Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  Nonetheless, taken hour for hour, matching what went on the air twenty years ago and later, under the ad agency aegis, against the swill we now get, programming was much more liberal and a good deal more innovative. A few shows that pop to mind readily, whose like we don’t see today, are Playhouse 90, U.S. Steel Hour, Armstrong Circle Theater, The Bob Hope-Chrysler Show, Alcoa-Goodyear Award Theater, Alcoa Premiere, Du Pont Show of the Week, Kraft Suspense Theater, and Schlitz Playhouse of Stars. Those are some undeniably heavyweight memories to throw up against Me and the Chimp, Nanny and the Professor, The Mod Squad, Mannix, The FBI, Marcus Welby, M.D., Alias Smith and Jones, The Partridge Family, and The Brady Bunch. Not to mention forthcoming horrors like The Rookies, Temperature’s Rising, the reincarnation of Dr. Kildare and the return of The Sixth Sense in September.

  Returning to the other hand once more, the whole thing scares me because we’ve seen what a keen job government has done in previous endeavors tampering with private enterprise. The concept of the Nixoid Philistines lobotomizing this close to the exposed tissue of the First Amendment causes my flesh to crawl. If the Justice Department successfully prosecutes and the creative reins are passed into the hands of independent producers, truly passed into their hands, with the government backing off and the advertisers being kept in their place, then this could be the answer we’ve variously lobbied for, individually and as a nation fucked over by the moguls to whom we entrusted our airwaves.

  Naturally, the networks claim foul and on April 10, at a meeting with Justice officials, they refused to sign a consent decree on the charges. They are planning to make this a full-out fight; already they’re massing their forces and their arguments. ABC, for instance, issued a statement that golly gee fellahs, we aren’t monopolizing what goes on ABC…of five hours of daytime programming daily, Monday through Friday, only one half-hour series is produced by ABC…that’s only 10 per cent of the total daytime schedule…of children’s weekend programming, out of seven and a half hours, only one and a half hours is ABC-originated, representing 20 per cent of the total children’s weekend schedule…and in evening primetime, only one regularly scheduled weekly series and seventeen out of forty-seven Movies of the Week are ABC product, making 10 per cent of the total from the network itself. In summary, ABC-produced product (according to ABC) makes up only 11.4 per cent of total programming. Now this would be dandy, if it were true; but it simply isn’t. It’s making statistics dance like heat lightning. Anyone who has worked even peripherally in the industry knows that while ABC may not directly produce all those endless hours of mindless bullshit, they control what and when, down to the last comma of every script. They accept or reject pilots, they make deals with stars, they censor scripts, they blackball directors, producers, writers, and actors (usually those who are “undependable,” meaning those who buck network authority), they install in key positions on outside-produced series the toadies who are ABC-owned, and in general they ignore their responsibility to uplift the viewing taste of the scuttlefish, as opposed to doing everything in their power to debase it…as they have since they came to power.

  But the pivot point around which the government case revolves is that to get a series sold, the producers must give up fifty per cent of their action to the network. The network takes half the profits and thus becomes a financial holder in even the series they don’t directly finance. That’s why we see endless re-runs of The Lucy Show and similar mindless claptrap that should, by all rights, have sunk of its own leaden stupidity: because the network bought out everyone else and they own the product lock, stock and henna. And since it’s what they call an “in-house property,” the network naturally gives it preferential airdate treatment over product they don’t own outright. So if you want to get into the big time, you have to give away at least half your juice to the Big Cannibal. The government (justifiably) feels this is using the leasing rights to the public airwaves—granted to the networks and their outlets—to somewhat improper advantage. Blackmail and extortion are even easier words to juggle, and stripped of the bullshit they’re probably more to the point.

  This is going to be a tricky one, friends. There are solid arguments for and against either side of the battle. If government wins it could open up the hard-times industry to wider independent production, it could raise the level of quality merely by diversification of creators, it could create many more jobs simply because everyone would be trying to sell product. BUT: it could mean a reactionary eye and repressive thumb ready to be used against tv if it didn’t support Administration actions, it could mean lowering of quality even further if the ad agencies pursue a policy of buying that which offends the least viewers, it could mean more fingers in each pie, more censors ready to boycott and kill, more steps between creator and viewer. If the networks win it could mean going on at this same troglodyte level of programming or dropping to even a more moronic level, if that’s conceivable. BUT: it could mean the nets would gain strength from a court mandate and might experiment a bit more bravely. At this point no one can say which of these multifarious futures loom largest as probable. No matter which way we jump, however, it can be disastrous.

  I would be inclined to stick with the devil we know—the networks—rather than the devil we don’t know—the government—were it not for the track record of pilot production the networks have given us.

  And as if some celestial network continuity deity wanted to give us a prime primetime example of the full spectrum of potentialities, on Friday night the fourteenth, the same day as the Justice Department announcement, CBS pre-empted its evening movie to present ninety minutes of unsold comedy pilots. And therein lies an argument that cannot be refuted, an argument that persuades me to go with the ham-hand of government.

  Let me tell you about it:

  Unsold pilots have to be “played off” if a network hopes to regain the money invested in developing and shooting such calling-card segments. But in displaying what they think is salable, networks give us a terrifying glimpse into their minds. The three unsold pilots composing CBS’s Comedy! Comedy! Comedy! ninety-minuter are a glimpse I’m not sure I deserved. They covered the range from far right to mediocre center to hilarious left, the spectrum from unbelievably offensively bad to average run-of-the-schedule to sensational. And covering that range and spectrum, they let us know what we

  can expect from networks if they aren’t whanged over the head by higher authority.

  The first half hour was a horrorshow made two years ago and justifiably condemned to rejection. Man in the Middle, starring Van Johnson and Nancy Malone, was a classic example of why the hypocritical “relevance” the networks tried to pass off two years ago as honest concern for the upheavals in this country fell flat on its ethic. It was a turgid pudding of stock clichés about paranoid hippies, crazed Minutemen, rational middle-of-the-road Establishment complainers with neatly trimmed hair and a McGuffey’s Reader bewilderment at “all the weird things happening in America.” It reinforced with cartoon characterization and insipid situation and slanted arguments every fear and antediluvian prejudice of the middle class. It said kids are fucked and they only protest out of lack of understanding of the wonderful rational order and balance of the systems set in motion by their all-knowing parents. It said all conservatives are far-right lunatics setting up mortar emplacements on the rooftops. It said all old people are senile imbeciles. It said all young people dress like rejects from a freakshow casting call (and they all need a bath). It said women are simpering, silly geese who get their rationales for living from Family Circle articles on vest-pocket psychoanalysis. It said the world would be just fine and quiet and like it was in 1901 Kansas City if only all these assholes would pay attention to the tenets of living adhered to by the fat burghers, the Kiwanis, and the Rotarians. In short, it lied outrageously!

  Johnson played his part with all the charm of an aging elf, mugging and grimacing as though time had not slipped by him, as though he were still squealing and winking in some vapid MG
M puff pastry. In every scene he tried to dominate, the shadow of June Allyson lurked in the background, wincing in pain. Ruth McDevitt, who played Johnson’s septuageneric mother-in-law, the bereft Bircher, played old age without a scintilla of dignity or poise, a ghoulish caricature of senior citizenry that went light-years beyond even the bizarre mode of a Marian Lorne, a distasteful affront to those who conceive of advanced years as a time of maturity, wisdom, kindness and gentility…and who receive from producers and directors who delineate character in this way a warped and senile image of their state of life in our times. The part of the hairy hippie was masticated and vomited back up by something named Elliot Street, an “actor” who clearly has no sense of morality in which parts he chooses to play. He is beneath contempt.

  But more responsible than anyone else connected with this sewer of a pilot are its writer-producers, Harvey Bullock and Ray Allen, two men who would espouse the most evil, vilest party line if it meant they’d get inked in on a network schedule. They epitomize the no-talent, cliché-gorged, hypocritical, insensitive soul-selling of the Hollywood hacks. By pandering to the jingoistic, unrealistic prejudices of a nation gripped by confusion and fear, they serve a demon no self-respecting artist can stomach being in the same time zone with. No insult is too crass for them, no derangement of logic too far-fetched, no level of banality beyond their stoop, no punishment severe enough. Bottom line: they are the Enemy.

  The second half hour, Keep the Faith, while by no means a sparkler of originality and inventiveness, looked like A Midsummer Night’s Dream by comparison with the toilet flush of Man in the Middle.

  An undistinguished but at least palatable lineal descendant of All in the Family, Keep the Faith was a Yiddish Sanford and Son dealing with a young, allegedly progressive rabbi (Bert Convy) and his older colleague (Howard Da Silva). It was a nice little half hour without any outstanding elements to recommend it, saved from total forgettability by a brilliant performance tendered by character actor Milton Selzer. Even Howard Da Silva—surely one of the dozen finest actors this country has ever produced—zombie-walked through his part, as though he knew it was a money gig and would never get serialized. A nod of approval should go to writer-producer Ed Simmons for at least a craftsmanlike job, but in the final analysis, it was just another of those half hours one spends while waiting for the apocalypse.

  Bringing us to the final third of CBS’s pilot peek into what it’s all about the Justice Department is pissed at. And in one thirty-minute pilot segment it was demonstrated just how inventive, just how hilarious, just how pertinent, and just how wonderful networks can be when they hire the right people on the right project and turn them loose.

  (CBS produced all three of these pilots, and the range from gawdawful to brilliant is mind-croggling.)

  This Week in Nemtin was the best thing I’ve seen on the tube in a span of time my memory cannot compute. Purporting to be a news broadcast of the preceding week’s events in the principality of Nemtin (140 miles long, all border, surrounded by “countries”), the show was outrageously funny from opening to closing. I suppose critics of the show could call it one extended Polish joke, but I herewith confess (and will surely be damned for the admission) Polish jokes convulse me. (When Alan King, on the Oscarcast, said he stood in a queue for a movie that ran around two blocks, through a Polish tattoo parlor where he saw the word “Mom” misspelled, I broke up and fell out completely.)

  Rather would I identify what Nemtin did as a video translation of Sholom Aleichem’s Kasrilevka, the village of idiots, the village of “little people.” (In Yiddish fiction, there is a great tradition used to explicate allegorical messages: the village from which the narrator comes is always the village of geniuses, good people, smart and quick and witty. The other village—Kasrilevka—is the village of the schmucks and schlemozls.)

  What Nemtin did with outrageous style and clockwork timing was illuminate the foibles and ineptitudes of all of us, microcosmically, within the framework of a nation where the President (played deliciously by Edward Asner) appears on television to deliver the Independence Day message in his bowling shirt, with his wife decked out in her wedding gown and white gym socks. “Like you,” he said soberly, “we will be celebrating this special day at home, enjoying the traditional meat loaf and cherry soda, singing catchy tunes.” And then his wife gave the pledge of Nemtin allegiance: “Gimme an N, gimme an E, gimme an M…”

  I don’t know how you’d react, but for the people in my living room watching that show, there were universal bellyaches and uncontrollable tears from laughing so much. It just went on and on and on, without surcease. When one thought one had laughed as much as one could, a reporter would climb to the top of a mountain where Carl Reiner, as the “wise old Nemtik,” sat pontificating on the universe (which he saw capsulized as an egg). And then he ate it. When one thought all the changes had been rung on the idea, out came the Nemtin All-Army Drill Team (two soldiers and a cadence caller) who did a routine choreographed so brilliantly I only saw half of it because I was lying twisted in a convulsive heap on the floor.

  Remember the funniest thing you ever saw? Nemtin beats it by three points on the sphincter scale.

  The day after the airing, everywhere I went, people were talking about the show and still laughing. Nemtin satirized government, race relations, politics, life-styles of old, young, minorities; it lampooned sports, justice, family life, children’s programs, war, public images. It went miles beyond Laugh-In or The Smothers Brothers or That Was the Week That Was. By using the analogue of Nemtin it said things about our uptight, super-serious attitudes as Americans that no network would permit were they unclothed and naked. With the brilliant Alex Dreier (a former newscaster turned actor) as the host-commentator, making even the most insane goings-on seem rational merely through the barrel-bottom timbre of his voice, the show was a holiday of style and class and wit breathtaking to sit through.

  And coming back full circle to why it is the Justice Department is dissatisfied with network practices in what they make and put on the air, here is a little inside information about why This Week in Nemtin never got on the air, and probably won’t, now that its time is past.

  Coming up on summer replacement time last June, there were two CBS pilots vying for the 8:00 Thursday open slot. Nemtin was one of them. It was aced out by the other.

  What brilliant series could have elbowed aside such an entry as Nemtin? What tour de force of artistry? What sure-fire audience-grabbing idea? Are you ready?

  Me and the Chimp.

  (Pause for shivers of disbelief.)

  (Pause for tremors of terror.)

  Me and the Chimp. A mindless moron concept about a typical Smith Family/Partridge Family/Brady Family family with a monkey for a house pet. Me and the Chimp. A witless farrago of clichés and creaking sitcom banalities that waste the talents of talented actor Ted Bessell and have him upstaged weekly by a simian. Me and the Chimp.

  Steve Gentry, in charge of new projects and pilots for CBS, when queried about this unbelievable shunting aside of a fresh, new idea for the dreariest potboiler one could imagine, avers it was all because of Ted Bessell. The net was so hot for Bessell, so hot to make a long-term contract with an actor they think is a sure-fire audience-grabber, that they opted for a series everyone knew in front would croak.

  Well, it’s nice to be in Bessell’s position, I suppose, but what about the network’s responsibility to those of us who lend them the use of our airtime? They sacrificed hours of primetime to make a contract with an actor that might up their corporate profits later. This is cynical behavior of the rankest sort. And in rejecting the Nemtin wonder created by Saul Turteltaub, Ron Clark, Bernie Orenstein, and Sam Bobrick, magic elves all, in favor of a series going off at the end of this season, predictably, CBS demonstrated the callousness and self-interest that clearly prompted the Justice Department to take its action.

  I cannot find it in my heart to feel sorry for crooks who themselves get taken. Or ladies who
clearly and purposely give off come-on vibes and then get raped. Or soldiers who walk around with grenades ready and moan when they get their arms blown off. Or ghetto storeowners who fleece blacks and then scream when they’re burned out. Or assholes who get caught in their own lies.

  Similarly, I cannot lament too loudly what is happening to the networks. I can only despise them for misusing what we gave them, thus putting us in line for potentially even more disastrous events if the government acts as it usually does when it has a chance to grab a little more control.

  I can only despise and revile them for not acting in good faith, with courage, with imagination, and at the peak of a form they can clearly demonstrate.

  But fear and loathing are all that are left to us with time run out on the networks and the ominous shadow of Kleindienst overhanging television’s future.

  AFTERWORD

  Revealed at Last!

  What Killed the Dinosaurs!

  And You Don’t Look so Terrific Yourself.

  It’s all about drinking strange wine.

  It seems disjointed and jumps around like water on a griddle, but it all comes together, so be patient.

  At 9:38 a.m. on July 15th 1974, about eight minutes into Suncoast Digest, a variety show on WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida, anchorwoman Chris Chubbuck, 30, looked straight at the camera and said, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts in living color, you’re going to see another firstattempt at suicide.”

  Whereupon she pulled a gun out of a shopping bag and blew her brains out, on camera.

  Paragraph 3, preceding, was taken verbatim from an article written by Daniel Schorr for Rolling Stone. I’d heard about the Chubbuck incident, of course, and I admit to filching Mr. Schorr’s sixty concise words because they are concise, and why should I try to improve on precision? As the artist Mark Rothko once put it: “Silence is so accurate.”