Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  Reynolds cited as one of his favorite episodes “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet,” which ran during the series’ first season. In that episode, Hawkeye’s buddy, reporter Tommy Gillis (played by James Callahan), shows up at the M*A*S*H unit because he wants to see war from the inside. Gillis is charming and light-hearted—one of his first acts is to kiss Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson) full on the lips. Gillis visits the front to write about war, and predictably enough, is killed. Hawkeye is distraught, naturally.

  The creators loved this episode. “It was the first indication that a mixture of laughter and tragedy might be possible, without any heavy-handed manipulation of the audience’s emotions,” wrote Gelbart.63

  “We loved the goddamn episode,” Reynolds said, “so we continued with an eye out toward having some kind of substance with a little more courage . . . we were always looking out for hypocrisy among politicians, because we said often that the war was caused by the failure of politicians. And that’s really where it’s at. This thing where ‘they stepped on us, we’ve got to step on them,’ the tit-for-tat kind of, the nationalism, meaning, ‘you insult us, we go to war,’ or we don’t speak to you anymore if you don’t do what we say, which is a policy we’ve been suffering under for a long time.”64 If the liberal view of war had to be boiled down in a nutshell and then preserved in amber, Reynolds’s remarks would suffice. This pacifistic attitude is rooted in the liberal meme that all people are good, and that all conflict is bad, and that all war is rooted in the failure of petty people rather than in significant ideological differences. The rejection of nationalism is a hallmark of the Hollywood internationalist’s mentality—artists often consider themselves world citizens rather than citizens of their country. Essentially, the Reynolds ideology here is no different from the John Lennon ideology in the mindlessly blithe “Imagine”: “Imagine all the people / Living life in peace.” Light up a doobie and sing along. That’s the M*A*S*H philosophical underpinning.

  M*A*S*H, more than any other piece of entertainment, brought forth the modern liberal antiwar movement—not the 1960s antiwar movement, which said that the troops were butchers and that Ho Chi Minh was gonna win; the modern movement, which opposes America’s involvement in war on principle and sees the troops as victims. “Our characters were heroic at a time when America was woefully short of heroes,” Gelbart wrote. “The series was antiwar. That was our intention from the beginning. But we were not anti the more than thirty-three thousand U.S. troops killed above and below the Thirty-eighth Parallel. . . . They, all of them, not as statistics, but as human beings, were surely antiwar as well. . . .”65

  But M*A*S*H was about more than war. It also pushed the network into allowing material on homosexuality in the military, transvestism, interracial marriage, impotence, adultery, and other controversial issues. The show pushed the envelope. But that’s what success does—it allows networks the freedom to give creators political leeway. And what better way to use such leeway than to cover it with comedy? Why bother with drama? As Gelbart told me, “It’s far more fruitful to take a very serious subject and worry your way out of it with laughter.”66

  HAPPY DAYS (1974–1984): VIETNAM WAR ANALOGY?!

  If ever there was an innocuous show, it was Happy Days (1974–1984). The story of a small-town family consisting of son Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard), daughter Joanie (Erin Moran), father Howard (Tom Bosley), and mother Marion (Marion Ross)—and one iconic outsider, Arthur “The Fonz” Fonzarelli (Henry Winkler)—was immensely popular for a decade, until it literally jumped the shark (the show coined that term after Fonzie jumped a shark while water-skiing).

  But the creators behind Happy Days were anything but apolitical. Garry Marshall, one of television’s most consistently excellent writers and producers—he is responsible for TV hits like The Odd Couple, Mork & Mindy, and Laverne & Shirley—is a down-the-line liberal. He’s anti–big business, which he sees as linked to both government and organized crime. He’s anti–small towns—he told Ben Stein that “There are a lot of dumb, violent people in small towns.” He’s got socialist leanings (“For some people to be poor, others have to be rich. The poor are taken advantage of by the rich”).67 He was a major supporter of President Obama’s 2008 run, creating a thirty-second ad on Obama’s behalf targeting the Jewish community, costarring Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, Danny DeVito, Rhea Perlman, and Valerie Harper.68

  Marshall’s liberalism runs along family lines, too. His sister, Penny Marshall, who starred in Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley before going on to direct and produce films like Big, Awakenings, A League of Their Own, and Cinderella Man, holds the same beliefs as her brother. Her idea of perfect happiness, she joked, is “multiple orgasms and the veal at Ago.” The most overrated virtue? “Chastity.”69 She was married to Rob Reiner for several years.

  Marshall’s personal liberalism didn’t play into his shows as much as it played into his hiring practices. He mentored writers ranging from Susan Harris (Soap) to Bill Bickley and Michael Warren (Perfect Strangers and Family Matters), the vast majority of whom were liberal in their politics.

  Notwithstanding his own politics, Marshall wanted Happy Days to be innocent. That’s what the network wanted—they wanted to counterprogram against All in the Family. And that’s largely what it was, with a few notable exceptions, including a couple of first-season episodes featuring Richie’s libido (he ogles strippers in “Richie’s Cup Runneth Over” and “The Skin Game”), and the addition of the Fonz, who was a concession to the 1960s rebellion.70

  Hilariously enough, one of the staff writers on the show, Bill Bickley, told me that there was a liberal message on the show that nobody has ever detected. Bickley, who wrote episodes for All in the Family and Room 222, two of the most socially conscious shows on television, as well as The Partridge Family, one of the least, knew how to write subtext. And he had a particular subtext for Happy Days.

  “I’m this English major that took everything seriously,” Bickley told me. “Happy Days—I had a whole subtext for Happy Days. It was a literary approach that if you really look for it, you can find it. . . . I had Vietnam in there. I said, ‘We know Vietnam is going on now, but they didn’t then,’ so I had Howard and Marion sitting in the living room as you’re hearing the boys playing outside and [Howard and Marion are] talking about ‘Thank God our kids will never have to go to war,’ and I was thinking, ‘Yes, we’re going to [war], see Vietnam!’ ”

  Vietnam? In Happy Days? Seriously? “I was into all that kind of masturbation,” said Bickley. “But I think a lot of times, our unconscious puts the structure [into] things, and actually some shows that are actually pretty light where we had no intention other than getting the next episode done, can have some stuff there . . .”

  Bickley’s explanation of Happy Days provides a valuable window into the creative mind—the same kind of writer who can attempt to add subtext about Vietnam in a show about greasers and bobby-soxers can also add depth of characterization to a breakout character like the Fonz. Bickley saw the Fonz as “a tragic figure. . . . Fonzie was an anachronism . . . time would move on, and Fonzie would stay stuck where he was. And that was the underpinning of the story. . . . I took it very seriously.”71

  Can you spot Vietnam in Richie Cunningham’s Milwaukee? Probably not. But it’s there—and the fact that it’s there means something, even if this particular political infusion doesn’t have much impact at all.

  THREE’S COMPANY (1977–1984): T&A . . . AND MOLIÈRE

  Four bouncing boobs and John Ritter. That’s Three’s Company in a nutshell. If ever a show was designed with the male viewer in mind, it was Three’s Company, the hallmark show for the T&A movement. And it worked beautifully. For seven riotous seasons, this comedy entranced America and ticked off the religious right, based almost completely on John Ritter’s capacity for physical humor and the writing staff’s capacity for sexual double entendre.

  The show’s premise was sim
ple: two hot girls living in an apartment with a straight male friend (Ritter). The two girls (Suzanne Somers and Joyce DeWitt) aren’t involved in anything sexual with the guy, but the rest of the world naturally assumes that they are. To demonstrate to the landlord that nothing is going on, the straight male friend plays gay. The premise alone was a shocker for Americans used to the separate beds of Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore. Sears withdrew its sponsorship from the program after Donald Wildmon fomented ire against the show,72 but that didn’t stop the network from running it.

  The show was another import from Great Britain (the original British title: Man About the House). But despite its apparently straightforward premise and lowbrow humor, the pilot’s original author was . . . Larry Gelbart. Fred Silverman, who greenlit the show as president of ABC, described it to me at his palatial estate off of Sunset Boulevard: “That damn thing was number one . . . [it] was universally condemned.”

  When I asked Silverman if Three’s Company was making any social statement by promoting a ménage à trois, American style, he denied it strenuously. “The fun of Three’s Company is that everybody, starting with Mr. Roper, thought that there was something going on. And there really wasn’t. . . . It’s kind of like French farce. I once got criticized for comparing it to Molière at the Writers Guild. I’ll never hear the end of that.”73

  Of course, Silverman left unspoken the understanding that Molière was not merely a writer of French farce—he was a satirist of French society. And in many ways, Three’s Company satirized American society in the same vein. It substituted friends for family; it substituted liberal living arrangements for more traditional ones. And it made us laugh. On the other hand, Molière was a serious moralist. Three’s Company wasn’t serious in any way, shape, or form.

  So Silverman wasn’t far off—Three’s Company is more Molière than Three Stooges.

  SOAP (1977–1981): A GAY ROMP

  Susan Harris is a uniquely talented writer, a sparkling and witty artist, and an ideologue. I met Harris at her large, modern-style home off Sunset Boulevard, a sparkling clean white gem in the hills. At sixty-nine, she is still a beautiful woman.

  “In the late sixties,” she told me, “I had a two-year-old, and my husband and I had split up, and I had to earn a living. And one night I was watching television, truly, and I said, ‘this is so terrible, anybody could do this.’ . . . Well, it turned out I could do that. I wrote this script on spec, and then sold it. And that started it.” Harris quickly fell in with Garry Marshall—Bill Bickley, who worked with Marshall at the same time, remembered “Susan with her hot tits and long legs”—and then ended up working on a couple of episodes of television with Norman Lear.

  Writing for Lear, she said, had a strong influence on her. “Prior to what Norman did, the people on sitcoms had completely unreal lives. . . . It was completely idiotic,” she explained. “And what Norman did, thankfully, was he brought the real world into television. That’s always what I wanted to do, and then was able to do.”

  While writing for Lear, she penned one of the most famous episodes in television history: the abortion episode on Maude.

  Maude, starring Bea Arthur, was a highly successful series that ran six seasons in the Lear heyday, a spinoff of All in the Family. Arthur was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, a Jewish girl who had experienced anti-Semitism growing up in the South. Predictably, Maude was an ode to the leftist vision of feminism—the title song proclaimed Maude the equal of Joan of Arc and Isadora (“the first bra-burner”)—and it was militant in its politics. Maude herself was on her fourth marriage when the series began. Like many in Hollywood, Maude was also a limousine liberal; she had a black maid from whom she would continually solicit approval. The series ended with Maude being appointed to Congress as a Democrat.

  Arthur mirrored Maude in real life. She declared that her character was great because she “looked real . . . [she] said what she felt and could tell her husband to go to hell.” Personally, Arthur went through a metamorphosis with regard to militant feminism. Early in the show’s run, she said openly that she “never felt that being a wife and mother isn’t enough,” but over the course of the show, she became more and more rigid in her feminism, finally divorcing her real-life husband and declaring, “I don’t think I ever truly believed in marriage anyway . . . I guess marriage means that you’re a woman and not a . . . person.”74 The Harris/Arthur marriage was more successful than Arthur’s actual marriage; Arthur would later team up again with Susan Harris to star in Golden Girls, the show on which Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry got his start.

  Maude’s most famous moment, though, was the title character’s abortion. In 1972, just before Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court, Maude, then forty-seven years old, decided to abort her fetus. The episode was a two-parter. At the end, Maude has a crucial exchange with her husband, Walter.

  “Just tell me, Walter, that I’m doing the right thing not having the baby,” she says.

  “For you, Maude. For me. In the privacy of our own lives. You’re doing the right thing,” he replies.

  Harris was just getting started. Her first successful series creation was Soap, quite possibly the most controversial series in television history. It started from Harris’s desire to write a serialized comedy rather than the self-contained half-hours television had always embraced.

  “It really wasn’t a satire on soap operas,” she continued. “It was called Soap because it was a good title and had the form of a soap opera, which was, you know, hooks and cliffhangers and not knowing where the story was going to go.”75

  While the series did satirize soap operas in a soft way, it was far more about character and politics. In keeping with the prevailing liberal sensibilities of the time, it focused on upper-crust liberals rather than downtrodden ones; since the Nixon Administration, liberals had shunned the non-minority lower classes.

  The series’ first true political breakthrough came in the form of Jodie Dallas (Billy Crystal), an openly gay man who makes a plea for tolerance of his sexual orientation in the third episode of the first season (after he shows up wearing a dress in the second episode). He confronts his stepfather, Burt: “You hate me because I’m gay, right?” Burt assents. To which Jodie responds: “Look at me, I’m a person . . . Burt, just think of me as a person, that’s all. That’s all I am, I’m a person sitting here. Burt, look at me, I’m a person . . . who happens to like men!” Burt balks, then finally accepts Jodie for who he is.

  Crystal started the trend of “playing gay,” which has become a must-do for so many television and film actors as a mark of artistic credibility. But it wasn’t easy. “I was Jackie Robinson for a while,” he told the New York Times. “It was very creepy at the beginning.” But Crystal’s presence on the show did exactly what its creators thought it would do: it warmed the audience up to the gay agenda. Near the end of the show, Jodie became embroiled in a battle over the custody of his love child. “The mail was three to one that I should get the child,” Crystal said, “and I thought that was the biggest victory of all.”76

  This kind of stuff went over big at the network. Marcy Carsey, then an executive at the network (and a woman we will meet in depth when we discuss The Cosby Show), recalled, “When they made me a vice president, the first thing I bought was a show called Soap. . . . We also got all sorts of pressure from advertisers and even from some affiliates. They did not want us to put it on. In the spring of 1977 we screened our pilots for upper management. That’s when they decided what to put on in the fall. When I screened Soap, I was so nervous I had a tummy ache. It was a landmark show, it broke taboos. And that, by definition, is potentially a hit. So I introduced it by saying something snippy, as usual: ‘You guys are going to love this or hate it. I don’t care how you feel about it. Just put it on the schedule.’ There was silence after the pilot. Leonard Goldenson was the first to speak, and he said, ‘We have to put this one on.’ ”77 Carsey
told me that putting Soap on the air was one of her proudest accomplishments. “I mentioned that Soap was one of my favorite shows that I ever put on the air . . . it dealt with homosexuality when nobody was, it dealt with all sorts of stuff that you just couldn’t do on television but we did, and I thought that was a great thing to do.”78 Fred Silverman was similarly proud of his role with Soap: “We did Soap, which was groundbreaking. One of the smartest comedies that has ever been on the air.”79

  From there, the rest was history. Despite the fact that Soap lost money, the network stuck with it. “We had no advertisers at all,” said Harris, “I think that ABC was very courageous in putting Soap on the air and sticking by it for four years when they lost money every single year. . . .

  “Soap did everything,” Harris proudly remembered. “We had the first gay character who was a real person. Gays have thanked us for that and still do.”80 Soap wasn’t the first mainstream television depiction of a gay man—that was That Certain Summer in 1972. But Billy Crystal did what Hal Holbrook couldn’t: he made homosexuality palatable to a mainstream audience through the power of laughter.

  It wasn’t just the politics of homosexuality that drove controversy. Soap had episodes dealing with impotence, adultery, and incest, among other hot (and fringe) topics. All of them pushed the audience left.