Media

...The sheer complexity of churning out a weekly TV series guarantees that it is really a producer''s medium, and that the producer, if he is serious and canny enough, is the auteur of a great TV series as surely as Orson Welles is the "author" of Citizen Kane...

...Are the best shows on TV only the afterglow-as dead fish are said to phosphorescent-of a moribund ideal...

...First answer: they are all creations of MTM productions ("Hill Street Blues," "The White Shadow," and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show''), which is to say they are all creations, in a sense, of Grant Tinker, former head of programing...

...And "Ozzie and Harriet," especially, was brilliant: imagine Harold Pinter dialogue with a Jerry Falwell sensibility...

...And it is set in the America of the late nineteenth century: perhaps the only honest detail of the show...

...And Furillo, the beleaguered precinct captain of "Hill Street," is a recovering alcoholic who is divorced from his first, neurotic wife and is involved in a heated, but terminally grown -up affair with a Public Defender (lots of bathtub scenes, that is, but-alas-no illusions...

...These series- and any number of others-tended to assume the sanctity of the family environment, the surmountability of all problems given enough love, and above all the centrality of the home-as the scene of important conflict and resolution...

...FRANK McCONNELL...

...The auteur theory insists that great directors establish certain perennial themes in the diverse material of the films (e.g., family solidarity in John Ford, Catholic guilt in Alfred Hitchcock...

...that the smarmily reassuring environment of "Little House" can only be imagined, without irony, in the irrecoverable fabular past of frontier America, or of the fifties...

...And they seem dated, I think, mainly because we don't think of ourselves that way anymore...

...they were, in a sense, part of our national mythology...

...These shows, for all their frequent brilliance, seem impossibly dated now...

...In terms of the increasingly problematic nature of the family, Mary Richards is one of the godchildren of Madame Bovary: caught between the tensions of familial role and social contract...

...And there is also "M*A*S*H*," and there is also "Taxi," and there is this season's best new comedy, "Cheers"-and there was, until CBS decided to knuckle under to political pressure, "Lou Grant...

...For that time-setting is an admission that the myth being celebrated is a myth...

...His shows are among the best expressions we have of the post-industrial, de-familized American self-image: a culture that finds "the job" a more congenial, more supportive context for living than "the family...

...They are like Egyptian paintings or eighteenth-century epistolary novels, only all the more alien because they should be so close to us...

...Ken Reeves, the basketball coach of "The White Shadow," was a New York/Catholic middle-aged/innocent whose life away from the court seemed bounded by TV dinners and an occasional, tense date...

...But the irony is that what the tube shows those families, increasingly these days, is precisely the dismantling of the home-myth...

...We are, I think, living through a curious period of readjustment in our mental history...

...All of them involve characters to whom work-the office, the hospital, the dispatcher's shed-is the truly human context of their lives...

...Suddenly we find that our jobs matter as much, or more than, our homelife...

...In the lives of these characters, in other words, what sociologists call the "expanded family" has expanded to the point where it actually displaces the'' natural'' family altogether...

...Sociologists have been telling us for decades now, in their customary prophetic tone, that TV endangers the togetherness of the family...

...In the MTM productions I have mentioned, it is the job, the work area, that is the crucial scene of conflict and resolution, and not the home environment...

...Tinker, in other words, is among the chief pallbearers for the myth of the happy home that reaches from the greatest novels of Dickens to "Leave It to Beaver...

...If our real lives are increasingly connected to a wider and wider circle of people...

...But all that is no more...

...And, like the murderer in a detective story, the idea of a home life becomes all the more present in these shows for being so carefully hidden, so visibly obscured...

...And Tanner, especially, points out how the growth of the industrial and post-industrial city, the complication of social and economic relationships, eventually led to the opening of killer fissures-fault-lines, as a Californian would say-in the ideal of the home as the real locale of the psyche...

...and even after Van Patten's character remarried, much of the show had to do with the difficulty of maintaining the healing home situation...

...But the center plot device was that Van Patten, the father of the family, was a widower...

...The Roman Curia couldn't have argued it better...

...All those moms and dads and children gathered around the storytelling tube, staring at it and not speaking to one another: it can't be healthy...

...And the remarkable thing about this evolution is that it makes the family more, rather than less important: as all endangered species take on a special kind of fascination...

...Second answer: they are all characters whose "private" lives are malnourished, or broken, or vapid...

...Remember "I Love Lucy...

...Ken Reeves, Mary Richards, Frank Furillo, Lou Grant, etc., don't have home lives shown on the screen...

...Ricky would always forgive Lucy for disguising herself and auditioning for his new show, Ozzie would always discover that David and Ricky hadn't really stayed too long at the school dance, Rob Petrie would always find the script he thought he had lost on the subway...

...Mary Richards was a virgin (or, at least, a very careful single girl) whose real family was the whimsical personnel of the newsroom she worked in...

...Eight Is Enough," starring Dick Van Patten (who began his acting career, these many years ago, as son Nils in the classic "I Remember Mama"), was a relatively intelligent, sometimes very fine series about the difficulties of raising a family of eight children...

...And no producer fits better this standard of artistic consistency than Tinker...

...Michael Landon's saccharine and essentially dishonest "Little House," on the other hand, is a series of almost overwhelming family solidarity, connubial health, and patriarchal platitude...

...Phillipe Aries, in Centuries of Childhood, and Tony Tanner, in Adultery in the Novel, have traced definitively the growth and decline of the idea of "the family...

...The Dick Van Dyke Show...

...It is, in the deepest sense, a mirror...

...Third answer (extra points for this one): they are all characters who represent an important, maybe a crucial, social and ethical reorientation in the American idea of the "successful self...

...But television is not a director's medium...

...The tube, in other words, is neither a lens nor a window...

...Looking at them, we ask: did people really think of themselves that way...

...call it the period of the redefinition of the self's landscape...

...Suddenly we find that the extended contacts we make with our co-workers can mean as much to us as the intimate contacts of the home...

...Is Grant Tinker, for all his brilliance as a producer, simply the leading articulator of the death of the American family...

...Nor is this altogether a shame...

...and so recently...

...The family unit, in other words, was ruptured...

...and their point was, again and again, that potential disasters arising outside the home could-always be defused inside the home, inside the atomic family unit...

...And along these lines, too, Tinker's productions take on the shape of a sustained work...

...if our passions and our hopes are more and more connected with society at large, rather than with the sacrosanct fiction of the home as castle, then the home becomes more crucial precisely as it becomes more competitive for a creative function in our lives...

...The auteur theory of film held that an individual film is the "work," the individual expression and projection, above all of its director...

...And we gaze into its melodramatic fantasies to see - disturbingly but also importantly - the wraithlike shadows of our own discontent...

...But what does it all mean...

...The TV mythology we repeat to ourselves has, in "Hill Street Blues," "Lou Grant," and other shows, caught up with the way we actually live, and try to organize our lives...

...It is interesting, in this respect, to compare two of the successful family-oriented shows of the last few years: "Eight Is Enough" and "Little House on the Prairie...

...These shows were important constituents of the way we thought about ourselves...

...Suddenly we discover, in other words, that "friendship" and "love" are not mutually exclusive terms...

...Ozzie and Harriet...