The Great American Column

...Ordinarily this effort might not be deemed an offense because in one way or another everything that pretends to realism attempts to destroy our sense of reality, and does so, as television does, by substituting its own...

...Its audience is divided into two sections...

...In plainer terms, do we seek the low ground in our culture because that is where we seriously and deeply live...

...Is it because the medium is too shallow to allow for critical penetration, because we do not wish to waste our critical energies on such foolishness or because we do not really want to improve the thing at all...

...A man usually jumps up and down like a great cartoon frog...

...Still, the question is not whether television is bad, or what makes it bad, but why we take it...

...Let's Make a Deal" represents a twist on television's former successes, "Strike It Rich" and "Queen for a Day" in that instead of having cripples as contestants, it makes cripples of them, but the early shows operated on the same sadistic impulse, and all three are part of the same general disaster...

...From one point of view, the one of sanity, it seems astounding that we have tolerated the programs shot at us - not merely the outright abominations like "My Mother the Car," "Gomer Pyle," and "Hogan's Heroes" (yes, it's those lovable laughable Nazis again, kicking their way into your hearts), which in fact are so beyond the expectations of our contempt that they find a sphere of art entirely their own, but the "family shows" in particular, the miniature classics such as "The Brady Bunch," "Father Knows Best" (you know, Bud, there are some people who are not as well off as we), and "Family Affair," which are meant to give examples to our lives...

...Before he has the chance to open it, however, the master of ceremonies says, I'll give you five hundred dollars for whatever is in that box...

...To deprive them of their sanity at the outset, the show's producers insist that the contestants disguise their actual identities in order to qualify for losing their, reason...

...He tells somebody dressed as Mother Goose, for instance, that he may have whatever is in this box (which a professionally bemused assistant produces) or whatever is behind that curtain (to be drawn apart by a long-legged girl...

...Not that this fact ever discourages Chris Shenkel or Curt Gowdy who are too happy to burden us, or Howard Cossell either, who has built up a remarkable career as television's smart stupid man, a reputation only half deserved...

...The importance of specific contests is blown way out of proportion, not merely to life, which would at least be forgivable, but to the sport itself...

...Hockey and basketball games are thrown completely out of joint in order to fit playing periods into commercial slots...

...On the news, of course, everything is called crucial, which is why nobody trusts the substance of news programs anymore...

...To a man, the sports reporters go on swearing that that game at the season's end, between two last place clubs, played in an empty stadium, with the lights out and the ball deflated, is, in their word, crucial...

...Why then is it that except for faint sniggers such as declaring it an "idiot box" or "chewing gum for the eyes," which are not properly critical remarks anyway, and except for Michael Aden's Living Room War, which stands alone in this regard, we have hardly ever criticized television seriously...

...Uncle Miltie's theme song was "Near You...

...Sometimes, there is a live animal behind one of the curtains, and, as the audience howls, a look of genuine terror comes into the contestant's eyes as he or she not only deals with the despair of losing, but with the possibility of taking home a pig or a mule...

...The only movies that do not lose their grandeur when reduced to the size of a television set are those that had no grandeur in the first place...

...In the world of crime we are given "Long-street," a blind insurance investigator, and "Ironside," named for his wheel chair, a partially paralyzed police chief who, at the end of every adventure, is rolled into position by his aides so that he may shoot the criminal personally...

...Of course there may be nothing more to this than the discovery of yet another form of our determined and resilient laziness...

...Television has lived with us comfortably and compatibly for twenty-five years...

...Or, there may be a sandwich in the box, whereupon everybody guffaws and the contestant collapses in disappointment...

...Some have to be forcibly quieted before the show can continue...

...What the master of ceremonies offers these people is a choice between unknowns...

...The master of ceremonies patrols the aisle up and down, choosing players at random...

...Comedy shows which are meant to make us forget our troubles are so desperate and frenzied that we laugh in order to calm down the participants...

...And it is true that the old days could boast of Sid Cesar, the "United States Steel Hour," "Playhouse 90," "Studio One," the "Hallmark Hall of Fame" and "Producers' Showcase," all of which by now are so legendary in their prominence that their stature only comments on the arena of comparison...

...Eventually, as political candidates discover, the biases factor out...

...Sports programming, which ought to be unimpairable, has been made equally crazy...

...It may be too, however, that in it we have hit upon the true level of our magnanimity and grace, a level which we outwardly deny and occasionally transcend, but which we nevertheless seek willingly like gropers in the dark, reaching out for the dial, creating the national click...

...In the long run, it matters very little that a man shows biases if he also has no judgment...

...Six hundred...

...Television is not theater...

...Talk shows which are meant to reveal the inner workings of the stars only reveal the inner void...

...But if there is a glimmer of truth here, we better catch it...

...The contestant hesitates...

...It has rescheduled our evenings, rearranged our furniture, readjusted our eyesight and otherwise occupied our existence like no other machine of our invention...

...It may be that we have at last found a machine that we are superior to, and therefore keep it around for self-aggrandizement...

...The contestant decides to keep the box...

...Charity aside, however, there are very few shows on television as ridiculous as the news (unless you count as shows the recent TV editorials which fearlessly cry out against pickpockets and poison oak...

...The contestant is baffled, but he chooses the box...

...Surely there seems in most of us most of the time little patience or eagerness for what we recognize and even admire as high culture...

...In the realm of the supernatural we are offered an assortment of domestic witches and "Night Gallery," the only terrifying element of which being Rod Serling himself, clearly grown mad as a hatter since "Twilight Zone," trying grimly each week to convince us that these episodes are frightening...

...Those whom he chooses to "deal" with can barely contain their excitement...

...The regular audience shouts, "keep it," "sell...

...Television is not movies...

...What is called "realistic" in literature is always much harsher and tougher than what we recognize as real life, and the "realistic" decisions we are occasionally asked to make are inevitably the ones which disfavor us in ways which constrict or belittle our very real imaginations...

...There is the regular audience, and in front of it, in a roped off portion, is the participating audience, would-be contestants who have come dressed as animals or inane allegories or in other outlandish costumes, and who forcefully vie for the attention of the master of ceremonies...

...Television is what it is: a household appliance, a gabby cousin, a series of pictures, a killer of time — all these things...

...When the lid is lifted there may be jewelry on display worth two thousand dollars, and the contestant shrieks in delight...

...The program is a quiz show called "Let's Make a Deal" which has to be seen to be believed...

...The excitement of the show derives not from the price or size of the prizes available, but from the act of depriving people of their ability to make informed decisions, in other words, to reason...

...Is it merely because we are not built to snstain a pitch of receptivity equal to the art object or event itself, is it a matter of stamina...

...At the same time we have recognized it as the greatest banality of our invention, and we have encouraged its domination of our days...

...Announcers use great wedges of playing time to advertize future games or other programs on the network...

...Consider it a given, too, that high-minded, culture-hungry, beauty-sensitive people such as you and I always cry out against the blights of the times, trying sincerely if awkwardly to raise the quality of the objects of our perceptions, thereby raising the standards of our perceptions as well...

...I myself am planning a script called "Barker" about a deaf and dumb Dober-man with three paws (remember "Tate...

...Whether this reluctance to criticize on our part in turn raises the question of our wanting any art at all, I don't know...

...If the contestant is a woman, she flings her arms around the emcee's neck and kisses him powerfully...

...Seven-fifty...

...It is our crises, the points of our highest intensity, which television calls real, and it seeks to obliterate our own sense of what is real by bombarding us with continuous and undiscriminated excitements until we are unable to tell the exciting (game, person, dramatic moment, news item) from the boring, the important from the trivial, and ultimately until we are unable to tell what is happening at all...

...It has been explained that it is the dramatic construction of news programs which sets up their evident biases...

...How close did he actually come...

...who is dragged up and down the hills of San Francisco, solving mysteries with his magnificent nose...

...But it is not a medium for art and great thoughts, and we know it, and we make no complaint...

...Television and Popular Taste Consider it a given that television is in terrible shape, that among the various instruments of communication, including the telephone, including obscene phone calls, it ranks the lowest, the silliest, the least challenging, entertaining, informative, inspiring, in sum, a zero...

...It helps to remember, too, that the old days could also boast of "My Little Margie," "Winky Dink and You," "Filbert the Flea," and "The Stu Erwin Show," and did, and that Robert Young, the grand old man, indeed the male muse of television, who knew best in the 1950s is still curing our fatal diseases...

...Or do we fall back on, and more often reach out for, the low culture, the melodramatic and silly and shallow, because in that low culture we dimly perceive a truth about our nature: that we are not the advancing social animals we have forever told ourselves we are, and that the proof of our delusion lies in the fact that, despite a number of sublime interruptions, we remain steadfastly cliche-ridden, dull, silly, melodramatic, loosely-constructed and not noble...

...but the sadder truth is the naive and facile conception of drama, particularly of tragedy and heroism, that news people have...

...In television, however, realism represents neither the excessively harsh nor the excessively practical...

...People will always prefer good melodrama to bad drama, which is one reason why educational television, with its atmosphere of silver plate and heavy linen, fails so solidly...

...The most outrageous show on television, for example, and one of the most popular, is also the most sinister, in just this way...

...And the answer, I think, is that we do not simply take it, but that we actively like it, and that we like it as it is...

...There is a faction of TV knowables who, upon hearing this description, will tell us that yes, modem television programming is indeed a disgrace, but ah, you should have seen the old days...

...In the center of this uproar, controlling it all, is the master of ceremonies, offering people money for things which they cannot know the value of, things which they cannot see, distributing punishments and rewards as capriciously as the Devil he is...

...Only a few can participate, therefore every person in costume continually screams and flails his arms in order to attract the emcee as he makes his selections...

...One of the redeeming features of television \s that it has provided a situation where people as unselfconsciously foolish as newcasters can talk without being laughed at, and where one may refer with a straight face to Eric Sevareid's analyses...

...We know that fact not by the paucity of plays telecast, but by our own observation that most of the plays that are telecast are so dreary and lifeless...

...Briefly, what makes all of these shows-news, sports and regular programming- so offensive is their attempt to create a brand of realism by destroying our own sense of reality...

...When the "deals" are presented there is nothing for these people to go on but bare intuition, tortured and prodded by the rest of the audience shouting "the curtain," "the box," "the money...