What was especially unfortunate (rather insidious really) about this moment was that the broadcast model of television distribution created a situation of artificial scarcity. It was not a proper competitive environment like we enjoy today. It truly was monopolistic, even if the snake did have three heads. Only a few huge corporations could afford the infrastructure for these national networks. Airspace was limited. Thus to make room for the new, the old had to be cast aside. As I happen to love all those new shows CBS introduced, I am glad they were brought into being. But how much better it would have been if the older shows could have been retained at the same time, because I also love those. TV variety, heir to vaudeville, was effectively killed dead by this historical moment, and that’s to be regretted.
[…]
But during the second half of the decade things changed. I have a good sense of when all the good shows started going wrong, but have had a harder time on figuring out why they did. As near as I can tell in most cases, the stars of the shows became too big for their britches. They won awards, they were on the covers of all the magazines, they got huge salary increases, and then they started getting creative control over their shows. I’m still somewhat at a loss as to why the actors’ mass madness took the same form all across the board, this humorless didacticism, the need to be “dramatic.” But it could be simply that there is a very funny elephant in the room. Because when I find myself asking the question, “Is it possible that actors are egotistical? Self-indulgent? Consumed with self-importance? Megalomaniacs?” Well, there’s your answer. Those qualifiers practically form part of the textbook definition of the word “actor”. They want to be taken seriously. And so, across the board, most of the stars of these shows started either transforming their characters into Christ-like saviors, or turning their programs into pulpits.
Also perhaps to a certain extent these new situation comedies attracted a different kind of star. The new breed were not the Buddy Ebsen/Lucille Ball/Jackie Gleason/Red Skelton type vaudeville clowns. Most of the new stars were college educated, had gone to drama school, been in improv and other theatre and sketch troupes, and appeared in lots of legit theatre. They didn’t just know who Shaw and Ibsen were, they had performed in such serious drama. They scorned old school comedy as “corny”; they were much more concerned with what they called “truth”. I remember reading interviews with Alan Alda in which he complained about episodes from the first season of M*A*S*H that had more farcical plots (e.g. “Tuttle” or the one where Frank Burns gets gold fever.) Fans happen to love these episodes; Alda however tends to favor dramatic episodes from the later years, but we’ll return to that.
Trav S.D., “The Insufferables, or Sanctimony in the Seventies: How Hollywood Helped Make Liberalism Unpopular”, Travalanche, 2018-03-12.
December 6, 2020
QotD: Mid-70s TV
Comments Off on QotD: Mid-70s TV
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
