TELEVISION
Terzian, Philip
electronics conglomerate taken over one of the largest firms, but the largest--United States Steel--is now into real estate. In West Mifflin, Pa., U.S. Steel has turned a former slag dump where...
...I think religious objections to it are ill-founded...
...I felt they were making it up...
...It has crept up on us quietly, without announcing itself...
...nor that Powell's brief exercise of the art of the political knife wasn't even . . . perhaps . . . alarming...
...Far from health, it exudes a kind of sickness, or some malady from which we must instinctively recoil...
...Instead of an incidental reference to sex or an occasional allusion, it is the nonsexual content that is slipped in every few minutes to relieve us from the hilarity...
...It was a logical extension of the cutbacks which were even being felt, ripple-like, in middle management...
...we are in a mood to conciliate...
...A compelling bit of evidence, if evidence is needed, is the very fact that no one much remarks the fact...
...the viewer in Televisionland has, thanks to the rating services, made his own preferences abundantly clear...
...This is very much a subjective thing, but the news I read strikes me as faint and uncompelling, as if we were only going through the motions of struggle and conflict...
...However, like any saturation of the flesh it soon loses its spark and becomes tired, silly, and embarrassing...
...It is a positive orgy of liberated language...
...What is remarkable about Soap is that it is unremittingly juvenile, and that this immaturity is considered to be a sign of health...
...It is remarkable to see people on television swapping homosexual lore and unzipping their trousers with abandon...
...It has been curiously like the beginning of the war, which arrived by stages...
...Steel Realty Development, a division of the steelmaker, is the developer...
...The question, of course, is whether this represents progress or regression...
...Soap may very well be the extreme that will carry television to the mean...
...No ohe expects the publishing business to stop printing its pulps that support its prestige items...
...This is fear valley," said one of them as he left the Campbell Works for the last time in October...
...In a symbolic irony reminiscent of the dominance which the steel trusts enjoyed over virtually every aspect of the lives of those who lived within its shadow at the turn of the century, United States Steel announced last month that this year it was not going to have its elaborate employees Christmas choral group and manystoried Yule tree in front of the 64-story corporate giant that pierces the Pittsburgh skyline...
...But in peacetime such things have a muted, puzzling quality...
...people's hearts weren't in it...
...Two distinguishing characteristics of peacetime, in fact, are the difficulty people find in remembering what war feels like, and their inability to imagine the circumstances which might lead to another...
...If so, the future is disheartening...
...The sales instinct, it would seem, is prepared to abuse nearly anything, and just as television news is pleased to stretch the boundaries of taste and judgment in the name of the people's right to know, so comedy ,will saturate us for the cause of the people's fight to snicker...
...Surely, one imagines, there is more to life than premature ejaculation, homosexuality, masturbation, etc...
...Steel has turned a former slag dump where its mills deposited redhot slag for 60 years into retail gold, building what will be Pennsylvania's largest shopping mail in 1978...
...if agreements elude us this year, perhaps we will reach them next...
...The news was greeted with satisfaction by the directors of Lykes, who saw the possibility of the profit line returning to its retrenched steel operation with such sympathy from Washington...
...The White House meeting, held the same day that the President had unleashed his attack on the oil companies, brought only a promise from Carter that "we are going to do something about" enforcement of existing trade laws to curtail foreign steel "dumping...
...It is a consecutive series --hence, I suppose, the title---which, in its substance if not subject matter, takes advantage of the new liberties in the treatment of sexuality...
...Or with the first of the big troop commitments in July, 1965...
...Every audience expects itself to be satisfied in entertainment, and as long as television remains a predominantly commercial enterprise (as it will), it can not be much different from what it has become...
...In peacetime we understand the consequences only too well...
...So long as it survives it is an admirable antidote to the sexual gluttony of our age...
...Or was it the return of American troops and POWs early in 19737 Or the end of the bombing in Cambodia in August, 19737 Or the fall of Saigon in April, 19757 Or the Mayaguez incident in May, 1975...
...The Pentagon started to count the dead back in 1961, but we did not really feel ourselves at war until three or four years after the first American casualties...
...Even now a lot of people have failed to notice the change...
...we are very far from feeling trapped in a corner...
...We will be into plastics in five years," predicts a corporate lawyer...
...The plot seems to be a kind of revolving door of ancient burlesque gags...
...terrorism is often in the morning papers...
...Now that it is permissible to speak the unspeakable, Soap more than compensates for years of repression and euphemism...
...No matter how much observers protested in print that this was indeed serious, we ought to be paying attention, important principles are at stake, down this road Nixon lies, etc., etc., I never altogether believed them...
...But these concessions are entirely perfunctory on my part...
...By then, presumably, we will have learned that "the television that could he" never could have been, and that whatever hopes and expectations greeted its invention were illusory, and unequivocally so...
...SOAP, ere...
...The players take a kind of giggly delight in their naughtiness and elbow-in-the-ribs remarks...
...For Lynn Pflug and thousands of others, there still remained only prospects of a bleak winter, closed mills, unemployment assistance that must eventually terminate and the special fear that comes when stable institutions begin to crumble...
...This is the first appearance o] what will be a regular column...
...Or with the onset of independent U.S...
...By devoting itself nearly exclusively to its notion of sex it has, inevitably, been applauded in the usual places, and has about it that air of self-congratulations so characteristic of low-minded pioneers...
...Steel had canceled Christmas for the enjoyment of Pittsburgh shoppers, it and its corporate counterparts had promised a bleak Christmas for thousands of their workers and their families--and the uncertainties of economic things to come for many thousands more in 1978...
...War is a matter of mood more than of violence...
...I don't mean that Lance's overdrafts w e r e n ' t . . , disturbing...
...What is annoying about Soap is not so much that it is salacious, as I imagine some would conclude that it is, but that it is dirty-minded, which is something quite different...
...We are at peace...
...For the reporters covering the story, and certainly for Carter, Jody Powell, Senators Percy and Ribicoff, and Lance himself, it was no doubt real enough, but to me the story had a certain hollow quality, as if no one quite believed in it...
...nor that the efforts of various oflieials to for: get the whole business weren't . . . troubling...
...But when did the war end...
...The Bert Lance affair, which dominated reports from Washington for so many months, never quite captured my attention...
...so infrequently, in fact, 11 November 1977:722 that we soon begin to thirst for a single entendre...
...Or so it seemed to me...
...That, I think, is being charitable...
...But if U.S...
...You might say the war began with the first American air raids on North Vietnam in August, 1964, after the Tonkin Gulf incident...
...The United States is at peace...
...It is too much to hope that the networks would treat our unbuttoned age with subtlety or discreti0n--that is not why they are there...
...military operations in June, 1965...
...People remember the campaigns and battles, but they quickly forget the mood...
...Or with the landing of a Marine battalion near Da Nang in March, 1965...
...Peace is implicit on the front pages of the newspapers every morning...
...At the very latest the war began when several hundred Americans died during a single week in the Ia Drang Valley in November, 1965...
...Like small children, they have gotten hold of something forbidden and, in their perversity, refuse to let go...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 TELEVISION Somedaymprobably not in our lifetime--there will come a new television season that will not be greeted with moans of dismay and editorial hand-wringing...
...A corporation can scarcely be expected to profit from symphony concerts, panel discussions and experimental drama...
...Insofar as politics is a cousin of war pursued by gentler means, we are even politically Commonweal: 723...
...It has, in fact, and in spite of itself, a kind of unconscious genius in its reflection of national taste and trends...
...You would think a state of war would be as easy to establish as the date, but it's not...
...It is populated by the usual inhabitants of 1970s sitcoms ---everyone seems to be in his or her mid-thirties, all of the men have styled hair, everyone over 50 is a fool, the blacks are hip and wise, the women are committed to careers (one, alas inevitably, is a reporter...
...This scarcely represents a breakthrough, either for television or society...
...It is true that, what we gaze at in horror today may very well have been impossible to show ten, or even five, years ago...
...The show has attracted a disproportionate amount of attention because it has been condemned by a number of religious organizations...
...The Bert Lance affair w a s n ' t really an affair at all...
...Did the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972 mark the end of the war...
...it was something of a charade...
...After years as the poor relation of the commercial networks, ABC has suddenly come to dominate the airways, and may therefore be expected to serve as the weather vane for the programming future...
...why should television be any different...
...PHILIP TERZIAN (Philip Terzian is Assistant Editor o/ The New Republic...
...There is still plenty of violence in the world, of course...
...The end, whenever it came, was in stages, a kind of military detumescence, its passage clouded by Watergate...
...Let us be thankful, therefore, for whatever crumbs are thrown our way, and who are we, after all, to tell Everyman what he should and should not enjoy...
...Or with the beginning of systematic bombing in February, 1965...
...A case in point is Soap, which represents, it seems to me, what is generally thought to be progress but is in fact regression...
...Soap is an "adult character comedy series," whatever that may be, on ABC...
...it may more properly be said to overwhelm them...
Vol. 104 • November 1977 • No. 23
