TV or not TV? That is the question looming behind — oh, let’s just say lots of the sociological curve balls of late 20th-Century American history, according to Steven D. Stark’s “Glued to the Set: The 60 Television Shows and Events That Made Us Who We Are Today” (Free Press, $25).
Couch potatoes should forgive the book’s TV Guide special-issue title, and turn on to this compulsively readable anthology of essays. Stark convincingly uses basic tenets of TV theory (it’s a mass medium that cannot afford to offend; its primary purpose is to sell sponsors’ wares) to explain the medium’s almost Darwinian evolution. He also accessibly expands the concept of TV criticism.
Good show? Bad show? Who cares? As Stark’s method has it, the thumbs up/thumbs down verdict is not the point when the answers to so many of life’s eternal questions–beginning with whether a horse is a horse (of course)–are as near as your remote control.
If it is enough for the rest of us to know the lyrics of “The Beverly Hillbillies” theme song while decrying the show’s worthlessness, Stark earns a double take for describing its unfathomable popularity (along with that of the even cornier “Lawrence Welk Show”) as the earliest premonition of a cultural divide that still separates the liberal coastal elite from the sentiments of America’s heartland.
And if calling “Sesame Street” the PC nanny to the Baby Boom generation would be a sufficiently snappy opinion to get the rest of us through cocktail hour, Stark deserves a toast for calling it “perhaps the most culturally vibrant vestige of the flower-power era Left. That’s the real reason why the show so irks conservatives who want to defund the Public Broadcasting System.”
“ER”? A fine show, perhaps–but when Stark gets down to it, its success reflects the coincidence of (a) public fears of Clintonian attempts to shake up the health-care system and (b) our abiding taste for a drama whose violence and mayhem is compatible with the late-night newscast that follows.
“Gunsmoke”? It may have just been a horse opera to you, me and Miss Kitty. But for Stark, the “Western’s us-versus-them mentality also reflected and reinforced the cold war paranoia of the ’50s,” when Westerns rode tall in the TV saddle. “These outer-directed stories also appealed to advertisers,” he continues, “because they were often allegories of the ads themselves: A problem (outlaws or clogged drains) can be solved in a short period by someone or something with know-how (a sheriff or Drano).”
Stark’s criticism–a high-dive and backflip into subtext, full of insight and just a touch of blarney–is wonderfully debatable, sometimes even infuriating. His research is impressive, providing insights that are often disturbing. For example, his opening essay, “What’s So Funny About Milton Berle?,” dissecting the rise and fall of TV’s first superstar, manages along the way to convey just how rapidly TV swept the nation.
Uncle Miltie shot from minor vaudeville stardom in 1947 to a legendary 75 percent audience share to cancellation–all in eight years. Why? Because Berle’s initial popularity came at a time when only a few stations existed outside East Coast cities, where his humor, with its obvious Jewish influences, was popular–and because his exaggerated physical shtick played well on primitive television sets whose pictures were hard to see. Once TV spread into the heartland, and reception improved, middle America–perhaps showing a tinge of anti-Semitism–turned off.
Underlying Stark’s opinions is a sturdy thesis about television that spans Milton Berle and milestones as recent as “Seinfeld” and the Hill-Thomas hearings. Since TV’s purpose is to sell, he says, it has always produced images that reassured as they reinforced nuclear family values. By establishing stay-at-home moms Donna Reed and Harriet Nelson as norms, TV encouraged the American housewife to do so–all the better to watch soap operas and buy soap, perpetuating television itself.
Shows that made viewers uncomfortable (such as “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” which Stark also addresses) were doomed. And because women were the core television consumer audience, TV and therefore society, he argues, have been largely “feminized” by a narrative form of disclosure that emphasizes feelings over conflict, and gave rise to soap operas, talk shows, and a celebrity- and gossip-dominated culture. Oh, there are apparent exceptions all over the schedule–but even sports programming (the most masculine of all genres, on the surface) has been feminized by an emphasis on the private tribulations of athletes, not to mention TV’s elevation of such sports as ice skating. Even macho cop shows like “NYPD Blue” arguably more closely resemble today’s soap operas than the police shows of yesteryear.
Whether TV has caused or merely reflected social change is harder to answer, but Stark argues that TV constantly attempted to come to grips with it–for example, by disguising the nascent feminist as Jeannie or Samantha, in sitcoms that required them to “`curb their power’ to be accepted into conventional society.” This is the weakest component of Stark’s essays, if only because the territory (and his examples) have been well-surveyed by previous critics. But Stark knows how to give credit where due, and he industriously builds on public-domain TV theory.
He also shows an admirably independent streak. Not many critics would exclude O.J. Simpson’s trial from the list of the 60 definitive shows and TV events, but Stark does–arguing that the 1991 Senate hearings that confronted Clarence Thomas with Anita Hill actually attracted larger audiences, and represented the modern precedent for America’s obsession with televised trials. Again, careful research makes his already entertaining book an authoritative one.
