The Nation's Pulse / Sleazy, Soapy, and Rich
Stillman, Whit
THE NATIONS PULSE SLEAZY, SOAPY, AND RICH by Whit Stillman Four years ago I began receiving TV Guide regularly in the mail. Life has not been the same since. TV Guide is famous for its program...
...Universal TV's new situation comedy "Harper Valley PTA" has Barbara Eden battling smalltown hypocrisy as epitomized by the local Parent-Teacher Association...
...In 1979, half the homes in the country could receive nine or more television channels...
...The rich women portrayed on the five night-time serials are perhaps the largest group of sluts ever assembled in peacetime...
...Regular readers of TV Guide's reporting and program listings soon find their preconceptions about television shattered...
...One of "Dallas's" story editors said in an interview that the show's popularity "has a lot to do" with "how we imagine rich people dress and act...
...I plead that you stand ixp to them...
...None of this was brought out in the Senate hearings on Haig's confirmation as Secretary of State...
...By 1989, half of the country may well have more than 50 channels to pick and choose from...
...Secrets of Midland Heights"-Lorimar's saga of wealthy, vicious Guy Millington and hypocrisy in a Midwestern college town-was apparently too rank (CBS cancelled it in January...
...Who can resist her . . . who can stop her...
...How we imagine corporation executives behave...
...Lorimar has sought to give "Dallas" a lofty ancestry-the original inspiration was Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, Time reported...
...Vlong similar lines, a social-problem episode of the series "Quin-cy," specially screened for a group of Missouri state senators, prompted the fast passage of previously blocked legislation...
...Bring in General Haig...
...In the old view television was hopelessley non-controversial, utterly timid about tackling serious social issues, far from the forefront of social change in this country-in fact, notably backward...
...Two producers said the world was controlled by "the presidents of the largest multinational corporations telling General Alexander Haig what they wanted done...
...This season Mobil budgeted $8,900,000 to finance 70 to 80 hours of first-run material on public broadcasting and commercial stations...
...NBC ascribed similar motives to "Rage," its drama about a clinic for Whit Stillman is New York editor of The American Spectator...
...Conversely, the puui, teachers, members of ethnic minorities, people from outer space, people like TV writers, were portrayed as good...
...JL»ike a television show itself, the current season has its own tycoon villain in Lee Rich, the former New York advertising executive who heads Lorimar...
...On "Happy Days," Fonzie might bring a girlfriend into a solar "warm spot...
...In "Portrait of an Escort," for instance, CBS brought to light the situation of the paid escort in America...
...On Madison Avenue Rich was noted for his memos on "the need for excellence" in television and the advertisers' role as the "most effective guardian of the public interest in broadcasting...
...In his book, Stein concludes that the program-makers are conducting through their shows a kind of class warfare against those groups they perceive as higher in status, resistant to their social and political messages, or in some other way threatening...
...he asked the advertisers...
...Actually the networks base a great deal of their programming around common social problems, and sometimes discover entirely new cnes...
...What is needed now, and what is for perhaps the first time feasible, is the emergence of impressarios with a new and improved vision of what American television, or at least one channel of it, could be...
...American television needs some Disneys for adults-minus, of course, Tinkerbell, etc...
...Jordan West needs extra money to support the daughter she loves," the network's ad explained...
...Traditionally television has made its points through the manipulation of stereotypes...
...These last projects, TV Guide reports, are the work of "a brash new generation of network executives" with "a strong and active interest in contemporary social politics" who are determined "to change the face of prime time...
...There's little or nothing made in the United States that has the kind of quality we want," Schmertz said at a New York TV Academy luncheon last summer...
...When asked whether she considered small towns frightening, the producer of "The Rockford Files" said: "Jesus, they did vote for Nixon...
...My intention," she said, "is to illuminate the battered women syndrome and give hope to women...
...Last year an episode of producer Garry Marshall's "Laverne & Shirley," entitled "The Slow Child," won the annual ARC of Excellence award from the National Association of Retarded Citizens...
...Perhaps it is then bad news that "Dallas" has already been shown in seventy foreign countries...
...Crime he ascribed to "what we in America have done to racial and economic minorities...
...This season Marshall and Norman Lear have said they will use their shows to proselytize for the Carter administration's energy policies...
...The sleaziness is Rich's contribution but anti-business, anti-rich messages have long been pervasive on television-showing up regularly on the best American-made shows, such as "Columbo" and the current "Lou Grant," as well as the worst...
...Lorimar imagined them all behaving disgustingly...
...We gotta [sic] tie energy up with sex so viewers will listen," Marshall explains...
...Richard's making a fool of himself over her, but Abby's secret is out-it's Gary she's after...
...The Mafia, big business, and government were seen as closely interlinked...
...TV Guide is famous for its program listings and in-depth articles on TV personalities and trends, but each issue also includes Judith Crist's TV movie column (except in Hawaii), editorials, a letters section (the main outlet for the work of a number of conservative and libertarian writers), TV Teletype New York/Hollywood, and the fact-packed TV Update section-Sally Bedell and Frank Swertlow reporting...
...As the only non-Lorimar serial, it is not quite so rotten...
...He also criticized the relentless portrayal of businessmen as villains on series such as "Dallas" and "Quincy...
...Rich is a sort of auteur-producer re-creating his sleazy vision in various locales across the country...
...But, outside the planet Ork, its principal present-day use seems to be to persuade voters that there is no need to develop real-life energy resources...
...At a 1978 meeting of the Association of National Advertisers he characterized the PTA's campaign to persuade advertisers to exercise their guardianship as a "blackmail attempt.'' "Where does it end...
...The hero of the last ten television seasons is Mobil Vice President for Public Affairs Herb Schmertz who through the wholesale importing of the best British television programming has given American viewers an idea of how good the medium can be...
...If that's not perfectly clear, CBS's ad screams: "How many marriages will Abby destroy...
...Judith Crist oddly criticized this TV 'movie for using "sleazy melodrama...
...In 1971, early in his producing career, Rich brought out The Sporting Club, a movie which earned a rare "BOMB" rating from the authoritative guide TV Movies, which commented: "Badly directed dud about violence and promiscuity among some beautiful people in Northern Michigan has enough ineptitude to offend everyone...
...Four years before he started planning Disneyland on a $10,000 budget in 1952, Walt Disney talked about building "a new kind of amusement park" of a quality and dimension only he could envision...
...Half the nation's households will have cable by the end of the decade, a report from the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson forecasts...
...Valerie Harper (formerly "Rhoda"), who fought sexual harassment on the assembly line last year, turned to the battered wives issue this season...
...ABC said that its Alpha cultural cable service would begin in April...
...The current network strategy of cloaking seamy plots with social messages underlined in crayon-in addition to a yearning for civic respectability and strange pride of authorship among TV writers and producers-seems to have prompted a selective abandonment of the old pretense that entertainment television is ideologically message-free...
...Dynasty," added in January, concerns the ludicrously decadent, Denver oil-rich Carringtons...
...Businessmen, the military, smalltown residents, the rich, gun owners, fundamentalist Protestants-generally anyone who might vote Republican-were portrayed as ludicrous or evil...
...If schoolteachers had the opportunity' to become corrupt they would, because they're so underpaid," he declared...
...The unanswered question, however," Crist says, "is what the Army, let alone Congress, has done about its intelligence agents...
...The vilification of capitalists and their families is so intense on "Dallas" that the editor of the British humor magazine Punch has wondered in print if the show's writers were working off "set texts from the Kremlin" and joked that it could lose the Cold War for the West if broadcast widely abroad...
...Watching thousands of hours of prime-time shows in preparation for his brilliant 1979 book The View from Sunset Boulevard, the TV writer and former American Spectator Talkies reviewer Ben Stein found that even "the most inane and repetitious television shows" were filled with clear and "deeply similar" political and social messages...
...A performing-arts cable service called Bravo began operating in December...
...Most of their attitudes were strange...
...Virtually all the Mobil programming will be imported from Britain...
...The U.S...
...But it has become almost axiomatic that good television appears off-network...
...A political group called the Solar Lobby and the former administration's Office of Conservation and Solar Energy said they worked for over a year "to educate" Lear and Marshall-with apparent success...
...He saw religion as unimportant in American life and said he personally rejected it because "it hasn't made the changes it's got to make...
...Docudrama has been the most directly political of television genres and among the first two of 1981 were NBC's "Kent State" and "Thorn-well," CBS's dramatization of a case first publicized on "Sixty Minutes...
...The pattern holds up in the serials modeled on "Dallas...
...Haig, in cooperation with several ex-Nazis, carried out their wishes...
...Usually, producers acknowledge their propaganda function in shows tackling the least controversial causes...
...Twenty years ago, as an army private, Thornwell was harassed and given LSD by army counterintel-ligence agents who suspected him of stealing secret documents-"treatment," Judith Crist reports, "the Army itself has since termed 'unconscionable.'" Congress recently awarded Thornwell $625,000 in compensation...
...But more likely prototypes are closer at hand...
...CBS Cable is scheduled to begin supplying cultural programming-music, off-Broadway plays, ballet, foreign films, and an "arts magazine"-near the middle of the year...
...It is our hope that "Rage" will shed some new light on this subject...
...They can go as far as you allow them to go...
...All he knew for certain," his biographer writes, "was he did not want to imitate the existing pattern because, as he had discovered when visiting them with his daughters years before, they were 'Dirty, phoney places, run by tough-looking people.' There was, he said, 'a d ed for something new, but I didn't know what it was.' " Network prime-time is today a dirty, phoney place...
...Lorimar's "Flamingo Road," described as "sizzling" in NBC's publicity, features both a corrupt sheriff and the horrible, wealthy Weldons of an old Southern town...
...rapists: "Unless we have a more enlightened approach to treatment of rapists these horrible crimes will continue...
...In fact, commercial airtime has been in such demand that advertisers have never had less influence on network programming...
...Thank you for your help...
...In terms of plausibility it is not far from this to "Dallas" and its imitators, the phenomena of this television season...
...Universal, as the leading maker of adventure shows, was the big loser when this lobbying led to the institution of Family Viewing Time, intended to limit TV violence...
...Interviewing the writers and producers responsible for much of the prime time, Stein found that their attitudes "coincide almost exactly with what appears on television...
...Now, it could cost her life...
...Missouri State Senator Harriet Wood wrote "Quincy" star Jack Klugman that the episode had "presented the need far better than any speech or printed material could have done...
...The Cali-fornians portrayed on "Knot's Landing," introduced by Lorimar last season, are merely affluent but the villainous rich from "Dallas" make crossover appearances...
...involvement in Southeast Asia...
...Interviewed by Stein for his book, Rich unburdened himself of many odd views...
...After becoming a producer himself, Rich had a change of heart...
...The report adds that "network audience losses will be proportionately greatest in the better educated, younger, more affluent households-the prime target of so many marketeers...
...Advertisers oppose overcommercialism and mediocre programming," he boasted...
...Eviolently what can be expected on the networks, then, is worse of the same...
...The ad hoc Mobil Showcase Network linking individual commercial stations in the top 50 television markets was set up after the networks rejected Mobil's image advertising (on the grounds that the ads "were taking a position on a controversial issue...
...The prospect of the slop now appearing off-Broadway being spread all over the country is' not much to look forward to...
...to spice up what could have been intelligent social drama...
...Xiven the most inane shows carry on the fight...
...There are enough social-problem TV movies to give some,performers regular employment...
...The move beyond mass-audience broadcasting is proceeding so quickly that in just one week this winter several new pay-cable services were announced...
...Tonight, she'll dine and dance with a stranger for fifty dollars...
...The national PTA has been the most vocal group lobbying against "sex and violence" on television...
...This season on "Mork & Mindy," Marshall is emphasizing how Mork's planet, Ork, uses solar energy...
...Solar energy in itself is the quintessence of the non-controversial cause...
...In Turkey the National Salvation Party issued an ultimatum calling for "the elimination of 'Dallas' from television" because it is "degrading and aims at destroying Turkish family life...
...In his unpublished' memoirs a Hollywood blacklist veteran recently boasted that, as a scriptwriter for the mid-sixties series "Daniel Boone," he inserted anti-Vietnam War messages in the show-placing this children's series in the vanguard of opposition to U.S...
...Garry Marshall commented: "When the government says something, I'm never sure whether the government is telling the truth, or whether it's big business talking...
...Meanwhile, the ABC group which produced "Attica" and the anti-Vietnam War docudrama "Friendly Fire" is now preparing an attack on the nuclear industry in the form of a dramatization of the "Karen Silk-wood case...
...If it helps to prevent one rape, we have performed a public service.'' Among the other public service TV movies which appeared during the same short period last fall were "Rape and Marriage: The Rideout Case," "A Cry for Love," "The Jayne Mansfield Story," and "The Women's Room," which Judith Crist called "a feminist tract set to Sturm und Drang...
...The most serious challenge to network dominance is coming from the new television technologies-video cassette, video disc, cable, and direct satellite-to-home transmission...
...military was seen as preparing a fascist coup...
...the governor signed the bill last week...
...Sue Ellen encourages Pam to have an affair, since she's about to embark on one herself," TV Guide reports of "Dallas's" last January episode...
...Of "Knot's Landing" it says: "Abby, eager to sink her claws into Gary, maneuvers Val into a restaurant where Gary is dining with another woman...
...Another group of producers believed eight families rule the world, with their representatives gathering annually to decide all major elections, decree inflation and unemployment levels for each country, stop and start wars, and so on...
...Reaching for an example of a relatively low annual salary, Rich came up with the figure $50,000...
...It was like a scene in a TV docudrama about the McCarthy era...
...The usual message on "Quincy"- that whatever the social problem or crime, businessmen or reactionary white males are behind it-is not emphasized on its press releases...
...As the networks' involvement in this area implies, the new "narrow-cast" television channels will probably be dominated by the same people who have done so much for broadcasting...
Vol. 14 • March 1981 • No. 3
