout lost or strayed then these kids will ever show? The roster goes something like this:

  Kent McCord runs second to Martin Milner. Richard Dawson places to Bob Crane. Gary Conway, Don Marshall and Don Matheson look sick next to Kurt Kasznar; William Reynolds loses (again), this time to Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.; James Stacy bulks tiny beside Andrew Duggan. David Soul and Bobby Sherman don’t have a prayer next to Robert Brown. Don Mitchell grows faceless in the face of Raymond Burr. Ben Murphy (who?) and Robert Stack. Stephen Young and Carl Betz.

  And every season they roll in more of these faceless devils who will wither in the television wasteland, hoping the “exposure” will catapault them, if not to stardom, at least to solvency. And every year they go the way of Don Quine. It would be sad, if it weren’t so predictable.

  The only one currently swinging (and off he goes with new year cancellation) is Otis Young, who gives Don Murray a helluva fight for center stage. (Does it strike anyone as fine and interesting that the two big new talents to emerge from the box in the last few years are both black?)

  There’s an obvious reason why these cats are doomed, of course. Aside from their general lack of charisma and/or talent. It is that their roles are superfluous. Like Ben Murphy on the Stack segments of The Name Of The Game, they are jacked-in by format writers as a sop to “the younger audience.” They are supposed to be identification for the youth set who can’t see themselves in Walter Brennan or Lorne Green. They are patent shucks like Luci and Desi Jr., brought in to revitalize saggers like Lucy, or they are calculated vote-getters like The Monkees (the single greatest hype of this decade). And they fail ninety-nine per cent of the time.

  They fail to grab the younger viewer. They fail to up the ratings. They fail dramatically and they fail personally. Because they are like a second nose. They can sniff, but they don’t really blow.

  Instead of creating series ideas that require the services of younger actors who have the steam and the muscle to carry a series, the networks either slip us fading swordsmen like Mike Connors, Darren McGavin and Robert Wagner (who have some redeeming qualities but become embarrassing hustling teenie-boppers on-screen)—or they put all the meat of the shows on the Gene Barrys, the Robert Stacks, the James Whitmores, and let the Enzo Cerusicos flounder along behind playing straight men.

  Writers are instructed that the subsidiary parts must not become dominant or the star will get uptight, directors instinctively shoot the two-shots so the star has the better angle, studio protocol forms itself so the star has a parking space beside the sound stage and the second lead parks outside with the secretaries and the guys in the payroll department.

  If you get the impression I’m lamenting for these poor nameless ones, you have glommed the wrong impression. They get paid a helluva lot more than school teachers, postmen, sanitation truck workers and research chemists—occupations I consider substantially more noble than that of poseur—so no one should cry for them. Their greatest loss is that they will be denied the inordinate amounts of egoboo and adoration they often need to sustain them in lives of hapless shamming.

  What I am lamenting is the crippling of often intelligently-conceived series ideas by the addition of the second nose, the second lead.

  They are unnecessary. But unlike the auk, the dodo and the passenger pigeon, though their time is long past as a species, they have not been allowed to slip quietly, like the saurians, into the primordial slime. Though their function is no longer valid, they have not been excised like the appendix of the vestigial tail.

  I cannot conceive of the perpetuation of this archaic thinking as a result of inadequate acting talent on the Star or potential star level. It would appear that the networks erroneously believe they must still offer the viewer a Doris Day or an Eve Arden or a Barbara Stanwyck to get the audience, when Patrick MacNee and Diana Rigg have shown this is clearly untrue.

  For rather than opt for inventiveness and daring and fresh conceptualizations in their series proposals, the networks continue to choose the safe path, ignoring the lessons of Cosby, Otis Young, Leonard Nimoy and Martin Landau. And condemning more and more young actors every year to stunted careers that inevitably end in failure.

  This is merely one more facet of a policy toward new programming that is so encysted with its own past, even the possibility of new directions seems impossible. It is a system whose existence is seemingly validated only by the inertia that keeps it running. A self-fulfilling prophecy, a laocoonian serpent swallowing its own tail, a moebius cliche of endless repetitions. Last week I dealt with another element of this problem in noting that we go from cycle to cycle—cops to westerns to medical shows to situation comedies and back to cops—and this week a look at all those second leads. Walking gravestone markers. Carrying the seeds of their own destruction in the roles they accept. Which are, I guess, better than no roles at all, but guaranteed to cut them off at the hips in mid-season.

  The answer, of course, is an obvious one. In two parts. The first is selecting actors with undeniable talent, not merely Barbie and Ken dolls who look good in their Harry Cherry suits. Talent cannot be ignored. We’ve had too many TV actors pass on to other, larger areas, to ever accept the canard that TV is solely the province of the mediocre. Steve McQueen, Leonard Nimoy, James Garner, Robert Culp, Dick Van Dyke, Bill Cosby, Mia Farrow—all of them came from television and all of them proved their worth by using their special talent to surmount mediocre material handed to them.

  But the second part of the answer is the more important. Conceptualization.

  The new series must either be constructed so one heavyweight actor dominates and is allowed to expand himself artistically—a la Ben Gazzarra and David Jansse
n—or the format must be so constructed that an integrated “team” of actors is needed to carry any one story-line. The most obviously successful rendering of this last is Mission: Impossible, whereas Here Come The Brides, The Big Valley, The Virginian and even Bonanza seem to me to be artificial versions of the same.

  Creators of TV series must be ready to acknowledge the truth that what is needed to hook a viewer, and hold him for thirty weeks, is not “something for everyone” (an old man filled with wisdom for the septuagenarians, a young stud for the Now Generation, a middle-aged ex-star for the matrons) but a clearly defined personality whose week-to-week growth and involvement with people and the issues of the day has some substantial meaning for other individuals.

  The TV audience may be referred to as a “mass,” even by me in my crankier moments, but when you pick it apart, the audience is still one-to-one, each person looking out of his own head for something to enrich and entertain him. Facelessness, homogeneity, a mass looking back at him can never provide an answer. Or enrichment.

  N.B.: As you read this, I’ll be winding up a week in Texas, lecturing at Texas A&M. Next week I’ll tell you what the attitude toward TV is in the Lone Star State. Presupposing, of course, that someone doesn’t pick me off from a bell tower. In expectation of same, I’m wearing my plastic head to Houston, Bryan and Dallas.

  S’long, y’awl.

  * * * *

  28: 9 MAY 69

  Well fed, decently talcumed, ex-Los Angeles Police Chief Tom Reddin made his show biz debut Tuesday evening. First at five o’clock, then again in reprise at 10:00, Reddin held center-stage on KTLA Channel 5’s The Tom Reddin News.

  How did he look? When I was very young, there was a popular song titled Penguin at the Waldorf, and all I remember of it is the line, “Penguin at the Waldorf, sitting in a big plus chair . . .” How strange that Reddin’s demeanor brought back that song, that image. That’s how he looked.

  How did he sound? He sounded like the strident voice of the Establishment. But then, what did we expect: conscience compels admission that expectations were not high for Reddin in his new role as newscaster, but a desire to be fair forced at least this reviewer to compose himself before the set swearing honest reportage of Reddin’s initial outing. The tip-off should have been the station-break billboard flashed just before Reddin made his appearance. It was a screaming American eagle, rampant on a lurid shield of stars and stripes. It was no mere call-card: it was an escutcheon, a standard, a presager of what was to come in the first Reddin hour. Lord, how that eagle shrieked.

  Twenty-eight years a cop—and thus heir to all the questions one must ask about the sort of mentality that finds succor in badge, gun and uniform—Reddin was quite obviously, and quite understandably, self-conscious as a public performer. Though rarely nervous, he was stiff, pedantic, well-rehearsed but somehow resembled a latter-day Clark Kent in search of a broom closet in which he could change to his alter-ego, Capt Charisma.

  He opened with a personal statement of position, heavily larded with the word truth, flanked on all sides by words like “balance,” “candor” and “honesty.” Yet even girded to be fair to Reddin, it became apparent, early in the presentation, that once a cop ... always a cop. Though Reddin swore at length that he was not a voice for right or left, police or politicos, Ms personal views—expressed with plastic helmets and cans of mace in another incarnation—were so blatantly obvious that to call what he presented news would be as appropriate as calling what Eichmann did an attempt at solving the overpopulation problem.

  Credentials for Reddin were presented at the outset in a fifteen minute segment during which testimonials were hurrah’d by everyone from Supervisor Warren Dorn, who presented Reddin with a plaque, through Yorty and Bradley and George Murphy, to Councilman Gilbert Lindsay; Lindsay performed so handsomely in the role of “show nigger,” declaring what a gentleman Reddin was, that his act could be termed with appropriateness, nothing less than a superlative Double Tom.

  After the fifteen minutes of everyone vouchsafing what a joy and delight it was to have Capt. Charisma with us twice nightly, Tom actually got around to reporting some news: the overruling of the Navy court-martial in the case of the Pueblo’s Cmdr. Lloyd Bucher.

  Reddin mispronounced Bucher’s name in at least three different ways.

  Byew-ker. Boo-chur. Byew-chur.

  In point of fact, Reddin didn’t actually report too much news. Other than the Bucher/Pueblo item, some chit-chat about how thrilled he was to be on the air, and “The Reddin Report,” an editorial about which more in a moment, Capt. Charisma was kept away from the heavyweight merchandise like Just Plain Bull In A China Shop. Experienced Hal Fishman got all the goodies: the Viet Nam report, the Israeli-Arab troubles, the Paris gold reserve drop, and a New York Times newsbreak (suspiciously passed over for all its import) about Nixon’s war plans on the occasion of the downing of the “flying Pueblo.”

  Cheap thrills, however, were achieved when a Channel 2 camera crew and reporter broke onto the set just as Reddin concluded his first news item ... and interviewed him. It was one of those rare moments in television when the viewer feels as though he has plunged down a rabbit hole: the interviewer who is merely a shadow image, being treated like an authentic happening, being interviewed by other shadows. It was the head of the snake swallowing its own tail.

  But for all these wonders, we had not yet reached, nor been treated to, the heartmeat of the Reddin mystique. We had not yet had unveiled before us the special fillip that was to validate that screaming eagle and its declaration of naked patriotism. But it was not long in coming.

  Again, the shield and bird; and with voice over in a tone usually reserved for announcements of the Second Coming, we were told we were next to be treated to an editorial on matters of pressing public concern ... T*H*E*R*E*D*D*I*N*R*E*P*0*R*T!

  What followed was a potpourri of all the hackneyed clichés employed by right-wing doom-criers since Nat Turner took on the white power structure. Reddin spewed forth a hateful little posture-reinforcer with no more than a nickel’s difference between it and a campaign speech on “law and order” by either George Wallace or Ronald Reagan. It was the party line, pure and exceedingly simple. After the obligatory nod to “righting wrongs” (none of which were mentioned in specific), Reddin went on to espouse the same hard line for “dissidents,” “trouble makers,” “anarchists” and “revolutionaries” that we have seen to work so charmingly on college campuses across the nation. “No deals, no amnesty,” Reddin declared.

  (During the initial segment of laudits for Reddin, Robert Finch referred to Reddin as “compassionate.” His first Reddin Report was many things, but it was hardly compassionate. More accurately, it was drenched with brutal and unfeeling jingoism.)

  It was the Reddin stand on opposing voices we had seen in his reactions to dissent during his tenure as Police Chief, changed not one whit. It offered nothing new, it expressed no degree of understanding or humanity, it merely reflected the tenor of violence that marked Reddin’s police rule of Los Angeles, and that of his predecessor, under whom he studied well.

  It was “America: Love It or Leave it” without a warming or ameliorative trace of “America: Change It or Lose It.” One’s reaction to Reddin’s editorializing, viewed through his glass darkly, could only be “Reddin: Pick It and Stick It.” For it was George Putnam without genitalia. It was the same nauseous, superpatriotic baiting that has kept this nation divided and trembling for ten years. It was “I love America” without the wit or sense or decency to understand that there are terrors in men’s hearts today that cannot be quieted by pointing to our own children and calling them the enemy.

  We might have expected something lucid and rational and impressive for a first editorial, something heavy-weight...but we were handed merely another Xerox copy of the standard voice-of-the-right platform. And God knows we have enough of that for one more to be the gas bubble that breaks the surface tension.

  The editorial
was reinforced by a patently rigged item from Long Beach State College, in which we were treated to riot scenes on the campus, as played for us by the hawk-faced oburstleutnant college security force. The item was introduced by an impartial, unslanted Reddin comment, “The militants usually have their way on campus, but I’m happy to report that today was an exception...” and it was epilogued by Reddin’s equally unbiased, “Militants have overreached, and the good people are being heard from . . .” It was as unprejudiced a bit of reportage as Joe Pyne’s displaying his hand-gun, on-camera, during the Watts Riots. And it proved to one and all the truth of Reddin’s opening assurances that he was not the voice of left or right, revolutionaries or reactionaries, etcetera, etcetera.

  As a tapestry of the American Scene, as seen from the blind right, it was total, with the proper counterpoint being played to Reddin’s comments about American affluence by commercials that came in groups, clusters, hordes:

  Use Bold to win points over your neighbors ... use Listerine to get ahead in your job ... use MacLean’s to get laid ... it was all a theremin background of corrupt values to Reddin’s naked gloating over SDS opposition. It was the essence of cheapjack, slanted yellow journalism.