Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  In American society more broadly, it was a time of relative tranquility. Under President Eisenhower, Americans reached the Cold War consensus: strong anti-Communism and enthused pro-capitalism. At the same time, tensions bubbled beneath the surface, particularly with regard to racial issues. Creators at Playhouse 90 embodied these differing strains, simultaneously taking part in the Cold War consensus while pushing, correctly, for the liberalization of the country on racial issues.

  Two young writers in particular came to prominence on the show: Aaron Spelling and Rod Serling. It’s difficult to overstate the impact Spelling’s career had on television drama—his shows dominated the industry for decades. He coined the modern action genre, the modern primetime soap opera, and the teen and young adult sexy genre of the 1990s. He started at Playhouse 90.

  Spelling grew up in Texas, the son of a poor Jewish salesman and an overworked Jewish mother. “To the day Dad died,” Spelling recalled, “I don’t remember him ever making more than $45 a week.” Spelling’s parents were both politically liberal—and they were both brave. Spelling’s dad befriended a black man, Spelling remembered, and brought him over “to join us on holidays. Whites and blacks didn’t spend time with one another back then in Texas, but that never meant anything to my dad.”1

  Spelling, like many of his Jewish compatriots, experienced tremendous discrimination, which affected his view of politics for his entire life. “I grew up thinking ‘Jew boy’ was one word,” he wrote. “You never saw so many rednecks in your life.” He also saw racism’s cruel and insidious effects time and again. When he directed Native Son at the Edward Rubin Playhouse, his father was immediately fired from his job as a tailor for Sears. “He wasn’t given an explanation, but the answer was obvious to all of us,” said Spelling.2

  When Spelling arrived in Hollywood, he tried to make it as an actor, playing character roles in I Love Lucy and Dragnet. He soon realized that his true calling was writing. On Playhouse 90, Spelling got a chance to play out his politics on the small screen—and as with many artists, he also got a chance to channel his demons into creativity. “In my early writing career, I felt everything I wrote should really say something,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “Why was I so interested in man’s inhumanity against man? Because I grew up in a neighborhood that was full of it. When you get your ass kicked every day as a child and have a nervous breakdown at nine, it tends to stick with you for a while.”3

  Spelling also tried to express his fully justified outrage at racism in his writing—an outrage shared by many of the Jewish liberals who staffed Hollywood writers’ rooms. After meeting Sammy Davis Jr., Spelling decided to write an episode starring Davis for Spelling’s mentor, Dick Powell, who at that time was starring in The Dick Powell Show. Spelling’s original script had Powell as a sheriff and Davis as his deputy and featured a climactic scene in which Davis shot a white bad guy trying to kill Powell. The sponsors rejected it outright. “I couldn’t believe the sponsors would kill that concept,” Spelling fumed. His replacement concept starred Davis as one of the Buffalo Soldiers. One of the key lines in the script came when an Indian asked Davis, “Why do you listen to the white man and fight his fight against us? He hates you as much as he hates us.” Spelling chortled at the sponsors’ idiocy: “Here I was using their forum to point out bigotry and that was okay with them.”4

  Later in his life, Spelling has written, he shifted his viewpoint toward entertainment rather than social messaging. “I believe that people are looking for a release and TV should provide it,” he said. “We’re in the entertainment industry. It’s our job to entertain.”5 But he never let go of his tendency toward infusing his work with his politics.

  Rod Serling was another one of the writers on the show who would go on to bigger and better things. Serling, like Spelling, was Jewish and grew up in a liberal home. Like Spelling, Serling experienced anti-Semitism. After serving in the Army, where he participated in the invasion of the Philippines, he went to college, then came to Hollywood. Television, he felt, presented the best opportunity for pressing his politics home. “Of all the media, TV lends itself most beautifully to presenting a controversy,” he said. It allowed him to “take a part of the problem, and using a small number of people, get my point across.”

  That philosophy guided him in all of his writing. Of all his political causes—and they were many, ranging from the antiwar movement to opposition to Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial run—his most beloved was the fight against racism. “I happen to think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice,” he said in 1967. “It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I’ve written there is a thread of this: a man’s seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.”6

  Serling wrote several episodes of the show. One of them, titled A Town Has Turned to Dust (1958), was loosely based on the killing of Emmett Till, an African-American boy murdered in Mississippi after supposedly making overtures to a white woman. (Serling had already tried to tell Till’s story on The U.S. Steel Hour but was met with thousands of letters of protest.) The network nixed Serling’s original idea, which was a direct adaptation of the Till case. Instead, Till became a Mexican and the setting changed to the 1870s Southwest.

  Less righteously, Serling showed shades of the 1960s radicalism lurking beneath the fair and quiet Eisenhower-era facade. For example, he penned the first installment of Playhouse 90, titled Forbidden Area, an adaptation of the Pat Frank novel. The plot focused on a Soviet infiltration of America’s Strategic Air Command; in the end, the United States decides not to start a nuclear war after finding out about the infiltration. Why didn’t they launch the attack? To avoid “ecocide,” the destruction of the environment.7 Serling’s Cold War semi-pacifism and indictment of anti-Red feeling began to bear its creative fruit on Playhouse 90.

  Playhouse 90 was masterful drama often driven by the deep and abiding belief systems of its authors. Its emphasis on anti-racism was strong and morally correct. Soon, however, Playhouse 90’s authors would use the moral impetus they gained from that righteous stand to attack other issues far beyond racism.

  THE TWILIGHT ZONE (1959–1964): SOCIAL ACTIVISM FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION

  Rod Serling moved from Playhouse 90 to a show of his own creation: The Twilight Zone. Serling had decided that attempting to skirt network censors on Playhouse 90 was a losing battle. If he tried to depict real-life political situations with any accuracy, he would be shut down. On The Twilight Zone, on the other hand, he could do whatever he wanted, all under the guise of science fiction. “On The Twilight Zone, I knew that I could get away with having Martians saying things that Republicans and Democrats couldn’t.”8

  Every Friday night, Serling would appear on millions of television screens. “There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man,” Serling intoned. “It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.” For half an hour, viewers would be transported to distant worlds, to the future or the past—and all the while, they’d never imagine that they were imbibing Serling’s brand of politics.

  But they were. Serling’s politics were a breakthrough for liberalism, fighting in outright fashion the Cold War consensus itself. He promoted the notion that anti-Red sentiment was sinful, that the nuclear arms race was dangerous, and that détente with the Soviets was not merely desirable but imperative.

  In one celebrated first-season episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Serling took on general suspicions about fifth-column Communists during the Cold War. The residents of Maple Street are humming along innocuously enough when they see a flash of light in the sky—and all of their electrical machines go dead. Tommy, a boy from the neighborhood
, informs members of the town that an alien invasion must be taking place . . . and that one of the members of the neighborhood has been planted by the aliens. Naturally, the neighbors tear one another apart. One of the neighbors ends up shooting another; he’s then stoned by the crowd, and attempts to deflect attention to Tommy. As the lights in the town flash on and off eerily iridescent, the neighbors riot. We pan back to see that aliens have indeed landed—and they’re manipulating the lights of the town, and noting that the best way to destroy humankind is to let them destroy themselves.

  Serling narrates, “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and the thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own: for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”

  Serling also tackled racism with righteous enthusiasm on The Twilight Zone. In one excellent season-two episode, “The Eye of the Beholder,” the protagonist, Jane Tyler, has her eleventh surgery to fix her appearance to resemble everyone else. Her face is swathed in bandages throughout the episode. Eventually, the doctors remove the bandages, and we see that she is a beautiful woman. The doctors and nurses cluck their sadness—she hasn’t been fixed. The audience then sees that the doctors and nurses all look like monsters, and that the woman has been trying to surgically alter her appearance to fit in. Fleeing the doctors and nurses, Jane finally finds solace in the arms of a handsome man who promises to take her to a de facto ghetto where they won’t be able to bother anyone with their ugliness. The theme of the show is clear: Racism is foolish, and appearance is meaningless—focus on skin color or ethnic background is superficial, ugly, and stupid.

  Later in life, even as Serling tackled themes ranging from animal rights to xenophobia and religious ignorance in movies like Planet of the Apes, he became active in politics directly. In 1968, he supported Eugene McCarthy over Lyndon Johnson. In that same year, he gave a controversial speech at Moorpark College in which he called himself a “moderate liberal” who would “salute our flag and stand for our anthem and feel an affection for my native land.” This, he said, “removes me from the pale of the new left.” But at the same time, he embraced the violent protestors in Chicago and railed against the Vietnam War. He received no pay for the speech after refusing to sign a loyalty oath required by the university, stating that such oaths were morally repugnant and fascistic.9

  Serling was a principled man, and his work reflects those principles. Many of the episodes seem dated today—the synopses themselves sound obvious and preachy. That’s because the dramatic medium on television was just coming into its own. Its creators had not yet learned to hide their politics beneath a mask of principle-free entertainment. The Twilight Zone demonstrates that there is a fine line between righteous entertainment and self-righteous entertainment. That line wasn’t just crossed on The Twilight Zone—it’s been crossed on virtually every drama since.

  STAR TREK (1966–1969, 1987–1994, 1993–1999, 1995–2001, 2001–2005): SECULAR HUMANISM GOES GALACTIC

  If Rod Serling took secular humanism to another dimension, Gene Roddenberry took it to another universe. Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, was virulently anti-religious. As a child, he said, “Every Sunday we went to church—Baptist church. . . . I listened to the sermon, and I remember complete astonishment because what they were talking about were things that were just crazy.” Later, he announced, “as nearly as I can concentrate on the question today, I believe I am God; certainly you are, I think we intelligent beings on this planet are all a piece of God, are becoming God.”10

  Many episodes of the original Star Trek, which ran from 1966 to 1969 on NBC, are dedicated to simplistic and thinly veiled anti-religious exposition. In “The Apple,” for example, a second-season episode, the Enterprise crew encounters a planet on which the immortal humanoids spend their time feeding Vaal, a machine they worship as a god, which forbids them sex and love. In the end, the Enterprise crew destroys Vaal, making the humanoids mortal but granting them freedom.

  The atheism of Star Trek carried over through all of its incarnations. Brannon Braga, a producer and screenwriter who has been instrumental on all of the modern Star Trek incarnations as well as 24 and FlashForward, explained at the 2006 International Atheist Conference, “In Gene Roddenberry’s imagining of the future (in this case the 23rd century), Earth is a paradise where we have solved all of our problems with technology, ingenuity, and compassion. There is no more hunger, war, or disease. And most importantly to the context of our meeting here today, religion is completely gone. . . . On Roddenberry’s future Earth, everyone is an atheist. And that world is the better for it.”11

  As a secular humanist, Roddenberry was an ardent environmentalist. The original Star Trek took on issues like overpopulation. In “The Mark of Gideon,” a third-season episode, Kirk beams down to a planet called Gideon, where the people have regenerative abilities and live long lives. Members of the planet also refuse to use birth control or refrain from intercourse, since they believe there is a right to life and a right to love. Kirk’s blood carries a disease which can kill members of the planet, and the planet plans to use his blood to control the population explosion. In the end, Kirk ends up transmitting that disease to a member of the planet, who then uses her blood to control the population, in Paul Ehrlich fashion. (The same topic is delved into with substantially more humor in the famous “Trouble with Tribbles” episode.)

  The original series’ most famous step into liberal legend was the season-three episode “Plato’s Stepchildren,” in which Kirk and African-American Lieutenant Uhura kiss. Although the kiss has somehow become a breakthrough moment in historical retrospect, within the plot of the show, Kirk was forced to kiss Uhura via telekinesis. As conservative columnist James Lileks put it, “The clinch was forced on them by lazy immortal Grecian wannabees with telekinetic power, who amused themselves by testing the boundaries of the Network’s Standards and Practices regulations. . . . Kirk understood, but he went along. You could say he did his part for God and Country, but of course Trek believed in neither.”12

  In those days, the networks were afraid that an interracial kiss would somehow provoke Southern Armageddon, so they insisted that Kirk and Uhura shoot two takes, one of which would cut out the kiss entirely. William Shatner, who played Kirk, and Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, purposefully sabotaged every take in which they didn’t kiss. “Knowing that Gene [Roddenberry] was determined to air the real kiss,” Nichols later wrote, “Bill shook me and hissed menacingly in his best ham-fisted Kirkian staccato delivery: ‘I! WON’T! KISS! YOU! I! WON’T! KISS! YOU!’ It was absolutely awful, and we were hysterical and ecstatic.”13 The kiss stayed.

  Roddenberry was also a down-the-line leftist. As John Meredyth Lucas, a writer who worked extensively on the show, stated, “We could do anti-Vietnam stories . . . civil rights stories. . . . Set the story in outer space, in the future, and all of a sudden you can get away with just about anything. . . .”14

  While Roddenberry was a secular humanist, he was, like Serling, a committed Kennedy liberal. But that liberalism came across not in the stalwart American exceptionalism espoused by Kennedy, but in the “Prime Directive” governing all Enterprise missions: “No identification of self or mission. No interference with the social development of said planet. No references to space or the fact that there are other worlds or civilizations.” In other words, anti-imperialism.

  Easier said than done. The Kirk Enterprise routinely violated the Prime Directive, involving itself in internecine warfare on a regular basis. Despite the fact that the Federation was supposed to look like the United Nations, it actually resembled the U.S. Congress in terms of policy. The Enterprise is a multicultural utopia all right, but it is pe
culiarly American. Kirk is infused with masculine characteristics, including the propensity toward insemination of every female alien in the galaxy. Kirk is super-American; his hero is Abraham Lincoln, a doppelgänger of whom appears in the third-season episode “The Savage Curtain,” to Kirk’s delight.

  While the original series was jingoistic, it wasn’t gung ho on the Cold War. While the Klingons are obviously supposed to be Soviet and the Romulans are obviously supposed to be Chinese and while they both oppose the Federation, which stands in for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Roddenberry was a peacenik when it came to the Cold War. Rumor has it that Chekhov, the Russian member of the Enterprise crew, was added to the ship at the behest of Pravda.

  Roddenberry’s attitude toward the Cold War is clearly evident in the third-season episode “Day of the Dove,” in which Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise are driven by some evil alien force to fight endlessly with Klingons who have come aboard the ship. Only when Kirk offers to make a truce with the Klingons does the brutal hand-to-hand combat end. Similarly, in the first-season episode “Errand of Mercy,” the Enterprise crew and the Klingons fight over the supposedly primitive planet of Organia, where the population seems to simply accept the cruel tyranny of the Klingons. When the Enterprise crew attempts to push the Organians into action, they resist. Finally, the Organians utterly incapacitate both the Klingon ships and the Enterprise surrounding the planet, and reveal that they are all-powerful. Then they impose a peace treaty on both sides. Kirk ends up accepting that peace treaty and understanding that it is better for everyone. A second-season episode, “The Doomsday Machine,” discusses the evils of nuclear weapons by having the crew of the Enterprise face down an alien machine that destroys planets and threatens to destroy its own creators (this episode is so bald-faced that Kirk actually compares the machine to twentieth-century nukes and laments the search for a weapon that could destroy everything).