'United States' Needs You
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television UNITED STATES' NEEDS YOU BY MARVIN KITMAN witnessing the start of a new TV series is a bit like going to the reference room of New York's 42nd Street library. Just as you never know...
...After that you risk rupturing your diaphragm...
...United States obviously is trying to save lives...
...Missing, too, are the trendy graphics and the introductory teases that tell you the whole story before it's acted out...
...He doesn't like United States any more...
...Like Mary Hartman, Mary Hart-man or the twin- or single-bed issue, United States will divide the nation into two camps...
...Gelbart's M*A*S*H started out slowly, too...
...Unlike movies or theater, TV shows have to grow on you, like hair on your face...
...A hospital unit with men dying from ghastly wounds as a source of situation comedy at first seemed about as funny as an open grave...
...The couple even has sex-on one occasion before going to Uncle Charlie's funeral...
...They just monitor them while doing something else...
...Uncle Freddie wouldn't dare cancel United States...
...Still, by normal TV standards United States is literature...
...Technically, United States is innovative as well...
...it always sounds as if hundreds of North Koreans have gathered in the bushes to giggle at Hawkeye and Corporal Klinger...
...Silverman praised the heck out of it at affiliates meetings, or wherever he was giving his quality-is-good speech...
...As with real people, we don't learn all about them at first glance by recognizing their type...
...Familiar as it may sound, though, in his first TV series since M*A *S*H, Larry Gelbart has given us a show that violates all the rules of sitcom, a game as rigid as pinochle...
...Actually, "never" may be an overstatement...
...It's not shot in the conventional three-camera fashion that contributes to making all sitcoms look the same...
...Nevertheless, I think NBC deserves high praise for underwriting this series...
...You may even wonder why it isn't funny...
...On paper, it's a simple proposition...
...it looks for involvement, identification and a laugh...
...there are no "sits" to go with the "com...
...If ever there was a show destined to find its audience the second time around in the summer, like All in the Family, it's United States...
...Yet in his new series Gelbart the agent provocateur has dared to turn off the laugh track...
...Then there is the absurd title...
...they don't disguise their feelings for each other...
...United States is high octane stuff, very rich...
...he only told them that the show would be about marriage and would not have a laugh track, which produced a huge corporate gulp...
...They're gutsy and sensitive...
...The competing shows (Hart to Hart on ABC and the CBS Tuesday Night Movie) may not be Supertrain, but history tells us that viewers do not break their behavior patterns after 10 o'clock...
...You know, the "Mork and Shirley" masses...
...If United States had been programed more daringly, it would have made more of an impact...
...His performance was reminiscent of the man with the beautiful daughter he wanted to marry off, yet kept in the back of the house where nobody could see her...
...well, I love it...
...I would even have rerun the first episode as soon as it ended...
...I'm not the only viewer who has taken up crocheting and needlepoint, I assure you...
...Instant replay works in sports, why shouldn't it in comedy...
...Moreover, the show starts in the middle of a scene-A clever device that gives you the feeling of walking past an open window and overhearing your neighbors talking, forcing you to listen right away...
...Just as you never know which of those old guys ruffling through the papers will turn out to be a Karl Marx, you never know whether a new show will turn out to be the revolutionary comedy or drama you've been waiting for...
...My ear needed tuning...
...Of course, Kitman's law is: If a show pleases me, 99 per cent of the American people will hate it...
...Usually with good reason...
...The only people tuned to NBC after 10:30 are The Big Show fans-All 86 or 87 of them, who are unaware that the Dancing Waters have dried up and remain loyal to the big big variety concept...
...Nielsen won't get it, despite its brilliant subtitle, "The State of Being United...
...Most unnerving of all, however, is the fresh handling of the plot and the characters...
...Any new show worth its salt must develop an audience...
...It's a long way from the Bradys and the Partridges to the Cha-pins...
...They'll think it's a put-on or a documentary or, worse, a public TV show...
...Next, the premiere of United States was put off...
...But I don't know what I'm carrying on for...
...The show was so good, he postponed it three times...
...Initially, at least, he seemed to see this as his Studio 8-H of comedy, another blow for high-quality...
...There is no canned music in the show either, no catchy theme song, like The Facts of Life anthem, which is more enjoyable than the program itself...
...The show is a comedy of observations and insights...
...In other words, test audiences didn't like the show because it was different-As it was intended to be...
...You could think of it as a California version of Scenes from a Marriage, Freddie Silverman's answer to Norman Lear's answer to Ingmar Bergman's answer to August Strind-berg's...
...He is the man without whom United States would not have been possible...
...and Mrs...
...But sitcoms in prime time are not allowed to go on without a running signal to inform the audience that something funny has been said...
...I'm not saying you will like the show right off...
...Perhaps, like the movie 10, we have here another example of the complete breakdown in communication between New York and California...
...and Mrs...
...The human body can only stand to laugh 48 times in any 23-minute period...
...Offbeat comedy, especially, has to be given the opportunity to find its own voice-And viewers must be given a chance to appreciate it...
...The time-slot the program was assigned-tuesdays at 10:30 p.m., following The Big Show-is a wasteland...
...The audience had to adapt to its rather unlikely concept...
...No one will switch from the other networks...
...Gelbart's law, as he told it to me, is: If something is really terrific, it doesn't need explaining...
...Sometimes they are the old ones, witness ABC's reopening of The Associates on March 27 with the same tired bunch of stuffed button-down shirts from MTM Enterprises...
...On the other hand, could you find a comedy by Gorky, Balzac or Trollope peppered with such fine slices of U.S...
...United States was guaranteed 58-59 on the Nielsen lists, sight unseen...
...By American TV standards, Gelbart is a radical, a madman, a bomb-thrower...
...But NBC's heralding of United States marked one of those times when my expectations were heightened...
...Remember this is not an average American family...
...One of their two sons is named Dylan, not a TV name like Joey...
...The father doesn't just lather up, he actually shaves in the bathroom while the Today show drones along on the TV set...
...Still, it is unnerving to listen to a comedy without canned guffaws after being conditioned to expect such hollow heartiness...
...The show had not yet had its premiere, though, when it became apparent that NBC had given up on the idea...
...The lighting is more subtle...
...Laugh tracks are hazardous to your health...
...Now there's a selling word for you...
...Admittedly, United States is a difficult show for the usual TV audience...
...But, for all his faults, Freddie Silverman agreed to the zany idea...
...What kind of curve ball is Gelbart throwing the American people with this double entendre on marriage...
...To the professional producer, it is the moral equivalent of death row...
...On the opening night it should have been given an hour for two episodes, so that we could really get to know Gelbart's family...
...Television trusts you to laugh at Laurel and Hardy, Marx Brothers or Burt Reynolds movies...
...Genuine wit coming off the screen today is like a foreign language...
...In fact, most new sitcoms are just like the old ones...
...The DAR and the American Legion would never countenance such a blasphemous act...
...Gelbart went to the network's top brass last year and said he was ready to return to TV...
...I would have to admit a distinct lack of doubt about such NBC third or fourth season entries as The Facts of Life, Sanford and Pink Lady and Jeff turning out any less dismally than last year's Diff'rent Strokes or Hello Larry...
...The other has problems, and they evolve on screen...
...United States is about marriage, specifically the marriage of Richard and Lib-by Chapin, played by Beau Bridges and Helen Shaver...
...There is a lot of dry material leavened by something that used to be called "wit...
...A second clue that United States was dead on arrival came when Freddie Silverman called Gelbart personally to explain what a terrific time-slot 10:30 on Tuesday is...
...The alien nature of the characters is one of the show's few drawbacks...
...Nowadays new and different shows are canceled before they get a chance to clear their throats...
...Perhaps he noticed someone was doing the same whenever Freddie Silverman talked about the need for quality TV...
...He presented no story line...
...But it caught on...
...Instead of the usual frantic half-hour punch-punch of jokes, the scripts of United States, by Gelbart and Gary Markowitz, have an altogether different rhythm...
...Pseudo-literature to be sure...
...Although the first eight of the 12 scripts were said by insiders to be masterpieces, the researchers probably found that they did not "test out well...
...The parents do the things real parents do...
...life as our commercials...
...This is all the more surprising because the Gelbart name is associated with the frantic laughter of M*A *S*H...
...Even M*A *S*H has a laugh track...
...But for people like us who are as excited by the Nielsen ratings in the papers on Wednesday as we are by the latest English soccer league scores, this is our cup of tea...
...And when the critics were not amused at the preview I attended in Hollywood last January, even Freddie was thrown...
...In this show you have to make up your own mind about what's funny...
...Yet no one seems to be noticing...
...Once Gelbart was given the okay, he was left alone to write and film the first 12 episodes...
...It's scary...
...If NBC does not renew United States after the first 12 weeks, it should at least repeat the series...
...And the set is made of four solid walls, not flimsy flats...
...The people speak their minds...
...As a result, the dialogue is freed from serving the false master of a contrived story...
...The problem is people don't pay much attention to what's being said in comedy shows...
...it is a California family...
...United States does not have situations...
...And with the premiere of the show March 11, it should be clear that a TV breakthrough has occurred worthy of heavy study on Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m...
...Chapin are not silly and undignified TV folk...
Vol. 63 • April 1980 • No. 7
