The Make-Believe Campus
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff The Make-Believe Campus About A year ago, I had lunch with a highly-placed television executive who was full of excitement about a projected TV series. It...
...Television has become more sophisticated, no doubt about it...
...The young professor's slobbery do-goodism affronts the con who very properly points out, "This book is no entertainment...
...But the horror of his death is heightened by what has happened between the two men, not mitigated...
...As the hour of Sullivan's execution approaches, Howe is inconsolable...
...It might well be 1935 for all that TV people have learned about the academic personality...
...Despite these formidable disabilities, "Message from the Tin Room" is strong drama...
...With this sturdy reconciliation to things as they are, Howe dutifully trots off to his staff room and the next set of freshman themes...
...Even daytime soap opera, that last refuge of unabashed sentimentality, has been overhauled, and along with the familiar baggage of betrayals and female agony and perfidious husbands, there are quasi-learned references to Freud and nuclear physics...
...The heart of the program must be dramatic action, people in conflict...
...The latter is nominally the hero, but the real hero-the underground hero-is Sullivan...
...There is no suggestion that like most professors today, he knows his way around and is skillful at bureaucratic infighting...
...But Dean Baker comes along with some bromidic remarks that immediately dissipate the gloom...
...Here Channing executes one of TV's nimble retreats...
...Why did you have to show me what a waste it all was...
...Buffeted by new cultural currents, television moves with the times-but slowly, slowly...
...And a certain piquancy was added when I learned that Trilling had shown considerable interest in the adaptation and had actually watched some of the scenes being shot...
...He hopes to win his freedom through its publication, and if you have not caught on, Sullivan is strongly suggestive of Caryl Chessman, with the same volatile mixture of intelligence, arrogance and aggression...
...Its controlling irony-the nutty but brilliant boy with his saving intellectual sanity counterposed by the Ail-American boy with his beautifully concealed All-American psychosis-was conscientiously preserved...
...Zorba, the older Preston and the younger, etc...
...It is all there: he is bookish, thoughtful, poetic, gentle -and hopelessly feeble...
...Meanwhile he has to fend off the uneasy suasions of the dean who feels, quite properly, that Howe is in over his depth...
...It may be too early to make a final assessment about Channing, but the omens are not encouraging...
...Had Sullivan been killed by a policeman during the crime, there would have been no manuscript, no immortality...
...He wants Sullivan to rework some of the cruder sections of the manuscript...
...It is so small, so intimate that when Joseph Howe (the name is that of Trilling's young instructor) misses class, the dean immediately calls him to account in his office...
...Using a tight deterministic logic, he argues that "there could be no other chronology...
...The indications are that Channing will simply provide another framework for conventional dramatic confrontations rather than a dramatic exploration of social reality...
...The producers had a chance, but they muffed it...
...Secondly, the series has been conceived in the safe-and-sound image of the profession genre: the headstrong younger man (Howe), counseled and held in check by an older man, wise in the sacred Mysteries of the profession (Dean Baker...
...Sullivan, after all, is far more abundantly alive than Howe...
...The television executive, a very intelligent and literate man, went into a familiar back-flip after describing the series...
...Finally, and most disheartening, is the characterization of Joseph Howe, the young English instructor at Channing...
...One could be reasonably sure that the series would not turn out to be yet another throwback to College Fun of the '30s with some contemporary Alice Faye in a tight sweater, waving a school banner and leading the football team to new victories...
...In this regard, they are much like Ben Casey and Dr...
...it's my last grab...
...The program, named tentatively "The Best Years," would explore in depth the highly-charged complex of higher education by focusing on one school...
...The sad annals of the birth and quick decline of Channing are indicative of television's pace...
...There is, to be sure, a certain professorial presumption about Howe's life-giving role...
...A demonic avenger of the crushed and nameless, he cries out: "When I saw a guy with a briefcase, I wanted to kill him...
...The briefcases shamed me You're sitting on a bomb, but you're too busy looking for a bank that pays the highest dividend to know it...
...He is the fallen proletarian angel, the poetic thug, and the anathema he hurls at the middle-class world and his self-exculpation have a kind of raw power...
...It deals with a thug, Sullivan, who has murdered the proprietor of one of those pathetic little "pappa and mamma" stores...
...the doomed man demands...
...Channing is, first of all, a small, residential campus...
...Think how much worse it is to die with everything to live for...
...Sullivan, therefore, has to die in the "tin room...
...We don't want the episodes bogged down in theses and abstract ideas...
...Howe flounders...
...The buildings mocked me...
...The Best Years" underwent a sea change in the interim and emerged recently as Channing (Wednesday-ABC), and it is my melancholy responsibility to report that in the intricate labyrinth that TV ideas must pass through before they reach the public, its good intentions were subverted, its sophistication watered down, and fatal regressions to the stale stereotypes of bygone ages took place...
...Bent on saving the condemned man, Howe drives to the state capital to plead with the governor ("I'm a professor, he'll see me"), but he does not succeed in penetrating the governor's office...
...An intense, steely young man whose primal force only accentuates Howe's pallor, Sullivan has written a powerful and arresting manuscript in prison which has come to Howe's attention...
...We mean to deal seriously with academia, he insisted, but, on the other hand, we want to avoid preachment...
...At the same time, he gropingly tries to understand how the young man could have committed so heinous an offense...
...It would deal, he told me, with a college, and his rationale for the series was persuasive and shrewdlyinformed...
...And as Sullivan's time approaches, Howe says mournfully: "I give him something to live for...
...There was, of course, one small cloud on this spacious horizon that should have made me suspicious...
...And Dean Baker is appropriately avuncular, easy-going (but firm underneath), and so devoted to the fledgling instructor that when Howe goes out on a tear, in despair about his own ineffectuality, the dean goes searching for him in the local ginmills...
...We have been spared only the pipe and the tweeds...
...In the first episode, "Message from the Tin Room" by Les Pines, there is hardly a hint of the new, affluent, power-proud academe with its fat grants, its junkets, its experts in demand everywhere-and, yes, its contempt for undergraduate teaching...
...Capital punishment has little to do with the situation...
...We have to stop manufacturing murderers," he concludes piously and somewhat irrelevantly...
...For Howe has been created in the hoary tradition of the high-minded but feckless professor...
...Go back to your ivy-covered world, your lectern, your panty-raids.' (These lines, I fear, sound a good deal better when delivered by a good actor, like John Cassevetes, than on paper...
...The university, he argued, was the locus of power in American life, the crossroads where ideas, technical expertise, political ideology, and the arts converged...
...It took his incarceration and his impending death to have produced the manuscript...
...The portents, therefore, were good...
...Some time later I saw a rerun of the Trilling story, and though much of its cerebral flavor was lost and a little hokey action had been thrown in to keep things moving, the story was recognizable and was treated with respect...
...Incidentally, the prison scenes are far more authentic than the academic ones...
...A locus of power...
...A certain dignity was conferred on the enterprise when I learned that the pilot program for the series-already shown and wellreceived-was an adaptation of Lionel Trilling's superb academic short story, "Of This Time, Of That Place...
...and their force was intensified by Cassavetes' fiercely expressive body movements, themselves a disparagement of Howe's straitjacketed gentility...
...Profoundly moved by the manuscript, Howe goes to see the prisoner...
...To die with nothing to live for is cruel...
...Sullivan, on the other hand, is all fire and passion...
...And the underground issue, as in the Caryl Chessman case, is capital punishment...
Vol. 46 • September 1963 • No. 20
