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

by Harlan Ellison

  The Bold Ones: The third section of Universal’s acromegalic rotating-series (doctors, lawyers and police) was aired last Sunday, with Leslie Nielsen as a Deputy Police Chief and Hari Rhodes as the DA. Jesus, did it stink! The script had three names on it, and in case you need a rule-of-thumb, gentle readers, for knowing when a script is going to stink on ice, use that. More than two names (and usually only one) means it was hashed and re-hashed by every sticky-finger on the lot, and what you’ll be getting is watered-down nothing. Instant vacuum.

  The female lead was a lady named Lorraine Gary, whose marital relation to Universal’s top attorney causes pause to wonder on what grounds she was tapped for the part, because she recited every sententious line of that gawdawful script in Capital Letters As Though They Should Have Been Carved On Mt. Rushmore. But she was only the foremost of many downers that show sported. Hari Rhodes was awkward, overacted and generally a talent wasted. Not to be undone, Nielsen, who is as competent and professional a stock artist as Universal has kicking around out there, leaned into his role with such affectated ferociousness that one expected him to have a coronary at any moment. The plot was straight out of 1939 Black Mask magazines, and I swear the shades of Hammett and Woolrich and Chandler must have been thrashing in their graves. I understand that this section, originally slated for eight productions, even as the Doctors and Lawyers were slated for eight, has been cut back to six. It’s amazing how the Universal thugs will never cop to their own inadequacies, but cut off the field troops as if it was their fault the ambush failed.

  Music Scene: is my pick as the best of the new. The tone and tempo of the potpourri is strongly reminiscent of Barry Shear’s well-remembered The Lively Ones of some years ago. By pre-taping all sorts of people doing all sorts of pop numbers, and then selecting from the backlog as one or another talent hits the charts, Music Scene can roll with the on-the-moment top dogs, and provide a running compendium of the best in current music. There are six bright and funny young people— notable among them is David Steinberg, who grows more infectious with each appearance on TV—who fill the interstices between numbers with SmoBro-like one-liners and shticks that are so hip they must go over the heads of the septuagenarians in the Great American Heartland. The sets and innovative thinking used to showcase the groups and individuals are superlative. Three Dog Night did Easy To Be Hard against a background of wrecked automobiles, and the eerie feeling it produced made, that song (one I’m not especially fond of) seem, for the first time, meaningful. James Brown did a turn that was also incredibly effective and even the taped melange of John and Yoko (who has got to be the ugliest chick in the civilized world) moved at a pongy pace. The show is intelligent, lively, colorful, something meaty on which to chew. And it is a beautiful lead-in for young viewers to:

  The New People: which got off on the right foot behind some bravura acting by Richard Kiley as the only adult left (temporarily) alive on a downed airliner full of young people. The show employed the very best tenets of dramatic writing to say what it had to say about Our Times while not sacrificing action. That it slipped, momentarily, into Preachment can be chalked up to Rod Serling’s script, and it’s a bad habit Mr. Serling has not yet learned to control. But one we can tolerate when he manages to perform his craft so well in all other particulars. This is a series to watch. It is potentially solid gold.

  I missed The Brady Bunch, the Durante/Lennon Sisters Hour, Bronson again, Room 222 and a few others, but I’ll be falling in on them this week, so look for them next time.

  I did manage to see a few minutes of the Bob Hope special, which was glutted with more unfunny comedians than the world has witnessed since Quantrell was working. It only served to convince me more strongly that any number of Grand Old Men (some of whom are younger than me) ought to be confined to Vegas or Friars dinners.

  Understand Debbie is back with her show, and inside information has it that her leaving the program because they ran a cigarette ad was strictly a hype. It seems they cut her salary somewhere during the summer, and she just walked to get them to up her again. Be interesting to see what would happen if they Viceroy’d her again, at the new rate.

  * * * *

  42: 10 OCTOBER 69

  So early in the new season, and already we have a name for it. Each year’s heaviest tone has been discernible in the most prominent product. The year of the hardcase cowpokes, the year of the doctors who struggle for humanity, the year of the witless situation comedies...last year was the year of the widows, white and black.

  And this year is the Time of the Plastic People.

  A parade of silly, coiffed and cuffed templates; a smoothly-performed pavane of slick, empty clichés; a ghastly rigadoon of obstinately endless phoniness so corrupt it climbs to a new video pinnacle.

  Purple is as purple does.

  The punishment fits the crime.

  Purple plastic people push me to puce and paucive pejoratives. They also make me puke.

  But that’s another vessel of vomit.

  (You’ll pardon me. Occasionally the Writer takes over from the Critic and the sound of me own silver words gets a tot too much. It usually happens in columns wherein I am discussing the craft of writing. Which is what this is.) (On second thought, make that The Craft Of Writing. If I’m going to be pretentious, I might as well go all the way.)

  Anyhow, the problem is ,..

  (Hold it. Make that THE CRAFT OF WRITING. I’m feeling festooned with power. It means I’ll probably get actively abusive.)

  The problem is Bracken’s World and Harold Robbins’ “The Survivors” as an emerging species. Bracken’s World is still festering, as I indicated two weeks ago, and I’m summoning up firepower. Gonna let’m run for another coupla weeks so all you folks can dig’m in their full flower. Then, when I flit them, you can’t say I didn’t give them a chance to mend their ways, even if it did mean scrapping the series and putting all those nice young kids back on unemployment.

  In any case, the evil that Bracken’s World manifests is also redolently obvious on ABC’s The Survivors, a multi-million dollar gawdawful cobbled-up by the Albert Payson Terhune of the Garbage Novel, Harold Robbins. Since the one rivals the other for greasiness, I’ll deal here with Robbins, with ABC, with The Survivors and with the taste of the American Scuttlefish. Those who survive may consider they’ve won a merit badge.

  Mr. Robbins, one of the more artful dodgers of our time, pulled a little fast ramadoola on Elton Rule and the ABC brain dancers, and using the same technique he employed to hustle Trident Press into an enormous contract for The Adventurers on the basis of only a title, he angered his little pixie way into their exchequer with the title The Survivors.

  There’s no point going into the horrors and hectics that pursued this abomination on its pestiferous path from Robbins’ skull to the tiny screen ... the loss of one producer after another (until they settled on Walter Doniger, the whizzer who gave us Peyton Place)...the internecine warfare between the “stars” ... the rewrites of the rewrites of the rewritten scripts...the money flushed down the gilded toilet ... no point. Let’s just dwell on the finished product that debuted on Monday night, September the 29th.

  The product is the same old product. Soap opera.

  Except Robbins’ product has enzymes.

  Newly-activated, sparkling with green and blue and gold spots. Before your eyes. The green is from moral rot, the blue is the alleged better blood of the jet set, and the gold is fool’s.

  Advertised as a “television novel,” The Survivors is simply daytime tearjerking without even a nod toward verisimilitude. It’s the downhome story of the Carlyle family: simple, good-hearted billionaires who lead lives like you or I. Septuageneric Daddy owns his own bank and is shtupping his thirtyish secretary on the side. Indolent playboy son races at Monaco, quits three laps short of winning to chase a piece of tail, and gets himself and his Lear jet hijacked to a Latin duchy in the throes of revolution. Daughter is a clotheshorse with an illegitimate son who’s marri
ed to an elegant embezzler notable for having clipped Daddy to the tinkly tune of seven hundred grand.

  Why go on? Add the dimension of thespic luminaries like Ralph Bellamy, Kevin McCarthy, George Hamilton and Lana Turner, and you have the total package. No better or worse than the general sling of slop we get? Is that what you think? Oh, come come, my friends. Just reconsider the cast: Bellamy, McCarthy ... Hamilton and Turner. Two fine actors and two gold lamé loxes whose “acting” ability is so scant it can only be termed amoebic. So why opt for glitterfolk like Hamilton and Turner, chockablocking them with genuine talents like Bellamy and McCarthy, when you have your choice of every fine actress and actor in town?

  Because Lana Turner and George Hamilton are intrinsically involved in the myth-world The Survivors tries to tell us is an actuality. Hamilton’s spotty past is well-known, as is Miss Turner’s. They are living, walking, talking symbols of the recherché mode of existence on which this series builds its rationale.

  Which brings us to the rotten core of the matter.

  Mr. Robbins, whose novels are ennobled by the words dishonest and illiterate, has made a not inconsiderable fortune by proffering to all the scuttlefish living lives of dreariness and encapsulation, a phantom image of a world in which the rich get richer and there are no poorer. A world in which black men do not exist, in which women are fit for little better than consumer consumption on the Tiffany/Cartier level—and having illegitimate babies.. A world in which the pettiest problems become high drama merely because they occur in a red velvet snake pit.

  Chromed and rhinestoned, Robbins has marketed a world where everyone is J. Paul Getty or Aristotle Onassis, and considering the lives and hopes of the Average Man would be as unthinkable as one of the Czar’s cossacks worrying which peasant’s cabbage patch he was galloping through. It is a view of the universe that was disgracefully irrational fifty years ago, and is totally out of place in the world of today.

  The vapid, incestuous, self-concerned fools who people Robbins’ series are the very people against whom every revolution in the world is directed. The Wall Street bankers who backed Batista against Castro, thereby assisting in driving Fidel into the waiting arms of Communism. The munitions men, the high-rollers, the wastrel playboys, the maudlin women with their overweening concern for their falling breasts and mansion peccadilloes. The blind and the precious. Those to whom creature comforts come before ethic. The emotionally and intellectually de-sensitized. The rhodium-plated ghouls who live off the masses, whose fortunes and perpetuations of fortunes can only be realized when field-laborers are forced to work for 30¢ an hour. These are the contemporary nobility Harold Robbins and his bloated associates at ABC have chosen to offer us as idols. I would be willing to wager the much-belabored network jingoism of “viewer identification” was not mentioned with great frequency when this epic was being assembled. For there is no one in this series with whom to identify. The men are all crippled by their corruptions and intravenous tie-lines to the corrupt power structure; the women are all indolent leeches, living off that same corruption and merely offering their bodies to their men as payment. They are modern courtesans (albeit with that little piece of paper that makes it legal) and their men are little better than cheaphustle 42nd Street johns.

  Once again ABC has proved that it will go with “name power” rather than quality. It has swallowed the Robbins shuck—as distasteful as it may be—and convinced itself that what it’s digested is caviar, not guano. It has lied to itself in believing we can’t see that Miss Turner has grown older and more lined without having improved one whit as an actress. (No amount of Lord & Taylor clothes will cover it.) It has lied to itself in believing that we will accept a paragon of moral and ethical turpitude like no-neck George Hamilton as a model of Concerned Humanity. (As an actor, he is the compleat gigolo.) It has lied to itself in believing that a world about to commit suicide is interested or enriched by a weekly viewing of the very societal elements most responsible for anguish in our times; and that by gilding them, we will accept their right to rule.

  If the series was at least an accurate portrait of that materialistic, destructive coterie of thieves and killers, it would serve as an object-lesson—-perhaps to delineate the face of the enemy for the younger generation. But ABC has even shied away from that nitty-gritty, and has slapped together every cliche and hack theme of a hundred Robbins and Robbins-imitated novels. And what punishment will they be meted for it?

  Mr. Robbins will make a billion megabucks, ABC will get it sponsored up the ass and out the gullet, and the peons in the Great American Heartland will accept this as just another affirmation of the impossibility of ever climbing out of the mud.

  Troops, they come wearing white-on-white, with diamond cufflinks and plastic hair. And if this series inspires you to any feelings but a desire to tear down their towers, then you are already lost.

  I do not think it mere chance that Robbins, in the fullness of his contempt for the true human condition, chose the name of this series. If he, and ABC, and the people whose shadow-images are played by these actors, have their way, they indeed will be the only survivors.

  * * * *

  43: 17 OCTOBER 69

  “the common man”: part i

  I cannot remember being more disturbed or depressed about something I’d seen on television than what concerns me this week. So unraveling and serious is it, I feel, that I don’t think there’ll be much ranting or pyrotechnics. You can usually tell when I’m genuinely bent out of shape; I get very quiet.

  Helen McKenna, a reader of this column from San Diego, sent me a carbon of a “letter of concern” she’d written to ABC, NBC and CBS. Her concern stemmed from an article in the September 27 issue of TV Guide. The article, by Edith Efron, was titled The “Silent Majority” Comes Into Focus. It was another in TV Guide’s more-or-less continuing series of reassurances to the Common Man in its readership that all the unpleasant things happening in this country will pass, that this craziness stemming from longhairs and unruly adolescents is essentially unimportant, that the Common Man will prevail, as he always has in the past.

  It was a he, of course; an elaborate lie as distasteful to those of us who know it will not pass, who see those “America—Love It or Leave It” bumper stickers and fear their undercurrent inferences, as TV Guide’s wretched editorial vindication of the CBS cancellation of the Smothers Brothers. TV Guide is edited out of Radnor, Pennsylvania and that is a small town where the thunder of a world in upheaval reverberates back merely as a laugh-track gone slightly out-of-synch.

  Miss McKenna’s letter, a small moan for nobility in a land sadly lacking in same, came three days after I’d seen the two hours of television which so frighten and shake me this installment. They seemed to tie in together so well, I would like to address this column to Miss McKenna and all the Helen McKennas who know our time is running out, that we have come to the brink of nightmare and must find new answers or perish in our own poisons.

  I am glad she did not see the program I’m about to discuss, for had she, she would have known (as I now know) that Miss Efron and TV Guide well understood the audience they were addressing with their perpetuations of the lies that basically America is sound at the grass roots, that the Common Man, like the Fifth Cavalry in a late late show western, will rush to save us at the final desperate stroke of midnight.

  The show aired over KCET Channel 28, the educational channel, on Friday, October 3rd. It was The David Susskind Show and it was titled “The White Middle Class.” In two hours of gut-level conversation, Mr. Susskind gave a forum to five typical, average, middle class white Americans. Not rabid Birchers, not hysterical religious fanatics, not insensitive bigots...just five ordinary Common Men. And they revealed themselves to be typically American.

  And—dear God, why am I so numb and resigned? —that was the horror of them.

  The five men were:

  Mike Giordano, 47 years old, from Newark, New Jersey; take-home pay $140 a week as a factory
mechanic; net annual income, $8500; father of nine.

  Frank Mrak, 44 years old, from Cleveland, Ohio; works in an employment agency and moonlights a second job selling life insurance for a total income of $10,000 annually; he was the subject of a Life piece on the working class.

  Paul Corbett, 40 years old, a traveling salesman from Philadelphia; six children, and a net income of $9000 a year. Remember this man.

  Vincent De Tanfilis, 41 years old, works for an insurance agency; married, with two children, he lives in Norwalk, Connecticut; he earns between nine and ten thousand dollars per year.