On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
ON TELEVISION By Marvin Kitman Color Television Adouble-page spread in Variety last week described the plot of one of the interesting experiments planned for the 1968-9 television season, an...
...But before I suggested to the producers that they add a Negro like Ossie Davis to the cast, it occurred to me that I ought to check the facts with my fbi...
...On one level, this show is pure escape entertainment...
...At home, she reports to her captivating six-year-old son, whose father was a recent war fatality in Vietnam...
...The genre most widely appreciated by Negroes appears to be the lawyer shows...
...But Mod Squad is one of those fictionalized series based on the files of the Los Angeles Police Department...
...Anything that happens in California is far out of the mainstream of the American experience...
...As a taxpayer, I've always had a special interest in this abc program, drawn from the files of the fbi...
...It's the only network show with an fbi agent on duty on the set at all times...
...So I felt free to call the Hollywood organization known as Msei, which handles publicity for The FBI show, to find out the name of the Negro they were planning to add to the cast in the 1968-9 season...
...Now, through the wonderful chemistry of television, the networks suddenly feel it is right to do something about showing that Negroes are a part of the American way of life...
...We don't give out that kind of information," he explained, "because we just don't give it out...
...At abc, which strikes me as being a bit more moderately militant than its competitors, it is not enough to merely have Negroes in the crowd...
...23rd with Negroes...
...this goes out...
...I think that's a waste of taxpayer's money, especially when he looks at a passing starlet...
...When the first Negro wins the grand prize, will they give it to him in the community of his choice, like almost anyplace...
...I hope this isn't their way of saying they're planning to do nothing about the problem of helping Negroes identify with the forces of law and order...
...Why...
...The Defenders placed 44th with whites, fourth with Negroes...
...This new major character in the twice-weekly series about a typical New Hampshire town is not just a doctor, but a neuro-surgeon...
...Other professions that have been opened to Negroes include architects (Family Affair), Department of Agriculture officials (Petticoat Junction) private secretaries (Mannix), farmers (May-berry, R.F.D...
...All the spokesmen for the show were mysteriously on vacation or out of the office...
...I'm not pleased either by the reports that J. Edgar Hoover, the director of my fbi, takes time off from his more important chores?like interviewing reporters at 3 a.m...
...Dick Clark quietly began mixing the races on the dance floor years ago in his American Bandstand show...
...Negroes do not want to see husbands coming home every night...
...fbi in the public's eye...
...Nearly twice as many Negroes in the Carey survey preferred Combat over Mr...
...The man is also dangerous because he does a lot of meditating in his spare time...
...Doris Day, a well-known friend of equal opportunity, had a Negro deputy sheriff written into her new show, called The Doris Day Show...
...Thus we find the show College Bowl ranked last in Negro preference...
...nbc's courageous decision to give a so-called Negress her own show, only 104 years after the Civil War ended, captures the spirit of equal opportunity that is spreading through television this year...
...Just how 'Julia' copes with her responsibilities as a nurse and a mother is the basis for a disarmingly engaging and truly different tv series...
...The same chain reaction which produced quiz shows and talk shows by the dozen is currently making television a black-and-white medium...
...A few years back, Professor James W. Carey of the University of Illinois College of Journalism and Communications explored this subject in a study, titled "Variations in Negro/ White Television Preferences...
...They have done documentaries on the subject, just as they've covered farm problems in South Dakota...
...The big role Clarence Williams III won in Mod Squad is fine...
...Zimbalist, my informants claim, quietly studied with Mia Farrow's guru long before she could even pronounce his name...
...One report claims Goldwater asked Zimbalist to quit the campaign because his ideas were too reactionary even for the Senator...
...All of this civil rights work, I was told recently, is in the abc tradition...
...Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the one situation comedy which is almost human—Jackie Gleason's The Hon-eymooners—was also the Negroes' most popular program...
...Negroes in general reject or find incomprehensible much television content," Carey noted, "because the action (be it comic or dramatic) occurs within certain structures and emphasizes patterns of activity with which Negroes do not identify...
...At cbs, for example, 15 of the new series next season will have Negroes in non-menial roles...
...After a long pause, during which I suppose my dossier was examined, my voicegraph analyzed, and my phone tapped, he answered: "We have a number of Negro agents included in the approved budget of 6,590 agents for fiscal 1968...
...He doesn't skim them, I'm told...
...His editorial style is to say things like "this stays in...
...As the show's star, Zimbalist is Mr...
...ON TELEVISION By Marvin Kitman Color Television Adouble-page spread in Variety last week described the plot of one of the interesting experiments planned for the 1968-9 television season, an nbc show titled Julia, starring Diahann Carroll: "The lovely Diahann plays a nurse in the health office of a large corporation...
...It seems to me that Negroes are less represented on the side of the law on television than they should be...
...I have a hunch that Stokely Car-michael and the most militant black power advocates are fbi agents...
...The prizes on one of my favorite abc programs, Dream House, begin with a spare room and end with a $40,-000 new house...
...Novak...
...My candidate for the list is Efrem Zim-balist Jr...
...I trust the producers don't think that by putting a number of Negroes into their programs they will eliminate the Negro audience's feelings of alienation while watching television...
...So does Don Marshall in Land of the Giants, an outer-spacer, and Clarence Williams III in Mod Squad, described in an abc brochure as "today...
...Carey's data suggests that many of the programs whose dramatic focus is upon families or organized groups receive relatively low ranking among Negroes...
...Another appealing element to Negroes —if not to whites, who ranked it 22nd—may be the set designs...
...I asked...
...neither of the couples in The Honeymooners has children...
...Even the Negro population of Peyton Place will double by September with the arrival of a Negro doctor, played by Percy Rodriguez...
...Otis Young receives separate-but-equal billing in next season's The Outcasts, a post-Civil War Western...
...Of course, television producers have long been aware that Negroes face employment problems...
...Perry Mason was third...
...The useful thing to consider is that of all the complexities in our society, they are more likely to know how a courtroom works than, say, a computer room...
...The producers, with the top bureau chiefs scrutinizing their every move, are sticklers...
...However, Zimbalist campaigned for Barry Goldwater briefly in 1964, until the two men had a falling out...
...Compare the Old Law Tenement school of decorating in bus driver Ralph Kramden's apartment with the Beverly Hills Moderne in a typical upper-middle-class drawing room comedy like Dick Van Dyke (seventh in white preference...
...People also were presented as they really are on game shows, like Newlywed Game and Dating Game, although they never gave a Negro girl a panel of white boys to choose from...
...But the racial imbalance question was a long way off...
...Just say we have a good number in all phases of agency work at every level...
...Since it went on the air in 1964, The FBI has won a number of awards for Americanism, such as the George Washington Honor Medal presented by the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge...
...The man in charge of press inquiries at fbi Headquarters at "Seat of Government," the phrase the bureau uses instead of "Washington," said he would look up the information...
...It gives them a sense of what is missing in their lives...
...The basic problem, still largely ignored, is program content...
...and cowboys (Lancer...
...the ether says Zimbalist grew disenchanted with Gold-water...
...Rodriguez is qualified for his role because of his background in medicine...
...Or will he be quietly given an alternate prize of five Cadillacs...
...Some people may think this is connected in a way with the guilt felt in the white community after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr...
...Any relationship between the average situation comedy and real life, of course, is coincidental...
...They have to be co-stars...
...A better way to stimulate identification with the best in the American way of life would be to have a Negro co-star on The FBI, a show that explores the very foundations of the American law enforcement system...
...But it is alleged that The FBI is the one network show still employing a blacklist...
...My theory is that the networks simply spontaneously discovered that Negroes were not represented on television...
...and asking them where they got their facts—to read the scripts of each episode of The FBI...
...One of the secrets of The FB/'s success is the attention it pays to little details...
...That there is little in situation comedies for Negroes should not surprise anyone familiar with the Moynihan Report...
...My informants in Hollywood tell me the fellow currently on the job is a tall, handsome man with white crew-cut hair who is disguised as an extra...
...At work, she reports to a cranky-but-loveable general practitioner, brilliantly portrayed by co-star Lloyd Nolan...
...It doesn't really matter whether Negroes identify less with the lawyers than with the defendants...
...Choosing contestants without respect to race or creed can be potentially embarrassing to a network...
...He portrayed doctors several times in the Ben Casey series...
...The press agent, who identified himself as Jim Bland, said he couldn't release anything more specific...
Vol. 51 • June 1968 • No. 12
