Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  Furillo: “I’m sending in Goldblume, see if we can open communication, defuse the situation. It’s by the book, Howard.”

  Howard: “Goldblume! Goldblume couldn’t defuse a roll of kosher toilet paper.”

  Not exactly an even-handed depiction of the muscular cop.

  Goldblume, by contrast, is a saint. In one episode, he sums up the liberal’s despairing question about crime after watching three teenagers arrested for several brutal slayings: “Where do you put all the hate?” The conservative would answer: in prison, or better yet, in the electric chair. The liberal would answer: hate springs from social conditions, so we must change society.

  There’s no question where the creators of Hill Street Blues stood in principle. But they also recognized that liberalism had tried and failed to correct the social situation. From the very beginning, the philosophy of the show despaired of the law enforcement situation. It quickly deteriorated to outright nihilism. Esterhaus’s slogan, “Let’s be careful out there,” eventually made way for Sergeant Stan Jablonski’s far more ethically questionable “Let’s do it to them before they do it to us.” As Kozoll told Gitlin, “Like a lot of onetime liberals, I think we’ve gotten to a point where we just throw up our hands and say let’s be honest. There’s no visible way to change anything anymore . . . there is very little illusion about things ever getting better.”41

  The cops in Hill Street are like the soldiers in M*A*S*H: victims of a mad society surrounding them. And as in M*A*S*H, the unspoken assumption is that broader societal change will have to take place in order for criminality to truly be cured.

  Bochco went on to produce shows with the same philosophy—breaking stylistic taboos while pushing a sophisticated post-liberalism—including NYPD Blue, in which he somehow finagled the network into allowing him to use the words douchebag and dickhead, as well as showing Dennis Franz’s bare buttocks, and L.A. Law, which introduced the world to the sweeps-week lesbian kiss. All of these depictions were gratuitous and superfluous to story—even the lesbian kiss did not affect the overarching storyline—but that’s Bochco’s mentality. Like so many others in television, he feels that he needs to push the boundaries, shock the bourgeois.

  Bochco’s contention was that such groundbreaking forays into vulgarity and sexuality were necessary because television wasn’t “very smart . . . not very funny . . . not very truthful, or very real . . . not very enlightening, and only occasionally thoughtful . . . it’s just not very good.” Newton Minow had come 180 degrees; instead of advocating higher standards of television programming, Bochco was arguing to lower the bar in the name of vulgar vanguardism. But like Minow, Bochco also argued for greater liberalism on television. “The television business, like it or not (and I don’t), has become politicized,” Bochco wrote in 1992, approximately thirty years after television became politicized. “Networks have become increasingly skittish about any program content that is perceived by pressure groups as objectionable. Does this mean that television shows have, by and large, become more conservative? You tell me. . . . Networks don’t want controversy. They don’t want bad language. They don’t want sex, particularly sex between individuals of the same gender. What they do want is big ratings. . . .”42

  Of course, like any creator, so does Bochco. And that’s where the meeting of the minds came with the network, which essentially allowed Bochco to funnel his envelope-pushing politics into his shows, destroying network standards wholesale. Was that good for television? It certainly made for fascinating watching in the case of Bochco’s work. But as with All in the Family, groundbreaking stylistic choices infused with political comment tend to fade away, and in their place, we tend to get the vulgar form rather than the politically fascinating substance.

  ST. ELSEWHERE (1982–1988): THE POLITICS OF HEALTH

  The medical genre has always been a staple of primetime schedules. Like most genres, it began as a semi-conservative procedural, upholding the virtue of doctors without attacking the status quo. Shows like Ben Casey (1961–1966) and Dr. Kildare (1961–1966) and even the later Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969–1976) dealt mainly with doctors trying to treat patients rather than doctors rebelling against society. They were Kennedy-esque in their liberalism, focused on the progress of human technology and often learning lessons about tolerance. Marcus Welby, M.D. was so focused on patient care that it even ignored the more radical liberal ideas of its day—one episode had the good doctor advising a patient struggling with homosexuality to resist the impulse, stating that his homosexual tendencies are driven not by actual homosexuality but by fear of homosexuality. The episode drew massive protest from the gay left.

  By the 1980s, however, liberals were despairing of the medical system the same way they were despairing of the law enforcement system. Liberal angst about the inability to provide universal medical care, about the rise of new diseases and conditions, about the ability of mankind to fight health problems altogether—all of it finally took form in a show called St. Elsewhere.

  Despite Hill Street Blues’s first-season troubles, NBC was looking to class up its schedule. They did so by picking up St. Elsewhere, also from MTM. While Grant Tinker would get the credit for St. Elsewhere, it was Silverman who picked up the show initially.43 The show itself was never a major success—it barely broke the top fifty during its six seasons—but it was a prestige show, largely due to its intelligent writing, great acting (the show launched the career of a young man named Denzel Washington, as well as the less-prominent careers of Ed Begley Jr. and Howie Mandel, among others), and provocative storylines.

  The creator of the show was a young writer named Joshua Brand; like most television writers, Brand sprang from the New York milieu. Brand majored in English at City College in New York, then went to Columbia for graduate school, where he began writing poetry and fiction. At his sister’s wedding, he met a screenwriter who gave him some tips on entering the industry; after Brand had written a few spec scripts, the screenwriter suggested that he move to Los Angeles. His screenwriting didn’t work out initially, but he did write a play, which ended up opening the door to television.

  Brand truly got started when he broke in with The White Shadow, a CBS show produced by MTM and starring Ken Howard as a former NBA star now teaching at a largely minority school. The show was produced by Bruce Paltrow—father of Gwyneth, an outspoken liberal, and the same fellow who would later produce St. Elsewhere (and allegedly discriminate against conservative actor Dwight Schultz when he auditioned for a part in the show).

  When The White Shadow was canceled, Brand decided to cowrite a show with another White Shadow staff writer named John Falsey. He based his idea for the show on his best friend, who was doing his medical residency at the Cleveland Clinic. Brand pitched the idea for a show at a teaching hospital, and Tinker and NBC bit. Brand and Falsey wrote the stories for the first season, then left after that—but the course of the series had been set by then.

  The thematic of the series, Brand insisted, had to be realism. That meant, as usual in Hollywood, that social issues would be tackled from a liberal perspective. Brand said that he didn’t intend to make the show about social issues, but in a hospital, they were unavoidable. “We didn’t think that that was driving us. But inevitably, when you’re dealing with people who don’t have enough money to get good medical care and all sorts of stuff like that, how could it not be social?”

  And it was social. More specifically, it was socially left. The first season featured an episode in which Dr. Mark Craig (William Daniels) had to confront the fact that his old college roommate was gay and seeking a sex change. Eventually, of course, Craig comes to accept his friend’s decision. Where did that episode come from? I asked Brand. “To be honest with you, what has motivated myself for the most part is I try to do things that were interesting to me,” Brand answered. (Brand’s take on homosexuality became even more apparent later, when his Northern Exposure, which he described as a “non-ju
dgmental universe,” featured television’s first gay wedding.)44

  The show routinely took the socially liberal position on health issues ranging from transsexuality to abortion to AIDS to sex education. Tackling such issues was a conscious decision by creators like Tom Fontana, who wound up producing the show and writing many of its episodes before going on to produce shows like The Bedford Diaries and Oz. “There was never a moment where we ever talked about not bringing up issues,” he told me. “We were always looking for what was out there that was going to throw doctors and nurses off their pedestals. So that’s how we looked for stories—whatever was going to confuse our characters. So things like transsexuality or AIDS or testicular cancer or mastectomies or abortion—we did at least one abortion story a season, and we always tried to tell it from a different point of view.”45 Usually, a different liberal point of view. To his full credit, though Fontana is politically liberal, and though the show was politically liberal, Fontana’s commitment to politically interesting television means that he actually wants more right-wing writers to enter the industry.

  The watchability of St. Elsewhere, like that of Hill Street Blues, does lie in its realism. But as with most drama, the creators can stack the case against one political side or another, and they did it frequently on the show, whether by design or simply by political osmosis.

  THE DAY AFTER (1983): TRYING TO RUIN REAGAN?

  As Reagan’s first term in office neared its end, liberal desperation reached its breaking point. How could they remove this idiotic cowboy from office, demonize his policies, and make nuclear détente a popular policy rather than a sign of weakness?

  They could run a television movie.

  On November 20, 1983, ABC ran The Day After. It chronicled the fate of Lawrence, Kansas, and the surrounding area in the aftermath of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The Day After was easily the most-watched television movie of all time, clocking in with 100 million viewers (the entire population of the United States in 1983 was approximately 234 million, which means nearly half the population watched the show).

  At the time, Fred Pierce of ABC told me, the made-for-television movie was the chosen vehicle for political messaging on issues ranging from homosexuality (That Certain Summer) to AIDS (An Early Frost) to incest (Something About Amelia) to child prostitution (Little Ladies of the Night). But none of those movies could compare in impact to The Day After.

  The movie itself was unclear on who led off the nuclear war; characters in the movie argued about it. But the point of the movie was clear: A nuclear war under any circumstances would be utterly apocalyptic. The show had an intense impact on the nuclear debate. Right-wingers denounced the basic assumptions of the program as misleading—i.e., the assumption that mutually assured destruction would ultimately fail—and left-wingers celebrating the program as a necessary step in convincing the population about the necessity of disarmament.

  “The Day After was a very important program,” wrote ABC president Leonard Goldenson, “but it would almost certainly not have made it to the network had not Brandon Stoddard several times put his job on the line to argue that we must broadcast it.”46

  I sat down with Stoddard on a sunny day in his Santa Monica, California, offices, just blocks from the beach. The office had a relaxed, Hawaiian decor. Stoddard, who now teaches classes at the University of Southern California, was kind enough to give me several hours of his time. We discussed The Day After at length. “It was my idea and I made ABC do it. . . . I was six-three when I started doing it,” the diminutive Stoddard joked. “It was the most difficult and probably the most controversial [thing] ever put on TV.”47

  The lead-up to the movie was enormous. The National Education Association issued a national alert to parents warning that children under twelve should not view it. The New York City School Board was less strident: “ABC’s intention in presenting [The Day After] is to educate the public about nuclear war. However, the scenes of terrible destruction, people being vaporized, mass graves, and death from radiation sickness may NOT be helpful or educational for children or young people. This is not just one more horror film . . . the threat of nuclear war is real.”48

  Stoddard wanted the film to transform people’s lives. “That movie was not necessarily reflective,” he told me. “Of course, the left thought it was about nuclear peace and thought it was the best thing in the world. People walked up to me with lit candles saying, ‘Oh my God, you’re the most wonderful person I’ve ever met.’ The right wanted to kill me. . . . [The Day After] was transformative.”

  Stoddard was adamant that The Day After wasn’t a political statement. In fact, he pointed out that, a few years after he did it, he also produced a made-for-television movie first suggested by Ben Stein in an article criticizing The Day After—a movie called Amerika, about what would happen to the country in the wake of a Soviet takeover. “And the left thought this was the most horrible idea they had ever heard,” Stoddard reminisced. “ ‘How could you do this?’ [I] literally had death threats at my office and at home.” Stoddard laughed as he remembered a conversation he had with hard-left actress Shirley MacLaine, in which he complained about the scorn he was receiving from the left. “Brandon,” MacLaine replied, “don’t you know they’ll kill anything for peace?”

  Stoddard wasn’t the only creator involved with The Day After who said that the movie was supposed to be free of political content. I met with the movie’s producer, Robert Papazian (who later produced HBO’s Rome), who told me the same thing. “What was important was this particular thing was terrible for the world. And as a result of it exploding, this is what is going to happen,” Papazian said. “It was about the process of destruction, and what the nuclear arms race was about and not why it should be stopped or how it should be stopped, but if it does happen, here’s what’s going to happen to the world and humanity as we know it.”49

  Lionel Chetwynd, who was close with Reagan, ripped Stoddard’s suggestion that the show was apolitical. “There was nothing to be proud of on The Day After,” he fumed. “Nothing whatsoever. It was an attempt to undermine Ronald Reagan.”50

  The film’s director, Nicholas Meyer, came down on Chetwynd’s side of the argument. Meyer, who directed Star Trek II, Star Trek IV, and Star Trek VI, is a vocally liberal ideologue. I met him at his large house off of Sunset Boulevard, where he ushered me in after I narrowly avoided being eaten by his enormous dog. “The motives for people such as myself, such as Jason Robards . . . the motives for many of the people involved in the making of the film were certainly political, they were antinuke,” he said. “But what I began to realize very early on, and where I sort of agree with Brandon [Stoddard], is that if we had proselytized, the whole thing would have backfired. . . . So it evolved in my mind into a kind of gigantic public service announcement.”

  Meyer told me, “My . . . grandiose notion was that this movie would unseat Ronald Reagan when he ran for reelection. In this I was hopelessly mistaken.”51

  Even if the film wasn’t meant to be a political statement, it certainly achieved political ends. According to one scientific study, watching The Day After made subjects more likely to push for “a more conciliatory approach to U.S.-Soviet relations.” The show also had an unintended impact on President Reagan—the same Reagan that Meyer derided and hoped to unseat. Reagan, a visual learner who was always disproportionately affected by what he saw on film, wrote a diary entry after watching a prescreening of the movie on October 10, 1983. “In the morning at Camp David,” he penned, “I ran the tape of the movie. . . . It is powerfully done, all $7 million worth. It is very effective and left me greatly depressed. So far they haven’t sold any of the 25 ads scheduled and I can see why. . . . My own reaction: we have to do all we can . . . to see that there is never a nuclear war.”52 Shortly after Reagan signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, according to Meyer, he sent Meyer a letter reading, “Don’t think your movie didn’t have
any part of this, because it did.” Meyer noted, “The making of the film was to date the most worthwhile thing I ever got to do in my life. Any movie that the president of the United States winds up saying changed his mind about the idea of a winnable nuclear war is not an insignificant achievement.”53

  It is controversial to suggest that The Day After was a turning point for Reagan or that he dramatically reshaped his thinking to cope with what he saw in that show. But if The Day After represents the truth of any proposition, it is this: Television is immensely powerful. As Stoddard told me, “If you’re putting The Day After on . . . , you reach 120 million people in one night, [and it’s] seen around the world and translated into seventeen languages and is played in Russia—the first American film ever played in Russia.”54 How can anyone argue that television doesn’t change the world?

  MACGYVER (1985–1992): A MOD SQUAD OF ONE

  With the spectacular failure of the movie MacGruber, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that its source material, MacGyver, was a highly successful series for ABC, wherein the main character made internal combustion engines from gum and paper clips. The creator of the show was a former Hill Street writer, Lee David Zlotoff. Zlotoff went to Brooklyn Technical High School, where he became an expert in pre-engineering; his dad was an engineer. Hence MacGyver’s invaluable mechanical skills.55

  But as executive producer Vin DiBona told me, there was more to the show than that. The show, he said, had a liberal sensibility to it. “Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that was the whole premise of the program, that MacGyver used his brain power and skill of stuff and science, and he solved all the difficulties through ingenuity. . . . No guns, no knives.” DiBona told me that MacGyver was also active with respect to the environment and racial equality. “Absolutely,” he said. “[MacGyver was a] good guy.”