On Television
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff A Blur of Banality It's almost as if TV has given up. This season has witnessed so little originality, such creative exhaustion, that one begins to think the...
...Closer in its intent to The Defenders than to Mr...
...Broadway himself) is a press agent—that fading anachronism—not a public relations man at all...
...This is the year of the situation comedy, each more frantic and gimmick-ridden and inane than the one before...
...But that doesn't mean that you know how to help those who suffer...
...The protagonist is minority leader in the state legislature...
...In contrast with Mr...
...Finally, matters are further aggravated by tasteless writing, including a masterpiece of tautology uttered by a newspaperman who talks about "the prostituted panderings of the purchased press...
...The trouble with Slattery's People, aside from its bang-bang resolution, is that it raises all kind of issues it does not have the time or inclination to pursue...
...Broadway, in other words, is a hodgepodge of styles...
...so you're an expert on injustice," Slattery says...
...The builtin melodrama of the newspaper scene is, I suppose, irresistible...
...In its swollen shape, public relations is peculiarly a product of the last two decades...
...We don't want your houses and your parking lots and your ghettoes...
...There is also a vexing ambiguity about Rodriguez himself, ably played by Ricardo Montalban...
...How exciting can swapping be...
...It is hinted broadly that, embittered by early deprivations, he exaggerates the wrongs inflicted on his people...
...Alas, like The Reporter, Mr...
...Bell has a girl friend, with plush chassis and heavy-lidded sensuality, but she is more than bedroom bric-a-brac...
...he asks...
...Surrounded by babes, he reminds one of Burke in Burke's Law but lacks the latter's urbanity and style...
...The brother, it appears, used to make the Metropolitan "a home away from home...
...Broadway and The Reporter, Slattery's People is a monument of tender social concern and thoughtfulness...
...At the very end, in the best Chayefsky manner, his secretary administers a dollop of love and melts his chronic rage...
...Broadway, this series is designed to provide a look at the anatomy of state politics...
...In previous seasons, we saw the emergence of the "professions"—teachers, social workers, psychiatrists, nurses...
...His office is staffed by one girl—no Madison Avenue opulence there— and his associate is Horace McMahon, recently demoted from Naked City's police force but not yet stripped of his tough-guy manner...
...Here was an opportunity for TV to illuminate a new sector of our lives...
...Rodriguez helps defeat Slattery's housing bill and fully expects the interment of his own...
...Do you go to school...
...You will give my little burro of a minimum-wage law a little pat on the rump," he says sneeringly to Slattery...
...At one point, he proposes a nationwide TV program instead, but Fontano, an unregenerate opera lover, dismisses TV as "a very uncultured medium...
...Broadway is a museum piece...
...All is Runyonesque joy and celebration at the end...
...This season has witnessed so little originality, such creative exhaustion, that one begins to think the medium has come to the end of the line and has finally settled into a bored, featureless middle age...
...It's enough to make one regard early Ben Casey as the golden age of television...
...Rodriguez is a Mexican-American legislator who is inflamed by the wrongs inflicted on his people...
...There are a few touches of contemporaneity in this stereotypegoulash...
...At least three new professions have entered the lists—reporter, public relations man, and state legislator...
...Yes, I'm studying to be a tomatopicker like him," the boy answers, jerking a contemptuous thumb at his bewildered father...
...Novak (although his irrepressible dogoodism hardly accorded with the harassment of five classes a day and home room...
...Perhaps that was to be expected...
...And Bell's secretary—breezy and irreverent in time-honored fashion— is an Oriental...
...Things maybe aren't so bad after all...
...It's all very ungracious to go on in this fashion...
...Slattery's People (MondayCBS) is somewhat better...
...I've seen the law mocked where I live, so don't tell me about the law," he snarls at Slattery...
...In the end, Rodriguez' bill is passed, and the legislator, burning bright, sees the error of his ways and tries to expedite Slattery's housing bill...
...A good deal of anger builds up throughout the play, and there emerges certain bruised pride entirely characteristic of MexicanAmericans...
...He operates out of his hat and a telephone booth, using guile and brass not bureaucratic unction...
...In fact, it was when he left that cultural center one evening that he was gunned down by his enemies...
...For all this to be swept under the rug when Rodriguez encounters American legislative decency strains one's credence...
...But another recent entry—Mr...
...The professional lines are blurred...
...Indeed, Mike Bell (Mr...
...If TV can come this close, why not a little closer...
...It perpetuates all the wornout Front Page clichés...
...But the Latin will not play ball...
...The political process, as everyone knows, is one of accommodation and compromise...
...Bell is at first understandably skittish about this "client," but when two sinister underlings of Fontano make menacing gestures (they are, of course, good-natured buffoons underneath), he consents to set up the girl's Metropolitan debut...
...However, Bell persuades her to follow through for the sake of her dear uncle...
...As played by Craig Stevens (Peter Gunn in another epoch) Mike Bell has a kind of understated efficacy...
...Indeed, she is an attorney murmuring legal terms along with endearments...
...Otherwise, Mr...
...Slattery is working on a deal that would have Rodriguez support a housing bill in return for help with a minimum-wage bill he is espousing...
...Meanwhile, the minority leader tries to teach Rodriguez something about consensus politics and challenges his embattled minority psychology...
...Unfortunately, the struggle was developed in such naive terms, and the resolution was so tidy, the entire issue was called into question...
...The girl is a smash success ("instant Tebaldi"), and Bell exploits the opportunity to present Fontano, the statesman of crime, to the press in his new, avuncular role...
...You could really learn something about case work from East Side/West Side, or about therapy from The Eleventh Hour or Breaking Point...
...This season, sheer invincible banality has collapsed all the programs into one...
...Despite some pre-season ballyhoo because Jerome Weidman was to write it, The Reporter (Friday-CBS) has proved to be the familiar mixture of mayhem and broads...
...It is, in fact, the private eye genre to which so many current series are indebted...
...The niece returns from Italy and is properly aghast when she learns that the Metropolitan Opera house has been hired for her...
...And who should know its Byzantine intricacies better than television...
...In a startling reversion to Damon Runyon, it deals with a bighearted gangster—one of those familial Cosa Nostra types—who had vowed to his dying brother that he would arrange a Metropolitan Opera appearance for the latter's daughter...
...He is Peter Gunn refurbished as public relations man, the quiet one of the '30s dragged into the noisy '60s...
...Bell is smooth but without real PR polish, tight-lipped but without that engaging melancholy of the hardeyed loners of the '30s...
...The heroes are all the same genus, dress the same way, and have virtually the same adventures...
...He sees himself as a political peon, and Slattery's ministrations are suspect...
...A recent episode highlights the essential archaism of Mr...
...At one point, Rodriguez turns nasty with Slattery and asks: "Does it occur to you that we Mexican-Americans don't want to buy into your society...
...And he is anything but the hysterical, murderously driven press agent of The Sweet Smell of Success, that superb requiem to a dying breed...
...The Sam Spade of the press release, he is irresistible to women but couldn't care less...
...Broadway...
...There was at least a faint whiff of chalk dust about Mr...
...It may well be that this process is inherently undramatic...
...When he is stopped for speeding at the opening of the episode, he is convinced that Anglo policemen, on orders from above, are persecuting him...
...Yet the conflict between the man of unyielding principle and the corrupted bargainers is a timeless theme, and a recent episode of Slattery's People had a go at such a story...
...He is bailed out by his secretary, a Mexican-American, and by Slattery, who form a kind of biracial committee to guide the hot-headed legislator...
...Generally, the programs made a game effort not only to persuade the viewer of the nobility of the practitioners but also to inform the audience of the mechanics and arts of the profession...
...Broadway (Saturday-CBS), a series about a public relations man—had more intriguing possibilities...
...Broadway is a tawdry regression to the movies of the '30s...
...And there is a mordant little scene when Rodriguez, at an open house for constituents at his office, talks with a Mexican boy who has been involved in a knife-wielding episode...
...But one wishes it were better...
...He is as much private eye as public manipulator...
Vol. 47 • November 1964 • No. 23
