Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  Goldberg told me that even from the show’s earliest days, there was a political backdrop to the show. “When we came up with Charlie’s Angels,” Goldberg said, “we thought it would be very entertaining, but also, it was the first time that women went into what was heretofore a men’s world. Women doing what men traditionally did and doing it well.”29

  Cheryl Ladd, who played Kris, the replacement for and sister of Farrah Fawcett’s Jill, said at an Equal Rights Amendment fund-raiser, “I think ERA and Charlie’s Angels do go together. . . . [The series is] not just pretty ladies. We don’t act like dummies and bimbos on the show. Angels shows that women can function in a man’s world.”30

  Of course, Farrah Fawcett thought differently: “When the show was number three, I thought it was our acting,” she said just before leaving the show in 1977. “When we got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.” Spelling rejected Fawcett’s comments wholesale. Spelling did admit, however, that the show was “camp.”31

  It was that balance of camp and political subversion that would drive Spelling’s work for the rest of his career. While Spelling revolutionized the television cop drama, his most significant genre transformation came in the form of primetime soap operas, which took the linear, serialized nature of daytime soaps and glitzed them up for a broader audience. Dynasty, which was the biggest hit on television for one of its nine seasons and finished in the top ten for four of those seasons, was “pure camp,” said Spelling, but it was a hit “because it showed that rich people have as many problems as poor folks, and there’s nothing TV viewers love more than to see rich people skewered.”

  Furthermore, Dynasty also pushed the gay rights message with Steven Carrington, one of the first openly gay characters on television. “You have to remember that when we did Dynasty, gays were afraid to come out of the closet in real life,” Spelling reminisced. “One great line summed it all up for us. Remember, this was 1981, and Blake [Steven’s father] came to see his son, who was now living with his gay lover. ‘I’ve been wrong,’ Blake said. ‘I’m glad you found someone who loves you as much as I do.’ That was a hell of a thing to say at the time, and we were all very proud of what we did.” Spelling would also push acceptance of homosexuality in Heartbeat and more famously, on Melrose Place.32

  Later on, of course, Spelling would dive into the teenage set with Beverly Hills, 90210, where he would pursue the same political agenda (on Beverly Hills, 90210, he brought in Darren Star, who would later create Sex and the City). “What set us apart from the other shows was our realistic portrayals of issues,” Spelling wrote. “On 90210, we entertained, but we also said a lot. We dealt with so many timely topics—drinking, drugs, AIDS, gun control, and even consensual teenage sex. We ended our first season with Dylan and Brenda going to a hotel on prom night, and we really dealt with the consequences of having responsible sex at their age.”33

  That’s what Spelling was all about: creating massively entertaining material that seemed like fluff but had political content embedded within it. Over his career, the balance may have shifted toward fluff—but the sweeter the fluff, the easier for the audience to swallow the serious content.

  GENERAL HOSPITAL (1963–PRESENT): DAYTIME TELEVISION’S BALANCE

  The soap opera genre is much derided for its supposedly cardboard acting (and yes, there’s a lot of cardboard acting) and ridiculous plotlines (how else are you supposed to keep a show going for fifty years?). But of all television’s genres, the daytime soap is probably the most reflective of American society. Since soaps run on a daily basis, their fans are obsessive and deeply involved in the shaping of the show—the soap opera audience provided Internet-like response to creators long before the Internet. And creators worked the show according to the whims of the audience.

  Not always, of course. Soaps are still created by liberal creators, and they still push liberal messaging. They’re not merely reflective of audience trends, they’re transformative of them. But soaps tend to lag behind primetime television in their radicalism. Perhaps that’s why they’ve lasted so long.

  General Hospital is, at last count, the longest-running show in the history of television. It has been on the air continuously since 1963. As you’d expect, during that time, the soap opera has undergone dramatic changes in terms of tone and content. Early on, the show actually focused on a hospital, as well as general themes of love and marriage and crime and lust. In the 1970s, as the show’s ratings sank, Fred Silverman, then at ABC, told the creators that they’d better spice things up or the show would be canceled.

  Spice it up they did, with one of the most famous storylines in soap opera history: the Luke and Laura love affair. Doctor’s daughter Laura (Genie Francis) fell in love with Luke (Anthony Geary), a low-level Mafioso. They began courting, and then Luke raped/seduced her (the show has always gone back and forth on whether it was rape or seduction). Later she fell in love with Luke and married him. This was an incredibly hot topic at the time—their wedding became the highest-rated episode of soap opera in TV history, with 30 million people tuning in, and the couple appearing on the covers of People and Newsweek.

  The story was politically incorrect, particularly in an era when feminism suggested that there was a stark distinction between rape and seduction (in most cases, obviously, there is, but the vagaries of rape law are well-known). The story was also reflective of audience sensibilities—the audience simply liked Luke and Laura. The fallout was dramatic but it raised the ratings.

  From there, the show took off in an action-adventure direction until finally rethinking itself for the last time in the 1990s as an issue-oriented potboiler, with AIDS storylines (the characters who got AIDS were straight), gay storylines, cancer stories, and abortion (on which the show takes a pro-choice stance). The show has moved progressively to the left since its inception, largely at the behest of its writers—the devotees of General Hospital aren’t issues-oriented viewers.

  “A lot of what defines this show is almost escapist fare,” head writer Robert Guza told me. “[But w]e as the creative people say, ‘We want to do some real stuff, we want to do a story on teen breast cancer,’ which we did, or ‘We want to do stories on bipolar disorders,’ which we did.”

  Although many of the writers for General Hospital are liberal, it tends to be more balanced than most shows. For example, last season it featured an abortion storyline in which one of the characters, Lulu, decided in favor of terminating her pregnancy. The issue was treated with more balance than would have been contemplated on other shows; Lulu even expressed regret over the abortion afterward, though she stated that she believed she had made the right decision. “We tried to show the whole complex of social attitudes in regard to abortion at that time on the show,” said Guza.

  General Hospital responds to audience predilections and to both sides of the political debate better than other shows because it has to fill time and please viewers. Whereas a primetime show may produce a couple of dozen episodes a season, a typical soap produces hundreds. “[Our need for balance] is really clearly a reflection of the audience,” Guza told me. “Basically all of daytime, we’re really responsive to viewers. . . . Also, because we’re so starved for material, we want to cover all of it. It’s hard to do an hour every day.”

  The soaps may be moving to the left—see, for example, the lesbian wedding on All My Children—but they’re generally far more reflective of the real political debate going on in the country than primetime. And that’s a good thing. Even though those in Hollywood and around the country scorn soaps as minor league artistry, they could stand to learn a thing or two from the soaps in terms of politics.

  LOU GRANT (1977–1982): EVEN FAKE JOURNALISTS ARE LIBERALS

  When Lou Grant premiered in 1972, the country was reeling from Watergate, from Vietnam, from the sexual and civil rights revolutions. By the time it went off the air, the country had responded to the liberal admi
nistration of Jimmy Carter by electing Ronald Reagan, voting for smaller government and less restrictive regulation. In essence, the country had rejected the politics of Lou Grant by the time the show went off the air.

  But it took a radical liberal to actually kill the show.

  That radical liberal was Ed Asner. Born in Missouri, the Jewish Asner served in the army, then went to New York, where he joined the city’s artist subculture. That subculture was reflected in Asner’s political views. Asner is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He believes that cop killer Mumia Abu Jamal is innocent. Most disturbingly, Asner is a 9/11 truther—a nut who thinks that the American government allowed 9/11 to occur. “Could it all be accidents?” he asks in a bizarre YouTube video. “Four planes destroying four different buildings? . . . Was it Osama? We all think in the deepest recesses of our mind, I gather, could there have been great culpability and criminality within the framework of the United States?”34 Somehow, the palpably insane Asner is considered worthy of work in Hollywood but those who believe in cutting taxes and killing terrorists are not.

  Asner blew up Lou Grant in 1982 because of his politics. The story was national in scope, and went something like this: Asner, the actor who played the title character, was liberal. So liberal, in fact, that he held a press conference in which he announced he would be sending $25,000 in medical aid to victims of the Salvadoran regime and supporting the rebel cause (which was Communist). The blowback was immediate, with the right wing pushing advertisers to cancel their investments. That season, CBS canceled the show.

  The show itself, of course, was almost entirely left. A spin-off of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, it carried the same creative team—Brooks, Burns, and Tinker, and added a familiar face in Gene Reynolds. All of them were still liberal, and all of them were happy to be doing a drama where they could really sink their teeth into political material. Reynolds in particular was overjoyed that he could shed the dead weight of comedy and focus on drama—he was sick of hearing from network executives that his shows didn’t have enough jokes.

  The show started as a comedy, since it was supposed to relate to Mary Tyler Moore. Burns said they had based the idea for Lou Grant on Woodward and Bernstein. “We were fascinated by the putting together of that story with Woodward and Bernstein. And the way the paper worked, and we were fascinated by that.”

  The network wasn’t satisfied with the idea. “Guys,” the executive told Burns, Brooks, and Tinker, “you’re giving us the New York Times when people read the Daily News.” Tinker, Burns related, “exploded. And he said, ‘I can’t ---- believe what I’m hearing. You wouldn’t want the New York Times on your network?’ And they said, ‘Not if it doesn’t get ratings.’ ” At the end of the meeting, the CBS executive informed the creators that their job was to think over his prescriptions and to make the show “a little more Kojak-ish.” Tinker quickly responded, “That’s not what I heard at all. I heard that these guys are going to keep doing the show that they’re doing and you’re going to promote it and it’s going to be a hit.”35 Tinker got his way, and Lou Grant did become a hit.

  He also got his way in terms of the politics: The show was a version of the New York Times. “Most television (and movie) writers are somewhat left-leaning, and it’s probably fair to say that the Lou Grant group leaned a bit more than others,” Tinker admitted.36 The show’s take on issues ranging from homosexuality to nuclear politics to illegal immigration was unwaveringly liberal in orientation.

  In the episode dealing with illegal immigration, for example, we see the INS haul off an illegal immigrant without regard for her two children and then we learn that illegal immigrants are often victimized by the coyotes who bring them across the border. The show does not contemplate the criminality of those who cross the border illegally. In another episode, Lou Grant and company uncover safety risks at a nuclear plant, à la Silkwood; in yet another episode, Lou Grant has to deal with a Latin American country torturing members of its populace (a thinly veiled swipe at El Salvador).

  All of this was fine and dandy. The problem for the series arose when Asner, who was also president of the Screen Actors Guild, began using his position as Lou Grant to push his politics. Anthony Hopkins took out a letter in the Hollywood Reporter expressing his displeasure with Asner: “I wish to state that he does not represent my views and I resent being spoken for by him. His barking, self-important militancy in the name of liberal causes, righteously sheltering behind the name of the Screen Actors Guild, is chillingly reminiscent of East European political debate.” Charlton Heston seconded the motion: “I would suggest that the serious professionals in the Screen Actors Guild would not want the guild to take positions on El Salvador or solar energy, but on acting.” Asner had already used his position as head of SAG to cancel an award to be given to Ronald Reagan, former president of SAG, since Asner and the board didn’t want to reward Reagan for shutting out the air traffic controllers (besides which, Asner had called Heston a “----sucker” in public).37

  Asner’s outspokenness killed the show, since he refused to disassociate himself from his Lou Grant character. That frustrated the creators of the show no end. “After the controversy had started . . . , Allan Burns and two other producers on Lou Grant came into my dressing room to ask me to stop what I was doing,” remembered Asner. “One of them said, ‘I think there are two ways to make a point in this life; one is in the way Lou Grant was doing it and one is the way you’re doing it, and I think our way is better, with Lou Grant.’ ” Essentially, Burns and the other producers on the show were asking Asner to embrace the “spoonful of sugar” idea that has served Hollywood liberals so long and so well—they were asking him to channel his politics through Lou Grant, rather than using Lou Grant’s name to promote his politics off the air.

  Asner turned them down. But one fact was clear: Asner’s agenda and Lou Grant’s agenda were the same.38

  HILL STREET BLUES (1981–1987): LIBERALISM IN CRISIS

  “Be careful out there.” So warned Sergeant Phil Esterhaus every morning at the station house before sending the cops out to police the streets and break up gang activity, drug rings, and prostitution rackets. Hill Street Blues, which ran on NBC for seven seasons beginning in 1980, was the first criminal law show to depict cops not as defenders of the law but as flawed human beings who sometimes use the law as a weapon—and, by contrast, to depict criminals not as villains, but as complex characters. This followed in the footsteps of The Mod Squad and Charlie’s Angels, which used cop shows to push political messages. Unlike those Spelling productions, however, Hill Street Blues embraced its politics by pitting inherently political characters against one another.

  That’s what made the show so good. That’s also what made the show so liberal.

  The show was commissioned by Fred Silverman and Brandon Tartikoff from MTM’s Grant Tinker. Silverman had just seen the film Fort Apache: The Bronx starring Paul Newman, and he suggested to Tartikoff that they do an hour show “that’s like Fort Apache meets Barney Miller.” (If you haven’t noticed, that’s the standard Hollywood pitch: one successful movie meets another. Every television show, therefore, owes something to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.) Barney Miller, ABC’s long-running cop sitcom, portrayed cops as quiet heroes going about their business but facing down societal prejudices in an utterly liberal manner—it was the transition step from Dragnet’s all-out cop worship.

  Tartikoff, Silverman continued, “went to Steve Bochco and brought in Mike Kozoll and that ended up being Hill Street Blues.”39 The co-creators of the show, Bochco and Kozoll, were both liberal. Bochco, who would go on to bigger shows than Hill Street, grew up in Manhattan, where he attended the High School of the Performing Arts, then went to Carnegie Tech, then worked his way up at Universal Pictures. If you’re looking for the perfect example of the industry baby, Bochco is it. Kozoll, by contrast, hailed from Wisconsin—but like Bochco, he had extensive experience with th
e cop genre. Also like Bochco, he leaned left.

  Bochco stridently denied at the time of the show that he was a “cop-lover.” His overall liberalism pervaded Hill Street. “We don’t answer questions that people desperately want answered simplistically,” he told author Todd Gitlin. “The appeal of a Ronald Reagan . . . to a great many people has always been solid, simple answers to very complex questions. I think what Michael means when he says that we are unfashionably liberal is in our perception that those simple, easy answers don’t yield results. They never have.”

  Bochco also announced that he was going to make life hell for the people at the standards department, in true bobo fashion. He bugged them on everything from sex to violence. There is one particular point, however, on which he did not bug them, according to Gitlin. Jerome Stanley, the head of NBC’s West Coast Standards and Practices, told Bochco and Kozoll to tone down the presence of minority criminals in the pilot. “Our quarrel with them, if you want to call it that, was that they were simply going to have to fictionalize it to the extent of saying that all criminals weren’t black,” he told Gitlin. Bochco and Kozoll agreed, and changed some of the criminals in the pilot into whites, resulting in an oddly multicultural gang attacking some of the cops.

  The political debate on the show took place on the character level. Captain Frank Furillo is a liberal, a secular priest suffering for the flock. Detective Henry Goldblume (Joe Spano) is the in-house liberal, constantly attempting to utilize caring rather than bullets. Goldblume was Bochco’s favorite character, because “he’s terribly, terribly troubled all the time, about being an essentially passive man in a violent world, and yet remaining in it because of his hope that he can be a pacifying force.”40 Goldblume’s foil is the insufferable Detective Howard Hunter (James Sikking), a racist moron bent on using lethal force whenever and wherever necessary—and often, even if it was unnecessary. In the opening episode, Hunter sums up his character nicely in an exchange with Furillo regarding how to deal with a hostage situation.