CONFESSIONS OF A NON-ADDICT
Steinfels, Peter
A MERICA USED t o mourn the passing of its innocence. Now, less ambitious, we mourn the passing of our "IV shows. Borne by our networks, we beat on ceaselessly into the past, and Gatsby's...
...It's just that with a marriage, growing children, a mortgage, and the New York Times every day, how much more commitment can you expect7 I thought the Bicentennial spirit might help...
...Borne by our networks, we beat on ceaselessly into the past, and Gatsby's green light, minute and far away, is no orgiastic future but the last glimmer of a darkening color television...
...I bad seen one episode of Forwards, Backwards--the one where Joey's father, Old Nicky, finally resigned himself to the unionization of his crews...
...Unfortunately I never saw it...
...I caught a few minutes of Jesus-and, despite the spindly premises of the whole effort, fiked it...
...I also watched four nights of Sonny Pootdown, Sonny Pootdown, the "soap opera for those who never liked soap...
...As the first situation comedy constructed around the life of a male nurse who was not played by Jerry Lewis, the CONFESSIONS OF A NON-ADDICT PETER STEINFEi~ LTL Show was certified a genuine breakthrough by the American Breakthrough Certification Union...
...All real living," Ralph says, "is watching...
...You, he says, are a slacker...
...Ralph looks grave...
...It was the same a few months earlier when the Larry Tyler Lear Show went off the air...
...All America, it seemed, turned faithfully, night after night, to Sprigs, the story of a Native American Indian family traced back over the Bering Strait to the Asian coastal home its "Great Pleistocene Forefather" had left ten thousand years ago...
...Would the new adolescent actor have even a faint resemblance to his predecessor...
...That was not the end, however...
...Amideo Cucinaire, the suave Latin pundit whose weekly introductions had put the series in context for American families unfamiliar with road graders and dumpand-fill operations, went so far as to invent a post-series life for the Bellami clan and their ex-employees...
...They were good shows, better than wrestling and presidential elections, though not quite up to Kukla, Fran, and Ollie...
...The Hardy Boys bored me stiff after three books...
...Would Francis Cabot Lowell's voice change next week...
...But did I manage to see Part Two...
...Humphry Ward, purchased from the British...
...Did the producers of Sprigs ask anything more of me than one week's devotion...
...If I could not persevere with the patrician class, I did no better by the oppressed...
...What can I say...
...This is a television civilization, he reminds me as though I could possibly have forgotten...
...Ralph is unappeased...
...I could not give it...
...Ralph quotes Martin Buber...
...Of course not...
...Every week I was going to watch the Lowell Legacy, a fortypart chronicle of a patrician family's role in American history...
...Look, Ralph, I begin weaHy, this is nothing new...
...Bankrupted by the drop in housing starts and the transfer of moneys from the highway trust fund, Joey ("The Ki~i") Bellami was last seen slumped over a deskful of unemployment compensation forms while, viewed through his office window, Sal and Frank could be observed bidding farewell to their favorite bulldozers...
...After three weeks my eyes turned to pewter and my heart no longer cared...
...27 May 1977:328...
...I never finished a crossword puzzle...
...Consider the obsequies performed over Forwards, Backwards, that evocative series about the family owners of a giant earth-moving company and the tough but sage hard-hats who operate the machinery...
...Really, I'm not complaining...
...The cast toured fifty-three upper-middle-class suburbs and all the Ivy League universities, explaining the impact of Forwards, Backwards on their private lives...
...Joey's son, Rick, returned from Sweden after Jimmy Carter announced amnesty for draft evaders~ Sal and Rosalie got married and bought into a Suffolk county free nursery...
...I never even made the nine First Fridays...
...Unable to sustain a long-term relationship with a television program, says Ralph...
...As for Nixon and Watergate, as soon as I realized there would be more Frost interviews to come, well, I kind of drifted o f f . . . . According to my friend Ralph, who is a television counselor (he got the Bradleys back together after their celebrated break-up over The Captain and Teneel), I am simply immature...
...Knowing my weakness of character, I did not even try...
...Even the equipment was purchased and put to use once the price of oil revived strip mining in Central Park...
...Ralph shakes his head...
...I needn't add that I've let slide the dramatic productions of Georges Duhamel's "Chrotlique des Pa.vquiers" (ten volumes) and Jules Romains' "Les Hofnrnes de Bonne Volont~' (twenty-four volumes) that PBS purchased from French television, or the twenty-part life of the ~ tctorian woman novelist, Mrs...
...I confess that all this commotion left me feeling more than a little forlorn and guilty...
Vol. 104 • May 1977 • No. 11
