The Glass Teat - essays of opinion on the subject of television

by Harlan Ellison

  So we now come to what Miss Nelson represents in terms of image. Mr. Hoffman calls her “an average type girl” and says “the kids seem to identify with her.”

  If this is so, it is a sad comment. On the kids who will be inheriting the incredibly complex, constantly more bludgeoning world in which we live. And on the people whose impressions of the viewing audience—notably in this case, the plastic formative minds of the young—are reflected in what they present for their pleasure.

  Miss Nelson represents the deification of banality. She is the vapid, elevated to godhood. Young girls watching this show, and deriving from it an impression of what it takes to “make it” (rock music and its world being the most glamorous scene going these days), can only conclude that if a girl is cute and doesn’t act “uppity,” she can attend Beatles premieres and swing with the mighty. For teen-age girls whose larval stage was informed by the Barbie doll (that classic tool of preparing the young as daters and consumers), this cocoon stage with Kam Nelson as the role-model can only prepare them for emergence into adulthood not as butterflies, but as moths, fit for little better than dull lives of crabgrass, Blue Chip Stamps and quiet desperation. Miss Nelson’s image is one that denies intelligence, genuine wit, the accumulation of information, the expansion of one’s personality as a woman, and leaves her representing only material gain and surface beauty.

  Kam Nelson lives in dream images. Her response to Riddle’s question about how she reacted to a male singer who had just done his turn was to say that the guy should have been in a gladiator movie. Her perceptions of the world around her seem to be limited to those that form what high school kids call a “sosh,” the compleat cheerleader type. All fluff and giddiness, with a head wherein a cogent thought would find itself in Coventry.

  A young lady of my acquaintance, who sat beside me during one of these shows, found my intention of devoting this column to Kam Nelson akin to killing a gnat with the battleship Missouri. I responded that Kam Nelson obviously got and has held her position as a role-model on this show because she was what the producers felt was most easily-identifiable to other teen-agers, and that in that capacity she was a spokeswoman for illiteracy, vacuity, banality and transient values of life.

  What would I have, asked this young lady, a smartass girl who had an answer to everything? After all, it was only a dance program.

  Precisely my point. On this sort of show, because it is the one kids relate to, there is an obligation on the part of possibly Miss Nelson, but certainly the producers, to offer something more golden with which kids can identify.

  Television is too potent a medium, too exacting an educational force, for anyone to dismiss even a boondock area such as The Groovy Show and its ability to shape and mold manners or morals.

  No, I would not have a 17-year-old girl genius on The Groovy Show; but neither would I have Susie Sparkle set up as the end-all and be-all for emerging personalities. What is wrong with Miss Nelson as a Force in our times is what is wrong about the Miss America contests and all the other shallow, phony shucks put over on kids too young to separate the wheat from the chaff.

  And in conclusion, I trust Miss Nelson and her attorneys will understand that while I may have nothing but the highest regard for her as a human being, it is the slapstick number she proffers six times a week on television that needs some examination. I think women are, uh, groovier than that

  * * * *

  10: 5 DECEMBER 68

  Conspicuous by its absence: sanity in the machinations of television logic and programming. Dichotomies abound like a plague of the Seven Year Locust.

  Point: Just at the end of last season, CBS prexy Mike Dann was confronted by a decision that had to be made. It came down to either the brilliant situation comedy He & She with Paula Prentiss and Dick Benjamin, or the pilot for Blondie with Patricia Harty and Will Hutchins. Only one of the two could be scheduled. Dann made the statement that in his decision his “job was on the line.” So he canceled a show notable for its inventiveness and sophisticated humor, He & She, and scheduled an abomination of stupidity and clichés that were weary in 1943 when Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake were portraying the dippy Blondie and her castrated husband Dagwood. Now Blondie has been axed, after a rating disaster surpassed only by the all-time debacle, The Tammy Grimes Show (to which Blondie bears a marked resemblance). It has been said, with kindness, of Blondie that rather than putting it on CBS, we should have dropped it on Haiphong. But the dichotomies ride high: Mike Dann, great decision-maker and seer of the rating wars, is still firmly ensconced in his job, mucking things up with regularity.

  Point: Robert Montgomery appeared as a guest on Dick Cavett’s show, Thanksgiving day, and made the observation that from tax monies we can ill-afford to squander, political candidates had spent between forty and fifty million dollars for air-time during the presidential race. He reminded viewers that they owned the airwaves, and why the hell was all this money being wasted when free air-time should be provided for the major candidates, as a saving to us all. Why indeed?

  Point: The FCC, ostensibly appointed to protect and defend our publicly-owned airwaves, is little more than a toothless tiger, serving first the needs of the politicians who own television stations (LBJ and his bird are classic examples), and next the profit-bloated networks. Their effectiveness is nil, and their voice is seldom heard save when they are chivvying the creators. Newton Minow, who dared to suggest that TV was a corrupt pyramid from apex to base, needing most severely a razing and rebuilding, was rapidly canned. So who, we must ask, does the FCC represent, in the final analysis?

  Point: With the horde of talented young writers pounding the Hollywood sidewalks in search of TV assignments, with the incredible number of excellent original scripts that go a-begging every year, with talent as vital as any currently working in the medium, helplessly dancing for dimes on Wilshire Boulevard, why do we continue to be “treated” to rehash remakes of clinkers like Heidi, Arsenic and Old Lace, Dial M For Murder and such outstanding lye pits as Princess Lee Radziwill as Laura and Max von Sydow in The Diary of Anne Frank?

  One can only conclude that television is a snake without a head, a mindless creation that has run amuck since the moment a network executive with the soul of a ribbon clerk discovered there were enormous profits to be made by paying heed to Henry Ford’s old adage that “No one ever lost money underestimating the taste of the American people.”

  So, in an effort to impart some little-known facts of television’s realities, the better to inform you, and thereby make you harder to underestimate, the following random potpourri of stray intelligences.

  1. There are twelve hours of prime-time movies this year. Next year there will be 14 hours. The shows that can compete with old movies are becoming fewer and fewer. Movies are proliferating because they are a bargain: the average cost of something scintillant like last week’s Something For A Lonely Man with the excellent Dan Blocker is 2½ to 3 million dollars. It runs for two hours, and can be re-run at least twice more during a season. Six hours worth of air-time for that kind of money is a stone bargain. But it also means that much less creativity.

  2. Any series must be on the air at least two or three years to make dime-one of profit, and since syndication of a series affords an opportunity to recoup deficit financing, it has to go 2-3 years before it can be syndicated.

  3. Networks seldom develop shows of their own. They are merely partners with the independent producers. And since studios develop 75% of the shows, and networks are the only buyers of shows, and since the networks go on what the Autometer rating in 1155 American homes say, we—the majority—wind up with fear-designed creations.

  4. Pre-season previews in New York for “random audiences” work like so: when the tourists hit NYC, and make reservations for, say, the Johnny Carson Show, a certain number of them are shunted over to the pilot screening section, and are informed, “Gee, we’re sorry, but Johnny’s booked solid tonight. We can work you into the audience tomorrow n
ight, and tonight, to show you what good guys we are, we’ll show you the pilot of a new series.” So they take these unhappy, angry, disgruntled yokels (whose mentalities were trained to a Carson level for openers, which should tell you what their imagination quotient is) and toss them into a screening room, and are surprised when even the best pilots rate somewhere down in the sewer.

  5. Without a script, you have nothing. You can have the finest director, the most brilliant actors, the most imaginative production staff—without a story, you are clinging to driftwood and sinking from the start. What do they pay a writer for a pilot script? Between ten thousand and (tops) twenty-five thousand dollars. What does the production itself cost? Between $450,000 and $700,000. I’m lousy at math. You figure out what the percentage of above-the-line cost that is, and then you’ll know why so many shitty scripts are written.

  Well, it’s been fun going through all of this with you, and frankly I’m grateful it was such a dead-ass week on television so we could get into it. But let’s hope next week provides something worth discussing that’s current; we can, after all, always hope.

  * * * *

  11: 13 DECEMBER 68

  This week, we do it in tones of black.

  Last Monday night, Diana Ross. Black. The beauty of blackness; God, how gorgeous. And the truest moment with no singing at all: the opening bars of Reflections, and then some inspired intercutting between stills of Miss Ross in native African garb and Herself, moving sensually to a black beat, dressed in that same clothing. It was the sole lone instant of a sixty minute spectacular that was not sold-out to Hollywood sequins and Vegas orchestrations. It was supposed to be Motown, babies; Motown, that’s Inner City beyond the Boulevard, that’s Woodward Avenue and 12th Street; that’s John R. and Brush Streets, and the House of Blue Lights. That’s black, babies, not them hincty Johnny Green smashbang Vegas lounge Timex flag-waving Saints Go Marchin’ In horseshit orchestrations. Don’t talk pride in black, joy in negritude, then sell-out to Mistuh Cholly because he spells his name with an N, a B, and a C ... because he’s got his hands full of bread. Even so, there was that one moment of black, with Diana Ross turned out in her heritage, moving like a dusky flamingo, all arms and legs and natural hairstyle, jabbing moving swaying stamping, proving that “they got natural rhythm” is not necessarily an invidious remark. That was beautiful. Even if she did muck it up by doing a tear-jerk immediately after, taking the name Martin Luther King, Jr. in vain. For one moment the screen and the world were black, and that was fine, just fine.

  This week, in tones of black.

  Tomorrow night, Friday night, 8:30 P.M., Channel 694, The Name of The Game goes black. (Have you noticed, soul brother, how uptight us honkies have got, that we don’t use the words colored man or Negro or nigger or suede or spade no more; black is the only safe one. Black this and black that. You’ll let us know when it goes out of fashion, okay?) The show is 90 minutes called The Black Answer. It is a special show, and I urge you not to miss it. Not because it is such a world-shakingly artistic offering, but because it goes a lot further toward reality in the TV-view of race relations than anything we’ve had since the networks became terrified of black militancy. (Oh, sure, Xerox will sponsor a series on black heritage, but when was the last time you saw a series segment with any clout behind it?)

  The show is black. It is about the fire-bomb death of the outspoken publisher of a ghetto newspaper, The Black Answer. Tony Franciosa is the star, and if you can get past his nice even teeth you’ll find a show that is very black. Ivan Dixon (simply excellent, as usual) and Raymond St. Jaques and Abbey Lincoln and a kid named D’Urville Martin who has enough starpower in him to run a small city’s electrical system straight through Christmas.

  I saw it on Tuesday. How it happened was this: the man who wrote, directed and produced the segment, Leslie Stevens, caught the final paragraph of last week’s column. It said the week preceding had been dead on TV and here’s hoping something hot comes up next week. So he called and said he had a winner, would I care to see a special screening. So I called The Free Press and asked the Powers to hold up my column—already written, already dummied, all ready for the printer—in lieu of what you are now reading, in order to hip you in time for tomorrow night’s show. They ran it for me at Universal, that big ebony tower in the Valley, where they hold Childe Harold a prisoner, Wasserman’s Folly. Leslie Stevens ran it—it was his baby— and I told him I’d tell you to see it. In fact, I’ll tell you three times: see it, see it, see it.

  Not, as I said, because it’s such a creative triumph, but because it is so improbable that Universal Studios, whose colophon on a production has systematically come to mean the acme of mediocrity on the television worm farm, permitted this show to be made; because the motives behind its conception and execution are in the truest sense of decency and (though I hesitate to use the word since the show uses it so liberally) brotherhood. Stevens is a good man; he is a talented man; and he has taken one of those rare holes in the defense line of Establishment timidity and run with the ball. He has by no means made a touchdown, but he has gained yardage, and for the broken-field plunging of Stevens we must applaud and pay attention. So see it.

  But, having said that, now I must deal with the show and the realities to which it pays service.

  (When I discussed the film with you, after the screening, Leslie, my statements had an implied “but” in them. I didn’t vocalize the “but” at that time. This is it.)

  But...

  Though the show deals with the desire of a segment of the black community for a national state of its own, though it plays changes on all manner of current events (LeRoi Jones’s having once been accused of peaching on a brother, Cleaver’s fugitive status, bombings of dissent newspapers), though it portrays a wide spectrum of black feelings all the way from the search for African roots in clothes and manners to the perfectly logical fear of the heat, still the show emerges as a heavy-handed sermon. And denies reality in the most vulnerable areas, seeking to present itself as white liberal.

  Franciosa plays a swashbuckling version of every guilt-ridden paddy parlor liberal, mouthing inane platitudes about brotherhood and integration, even at one point turning away from a conversation in badly-acted frustration at “all the violence and destruction.” He says he’s sick of it. Well, shit, baby, everybody’s sick of it ... most of all the blacks who’ve been hammered by the worst of it.

  The drama jabs at some delicate sores on the body of racial strife in America, but never really draws blood. It backs off. I’ll give you an example: the killing and fire-bombing have been blamed on Joe X, the leader of a militant group called the Black Battery. He has been cornered in a warehouse, and the laws are in the process of smoking him out, with the plainly stated probability that he will be killed in the embroglio. Franciosa has uncovered the real culprit, and has gone to Joe X’s sister, to get her to tell him where Joe is hiding out (he doesn’t know the cops have found him, but knows time is growing short). She won’t tell him. The tension is building. It is one of those moments of genuine conflict during which anything can be said and be gotten away with. Franciosa pleads with her; she is adamant; he gets furious, frustrated. He says trust me, and she says why should I, and he gibbers some more about her knowing him well enough by now to blah blah blah (plotwise, there’s no doubting why she’s holding back; she doesn’t know him well enough to gauge him as anything more than a nosey Whitey). Finally, a third party convinces Claudia to tell him. A cop-out. What should have happened was Franciosa leaning over and saying, in as rotten a tone as he could muster, “Listen, you dumb black bitch, I’m trying to save your stupid brother’s life! Now if you can’t find the smarts to help me help him, we’ll forget the whole damned thing and you can count the riot gun holes in him at the funeral!”

  But that would have been going too far. That would have been forcing both Mr. Stevens, the writer, and Mr. Franciosa, the actor, to relate as human beings, the way real people would have reacted. But th
e white liberal reaction took hold, and the thought of calling a black bitch a black bitch was too dangerous.

  Understand something: I am being presumptuous in telling Stevens how to rewrite his show. I am very likely overstepping the bounds of good criticism and letting the writer in me hold sway. But I explain it (though don’t excuse it) by contending that, as Stevens put it, “this is an opportunity to use the Establishment’s own instrument to disseminate a little information,” and opportunities like this arise too seldom—on a medium where Julia is the new image of the black totality—to back off even a little. The responsibility for Stevens was far greater than usual. No one expects Family Affair or Bonanza to open any eyes, to say anything fresh and daring about the horrors that surround us; Stevens had that opportunity, and in his own words, all he added was “tabasco to the pudding.” A stick of dynamite in that tapioca might have been harder to get down the censors’ gullets, but the responsibility was there!

  I’ve urged you to see The Black Answer tomorrow night on Name Of The Game, and I do not think you will treat me unkindly for the urging, but it is almost entirely for the portrayal of the proud black woman by Abbey Lincoln, for the adeptly-carried preachment of black militant position by Ivan Dixon, and the noteworthy talent of D’Urville Martin that you should so expend ninety minutes of your time.