The Performer's Medium
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff The Reformer's Medium IF there is any doubt about the relative seriousness of TV vis à vis theater, one need only scan the current offerings in both media....
...Reform politics is a going reality, and there is no reason why a TV script should not deal with it...
...The lunge for academic excellence is turning into a panic-stricken stampede, and the best of the young people sometimes turn into psychiatric cases or beatniks...
...And it has touches of mordant humor which lift it above mere social preachment...
...His wife is a nice young thing from the South who nags at herself about the state of her conscience...
...The story in question concerned a sensitive, bookish boy whose biggest problem is a congenital inability to say "Hi" to a pretty classmate he passes in the halls...
...The kid who is really in today is the bookish boy...
...True enough...
...Novack (Tuesday-NBC) took a look at the non-conforming high school student...
...he is in debt, and the house is all they have...
...But "The Poet and the Politician" tries to make a nice going-to-church liberal out of the rebel, and that simply won't wash...
...Anyone over 30 will recall the wan truth of his answer when asked why he did not fight: "If you made trouble, if you sued, you were dead...
...We are getting punchdrunk with piety...
...It is the National Merit Scholarship that kids covet these days, not a major letter in track or lacrosse...
...But if the script does not sound reveille loud enough, there is at least no ambiguity about its moral temper...
...Even if you won a suit, you became controversial—unclean like a leper...
...To dispose of the house of a defector, the Negro couple recommends a friend...
...This will not do...
...Second, television has an infuriating habit of summoning up its courage, taking a deep breath, and then emitting a puny little squeek...
...Our moral sensibilities are getting dulled through sheer repetition, and we shall soon become as suspicious of exhortations to understand our neighbors as we are of TV'S noisy nagging to buy detergents and filter cigarettes...
...The therapy works, and the boy returns to the bosom of the adolescent community...
...Meanwhile, the young couple have undergone an Ibsenic sea-change...
...At best, there are only two or three plays on Broadway that purport to say anything and perhaps the same number Off-Broadway...
...Just before the last commercial, we see him chirping a cheery "Hi" to the little nymphet whom earlier he was at the point of molesting...
...A Negro family moves in—an eminently suitable one, with MIT in the background, good speech, wellmannered children—and panic ensues...
...When the détente breaks down, Ted and his cohorts go into politics— Reform-wing, of course—and beat the political boss at his own game...
...Novack, though, makes a problem of hire as if this were 1935...
...But there are two things that worry me...
...Race relations and brain-damaged children...
...At this point, the episode could have been dissipated in a fog of good-will, but the script takes the hard way out...
...And that is just the way the issue has to be defined...
...The boy is the sort who lies in wait for his teacher in dark stairwells clutching a fat manuscript fairly oozing with adolescent Weltschmerz...
...It is, in fact, a mischievous script...
...Now here is a very real problem...
...Here the producers and writer found their courage and spoke up without equivocation...
...On the other hand, one need only look at a week's TV schedule to perceive, along with huge subcontinents of junk, the social topography of America...
...But leave it to TV to fight yesterday's battles with the electronic weapons of tomorrow—in short, to miss the point...
...As a matter of fact, he is so much the apprentice social worker that he finds himself running a cultural center in quarters provided by a local political boss...
...Ruby Dee, as the Negro wife, is asked by a patronizing white man whether she prefers Louie Armstrong or Miles Davis...
...At play's end, the lines are being drawn...
...Although he has a passion for folksinging and artistic dalliance, he is a college graduate, socially responsible, and not at all the type of Bohemian who is ready to mount the barricades...
...Novack looks for him whenever the boy is in trouble...
...Entitled "The Poet and the Politician," it drew on Greenwich Village history of a few years back when folksinger and beatnik were arrayed in battle against the police and their political bosses...
...It is in this book-lined sanctuary that Mr...
...We are in danger of producing a race of zombies with College Board Scores in the 700s...
...He turns out to be a self-made man, crude yet likeable, who violates the pseudo-genteel norms of suburban living...
...Nor should one sneer at such efforts, even if they are tainted with a certain Philistinism...
...The little ninny, living no longer in her doll's house, has discovered unexpected resources of strength, while her blowhard husband has edged toward the hateridden and the nervous...
...The conflict between natives and folksingers in the Village has deep roots, not the least of which is sexual envy...
...The play has to do with a young suburban couple...
...Brock confronts the young couple with astringent candor: "All right, you wanted a white Negro and you got a black one...
...Susskind made the perfectly sensible remark that never in television's history—not even in the Golden Age of TV drama 15 years ago—has so much attention been focussed on social problems as in such programs as The Defenders, Nurses, and East Side/ West Side...
...The crabgrass vigilantes are sure that property values will collapse, and the blockbusters, portrayed with shrewdly-tempered malice, move in and exploit their fears...
...Novack takes the lad under his protective wing, even reads his outsized manuscripts...
...The author, Ernest Kinoy, who knows the TV business well, provides a chilling portrait of a scared industry reacting to charges all the more devastating for being unformulated...
...Brock is there to prop up the faltering, and the issue is gravely in doubt...
...Feeling unloved and unlovable, he commits some minor delinquencies...
...Another recent show which avoided the easy out, the rousing rah-rah finish, was "Blacklist" on The Defenders (Saturday-CBs...
...A few weeks ago, David Susskind received a B'nai Brith award for promoting better understanding through his program East Siile/West Side, which incidentally has not been renewed for next year despite the kudos it has won...
...Jack Klugman as a minor character actor reduced to selling shoes turns in a wonderfully poignant performance...
...In the version of it I read, a sorehead reference to racially-mixed couples by the political boss was primly deleted...
...All those people, such an agglomeration of talent, such logistical ingenuity—and is this all that comes out at the other end...
...He also moons calfishly beneath the window of his dream girl, the one to whom he can not say "Hi...
...But the script glosses over that...
...Preston, who is handling the case, finds that there is no basis for suit—there is simply no one to sue in these echoing Kafkaesque corridors—and his son angrily concludes that the law is indeed an ass...
...Not too long ago, Mr...
...Oddly enough, television, which generally finds neat solutions to the most forbidding problems, here embraces irresolution...
...But Brock (George F. Scott) turns up too, and tries to keep the suburbanites' nerves under control and to make them understand that it is all up to them—if they don't bolt, all can be well...
...McKenzie is a nice boy going steady with a sweet Italian girl and, no doubt, he will in time settle down, go to graduate school, and sing folksongs only at those academic parties where people foregather to get some relief from their dissertations...
...The script itself gave the game away...
...Their neighbors are gardenvariety suburbanites given to barbecue pits and money worries...
...All of the nightmare fears come flooding back...
...Breaking into the school's trophy room, he smashes some holy ikons—basketball and track awards that in his ineptitude he could never win...
...I dig Bach, also Mozart," she replies acidly...
...On the other hand, when East Side/West Side feels itself on morally firm ground—when there is no danger of getting too far ahead of its constituency—it can do a remarkably good job...
...He is gregarious, reckless with money, superficially liberal...
...As a matter of fact, they nail one of the lies that are athwart real communication between the races: the furtive, unspoken insistence upon the White Negro—the Negro who conforms to the white man's genteel expectations...
...The solution to the boy's desolation is, in the idiom of the trade, heartwarming...
...Another vexing distortion recently turned up on East Side/West Side (Monday-cBs), which should know better...
...One looks at the credits at the end of a TV show with a kind of stunned disbelief...
...The rest is froth, titillation, musical jamborees...
...The folksinger is a bearded young man, Ted McKenzie, who is a curiously acculturated rebel...
...No Hiding Place" is crisp, economical, and right-minded without being sanctimonious...
...The real problem, as Paul Goodman and others have pointed out, is that there is no viable way for youth other than the academic highroad, no honor, no work, no future...
...Television, in fact, would appear to be the improbable offspring of a misalliance between Jane Addams and a minstrel man who happened to be passing through Hull House...
...medical malpractice and the problems of the aging...
...When not engaged in these assaults against the sancta of society, he can be found browsing in the stacks of a local bookstore...
...First, liberal good-will is getting to be as pervasive as TV commercials...
...Such was the case with a recent show, "No Hiding Place," which dealt with Negroes moving into a formerly all-white suburb...
...This is both good and bad, but in ways that the scriptwriter fails to understand...
...unemployment and divorce—encompassing these and more, TV is the reformer's medium, the happy hunting grounds of the social worker...
Vol. 47 • February 1964 • No. 4
