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

by Harlan Ellison

  I’ll tell you about the level of originality of this dog: during the screening, Maharis is leaving Miss Leigh to go off on a mission of spectacular (ho hum) danger and as he reaches the door, Janet says, “Gus ...” and he turns around and looks at her, and me, sitting in the darkened viewing room, I say, “Be careful,” a second before Janet says, “. . . be careful.” At which point I got up and went out and got a pint of orange drink and a burrito from the studio coffee wagon. When I came back, not much had happened that I didn’t remember happening in 77 Sunset Strip back in 1959.

  Maharis acted with all the wizard skill and animation of a poison dart-victim weighted down by anvils, trying to walk across the Bay of Biscayne on the bottom. Miss Leigh, who was cute and sensitive and fine to watch in this kind of role in The Manchurian Candidate and Psycho and even as far back as Orson Welles’s Touch Of Evil, has allowed herself to either grow hard and brittle and leathery looking—like a dyke who ain’t happy about being a dyke—or wasn’t hip to the way they were shooting her. Everybody else mugged and overacted and slimed up the premises, thus telling us all we need to know about Mr. McCowan’s directorial strengths, and in all it was marked n.g. from the git-go.

  At some point along the way—and this is the point of reviewing such an obstinately shitty flick—the powers that khan ... should. They should get hip to the fact that old men who wrote Raymond Chandler-fashion twenty years ago can’t retool for contemporary drama. They should stop letting themselves get whip-sawed by fast talking Executive Producers like Danny Thomas and Aaron Spelling, who sell them meadow muffins which are called chocolate éclairs. They should begin to realize that they have a nice, viable form in the 90-minute movie, and stop castrating it by buying safe, hackneyed, cliche stories resuscitated from moldering issues of the pulp Argosy, vintage 1934. They should finally throw up their hands and admit that crud won’t get it (if you haven’t checked lately, ABC, you’re trailing in the Ratings Race) and see if they could get somewhere with quality.

  Like the guy who died on stage, and it was suggested from the audience that they give him an enema, it might not help ... but it couldn’t hurt.

  Taaaa-daaaaah!!

  It also couldn’t hurt to watch a lovely show called My World—And Welcome To It that NBC brings us every Monday night at 7:30. It’s a half hour sitcom, but many marks above the Lucy level. Based on drawings and anecdotes and short pieces by James Thurber, it has a charming cynicism and unabashed joy in life that no series since the ill-fated It’s A Maris World of 1962 has managed to capture.

  William Windom, as the Thurberesque cartoonist chivvied by his sensible wife, his elderly (before her time) girl-child, and a random pack of dogs, editors, dream fantasies, plights of our time and garden variety horrors of contemporary society, runs the gamut from staunch nobility in the face of madness to bemused resignation that They Are Out To Get Him. He is Everyman with a green eyeshade.

  The really great thing about this series, though, is that it attempts to use video as a medium. There is animation and cartoon backdrop and stop-action and all kindsa groovy things. It’s visually very interesting. And using the Thurber material inventively (they’ve played with such famous bits as The Unicorn In The Garden, If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomatox and the legendary anecdote about Harold Ross of the New Yorker insisting on knowing which of two hippos in a cartoon was the one delivering the punchline) they seem hellbent intent on singlehandedly raising the quality of TV situation comedy.

  And so I shouldn’t get stoned by agents for neglecting their clients, let me hasten to add that as inept an acting job Janet Leigh and Raymond St. Jacques and William Smithers and Maharis did in The Monk, that’s how good the acting of Joan Hotchkis (as the wife) and Lisa Gerritsen (as the aging toddler) is in My World— And Welcome To It.

  It ain’t often I recommend anything as unreservedly as this show. And to the guy who wrote in to TV Guide saying the show wasn’t doing appropriate honor to the work and memory of the God Thurber ... well, sir, you are hereby consigned to an eternity watching Gilligan’s Island reruns.

  Trouble with people, Clem, is that they don’t know when they’s well off.

  * * * *

  46: 7 NOVEMBER 69

  INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO A SPECIAL COLUMN: The premier publication of the “new wave” in speculative fiction is an English magazine titled New Worlds. Recently, one of its editors, Charles Platt, wrote me a letter in which he solicited a contribution for an offbeat symposium on the theme of “1980.” He did not want the usual sort of predictive piece on what the effects of over-population or atomic energy would mean to the world of 1980, but rather (as he put it) “a writer’s personal, subjective, idiosyncratic reactions to the 1980’s—how they see the general idea of there being a future, themselves in it, aging, progress in the various arts ...” Charles spoke very specifically of this column—having read it on a recent trip to the States—and he suggested I try something like it for New Worlds. Yes, why not. So ... postulating I don’t pick up a .45 slug in the head before that time, here is a sample of The Glass Teat from the Los Angeles Free Press, dateline Thursday November 13th, 1980. Res ipsa loquitor.

  * * * *

  THE GLASS TEAT

  I’ve run out of pipe tobacco and I’m getting nervous. Maybe tomorrow or the next day I’ll have one of the kids try to slip into Pasadena and rob a pipe store. Maybe I’ll do it myself. For those of you who may be reading this—if the printing press hasn’t broken down again—you may gather that my wounds have healed sufficiently well for me to consider a smash&grab raid. Yes, your faithful columnist didn’t buy it last time out

  But things here in the “underground” (if you’ll pardon the pretensions) are not good. The goddamed Good Folks are stepping up their activities. Christ only knows how they can find the extra money to finance stronger tac/squads ... the way their taxes bleed them. But I suppose it’s money well spent, from their viewpoint: cleaning out the dissidents. As far as I know, we’re one of the last three or four pockets left in Southern California. And they almost brought down Chester Anderson’s chopper last week when he made his run to drop the Free Press on LA. But I suppose we’re still a pain in the ass, if hardly effective, because Mishkin came back on Sunday with the new wanted posters. My faithful readers will be delighted to know the price on this columnist has gone up to a full ten grand, plus a year’s meat-and-sweet ration points. Now that’s what I call critical acceptance.

  However, enough personal chit-chat.

  My subject for this week is the President’s speech on The War, carried over the four major networks. For those of you reading this column in shelters and the outback, it won’t provide anything more than another taste of the bitter gall we’ve grown to know as a steady diet. But for those of you Good Folks—true patriotic Americans—who find one of these newspapers lodged in your eucalyptus or missed being washed down the sewers by the watersweepers, it may offer a moment of doubt in your unshakeable faith. At worst, it can proffer a moment of humor, and God knows you poor fuckers don’t have many of those these days.

  He’s wearing makeup better these days. They’ve managed to disguise the insincerity of the jaw, the deviousness of the eye-pouches, the corruption of the jowls, the thug-like stippling of unshaved follicles, the corn-ball widow’s peak.

  They’ve even managed to exquisitely cover the plastic surgery scars and the discoloration left by last December’s assassination attempt on him. (I still contend if Krassner had used a thermite jug instead of that damned Molotov cocktail, he’d have bagged the snake. But, if at first you don’t succeed ...)

  But nothing serves to conceal his dissembling. Nothing works to cover his mealymouth. Nothing manages to fill in with substance the empty spaces of his endless promises. He used all the time-honored phrases—my fellow Americans, this Administration, the Search for Peace, let us turn our faces away from conflict, grave concern, you are entitled to your minority opinion—all of them. They were all there—arrayed in shabby tedi
ousness. The War has been going on for seventeen years, my fellow Good Folk: how many times have you heard the Man mouth the words “peace with honor”?

  And he’s still wiping his nose publicly, on-camera.

  He revealed a secret letter he had sent to Premier Mbutu, offering nothing new or conclusive, merely babbling that the United States is anxious to make some progress at the Trobriand Island Conferences. Well, hell yes, gentle readers, he wants to make some progress at the talks. Now that Tanzania and Zambia have joined the “menace” of Black Communism the President tells us is washing its tide over all the civilized world, he’s scared out of his mind that his own American Black States—Kentucky, Georgia and Illinois—will get more out of hand. He hasn’t forgotten (or by any means forgiven) Governor Gregory; offering sanctuary to Dennis 3X and his militants after what they did in Washington was enough to make the Man declare Chicago ripe for low-yield H-bombs.

  Of course he wants peace, the snake! He wants peace on terms no one will give him. He wants more mindless flag-waving. He wants us to believe that there is some incredible nobility in our interfering in the internal affairs of seventeen Asiatic and African nations! He wants it all to go back the way it was, when he was a whey-faced lad in a small Florida town, forty years ago. He wants the death toll that now stands at 855,-000 to rise to a nice even million. And he wants you to swallow higher taxes so the Pentagon can raise its budget and build the spacedrop platform without worrying where its next billion is coming from. Won’t that be a charmer, gentle readers: your sons and husbands and brothers dropping straight down from deep space into India and Rhodesia.

  The Man gibbered you, friends. He said nothing new. He merely tried to pull the fangs of the December Offensive you know we dissidents will be mounting next month. He doesn’t want a repetition of last year’s Grade School Uprising.

  He wants to make certain that the last few of us out here scrounging for canned goods to stave off scurvy don’t get any help or succor from “confused, misled Americans who fail to realize that by aiding the dissident elements in our society you are helping to prolong the war.” Well, he needn’t worry. It’s been seventeen years, and those of us who long ago committed ourselves to saving you poor scuttlefish from your own gullibility, we know we won’t get any help. We’ve had our examples. Bobby Seale died in a Federal Penitentiary six weeks ago. Pneumonia. Sure, it was pneumonia. How many of you remember Bobby Seale?

  You want some straight talk, gentle readers ... you want to know how we really feel about it?

  Most of the spark has gone out of us. We can afford to tell you truths like that. We aren’t on the same wavelength as those of you who lie publicly to keep up “morale” and buy “public support” with lies. We can tell the truth because nothing can stop us from doing what we have to do. We know we can’t win, we know we can’t change the course of history. But we do it because it’s reflex now. We’re resigned to living like animals in these sections of the Great United States you’ve come to call the outback. We’re secure in the knowledge that one after another, we’ll be picked off and killed. The tac/squads don’t even take prisoners any more. They got their new orders last year: flatten them.

  You don’t know, you’ll never know. You’ve let — yourselves be lied to so often and so ineptly, you’re willing accomplices to your own destruction.

  How do we feel about it? We feel that if there is a God he’ll hasten the ecological debacle you’ve permitted to spread. He’ll kill off the diatoms in the ocean faster, and he’ll deplete the oxygen supply, and well all go under at the same time, gasping for air like iron lung rejects.

  But if that doesn’t come to pass, here’s how we figure it: the Man and “Confucius” Ta Ch’ing and Mbutu will one day say fuck it, and turn loose the Doomsday Machines. And if—as predicted—it kills off ninety-six per cent of the population of the Earth, that’ll be cool. Because you deserve no better.

  And as for me, I personally look at it like this: if I’m in the ninety-six per cent that gets zapped, then I’m dead and I’m sleeping and I’m at peace at last and I don’t have to fight a fight you scuttlefish never wanted me to fight. If I’m in the four per cent that manages to escape alive, well, I’ve learned how to live in a rabbit warren, and I’ll survive.

  Either way, I’ll be delivered from ever again having to sit and be bored by the TV appearances of a man whose obvious disregard for humanity puts him solidly at the front of a nation that is notable for self-loathing.

  My only regret is that I’m out of pipe tobacco. It’s funny how little things come to mean so much at the final extreme.

  Goodbye, gentle readers. I always end my columns these days with those words. Chances are very good that by this time next week one or the other of us won’t be around.

  * * * *

  47: 14 NOVEMBER 69

  This week, painful reappraisal and viewing-with alarm. The former is something I do only when irrevocably pressed to the wall by the realization that my godhood is fraying at the edges and the latter I do so often it has become the systole and diastole of my routine existence. Nonetheless, painful though they may be, they must be done this week.

  Reconsideration of ABC’s The New People is definitely in order, because after the first show—the airing of the pilot segment by Rod Sterling—I recommended this sixty-minute’s hype. Well, friends, they sucked me in, too. I will confess that much of my feeling of having been impressed by The New People was due to Richard Kiley’s bravura performance as the last adult left alive when a planeload of peregrinating teen-agers gets downed on an uninhabited island in the Pacific. Kiley brought to the situation of a melting-pot of young minds forced to create a new society in their own image, a strength and order that catalytically forced the weaker characters of the kids to react in some positive and impressive ways. But Kiley’s character was only in the pilot segment, used to set the scene. Then he was killed off. Now the shows rest heavily on the shoulders of unknowns like Peter Ratray, David Moses, Zooey Hall, Tiffany Boiling, Dennis Olivieri and Jill Jaress. And occasionally on the backs of semi-knowns like Rick Dreyfus and Brenda Scott.

  But, surprisingly, the blame for this show’s having gone instantly and disastrously downhill does not lie with the kids. They are quantum-jumps below even McQueen, Garner, Farrow or Barbara Hershey (all of whom were doing comparable TV parts at approximately the same ages) in talent, but they are game, and they do the best they can with the shabby material they get for scripts. For therein lies the reason The New People is mired down in the horse latitudes of the ratings. The basic concept of the show is a viable one; while not entirely fresh (they’ve been doing the old “how will people react in a microcosm of society” shtick since Outward Bound), it is workable. The production values are more than satisfactory, having managed to squeak-by in establishing an entire AEC-abandoned test site city—a bit that does not bear too close examination before it becomes patently ridiculous, yet one we are willing to accept if the rest of the show functions logically. The direction and photography are hardly distinguished, but in a field where second-rate talent is the best one can hope to get when your real talents all flee to theatrical films, it is acceptable.

  So all that remains on which to rationally dump the blame for the increasing failure of this show, is the script work. And there it takes no great depths of perceptivity to recognize why The New People has come a cropper.

  The second week’s plot was an impossible farrago of clichés harkening back all the way to Paul de Kruifs Microbe Hunters or the discovery that the anopheles mosquito causes malaria; one of those insane dumbplots in which people begin keeling over from The Dreaded Plague and some kid who had a semester of Pharmacology 101 brews-up the antidote from Brillo pad squeezings and the memory of his Granny’s faithful spiderweb poultice chest-rub.

  I can’t tell you much about the third week’s plot because the teaser and six minutes of act one were all I could stomach of acting so porcine and dialogue so pretentious that they instantly
buried the story of one of the castaways who was either pushed or fell off a cliff. If you’ve ever watched a show that telegraphed itself as being unviewable a few minutes into the story, you’ll know what it was that impelled me to switch over to Laugh-In. (And while I’m at it, may I point out to the manufacturers of The New People that of all the ridiculous, insipid, insulting and generally all-around moronic theme songs jammed up the noses of the viewing public—dating all the way back to such classics as 77 Sunset Strip snap! snap! and Hawaiian Eye— The New People is far and away the most offensive. Not merely because of its lack of musical value, but because of its cheap attempt to “reach the younger viewer” with what the old farts who created it think is a contemporary sound. Not only is it a far cry from even kitsch value as a contemporary sound, but it is a tieline into understanding why hypocrisy is spotted instantly by today’s TV viewer. Particularly the younger ones. They know this is a young idea, written and produced by old people, trying to sound young. And they won’t go for it. And that’s why The New People has not pulled the core of viewers it needed to succeed. Older viewers can’t identify with a bunch of young snots, and the young people won’t be a party to being hustled.)