Nice Guys Finish First
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff Nice Guys Finish First There was a time when Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman was regarded as straight social gospel. There was general assent to its theme...
...And the naked way in which they wield this power is nothing less than ludicrous...
...They constantly get into schoolboy scrapes and squeeze out of them through a mixture of guile, chutzpah, and sheer blundering energy...
...Geniality of sorts also has its day on a far more serious program, The Defenders (SaturdayCBS...
...he is a nice guy...
...Recently, however, a TV drama closed the gap between literature and sociological theory...
...Rather, the rich man's failure is a lack of understanding and fellow-feeling...
...Capitalist society, the play argued, will throw anyone on the junkheap, no matter how genial he is...
...It was obviously in the young hoodlum's interest to pin the guilt on the new cottage master...
...It sure is...
...A recent episode dealt with a reform school in which an escaping inmate is killed by person or persons unknown...
...The men in McHale's Navy are not warriors at all but Falstaffian buffoons who are prone to load the depth charge tubes on their PT boat with beer cans...
...Psychology has its own sentimentalities, but never mind that for now...
...There was general assent to its theme that it was not enough to be "well-liked" or even "very well-liked...
...But the Nazi physician, mind you, had settled in suburban America, paid his taxes, married a nice American girl, and had a couple of towheaded kids...
...Later another producer argued that there are not enough real artists in the business...
...This milky benevolence even extends to warfare, an area which formerly had not been spared any rigor in its TV incarnations...
...McHale's Navy (Thursday-ABC) is admittedly a farceur's version of World War II, and perhaps one is ill-advised to interpret it seriously...
...The final scene is a huge love-feast in which all of Sweeney's friends make it clear that it doesn't matter at all whether or not he is talented...
...The symposiasts, described by TV Guide as "articulate producers all," began to talk on tippy-toe...
...The story ends in a hung jury with Preston, the attorney, making an earnest statement about the obligation of the next jury to wrestle with the case's knotty issues...
...And Sweeney's boss, ready to dump him only hours ago, keeps him working in his night club...
...That is what The Defenders is almost always about...
...Another remarked about the network taboo on auto accidents (which kill 50,000 Americans a year and are more serious than muggings or narcotics by far): "These are understandable things, they deal with sensitive areas...
...Mickey Rooney plays the part of a shabby, desperate comic at the tag end of his career who sues a commentator for having impugned his talent...
...Television sponsors are afraid to take a chance with new talent...
...One shot shows are generally ignored by Pavlovian audiences in favor of series...
...A string of witnesses testify that they promised to hire Sweeney but neglected to do so because of his fading talent...
...He mugs, he rages, he weeps, and there is a brilliant sequence in which he parades his battered music-hall wares before the startled courtroom...
...It's called FailSafe," one producer quipped...
...You almost get a feeling of sympathy for the people on Madison Avenue," one of the producers charitably remarked...
...Yet The Defenders does not wallow in existential evil...
...Like in any good TV drama, the producers ended on an affirmative note...
...New shows, we learn, suffer in competition with old...
...The court trial becomes an ordeal of revelation...
...If simple justice ever had a clear, strong voice, this was the time...
...For at a time of loosening restraints in the arts, the Neanderthalism of network censorship still persists...
...the good grey names represent insurance...
...After all, fun is far more important...
...The inmate leader of the cottage, he is a murderous punk who kept the other kids in line until the new cottage master came along and deprived him of his authority...
...The occasional officer who lives by the book is held up to scorn and almost always gets his comeuppance...
...Was it right, 20 years later, to kill this hard-working man...
...The producers are shrewd analysts and make some interesting comments...
...One offered a mild explanation "without its being a reflection on the new shows...
...When he perceives the unamused, stricken faces of his listeners, he realizes that he is finished...
...No sooner did they cite censorship than they were providing apologetics for it...
...Like the Prestons themselves, they were terribly busy understanding the other fellow's point of view...
...Viewers, of course, knew from the outset that he could not be guilty...
...This is not deathof-a-salesman country but the new benign welfare state...
...The villains in The Defenders are those who do not try hard enough to understand others...
...But the parallel with Mister Roberts should not be overdrawn...
...Geniality . . . all was geniality...
...His son, allegedly dead, turns out to be alive (although this has almost nothing to do with the spine of the play...
...The big difference is that Mister Roberts wants to fight and is denied the opportunity...
...There is a kind of rugged New England rationality about Preston (played by E. G. Marshall) and his son...
...It is the controversial that is not tolerated...
...But hold on...
...The discussion opened with the grim question of why so many of last year's new shows failed...
...The important thing is that they love him...
...Sweeney, played by Rooney with a kind of seedy dignity, is lacerated by what he learns, yet tries all the harder...
...But this becomes The Defenders' chief weakness, for the show has an ungainly way of chickening-out on too many issues...
...On trial for the offense is a cottage parent who himself had been an inmate some years earlier...
...Suspicion, then, quickly fastens on a vicious young bully...
...This is another variant of the populist myth which achieves full flower in Beverly Hillbillies...
...The program weasels out of the problem nicely...
...It is fascinating to see how much of a piece television really is...
...He is not represented as evil—the young punk is a far nastier figure...
...Willy Loman, it turns out, was right after all...
...The ideology of the '30s, which Miller was really reflecting, had a long unearned twilight...
...Cigarette and automobile manufacturers evidently have a hammerlock on the TV industry...
...I'm sophisticated enough to understand this...
...A critical reader could take that about as seriously as one of the upbeat conclusions of their shows...
...In the July 20 issue of TV Guide there was a symposium of six leading TV producers—"the medium's giants," the magazine reverently called them—and they sounded for all the world like characters in their own productions...
...What the producers then said illuminates why in fact there are so few real artists in television...
...But it seems to me that it reflects the current distaste for war far more accurately than either Combat (Tuesday-CBS) or Gallant Men (Saturday-CBs), both of which present familiar blood-and-guts versions of the last War...
...Instead of clobbering the helpless entertainer, the defendant—the libelous commentator—makes a handsome settlement...
...The young punk, viewed in the clear, cool light of psychology, is really a failed leader...
...I sympathize with it," one producer said...
...Willy Loman's error, in addition to scanty self-knowledge (he wasn't a real salesman to begin with), was a gross misapprehension of the nature of the system...
...it would be against every meliorist principle...
...with their revelations of a new, manipulative public relations society changed it—at least as far as literature went...
...Not too long ago, there was a program about a concentration camp victim who shot and killed one of those infamous Nazi physicians who made the selections of victims in Hitler's death camps...
...The real murderer, it develops, is a pillar of the community, a nearby estate owner who loathes the bums and bullies who populate the reform school...
...This is life...
...In McHale's Navy, war is not only unthinkable, it is almost irrelevant...
...But the most amazing aspect of the symposium was the sophisticated forebearance that the producers could muster in the face of such skulduggery...
...Another whose show was strangled in its cradle crooned that his abortive series "had the utmost cooperation from the network in the effort to make it, as they say, take off...
...The content of drama, in terms of what millions of people will see, is in the hands of just a few men," a producer admitted...
...The concentration camp alumnus proves to be a tricky character...
...TV producers, unlike book publishers, cannot do quality things which will lose money because the costs are prohibitive, the losses staggering...
...For "Everybody Loves Sweeney" (Dick Powell Theater, Tuesday-NBC) is a sweeping reaffirmation of the very idea that Death of a Salesman beats down...
...A series about lawyers is peculiarly adapted to project television's constant message about interpersonal relations in crowded, midcentury America: try to understand the other fellow's point of view...
...It's up to each individual to help improve the medium, the producers piously agreed...
...Not even David Riesman and William Whyte Jr...
...Another producer, in a burst of truth, pointed out that obscenity is often countenanced...
...I learned, for example, that to have an automobile accident on a TV play is "one of the unpardonable sins of all time...
...In their disdain for the martial virtues, they come close to a contemporary nerve...
...Arthur Miller's preachment went unchallenged for a long time...
...McHale's Navy is a kibitzer's view of the war—a serialized Mister Roberts in which the enlisted men and McHale (really an enlisted man at heart) taunt the authorities and subvert the war effort...
...The officers—the real officers, not McHale—are equally clownish: pompous, ineffectual, even more foolish than the enlisted men...
Vol. 46 • August 1963 • No. 17
