by Ben Shapiro
Larry Gelbart’s paean to the dead president reflected the general feeling in Hollywood: “One way or another, he was going to win you over. . . . You could be seduced merely by a photo of him. . . . We are his forever. / We are eternally charmed.” Gelbart nauseatingly described the murder as “our loss and our shame,”36 despite the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist with ties to both the Cuban and Russian governments. James Aubrey, by contrast, was shameless. The day after the murder, he told Blair Clark, head of CBS News, “Just play the assassination footage over and over again—that’s all they want to see.”37 Gelbart’s view trumped Aubrey’s; Aubrey found himself out of a job.
The path was clearing for open liberalism on television.
Perhaps the first executive to move television in a more openly liberal direction was Robert Kintner. The former “sex and violence” ABC head had taken over at NBC. But whereas he had programmed the most salacious shows he could find at ABC, he suddenly moderated his programming choices at NBC in favor of “quality” programming—elitist stuff in line with the Newton Minow vision of television. One example was a British import entitled That Was the Week That Was (known more briefly as TW3), a proto-Daily Show with a varied cast making fun of the news. In the United States, the show starred Henry Fonda and Henry Morgan, and featured regular guests like Alan Alda and Gene Hackman. Gloria Steinem and Tom Lehrer wrote for the show. Steinem, of course, was a militant feminist; Lehrer was a militant liberal satirist; Alda was tremendously liberal, as were most of the other hosts and guests. For those too young to remember Lehrer, he was a Harvard mathematician who penned lyrics like this, to his song “Send the Marines”: “We send the Marines. / For might makes right / Until they see the light / They’ve got to be protected / All their rights respected / ’Til somebody we like can be elected.” It’s no wonder the teens who watched this ended up protesting Vietnam and chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Viet Cong Are Gonna Win!” The show bombed in the ratings, but it broke through the unspoken ban on open politics during entertainment hours.
Grant Tinker, who worked under Kintner (he later became the head of NBC himself) saw Kintner as “reach[ing] for something more than the ratings . . .”38 In 1966, Kintner reached for more than television—he left NBC to join the LBJ Administration.39 But he didn’t leave without foreshadowing just where television was headed: toward the fusion of ratings-grabbing lowest-common-denominator style with ardent political liberalism. Kintner recognized that audiences did not respond to Shakespeare, Profiles in Courage, or That Was the Week That Was—they responded to Bonanza.40 With that simple fact in mind, he urged that television produce programming insinuating political propaganda into entertainment programming rather than creating elitist programming that would appeal to a select few. He wanted television to “deal with more controversial social, economic, and political subjects in both news and entertainment programming.”41
While the executive ranks at the networks were gradually shifting toward a more openly liberal stance, the creators were waiting in the wings. They were generally the same people who had made it big in the 1950s—the Jewish vaudevillians were now out on their own. Mel Brooks, the former Caesar writer, was now running Get Smart!; Carl Reiner, another Your Show of Shows graduate, was running The Dick Van Dyke Show. Leonard Stern, who had started as a jokewriter for Gleason, helped create The Honeymooners, became a force in his own right, working on Get Smart! and the more openly liberal and urban He and She. Firebrand political liberal Aaron Spelling was in town, and he was finally hitting the big time after writing regularly for Playhouse 90. Hardcore leftist Gene Reynolds had worked his way up from actor to director of shows like Leave It to Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show to enter the world of production.
There were too many liberal creators waiting for a political platform for their skills. If only the executives could be convinced to shift their focus to the right kind of audience, the creators would be given free rein to preach their politics. There was a sense in the industry that the dam was about to burst.
TELEVISION’S SOCIAL REVOLUTION: THE LIBERAL BREAKTHROUGH
The Vietnam War burst the dam wide open.
During its early years, Americans largely approved of the Vietnam War. When Gallup asked the public whether the United States had made a “mistake” sending troops to Vietnam in mid-1965, only 24 percent of Americans said we had. By the third quarter of 1967, 41 percent of Americans thought it had been a mistake (against 48 percent who thought it had not been a mistake), and by August–September 1968, 54 percent of Americans thought it had been mistake.42
On a societal level, this disenchantment with America’s military foray combined with the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, the drug subculture, and the growing socialist movement on college campuses to form a powerful counterculture. Early on, television contributed to the counterculture in relatively minor ways—the semi-innocuous emphasis on sexual liberation on television in shows like Peyton Place and The Avengers (ABC), the similarly innocent focus on race in shows like I Spy! (NBC), the less harmless antics of the political leftists on TW3 (NBC). But once television picked up the current of the counterculture, it elevated it to new heights in the public consciousness; the honchos on television realized that for the first time, the counterculture had an element that received majority approval—namely, opposition to the Vietnam War—and they capitalized.
That couldn’t have happened without the emergence of a new set of executives. The newer crew was college educated, literary in taste, and had grown up with television. They were comfortable with the medium. They also bridged the gap between executives and creators—rather than leaving production to the creative side, they often stepped over the line and involved themselves in creative projects. That merger between business and creative elements marked the beginning of the end of profit-only television, and the beginning of social goal-oriented TV. No longer would television be separated into lowbrow entertainment geared toward profit and highbrow programming geared toward political propagandizing—now the two would be combined into a form of lowbrow politics that would infiltrate American society from top to bottom.
At ABC, co-opting the counterculture had always been a network goal. Leonard Goldberg, who knew the value of targeting youth audiences, had taken over as head of programming. Goldberg was also a creative talent, not merely a business administrator. Later, with Aaron Spelling as his partner, he would go on to create some of the most provocative and popular shows in the history of American television. His vice president of planning, Fred Pierce, led the effort to target advertisers by spreading the message that young people were better buyers. Pierce was actually a political conservative, but he was a research maven, and targeting youth was the only way ABC could survive.43 Leonard Goldenson expressed the ABC mind-set of the mid-1960s: “Neither of our rival networks was particularly willing to experiment with radical ideas. They didn’t need to. They were already winning.”44
ABC’s programming reflected that reality. In 1965, ABC finally broke into the top ten with Bewitched and The Fugitive; both centered on action or sexy comedy (if you don’t remember Bewitched’s use of double entendres, rent it). It wasn’t until 1968, though, that ABC really started to make a dent with The Mod Squad, a series that relied on action and young faces and featured an openly liberal sensibility about the youth movement. Goldberg worked with Aaron Spelling, his future partner, on it.
Goldberg brought in allies to push the youth revolt. He found and recruited a couple of brilliant young minds who would go on to become dominant players in the entertainment industry: Barry Diller and Michael Eisner.45 Diller was far more of an ideologue than Goldberg; Diller found an ideological and business ally in Eisner and brought him in with Goldberg’s go-head. Both Diller and Eisner were unapologetic liberals, and they programmed as such.
As the producer of the ABC movies of the week, Diller’s programming genius was utilized to promote liberal soci
al messages, from The Young Lawyers (1969) to That Certain Summer (1972), the first television movie tackling homosexuality. Summer’s writers and producers William Link and Richard Levinson gave credit to Diller, who is widely rumored to be gay in Hollywood, for putting the movie on the air: “It would never have been on the air if it weren’t for Barry Diller,” said Link.46
At CBS, too, a transformation was under way. Paley was still in charge, and Mike Dann was at his side. In 1966, though, Dann unexpectedly paved the way for his own exit by giving the go-ahead to an innocuous variety show starring two musical brothers who had already failed once on television. Their names were Tommy and Dick Smothers, and they had a cute and innocent shtick playing off their sibling conflict. No big deal. It would be innocent fun.
But they didn’t exactly live up to their clean-cut image. Tommy, it turned out, was politically active. He was part of the hippie movement, the antiwar movement, the drug movement. The show died when Tommy began stealing tapes of the show so the network couldn’t censor them.
But the snowball was already rolling down the hill. The Smothers Brothers opened the eyes of the management—youth audiences could bring in huge numbers. It was one thing to trot out a sop to the kiddies; it was another to actually win using youth programming. And The Smothers Brothers had put up real competition to Bonanza, the number-one show on television, which was unthinkable.
Paley saw the light. Before Dann knew it, his regime was on its last legs. In 1969, Paley elevated Robert Wood to the network presidency. Wood, like Goldberg, had spent virtually his entire adult life in television. Unlike Dann and the other CBS brass, Wood wasn’t addicted to numbers, whether those were ratings points or audience-testing results. “I read the reports,” he said, “but I figured they should get a certain weight of importance of five percent of your thinking, or six percent, or something like that. I always felt that if you rely too heavily on testing, you were substituting [for] your own intuition, your own instincts, your own experience.”47 This reliance on gut instinct as opposed to research gave executives far more leeway in picking programming—now they could put on programs they liked, as opposed to programs that had charted well in testing.
And Wood was eager to apply his sensibility to programming. He proposed that CBS dump its entire rural schedule—all the successful programs like Gomer Pyle, Petticoat Junction, The Beverly Hillbillies—and instead slot in hipper, more urban programming targeting younger audiences. He wasn’t interested in highbrow liberal programming—he wanted lowbrow material that could attract audiences.
Mike Dann called Wood’s play “a massive assault on my scheduling philosophy”48—and it was. It was a calculated attempt to move away from reliance on rural, conservative audiences, and to cut off the burgeoning youth movement at ABC.
That nascent conflict broke into the open in a 1970 meeting that changed television forever. As Dann described it, “For Bob Wood winning the numbers was no longer enough. . . . To my horror, he even suggested that we could afford to lose the ratings if we had to, because the gain in revenues on the back of a younger audience would offset the loss.”49 Dann stood up to Wood—and Paley cut Dann dead. CBS was moving away from programming for America and moving toward programming for particular Americans under the direction of Bob Wood.50
Wood’s deputy was Fred Silverman, another TV baby, who sported outsize glasses and a consistently wry smirk on his face. He majored in television programming and theater at Syracuse, then attended graduate school at Ohio State, where he wrote a famous dissertation on the development of the ABC network, even going so far as to interview Leonard Goldenson. By age twenty-five, Silverman was CBS’s director of daytime programs.
Silverman eventually rose to become CBS vice president of programs. As a creative man rather than a numbers cruncher, his programming philosophy mirrored Wood’s—he relied on what the press casually termed his “golden gut.” Silverman explained his strategy to me: “There was no research in buying a script. You’re basically going by your own judgment. . . . I’d say yes or no, usually based on a couple of lines of description.”51
This left Silverman a lot of discretion, and he wasn’t shy about using it. He opposed the Dann method, which acted as a barrier to change. And he was interested in doing socially important programming. “I would hope in some ways that we kind of led the audience,” he told me, “that we didn’t follow the audience, and that on some of the shows, we were at the forefront of movements.”52
It was no wonder that during this period, CBS’s programming shifted television dramatically to the left. The brass gave the go-ahead to a vulgar and shocking new show called All in the Family, which featured television’s first flushing toilet, frequent use of racial epithets, and issue-centric episodes focusing on hot button topics. The show was introduced to the network via agent Sam Cohn, a friend of Mike Dann’s—Dann and Cohn knew each other from their work with the Democratic National Committee for Television during the McGovern campaign, of which Dann was chairman. Paley hated the show, but Silverman, Dann, and Wood backed it, and they won.53
CBS also bit on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a feminist legitimization of the single woman who doesn’t need a man. CBS honchos swung into action on M*A*S*H, a dramatically antiwar show that captured the spirit of the times by mocking the military, religion, and traditional values. They even bought The New Dick Van Dyke Show, which was nothing like the original Dick Van Dyke Show—Carl Reiner, now fully able to express his liberal viewpoints, inserted his progressive sensibilities to the hilt, going so far as to quit the program after Bob Wood rejected a scene in which Van Dyke’s screen daughter walks in on Van Dyke having sex with his screen wife, played by Hope Lange. CBS’s urban renewal project paid huge dividends—they dominated the ratings for the next five years.
At NBC, a similar transformation was under way. Herb Schlosser was now heading NBC’s West Coast programming (eventually, he’d take over as head of the network). Schlosser, a Princeton and Yale Law grad, was yet another political liberal, and he believed that television could be used as a message medium. In a 1974 speech, he laid out his elitist viewpoint. “We have to strike the delicate balance between following public taste and leading it [italics mine] by offering new forms and styles of entertainment.”54
The most notable example of the “message medium” philosophy leaped into the public consciousness in 1967, when Schlosser greenlit a special titled Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. The name of the special was a takeoff on the hippie culture be-ins, love-ins, and die-ins, vestiges of which can still be seen on today’s college campuses when students need an excuse for ditching class. The special was a hit, and NBC picked it up as a series for 1968. The show was in the mold of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, but it was far more fast-paced and visually edgy. Like Smothers Brothers, it was eminently political—and eminently leftist.
If the executives during the late 1960s and early 1970s were different, so were the creators. Sure, there were still the holdovers—Larry Gelbart was responsible for one of the biggest shows on television, and so were men like Leonard Stern, Gene Reynolds, and Allan Burns. But those holdovers were now able to take the risks they’d always wanted to take. “The writers were leading the networks at that point because they wanted to write stuff that was more socially conscious,” Burns told me.55 By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the networks began to catch up to the early starters like Burns and Reynolds. By the time Burns wrote Mary Tyler Moore along with Brooks, he could openly approach his subject with a socially conscious attitude, so long as he did it strategically: “We weren’t trying to ram home messages in the show, we were trying to do it subtly.”56 Reynolds was hired to do M*A*S*H, where he joined Gelbart in using the program as a weapon on behalf of the antiwar movement.57
Perhaps the best example of an older writer who benefited from television’s transition to the new age was Norman Lear. Lear was forty-eight when All in the Family premiered on CBS. He
had written for television in relative obscurity during the 1950s—he wrote episodes of The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show, The Colgate Comedy Hour, and The Deputy. In the 1960s, he turned his attention to movies, writing and directing Divorce American Style and The Night They Raided Minsky’s. Once All in the Family hit, he became not only the biggest star in the television industry—he virtually ran it. And all the while, Lear was promoting his agenda. With All in the Family, Lear wanted to use Archie Bunker as a repository for and caricature of all right-wing views, then mock them. His other shows followed the same leftist pattern.
The nonholdovers—people like George Schlatter and Susan Harris—were college kids who had imbibed the culturally Marxist guilt propagated by Frankfurt School intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse (“make love, not war”). They made no bones about their politics, and they were largely uninterested in telling both sides of the political story. These were militant feminists, militant atheists, militant liberals.
The transition in the creative world had started—open liberalism was in. By 1975, liberals in the industry had utterly consolidated their control, and they were programming their political viewpoints straight into the public consciousness.
But the liberals made one mistake: They overreached.
“JIGGLE TV”
By 1976, the American people were tiring of the strident and cynical liberal commentary of Norman Lear. The American people had already unleashed their pent-up rage against Richard Nixon, who was gone, and the Vietnam War, which was now over. It was a time to rebuild—and more than that, it was a time for escapism. Disco was the new thing, replacing the drug rock of the late 1960s; movies like Easy Rider had been replaced by Rocky and Star Wars. Politics on television largely went. The lowbrow programming stayed.