On Television
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff Hillbillies and Headshrinkers THE POPULIST FABLE is as old as Jacksonian democracy. Its main component is a stubborn faith in the superiority of the...
...One can argue that for artistic reasons the protagonist has to be a psychiatrist rather than a psychoanalyst...
...The animals also contribute to the enveloping clamor...
...A psychiatrist, on the other hand, is an activist, a manager of the mind...
...All in all, it is a crude cartoon of the upper class, a sleazy consolation for the poor...
...Granny, as agile as she is irascible...
...I was never more aware of this than when I looked at some notes I had taken of the dialogue some time after the show...
...It is like seeing old movies with their intimations of a gentler time...
...But that is exactly the point...
...In one episode, Bassett rescues a suicidal girl from a window ledge, in another a homicidal girl tries to run him down and then tries to seduce him...
...This is all innocent enough, even reassuring in a way...
...She is injured...
...And their speech, at the other end of the social spectrum, is as quaint as that of the hillbillies...
...Beverly Hillbillies is a stunning rebuke not only to television's reformers but also to that cheery brigade of critics who have hailed America's growing cultural sophistication...
...I suspect, is another example of television's itch to have it both ways: To make it big commercially and to be high-minded...
...and Cousin Jethro, a muscular lummox...
...These days, the psychiatrist is actually replacing the psychoanalyst as the hero of therapy...
...During a typical episode Aunt Pearl, determined to trap a man, offers lessons in yodeling and makes a nuisance of herself in the family's high-rent district...
...It is a singularly mindless program, and when one laughs it is not at its artfully contrived humor but at its sheer outrageousness...
...There is also an imposing agglomeration of dogs and cats to add to the general cuteness...
...Two policemen are dispatched to deal with the problem...
...That's about it, except for some bucolic homilies ("Folks are harder than critters") and a running battle between spry little Granny and Aunt Pearl over kitchen privileges in their opulent kochalein...
...On the middlebrow level, there is folk-music...
...he is smitten with remorse and walks out on the girl...
...Essentially, the program is a melange of slapstick, bucolic schmalz and backwoods exoticism...
...In a recent issue of Telefilm magazine —the Partisan Review of the industry—the program's producer wrote: "Our characters will remain honest, sincere, moral, and loyal people in a setting of sophistication of modern life...
...his wife is a hopeless hypochondriac...
...They represent a moral norm we do not achieve...
...The meshing of the middle-aging man's neurosis (replete by the way, with migraine headaches) with the infantile girl's needs is hard to take...
...A recent episode showed Eleventh Hour at its best...
...His machinations can well provide the stuff of drama...
...In the end, the girl, who is Dr...
...That has always been her style with married men: She starts with them because they are "safe," abandons them when they are really available...
...In a moment of Faustian fervor, another executive declared that "the word hillbilly would have a new meaning in the United States as a result of our show...
...As played by Wendell Corey, he is simply a nice, sensible middleclass fellow, who makes his shares of blunders, carves out no immoderate claims for psychiatry and is a pleasant executive type...
...Their obstinate honesty, their reluctance to submit to the middle-class yoke are disconcerting...
...The second cop, a more intransigent type, tries his luck and is struck speechless by a combination of pretty Elly May and a cat with an improbable penchant for swimming in the pool...
...At long last, the psychiatrist has been fully acculturated...
...The episode argues a little too vehemently that all men who stray from the reservation have psychological disabilities, and that the women with whom they stray are similarly afflicted...
...Bassett is neither an omnipotent witch-doctor nor a tic-ridden bundle of neuroses...
...For those who have thus far managed to avoid it, Beverly Hillbillies deals with an Ozark clan which has struck it rich in oil and has settled—if that is the word—in Beverly Hills, its folkways utterly uncontaminated by contact with its wealthy neighbors...
...But what is most arresting is the persistence of old populist myths...
...She raids the city pound and returns home with a carload of derelict animals...
...In effect, he was saying that popular taste could achieve new heights if only TV people had a sense of mission...
...A subplot of sorts is provided by the legal kidnapping of Elly May's hound-dog...
...This...
...From the moment the program begins—with a Rorschach blot as its insignia—the viewer can see that this isn't the usual psychological Gothicism...
...And the acting is on a uniformly high level...
...It is interesting that, except for the left-wing myth-makers, there has been very little populist sentimentality about the urban masses at a time when urbanism is triumphant...
...But fun isn't enough...
...It presents a new view of the psychiatrist...
...For the program is clearly a regression, a striking demonstration of cultural Neanderthalism...
...Drysdale (notice the anti-pastoral name) is pompous and inept...
...It is easy to overlook that the networks are full of ex-intellectuals, failed intellectuals and sophisticated antiintellectuals who act as the musclemen of the medium, clubbing the opposition, grinding out a rationale for the networks' barbarism, and intoning the ideology of "democratic culture...
...If Eleventh Hour is not very good—one wonders if any clinical material can ever be made to yield decent drama—at least its image of the psychiatrist conforms to the realities of the '60s...
...In a compulsively social one, it is too isolating...
...The language was absolutely wooden—a species of non-writing, in fact—but on screen somehow it comes alive, compellingly alive...
...In its way, this psychological moralism is as phony as the 19th century version of the fallen woman...
...The story is perhaps a little too neatly didactic...
...The activist, quite clearly, is back in business...
...But give Eleventh Hour its due...
...Aunt Pearl, an eager "widder-woman...
...Only such types would try to palm off Beverly Hillbillies as anything other than a rambunctious situation comedy as devoid of values as Dick Clark's Bandstand...
...Populism has a long history, and both attractive and unattractive elements in American life can be explained by it—the Scopes Trial and the Popular Front, Lincoln and Joe McCarthy, know-nothingism and trade unionism...
...Instead of holding up aspects of American society to scorn, Beverly Hillbillies rakes over some old clichés...
...The dialogue is restrained even if it does tilt a little into jargon ("I'm tired of new adjustments, new responses"), the portraiture is reasonable if unsubtle...
...A risky profession, psychiatry...
...He breaks with his wife, but in one of those half-accidental, half-willed things, he wrecks his car while his wife is with him...
...Instead, there has been a fraudulent exploitation of a fading ruralism...
...The girl then tartly informs him that she would have run out on him at the crucial hour anyway...
...Eleventh Hour (NBC-Wednesday), in contrast, is something more than an old stereotype refurbished...
...The first cop, given cider to drink and mountain lyrics to sing, staggers out Ozark-tamed...
...It concerned a director of a community house, settled into a pleasant if unexciting marriage, who falls in love with a woman far younger than himself...
...their rich neighbors are merely pitiable...
...We are fascinated by the show, he argues, because, like the Drysdales, we too want to see the Clampetts acclimatized to American life...
...It's so stupid, it's funny...
...At least one respectable commentator has taken the show's claims seriously and views it as "valid social criticism...
...For some television moguls, the program also has to have an aura of high seriousness...
...Among them are PhD's with an itch for the big dollar, graduate students who have lost patience with the academic wasteland, drifters, grifters and erudite conmen...
...What he doesn't know is that the girl is dedicated to defeat and has made five false starts in love in recent years...
...It is Lil' Abner in Beverly Hills, but without Al Kapp's corrosive point of view...
...and their secretary, gaunt and sexless, looks like a hockey coach at Vassar...
...Elly May, a nubile blonde...
...The big developments in treatment today are group therapy and chemical therapy...
...On the lowbrow level, there is television's Beverly Hillbillies (CBS-Wednesday), currently the most popular show on the air...
...Everything points to it: Psychoanalysis is a foreign graft...
...The overwhelming success of this corn-pone program is an ironic reproach to Newton Minow, whose strictures against network programming were themselves underlain by some populist assumptions...
...At a time when Antonioni's movies appall and our novels project visions of emptiness, such fictions are engaging...
...The hillbillies, full of hill-country sagacity, are always triumphant...
...Its main component is a stubborn faith in the superiority of the uneducated and a corollary distrust of both wealth and cultivation...
...I'm an expert on that...
...The clan includes Jed Clampett (Buddy Ebsen), the head of the family...
...The psychoanalytic relationship is too cerebral and, from the point of view of the medium, too static...
...Naturally, their dog is a cossetted French poodle...
...In a restless time, it takes too long...
...But he is suffering from middle-aged panic and determined to make a new start...
...So much an activist is Dr...
...Bassett that the genre begins to shade into the whodunit and even into soap opera (agony now comes in wholesale lots...
...Bassetti patient, sums up: "The next time you leave the reservation, remember this: There are no shortcuts to happiness...
Vol. 46 • February 1963 • No. 4
