The Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  All I can say for sure is that when he was aping the material of Vegas shtickmeisters like Jack Carter and Shecky Greene, he was a drag. He was no better than any of the other downer comedians tv has persistently thrust at us these past ten years, a put-down than which is no greater. The only times the show came to life were when Sunday’s Child, a trio of young and very swinging black foxes, came on (and even they were treated with super-whitening enzymes…they sang Glen Campbell’s hit, “Wichita Lineman,” rather than something soul-oriented…and there is nothing whiter than Glen Campbell, god knows, unless it’s Pat Boone; even so, they managed to juice up the song in a way that made their stint so impressive, it made James Brown’s embarrassing by comparison), and the other instance was Wilson’s portrayal of Reverend Leroy, a storefront minister of the larcenous old shout-’n’-stomp school. Utilizing the incredibly rich materials of black humor, Wilson made this an individual few moments of special ethnic hilarity.

  But to be honest, if I get home late on Thursday nights, and miss Wilson, I won’t go searching for razor blades to slash my wrists. I’m probably being unfair, but fuck it, who cares?

  —

  THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE BELL

  on the CBS Thursday Night Movie (9:00 p.m.)

  They opened the new season with a Cinema Center fillum made specially for the tube. I guess they thought this was their heaviest-weight item, a real grabber, based on a so-so 1952 novel (The Brotherhood of Velvet) by David Karp, who produced and scripted the film. It starred Glenn Ford, who looked very, very tired and looked as though he needed the job.

  It was about this secret cabal of powerful men who…but you know the story. Paranoia based on our contemporary fetish for conspiracy. It went on and on and on, and only Will Geer (delightfully omnipresent all this week, no matter what channel you tuned) made it worthy watching at all. Most of it was cheap, illogical, patently ridiculous, and if this is what CBS thought was their hottest available item, it bodes ill for the new season of tailored-for-tv flicks on this channel. In summation, friends, in the words of William Conrad, who played a fat Joe Pyne in this script…dingdong.

  —

  THE INTERNS

  (Friday, CBS, 7:30 p.m.)

  There is very little they can show us inside a soundstage hospital that we have not already seen a thousand times on Dr. Kildare, The Doctors, The Doctors & The Nurses, The Bold Ones, Ben Casey, Marcus Welby, M.D., General Hospital, Medic, and the other, even lesser Hippocratically oriented series with which tv has healed itself. We are an eighteen-year-old, tv-weaned generation, and we know all about EEGs as opposed to EKGs, we know hospitals don’t allow longhaired and bearded hippie freak orderlies in the drug room, and we are weary of stupid network idea men thinking they can pawn off old movies as fresh series ideas with the addition of some “sparkling young talents.” The Interns and The New Interns were a pair of moronic feature films over eight years ago (distinguished, in the eyes of exploiters, chiefly by a “wild” party sequence, reverberations of which tremble on, even into the opening segment of the series). Converted into choppy, triple-plot-thread segments weekly, they are no big deal.

  The first show was a systole/diastole of boredom, filled with mawkish bathos, superficial characterization about as penetrating as a carny crystal-baller’s palm analysis, with wretchedly familiar sets and actors who chose templates rather than performances, and with a flagrant waste of whatever talents Broderick Crawford has left in him. This is a sad, pitiable dud. Or, as we say, here in surgery, the prognosis looks shitty. Probably terminal.

  —

  THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW

  (Saturday, CBS, 9:30 p.m.)

  I would tell you right out straight. This is a funny show. You know how it is I know a funny show from a not-funny show? A funny show, I sit and laugh. A not-funny show, I sit and pick my nose and scan the new Scanlan’s and begin putting my hands up Cindy’s skirt and cutting Danish Nibbling Cheese and scratching Ahbhu’s stomach and whistling the theme from the old Topper series and wondering whatever happened to Anne Helm who was beautiful and who hasn’t done much acting lately and I wish I was in my office working at something I like and talking on the phone to Norman Spinrad and reading part of a new (old) Doc Savage novel and just a gang of other stuff. But funny, I sit and laugh. So you wanna know, I laughed like my godson Eric Coltrane Kirby when I quack like a demented Donald Duck for him.

  Edward Asner is interviewing Mary Tyler Moore for a job, see, and she gets upset because he’s been asking her these personal questions, see, and she snaps at him and Asner says, “Y’know…you got spunk!” and everybody laughs as Mary preens, and Asner says, “And I hate spunk!”

  That is funny.

  And Lisa Gerritsen from My World—And Welcome to It is there, and so is Cloris Leachman, and so is Gavin MacLeod, and most of all there is Mary Tyler Moore and Asner—both of whom are outright, unmitigatedly, without reservation brilliant—and damn it that is a funny show. Hello! Stick around a few seasons. We need you to help offset Hee Haw.

  —

  THE YOUNG REBELS

  (Sunday, ABC, 7:00 p.m.)

  If you watched the special on Channel 11 I recommended last week, you missed the opener of this series and, as I promised, I watched it for you, and here’s my report:

  Seventeen seventy-seven, and three twenty-year-olds from Chester, Pennsylvania (which is an awful town today—I don’t know how it was in 1777—I was once married in Chester and it was a real pesthole), decide to slow General Howe’s march on Philadelphia through the daring use of some Leyden jars, some guerrilla tactics, and a lot of Yankee Doodle spunk. And in the words of Edward Asner, “I hate spunk!”

  It was more of the bullshit video heroics so familiar to students of the glass teat. That infantile fantasy view of war and violence imparting nobility without once touching reality. In this show, cannon blast troops with grapeshot and men do somersaults. In reality, grapeshot whistled through lines of troops like red-hot shrapnel, tearing off arms and ripping holes in men’s faces. In this show, that fabled “Yankee ingenuity” rescues the situation at the last moment as mere youths defeat trained troops that outnumber them a hundred to one. Now I’m not saying it can’t be done—nor that it wasn’t done in the days of muskets and horse soldiers—but I say that implying this romanticized view of revolution against King George has any parallel with revolution today is imbecilic. And misleading.

  By showing a twenty-year-old Major General Lafayette, and by hitting over and over again at the youth of these rebels, the producers undoubtedly think they are making a point the scuttlefish will recognize as relevant to student dissenters and campus revolutionaries. Hogwash! They’ve phonied up this show with so much bogus patriotism and superman heroics, all it does is make peace protesters with stones and placards look like cowards. If the Movement were ever to take steps such as these Yankee Doodles employ, in pursuit of a goal of freedom easily as noble as the original, martial law would be declared in every American city and every radical would be in a prison camp by week’s end. Hell, the bombings have already set Congress and Mr. Mitchell to work drafting new repressive measures, and the death toll on Panthers mounts geometrically week by week.

  No, there is no comparison between revolution then and revolution now. To suggest otherwise, as this series does, is to lie to both sides.

  As entertainment, I suppose the series does all right. It has color and pace and action, and if that’s all you want, that’s all you’ll get. But to this critic, The Young Rebels (produced, appropriately enough, by the people who gave you The Mod Squad—and how about drawing some parallels there) is a deceitful, time-wasting exercise in chicanery and false allegory.

  —

  THE TIM CONWAY COMEDY HOUR

  (Sunday, CBS, 10:00 p.m.)

  Had some lively moments, such as a spoof of Christmas shows, a Japanese pilot trying to convince his fellow airmen they must become kamikazes, and a hilarious portrayal by Conway of a lushed private eye named Dann
y Draft. C+ rating.

  All of which brings us to the concluding review for this week’s special section, the closing bracket of an analysis of the exploitation of social consciousness. The opening bracket was Andy Griffith’s old-man lecture on dope, and the closer is—

  —

  ARNIE

  (Saturday, CBS, 9:00 p.m.)

  When Arnie Nuvo, loading-dock foreman at the Consolidated Flange Corporation, leans across the breakfast table and says to his son—who is about as shaggy as, say, David Eisenhower—“Get your hair cut,” and the son asks why, and Arnie says, “Because you’re starting to look like your mother when I proposed to her seventeen years ago,” I get a trifle chilled.

  Why? Because I’ve seen the movie, Joe. Because I’ve been razzed by hardhats constructing office buildings on Ventura Boulevard. Because I’ve seen that giant crane out in the Simi Valley that has an American flag flying from its platform after hours. Because I’ve seen newsreels of the New York “patriots” beating up peace protesters. Because the week the construction workers pounded kids to jelly in the streets, Nixon had their leaders to lunch and praised them for their fervor. Because I remember that fine middle-class scuttlefish who started the riot at the UCLA Naval ROTC graduation ceremonies; a riot started by them—the Arnies of the world—that resulted in peaceful protesters being beaten and then jailed. That’s why!

  And as the half-hour situation comedy progresses, and as I see uptight Arnie being squeezed by taxes and future shock and an archetypal Simon Legree boss and orthodontists who want $250 for his daughter’s corrective braces, and as I hear him say to character actor Tom Pedi, “A man can’t live this way; there’s always an emergency; there’s never any money; is this any way for a man to exist?…” I grow even colder.

  Because I realize that the “social relevance” that has hit this season’s tv fare with a vengeance has even reached the usually mindless little sitcoms. And I wonder if it is the Utopia for which I’ve hoped.

  Or, as Gulley Jimson said, “It’s not the vision I had.”

  If Arnie is Everyman 1970, it is an alarming conceit. Reluctantly, I must agree: Arnie is the Human Condition in this country in the last third of the twentieth century. And he’s right…it ain’t no way to live! The local, state, and Federal governments are draining our blood to an extent that makes it impossible to live comfortably, secure in the knowledge that we’ve got a few bucks laid aside for an emergency or for a getaway week or two when pressures compel.

  No wonder this country is divided, with the middle class taking up the cudgel and the blunderbuss to maim and kill dissenters. They are being squeezed to death and the pressures are turning them into amuck monsters. And the men responsible, the deluded, nest-feathering military and administrative Draculas who see life as an endless series of conspiracies against which any amount of tax-levying and brutalizing procedures toward its people are in the name of some nebulous Higher Good, have thrown the hardhats a flock of scapegoats rather than admit their own culpability. Thrown to the slavering, demented hordes of homeowners and lathe workers are longhaired hippies, rabid black militants, freeloading welfare cases, cowardly draft dodgers, bomb-hurling campus radicals, marijuana-puffing maniacs, and intellectuals.

  So when Arnie Everyman says to his son, “Get your hair cut,” my blood runs cold.

  We are seeing the elevation of “Joe” (the one in the film) to the level of cultural totem.

  And as we have seen the exploitation of the young at one end of this season’s programming, here at the far right end we see the exploitation of the fears of the older generations.

  They don’t know what’s happening. They work their asses off and still never get ahead, and the city council ups the rates another 6 percent. It is enough to drive them to mass lynchings, and the monsters who did this to them need never worry, for with all the scapegoats listed above, the middle class need never seek out the real culprits: the power-mad Pentagon hardware buyers; the dissembling politicians with their hands in the lobbyists’ pockets and their conceptions of the state of things frozen at 1927; the corporate heads who warp-and-woof with one another to take over what should be a country run by people, not computers; the gimme-gimme unionists who demand higher and higher wages for shoddier and shoddier workmanship; the liars, the cheaters, the carpetbaggers who rape and run. The Silent Majority is being told in every way, through every day, that it’s the small band of dissenters who are turning their world and their lives into hell and desperation.

  And in Arnie we see the personification of the condition.

  As art, the show is interesting. Herschel Bernardi, in the title role, is perfect. But then, Bernardi is perfect. He is one of the genuinely great character actors of our time, and it is a blessing to have him back in a regular series appearance (his last was as Lieutenant Jacoby in Peter Gunn, and you know how long ago that was), even if he is cast as an analogue of the struggle of Common Man to remain human under the brutalizing and crushing pressures of Corporate-owned America Today.

  This, more than almost any other I’ve seen so far, will be a series to watch carefully. Not only for Bernardi’s brilliant acting, but for the undertones of what it will say about the condition of life in our country today. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this in later columns.

  —

  This has been a special triple-length special column. The next two or three installments will deal with the remainder of the series debuts as they are aired. Try to stick around; things look interesting this year.

  —

  81: 9 OCTOBER 70

  THE NEW SEASON: PART TWO

  There is a story told in the Industry about the weird and dramatic circumstances that led to the firing of a certain network head about five years ago. The way the story goes—and it’s strictly gossip, he said innocently, his forked tail lashing impishlyparticular dude had an eye for the ladies, as do so many of us. (In fact, his eye was so good, he managed to get for a mistress one of the outstandingly gorgeous actresses of the past decade. And to keep her on the hook, he set her up in a classically moronic situation fantasy/comedy, which happily only lasted one season. Or was it half a season? My memory is sometimes weak on minutiae.)

  Anyhow, one ethereally beautiful creature wasn’t enough for our protagonist, the network head, and he used to play pretty heavily in the Courts of Eros. The only trouble was, he played a little too rough. He was a puncher. Used to like to knock his playmates around. Gave him a heavy jelly to bat women about. Charming dude.

  One weekend in Vegas, the network head was playing heavily, and he got eyes for an attractive, dark-haired young girl at the tables in the casino of the hotel where he had a suite. So he hyped her, and she came up to his rooms, and what with one thing and another he not only knew her in the Biblical sense (as we of pure thought and action put it), but he beat the shit out of her. For no particular good reason.

  When she managed to escape the dubious joys of our boy’s love nest, she went straight to her father and made some complaints…through bloody lips. Which wouldn’t have been so bad for the network head except that the girl was the beautiful daughter of a well-known Mafia don. So he instantly put out a contract on the stupid bastard. Which was no more than he deserved.

  In a justifiable panic, the network head appealed for help from a buddy of long standing, an ex-actor who was a godson of an even more powerful Cosa Nostra boss. The ex-actor, a bright kid who had fallen on hard times career-wise, saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to recoup his fortunes, and he agreed to ask his godfather to intercede…for certain considerations.

  The considerations were that the ex-actor would get his own show—a summer replacement song-and-dance hour—and that the network head would form a production company with him that would produce shows to be included on the prexy’s fall schedule.

  Well, to make a sordid story as squamous as possible, the network head bought, for his schedule, a handful of shows produced by the ex-actor (whose own show rated s
o low in just the few weeks it was aired that it had to be yanked before suspicion grew rife). Except the deal was so ugly the shows were bought before any pilots were made. And so the network was stuck with a couple of comedies and a couple of dramatic hours that were so awful the bloodhounds got on the scent. No one could figure out how a man with the successful track record of the network head could buy such a crummy product. And every one of the shows plonked to the bottom of the ratings, and the president of the network started investigating, and when he found the shows were all owned by the ex-actor in partnership with his own network head, he fired the larcenous bastard outright.

  Time has passed and the ex-actor wrote a book about the Industry, and after a few years on the outside looking in, the ex-network head is back in the Industry, in a powerful (but different) position. Thereby proving something or other about the nature of an Industry so corrupt that it continues to rehire members of its cadre it knows to be thieves and degenerates. But that’s just an aside.

  What this story is in aid of is the manner in which a network—ostensibly in business to serve the public welfare and make a good buck on the side—gets itself in hock to a producer of video product, and how these sweetheart deals invariably result in debased and incredibly rank series that eat up endless hours of prime time.

  Let me make the point that not all long-term deals with producers come up with garbage. There are honest men in the Industry, and they care deeply about the product they purvey. Quinn Martin is one (though, for the most part, I don’t care for the kinds of shows he chooses to produce), and even if he does get fifty grand above budget to produce a segment of Dan August (thereby making it look sensational production-wise on the screen, and ensuring it’ll be a hit) for ABC, it is money well spent. Though the producers of other ABC shows stuck with budgets of $182,000 ought to be just a trifle pissed off that they have to struggle along with such pittances. (It seems incredible that a decent segment of any given series can’t be made for that sum of money, particularly when one realizes that the core of the show, the script, only costs $4500—less than 2½ percent of the total budget for the most important element necessary to bringing forth something worthwhile—to be precise, it’s 2.47 percent—but when you stop to consider that 40 percent comes off the top for studio overhead before they even start production of a given segment, you begin to understand the evil nature of the money-grab in Hollywood.)