On Television
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff Pure Fantasy OF all of television's longrunning programs, Route 66 (CBS) shows as much durability as any, and in many ways it epitomizes the medium at its...
...old hat, and private-eyes have a history in literature and the movies (even if one ignores the indebtedness to Edgar Allan Poe), which goes back at least 40 years...
...And the serials—Nurses, The Defenders, The Eleventh Hour, etc.— owe their spiritual ancestry to both soap opera and domestic drama...
...Route 66 sometimes reminds me, in fact, of those ghastly commercials showing mindless young people having a mindless good time—the girl shaking her mane in the sunlight, the boy ardently in pursuit (they sure run a lot), and both of them laughing endlessly...
...But it is hard to imagine Route 66 existing in any medium other than television...
...The real heroes of Route 66, therefore, are the internal combustion engine and the handsome chassis on which it is mounted...
...But Route 66 has the doubtful distinction of being a show which is in essence a blatant and aggressive commercial...
...We know that in cigarette-sponsored shows, characters smoke all the time...
...There is fun, God knows—great gobs of it...
...An hour-long show on prime Friday evening time, the program deals with the adventures of two virile and footloose young men who roam the country's highways (66 is the country's main East-West artery) and find adventure everywhere their rakish Corvette takes them...
...But there is also, inevitably, that neutralizing element—TV's insatiable passion for moralizing...
...The sheer youthfulness and physical vibrancy of the two adventurers are also a calculated part of this "image" of motoring joy...
...asks one of them as they contemplate themselves in oilstained clothes on an excursion boat in Cleveland...
...They sample the life wherever they stop, get into a fracas of one sort or another, and then, chastened but never a day older, go their own way...
...In a recent rerun, they rehearsed their little catechism...
...Here it is the young who instruct the old...
...The heroes' middle-class character is constantly underlined...
...What are we doing here...
...For the key shot in almost every show is that of the two young men in their Corvette zooming along against the background of either mountains or the cool sea...
...Lantern-jawed Western heroes are, after all...
...Later, later, they will settle down...
...It's outdoor work," his friend reminds him, "we're saving our money, and we're meeting interesting people...
...For one thing, there is in it a curious interplay between the world of commercials and the domain of fiction, TV is the first art in which advertisers play a predominant role...
...ON TELEVISION By David Boroff Pure Fantasy OF all of television's longrunning programs, Route 66 (CBS) shows as much durability as any, and in many ways it epitomizes the medium at its purest...
...Martin Milner (Tod), who has the ingenuous, little-boy quality of a young Van Johnson, is actually the hard-headed one, while his partner Buz, who used to be played by George Maharis, is the susceptible one, prone to fall in love easily and to embark on hopeless crusades...
...The variety shows, crudely and unimaginatively transposed from the stage, are just that—nothing more...
...In the end, TV will be less culpable for having stimulated delinquent impulses in our young than for having subverted the nation with its mystique of fun...
...Thus we see the standard TV package in this reconciling of opposites: wandering but respectable youth (beatniks with credit cards), fun-loving but responsible, adventurous but moralizing...
...Ultimately, our two Rover Boys prove to be as primly moralistic as Sundayschool teachers...
...We know further that, though something like 50,000 people die annually in automobile crashes, almost nobody does on TV except an occasional villain whose car significantly goes off the road...
...There are other elements that stamp Route 66 with TV orthodoxy...
...And here the erotic suggestiveness of the camera is most intense...
...Typically, they get involved in somebody's problem, and then after administering a rebuke or teaching a lesson, off they go...
...The program thus offers both a fantasy of youthful irresponsibility and the car as the principal vehicle of that dubious fantasy...
...It sounds, to be sure, a little like a middle-class picaresque— Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews taking a year off for kicks after majoring in business administration...
...The character interplay is changeless...
...But in all fairness, Route 66 is not quite that bad...
...And always mobile...
...It is hardly an accident, of course, that one of the show's sponsors is an auto company...
Vol. 47 • July 1964 • No. 64
