Prime Time
FOUR MORE BEERS: The reason Call To Glory (ABC) bombed is because it didn’t deliver the militaristic thrills it promised—viewers who’d seen the show incessantly hyped during the Olympics tuned in expecting to see some flyboys in heat but instead got the same old cold war liberal morality plays (a cold war liberal is someone who is progressive, in a sodden sort of way, when it comes to social issues—Call’s civil rights episode was square in the tradition of the Kramer/Susskind school of soggy uplift—but just as phobic as everybody else when it comes to the Commie threat).
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Prime Time
ACID IS GROOVY
Richard C. Walls
FOUR MORE BEERS: The reason Call To Glory (ABC) bombed is because it didn’t deliver the militaristic thrills it promised—viewers who’d seen the show incessantly hyped during the Olympics tuned in expecting to see some flyboys in heat but instead got the same old cold war liberal morality plays (a cold war liberal is someone who is progressive, in a sodden sort of way, when it comes to social issues—Call’s civil rights episode was square in the tradition of the Kramer/Susskind school of soggy uplift—but just as phobic as everybody else when it comes to the Commie threat). People tuning in to get a dose of “standing tall” didn’t want this kind of equivocation....
If the networks really want to cash in on the conservative trend (and they’d better hurry) they’d make a series out of Red Dawn. An unbeatable premise: each week a different small town in America is taken over by forces from a different hostile country. It could run forever.
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JUNKIES FOR REAGAN: The network execs could do a little cogent research by watching the cable station C-Span, specifically the call-in shows. Three times a day for an hour average Americans, every one of them a potential fraction of a Nielson rating point, get on the horn to harass various “experts” (think tank mavens from the left and right, newspaper columnists, actual pols). The format is stark intimacy—one host, one guest, one point. Both hosts and guests have apparently been instructed to stare directly at the camera (in close-up) when addressing or listening to a caller—and since the hosts have also been instructed to remain objective at all times, part of the fun of the show is watching them stare barely blinking at the camera for three or four minutes with an expression of noncommittal attentiveness while some caller rants about the pinko tendencies of the national news media. And rant they do, CSpan callers being, by and large, a conservative and curmudgeonly lot (in fact, a popular non sequitur among callers is to accuse the 30.5 million people who voted for Mondale/Ferraro of being “out of step” with America—quite apart from the large question of why anybody would want to be “in step,” it remains that the largest group of steppers in this country are those who didn’t vote at all). It’s instructive to listen to these people reject the very objectivity they say they long for. C-Span commendably presents a wide spectrum of guests and when the guest is conservative, caller after caller burbles praise of the station: “I’m a C-Span junkie—you people are so objective, not like the networks...I love you guys.” But when somebody to the left of Big Ron is on, veiled threats hang in the air. Someday, despite the C-Span hosts’ super human ability never to tip their hand, it’s going to dawn on these clowns who call in that objectivity itself is a liberal concept and they’re going to descend on the studio, rope in hand. ..
☆ ☆ ☆
GOD KNOWS BEST: So it’s no longer necessary to consult dusty tomes in order to vicariously experience the electricity of the McCarthy era—C-Span callers will bring it to you live, now. Meanwhile, seekers of less overtly political nostaligia need look no further than the Christian Broadcasting Network which offers a slew of pre ’60s-social-upheaval sitcoms and series as well as movies untainted by the current moral decay. For the fundamentalists who run the station the shows represent a lost golden age which they hope to resurrect. Lots of luck, fellows, but you’re going to have to screen your shows a little more carefully— recently, in the station’s on-going effort to present pre-Babylon movies, they ran Fritz Lang’s ’53 almostclassic Crash By Night, as sordid a piece of incipient modernism as you’d wanna see, and based on a story by known commie symp Clifford Odets, to boot. Looks like the noise of secular humanism has gotten under the tent, so to speak.
Of course most cable subscribers could care less about all that shit and just watch the old sitcoms for somewhat less insidious nostalgia fixes, which is the best reason for sitting through them. God knows, they’re not very funny.
