Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  Star Trek drifted further and further left in its future iterations. The original series went off the air, but popular demand brought it back again and again.

  The only other iconic captain of the Enterprise appeared much later, in Star Trek: The Next Generation. His name was Jean-Luc Picard, and unlike Kirk, he was a sexless eunuch, an international bureaucrat rather than a swashbuckling hero. He didn’t seek to impregnate half the alien universe, as Kirk did; instead, he was a peaceful ambassador for the Federation, almost impossible to ruffle and fully respectful of the lifestyles of virtually all civilizations. Picard would have seen Kirk’s behavior as cowboyish, retrograde. Picard could only exist in the administrative, bureaucratized world of the late 1980s and 1990s—he’d have been laughed off of television in the patriotic early 1960s.

  Picard is the perfection of the Roddenberry vision. As Lileks noted, “Series creator Gene Roddenberry is the Great Lawgiver; Kirk is the Angry Prophet who prepared the way for the Most Serene Captain Jean-Luc Picard.”15 During the 2008 election cycle, the media compared then-Senator Obama to Spock. That was incorrect—he was far closer to Picard, a universalist bureaucrat convinced that non-intervention and anti-colonialism would result in a peaceful future. Obama and Roddenberry certainly shared one belief: the possibility of perfecting man via secular humanism.

  THE MOD SQUAD (1968–1973): HAVE NO GUN, WILL TRAVEL

  Fast forward a couple years from the original Star Trek. America’s Cold War consensus was splintering; the burgeoning racial and sexual revolutions were in full swing. Meanwhile, ABC tried to capitalize on youth audiences in an attempt to compete with the far more powerful CBS and NBC networks. That effort bore its first fruit in The Mod Squad.

  The first drama to capitalize on the youth movement of the 1960s was created by Aaron Spelling. The Mod Squad was ABC’s first true urban hit, helping reshape television by directing it at young urban audiences. The show itself revolved around three hippie kids of varying races: African-American Linc (Clarence Williams III), and Caucasians Julie (Peggy Lipton) and Pete (Michael Cole). They were juvenile delinquents given a choice to help the police take down adult criminals or to go to jail.

  You might think that the show was anti-crime, an ode to law enforcement in line with earlier cop shows. Not exactly. The show carried a liberal political message: Don’t trust anyone over thirty and white, and don’t carry a gun.

  “All three were on probation and were offered a chance to redeem themselves by working on a special ‘youth squad,’ whose purpose was to infiltrate the counterculture and do something about the adult criminals who were always trying to take advantage of the young,” Spelling wrote. “ ‘The Mod Squad’ would never arrest kids . . . and would never carry a gun or use one.”16

  When Spelling first presented the idea of the show to Leonard Goldenson at ABC, Goldenson liked it—but folks at the network wanted a less controversial title. They suggested The Young Detectives. Spelling turned it down flat. “We’re doing a show that has meaning,” he told Goldenson. “These kids are social activists. They carry placards, but they don’t carry guns. I’m trying to be different.” Goldenson let him have his way. Later, Goldenson bragged, “We did the show for five years. Nobody ever fired a gun.”17 Spelling agreed, “No one ever carried a gun and no one ever fired a shot. We protested the war we were in, we made social statements about drugs, we said it was okay to have a black kid as your best buddy.”18

  Spelling had a particular fondness for the character of Linc (who had been arrested during the Watts riots) and Clarence Williams III, the actor who played him—a predictable development based on Spelling’s deep hatred of racism. That hatred of racism led Spelling into the unenviable position of labeling Hollywood a racist town. “I learned from [Clarence] that even at the height of the Civil Rights movement there was still bigotry in our business, which I didn’t realize until I saw things through his eyes,” Spelling recalled.19

  The Mod Squad, Spelling made clear, was not about law enforcement. It was about “honestly depict[ing] what was happening. I tried to build up the contrast between our show and the older model of a cop show, the one where I got my start, Dragnet. . . . They were right-wing, we were liberal. They thought everybody under 25 was a creep, we thought everybody under 25 was misunderstood. And, more importantly, Mod Squad had an ingredient called ‘soul.’ ” Where did that “soul” come from? From gritty realism. “See, even the crap I came through on Browder Street was good for something,” he said.20

  The evolution of the cop show began with The Mod Squad. Unlike previous police shows, it didn’t see law enforcement as entirely good—law enforcement was only good if used to target non-liberals. Unlike previous police shows, The Mod Squad wasn’t interested in upholding the status quo—it was more interested in pushing the youth revolt. Aaron Spelling was the first creator to break out from the procedural nature of cop shows and move toward a more socially oriented take on the law, portraying cops as morally ambiguous and the entire law enforcement effort as inherently fraught with peril.

  Spelling felt that The Mod Squad embodied the essence of how drama could be used politically. “It’s a show of today,” he explained to a reporter. “The only way to convey ideas today is through dramatic action. . . . I think every episode should convey an idea.”21

  THE WALTONS (1972–1981): THE LIBERALISM TIME FORGOT

  Most people consider The Waltons a conservative show. In most ways, it is. It is a wonderful family program, a clean and pure representation of honesty and decency. Many of the episodes are moving, and most of them warm the heart. It’s difficult not to smile at the end of each episode, when the children throughout the house say goodnight to each other: “Good night, John Boy.” “Good night, Elizabeth.” In fact, growing up, my three younger sisters and I would imitate the back-and-forth each night as we fell asleep.

  By the time The Waltons came on the air, television had transformed into a repository of urban, vulgar liberalism, with open talk of sex, drugs, and race. All the rural shows of the 1960s were gone, replaced by urban hits like All in the Family and Mary Tyler Moore. The Waltons was something different: a show that revered tradition. “The Waltons was so perfect,” explained Lee Rich, one of the producers of the show. “People said ‘That was exactly like my family,’ which was generally bullshit. What that person was saying in effect is ‘I want my family to be like that.’ ”22 It was both an aspirational show and a show that described an almost mythical American past.

  The series was a big hit, providing CBS with a necessary counterbalance to All in the Family. And Bill Paley wanted that counterbalance. “Paley loved it at the time,” said Fred Silverman. “And so did I.” The show was actually supposed to be a sacrificial lamb, going up against The Mod Squad on ABC and The Flip Wilson Show on NBC.23 It broadcast for nine seasons, hitting its peak in its second season, when it reached number two in the ratings.

  The key to The Waltons lay in its comparative conservatism. By today’s standards, the show is almost entirely conservative, and by the standards of 1970s television, it was largely conservative. By the standards of the show’s creator, though, the show was liberal.

  I interviewed Earl Hamner, the creator of the show, at his offices in Studio City, which were just what you’d expect them to be: crammed with fishing equipment, fishing paraphernalia, kites—it looked like grandpa’s basement. It was a gateway to America’s more rural past. And as Hamner spoke, I was transported there too. After all, I grew up on The Waltons, so I knew his voice as the unseen narrator.

  Hamner grew up in Virginia, a Baptist and the oldest of eight kids. “We came from impoverished people,” Hamner said. “I should have been in the state of Virginia and become a Baptist preacher in a small parsonage in a small town of 800 people. So I look at these things . . . from a very special place.”

  Hamner started off as a radio writer in Cincinnati, then moved to NBC in New York, where he
did documentary stories on Thomas Wolfe and Teddy Roosevelt (for which he interviewed the First Lady, Eleanor). After writing a few television episodes, he decided to move out to Los Angeles with his family, where he wrote some scripts for The Twilight Zone—his big breakthrough came from Rod Serling. Then, he told me, he ran into a roadblock.

  So Hamner turned to novels. One of those novels was called Spencer’s Mountain. A decade after its publication, Hamner’s agent sent it to Lorimar, where Lee Rich took a look at it. Rich and his partner sent it on to CBS, which asked Hamner to turn the book into a television movie, The Homecoming. When that television movie was successful, CBS asked Hamner to turn the show into a one-hour series, which he did.

  When I asked Hamner why Bill Paley at CBS had picked up the show, Hamner answered straightforwardly: “I think that there was a political motivation. At that time there was a great deal of discontent with what they called the overall sexuality and violence of the medium and I believe that Mr. Paley was smart enough to see that this was [the] antidote.”

  Hamner’s analysis is interesting in that it ignores the role of people like Paley in creating the “overall sexuality and violence of the medium.” The Waltons, in Paley’s view, was only necessary because of the nature of the medium itself—but this left unspoken the fact that Paley greenlit All in the Family, that other liberal executives and creators made active decisions to push television toward more graphic sex and violence. If Paley had truly been worried about the overall sex and violence of the medium, he would have greenlit ten shows like The Waltons and dumped those like All in the Family immediately. He didn’t, instead pushing The Waltons as a silver bullet meant to respond to the new tidal wave of sex and violence (much in the same way that today’s liberals point to Fox News as the balance for CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and CBS).

  Although the show was a throwback, a palliative to the acidity of All in the Family, Hamner still saw it as teaching liberal social lessons. “To me television is the medium . . . that could elevate people, could inspire people, could instruct people; it could teach, it could lead.” Yet Hamner shied away from shocking the bourgeois—he even scorned it. “If television encouraged anything, it may be the expression that I loathe . . . ‘pushing the envelope,’ ” he said. Hamner is a Hollywood liberal in the old style—he wanted television to softly lead Americans, but he wanted television to avoid vulgarity and shock promotion, and he strongly believed in the goodness of Americans and America.

  To that end, The Waltons consistently promoted liberal messages about tolerance of everyone (including many criminals), always through the guise of the Walton family, who together with their kindhearted neighbors composed a near-perfect society. In a first-season episode, “The Boy from the C.C.C.,” for example, Gino, a city boy who has run away from FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, is found by the Waltons hiding out in the forest. Gino stays with the family but ends up robbing them of their money, after telling John-Boy about his parents’ deaths in the slums of New York. John Walton Sr. stops him, but as he considers whether to turn him over to the police, Gino undergoes a transformation, then finally rejoins the C.C.C. and helps work on a national park. The message is mild but present: Criminals are the product of bad social circumstances, proper social circumstances can cure criminality, and government can be helpful in doing so.

  This is innocuous stuff next to the fire and brimstone of All in the Family, but it’s there nonetheless. The opening episode of season nine, “The Outrage,” is perhaps the clearest evidence of the show’s worship for FDR. A two-parter, the episode told the story of Harley Foster, a black man who has lived on Walton’s Mountain for years. It has recently been discovered that Foster escaped from prison after being convicted in a biased trial. The sheriff is forced to recapture Harley, and John Walton Sr. works for his release. “In the closing months of World War II, the fighting, far from the serenity of Walton’s Mountain, was beginning to wind down,” Hamner narrates. “On the home front, however, my father found himself in the vanguard of the battle for equality and freedom that was so long overdue in America.” When it becomes clear that Harley will be kept in jail without any hope of release, John Sr. appeals directly to President Roosevelt, who pardons Harley just before his death. “The train bearing the body of Franklin Delano Roosevelt moved slowly from Warm Springs, Georgia, toward the nation’s capital,” Hamner narrates as the show closes. “Wherever it went the people who loved him gathered to mark its passing, remembering the man who led a nation out of its most crippling depression and toward victory in its greatest war, planting seeds of brotherhood along the way.” Then the show concludes with John Walton uttering the show’s hallmark closing line: “Goodnight, Mr. President.”

  Is this liberal? Of course. But it’s also classy. And Hamner dislikes what he sees on television now, because it lacks that class. “A clue to what TV has become to me,” he said, “is in the fact that I watched The Today Show on a Friday not long ago, and they had a musical group of young kids. . . . And one of the boys . . . as he sang, kept his hands touching his penis, which I found unnecessary. I thought, ‘Jesus, why do you got to do that? His singing doesn’t come from his penis.’ . . . The singers that I liked back in my day were like Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney. Those people sang from their hearts. These people today sing from their crotches. It seems to me that we have moved from television that was created from the heart, to television that now seems inspired from the groin.”

  Although Hamner’s highest value was family in The Waltons, he told me that he disliked being seen as a totem of the right. “I wish that I could say I am not your property. You know? Because I think so much of Obama.” In fact, Hamner told me that he hoped the rural liberalism of The Waltons helped pave the way for the election of Jimmy Carter. He also said that he was “pretty into today’s liberalism. I’m for abortion. I’m for gay marriage.”

  While Hamner may have evolved in his liberalism, he is definitely of the old school in his style. He was cordial in his politics, and he was elegant in his attempts to infuse messages into his programming. And those messages were 1930s-brand rural liberalism—which makes The Waltons a uniquely balanced slice of pure Americana, when viewed in the context of its time.

  CHARLIE’S ANGELS (1976–1981): BIKINI-CLAD FEMINISM

  Jiggle TV in the 1970s sprang from the country’s desire to escape: escape Vietnam, escape Watergate, escape OPEC. Charlie’s Angels catered perfectly to that desire. The eye-catching program about three beautiful women—Kelly (Jaclyn Smith), Jill (Farrah Fawcett), and Sabrina (Kate Jackson)—was bashed as exploitative and sexist, but it was truly just escapist fun.

  Or was it?

  As we’ve already seen, Aaron Spelling was a master of inserting his politics into shows. He was also the first creator to transition away from cop procedurals and toward cop social dramas. Charlie’s Angels fit well within that pedigree. While critics ripped the show as fluffy material designed to oppress women, that wasn’t the intent of the show at all. Precisely the opposite: the show was meant to combine entertainment and beauty with feminism, even as it played on America’s desire for escape.

  By the time Spelling moved on to Charlie’s Angels, he had already entered his “cotton candy” period—the period in which he told a reporter, “What’s wrong with sheer escapism entertainment . . . cotton candy for the mind?” At the time, Spelling’s programming dominated the airwaves: Aside from Charlie’s Angels, during that decade he would launch The Rookies, S.W.A.T. (a show he would later disown for its violence), Family, Vega$, Starsky and Hutch, Fantasy Island, Hart to Hart, T.J. Hooker, The Love Boat, Hotel, and Dynasty, among many others.

  The public never moved beyond Spelling’s “cotton candy” remark. The press also dubbed him the King of Jiggle. Leonard Goldberg, who was Spelling’s partner at the time, got hit with the same accusations. “I was criticized all the time,” Goldberg told me. “Did it hurt? Yeah, sure it hurts. . . . To be demeaned like tha
t was terrible.”24

  The labels were inaccurate. Not only did Spelling-Goldberg make Family, they also worked on television movies like Something About Amelia, which tackled the taboo topic of incest, and Little Ladies of the Night, which dealt with child runaways and prostitution. Spelling also produced And the Band Played On, “where we really tried to say something about how the government mishandled the AIDS crisis,” and Day One, in which Spelling contended that “we never should have dropped the atomic bomb.”25

  The truth is that if anything, these labels probably helped the Spelling-Goldberg public image; since their programming was considered innocuous bubblegum, guilty-pleasure material, it also drew higher ratings than it would have if the public had considered his work politically serious (Charlie’s Angels would have outdrawn The West Wing any day of the week).

  While the public was focusing on Spelling-Goldberg’s sexy programming, though, they were utterly ignoring the underlying messages he was inserting in that programming. Even their sexiest show, Charlie’s Angels, carried that messaging.

  The show’s genesis was pure Hollywood. “We went to breakfast with Michael Eisner and Barry Diller from ABC, both of them my boys, then heads of ABC programming,” Goldberg related. “And we pitched them an idea for a show: ‘It’s going to be different from what’s on, which is very realistic and ash can and gritty. It’s a very high style show. It’s about three girls, beautiful girls, dress beautifully, who are private detectives. It’s called Alley Cats.’ . . . And they said, ‘It’s the worst idea we have ever heard for a television show.’ ” Nonetheless, they let Spelling and Goldberg proceed.26

  The show bombed in testing. “The average score on good pilots was 60,” Spelling wrote, “and Charlie’s was way, way below that.”27 Fred Silverman, who was in charge of ABC at the time, continues the story: “[The initial episodes] were so bad that we actually put the names of the episodes in the hat and drew straws to decide what was going to open. . . . We put them on the air and it was an instant hit.”28