Trash on the Beach

...On Television TRASH ON THE BEACH BY MARVIN KITMAN YOU'RE RIGHT-The Hamptons, that festival of miserable TV on ABC this summer-smelled And I don't mean from the sea or the fish The five-part miniseries had inspired excitement in intellectual circles because it was created by Gloria Monty of General Hospital Well, she rested on her laurels here...

...The subject was lust and sex and sleeping around, three of my favorite subjects on TV For five Wednesdays (9 00-10 00 pm ) we could tune in to an hour's drama of who's who in whose bed Out in the beach towns on the east end of Long Island (where the Hamptons are) they kiss right m front of the children How disgusting can you get...

...My wife says ABC only did The Hamptons because somebody wanted to be there for the weekends The show gave them an excuse to play for a year-all research, of course No matter that they could have called the enterprise Rockaway Beach or Asbury Park, or some other classy spot that will become next year's sordid, or at least sandy, miniseries...

...Most disappointing about The Hamptons was the setting It didn't look anything like the real article No pond downtown, no Guild Hall, no windmill, no potato fields, no Haagen-Dazs ice cream parlor, no long lines at the movies, no loitering on the beaches waiting to be invited to parties To capture the Hamptons in all its beauty, my wife suggests, the few millionaires not already there should be landing in their Lear jets A Polaroid snapshot by visitors from Iowa or Pittsburgh captures more of the actual place than ABC did . Everybody knows pictures do not lie, and yet the location shooting, conducted at huge expense by the network during the spring, was hardly discernible on screen The backgrounds looked pretty much like Malibu, another ocean-side community immortalized last spring in ABC's salute to sexy beaches coast to coast True, the houses were nicer in The Hamptons than in Malibu, and they were older In California anything older than Joan Collins is considered ancient, a relic, and immediately torn down for a condo or a taco/ salad joint...

...For some reason, though, The Hamptons failed to strike this chord in me It was as boring as clams cuddling The tide going out is more moving and dramatic Maybe I am getting oversoaped I used to believe there was no end to the number of times I could enjoy the same story I was wrong Revealing the limits of my tolerance was the true value of The Hamptons...

...The plot was a third generation rip-off of Dallas The conflict did not lie in the oil business or even the lobster fishing industry No, this one concerned a takeover attempt at a New York City department store Merchandising1 The two families that owned the store (the Chadways and the Duncans) were feuding and the saga dragged on I'd rather watch the life story of Fred the Furrier as he tries to lure Dorothy and Frances and Roxanne and Florence and Tootsie into his fur vaults at Alexander's In its effort to recycle the venal people from Dallas and Dynasty, The Hamptons produced a collection of zeroes more tedious than the last literary cocktail party I attended in Sagaponeck...

...The premiere episode on July 27 even had some old guy trying to sleep with his daughter In Kansas they must be thinking, so this is New York Incest' Later episodes revealed she was only a stepdaughter, but the damage had been done The bad impression fitted right in with the general suspicion of the Big Apple Everybody in New York is always getting mugged...

...Well, for one thing, I don't go to Dallas or Knotts Landing for my weekends and vacations The spiritual home of some writers is Pans Mine is East Hampton I have become deeply attached to the town, even though I am too poor (partly because of writing reviews for this magazine) to buy a house there Like the milling crowds who press their noses against the windows at Tiffany's, my wife and I like to drive up and down the streets, gazing at the mansions In the last 50 years the town has undergone a Liz Taylor-like transformation The youthful bloom is gone, but admirers still love it, regardless of Joan Rivers...

...The real people in the Hamptons are Budd Schulberg and Irwin Shaw, or Willie Morris coming up from Yazoo City, Mississippi for a rest Or Cheryl Tiegs and her husband, the famous photographer, Peter Weird Or Michael Arlen riding his bike down the main street Maybe Truman Capote staggering around on the beach, or Herb Schmertz trying to look like an intellectual In the premiere, however, there was not a single writer, not one token artist or rich suntanned liberal feeling guilty about his cottage No one who could be passed off as a phony esthete, or as a sex-starved rich woman exploiting some starving novelist "I'm sure they have people like the ones on TV in Southampton," Miriam Ungerer said "But we never go there ". The network's idea of portraying New Yorkers was removing their California actors' gold chains So many good actors in Manhattan are unemployed and ABC relies on imports They were pathetic trying to pass themselves off as Manhattan merchants and business moguls We have come not to expect superb performances in prime-time drivel, and none were to be found in The Hamptons But I do want some fun and surprises, some richly awful acting, a la Joan Collins In The Hamptons, the Long Island Railroad stole scenes-that's how feeble the drama was The cannonball was great, arriving from the city, doing a roll-on...

...It is all in the eye, I concluded, the Hollywood eye-the way they see at the locations they travel to The same thing happened in painting for several hundred years Take Rembrandt's dark colors Canvases came out somber for centuries until the Impressionists saw the world in a new light...

...First, they shuttle the usual California people who write and make all the series to the fresh location Then, metaphorically, they stay on the 45th floor of a New York hotel for a few days, glancing down at the garbage swirling in the street and praising the excitement of the place But they can't wait to jet back to Lotusland The experience does not touch them deeply...

...As disappointed as I was with The Hamptons, I'll bet the audiences loved it in Kansas This dud's shortcomings validated their own existence They could see how tedious life is in other glamorous places...

...The Hamptons, I thought, would serve an important educational function by satisfying the masses' envious curiosity, letting them peek through the windows of the rich and powerful And it would be a cheap summer vacation for me Thinking ahead, I also figured the miniseries would provide an opportunity to analyze boring dialogue-an important aspect of a TV critic's job I felt so strongly about the scholarly value of this undertaking that I took the trouble to drive out to Wilfred Sheed's house in East Hampton for the premiere, which I had already endured at a critics' screening the preceding Monday The show might improve in the right setting, my theory went-at any rate, that is what I'm going to say to the IRS when my trip appears on this year's tax return under "research ". At Sheed's I realized that the actors did not bear any resemblance to East Hampton types "With hairdos like that," said Miriam Ungerer, Sheed's wife, "they could not even get a seat at Bobby Van's bar in Bridgehampton " The guys portraying the cutthroat businessmen were too soft They had the laid-back air of Hollywood hairdressers The bone structure was wrong These are a lot of mean faces in the Hamptons, but none like these...

...Going on location doesn't seem to help TV much because the suede shoes and aviator glasses set tote their California minds to every project They may travel far in search of photogenic vistas, but they unconsciously try to keep anything genuinely local out of the show It's amazing how they do this...

...The lack of realism in The Hamptons bothers me because I had been looking forward to bragging about the place to my relatives I wanted to be able to say, "Look at what I've discovered-I'm sharing a special hideaway with you " On the other hand, I might feel differently if I were a property owner Then I would probably say, "Yes, it's Beverly Hills East," as Helen Rattry, publisher of the East Hampton Star put it My message would be, don't come The strategy is the same one they used in Sag Harbor when they claimed the spiders were as big as dinner plates "Bigger," Miriam Ungerer used to insist, embellishing the rumor...

...I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm one of those people who likes a certain amount of sleaze in his diet, along with vitamins and minerals and mercury in, say, fish You need a trace of roughage to keep you going in a long, enervating summer Biologists may one day demonstrate that we require at least some sleaze Perhaps our glands manufacture a hormone that makes us revel in trash after The MacNeil/Lehrer Report and Presidential press conferences-secretly, of course, in the closet, where nobody can be shamed Closet viewing is more widespread than you might suspect If the truth were told, some closet viewers would have to admit to actually watching more bad TV than confessed addicts...

...Besides, the Hamptons do not meet TV's high standards of reality East Hampton in particular resembles a middle- American small town, or someplace m New England Not graphic enough to come across as Gomorrah East Give the networks Venice, California, with its bodybuilders and rakish beachfront, and they will explore it at length That is reality All the streets in the Los Angeles archipelago they' 11 show (Dick Van Dyke once said, "There isn't a tree in LA that isn't getting a residual") As for capturing the real Dallas, the real Philadelphia, the real East Hampton-forget it In TV land there is LA, then New York, and the rest is "flyover ". Location shooting for efforts like The Hamptons involves making sure they use New York license plates on the California cars That's authenticity on TV today If the show becomes a series in the fall, the filming will be done in LA This accounts for the palm trees in "New York" programs like Kojak...

...Sleaze aside, The Hamptons did not do justice to the real Hamptons, much to the chagrin of many astute observers This should not have surprised anyone, the cynics say TV does not catch Dallas in Dallas, Denver in Dynasty, or even Knotts Landing The medium always misrepresents, distorts and besmirches anything that cannot sue What's so special about the Hamptons that they shouldn't take their lumps from TV along with life, death, sex, and everything else the tube tackles...