“The media in general, and television in particular,” says Malcolm Muggeridge, “are incomparably the greatest single influence in society today.” He ought to know, having spent well over half a century in the media, much of it in television. Other television pioneers share his view. The late screenwriter Paddy Cheyevsky, speaking through his character Howard Beal in the film Network, says that television is “the most awesome, the most powerful force ever unleashed.”
In spite of the characterization of television by Newton Minow (of the Federal Communications Commission) as a “vast wasteland,” and though an advertising executive named Jerry Mander wrote a book called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, the medium has moved from strength to strength. It is part of what Hans Magnus Enzensburger called “the Consciousness Industry.” Advertisers quip that certain age groups (2–11 years, and over 55) are so obsessed with television that they will watch the test pattern. There is a certain intellectual—or even spiritual—chic to ridiculing the networks, but nearly all homes (mine included) have a television set. The tube is part of our life and lore. We don’t so much watch television as settle into it like a bath, huddle around it like fire, or treat it as though it were someone else in the room. This goes on for thousands of hours, years even, during a lifetime. It is an awesome force indeed.
But with the superabundance of programs and the dazzling new technologies associated with television, what the final product on the screen really represents may be overlooked. Bypassing an explanation of how the new technologies work, one must ask: What is television? Here the literal-minded and image-oriented citizen of the twentieth century has a problem.
Most people who read novels recognize that the contents of a given book are a product of the writer’s imagination and prejudices, and not a full representation of reality. However, when it comes to a visual medium, it cannot be doubted that many people accept the offerings of the camera as representing the actual state of things. In discovering what, precisely, television is, some basic distinctions are necessary.
Tv And The Producers
A novel is a writer’s medium. The scribe does it all: casting, dialogue, costumes, sets. A stage play, although the product of a single author, is a director’s vehicle, as is film. But television is the primary domain of neither the writer nor the director. In television, the rule is producer over all—making television programs primarily what a producer wants to say, or what a producer thinks life is all about.
Ben Stein, in a remarkable book titled The View from Sunset Boulevard, stated: “When a viewer understands that television is not supposed to be a facsimile of life but is instead what a Hollywood producer thinks life is, the viewer can then understand the mismatch between television and what he knows to be true” (emphasis added).
The creative brokers of American television number in the low hundreds. Nearly all are white males living in Los Angeles. Stein adds: “Television is not necessarily a mirror of anything beside what those few people think.” Before examining what those few people do, in fact, think, keep in mind a few facts about California.
Just as a magazine like the Atlantic represents an East Coast, New England view of the world, American television presents a California view of the world. Furthermore, the city of Los Angeles serves as television’s permanent human environment. For non-Californians (and even those who live here), there is a dimension of unreality to it.
In Los Angeles—unlike, say, Newark—the sun shines nearly every day. Cars don’t rust or get muddy. Even slums like Watts are positively antiseptic when compared with similiar regions in the East. Stein observes: “What we see on television is nothing less than the apotheosizing of Los Angeles.” Television producers replicate the world they live in, and the fit between their opinions and what one sees on television is nearly perfect.
The Producers’ View Of Life
The following portrait of the television producer’s weltanschauung is based on books by Stein and Todd Gitlin, both of whom spent countless hours interviewing and working with the pacesetters of the television world—people like Norman Lear and Aaron Spelling. Stein, a journalist and novelist formerly with the Wall Street Journal, has a basically conservative orientation. (He has also started to produce television programs himself.) Todd Gitlin, on the other hand, is a sociologist with a more liberal perspective. Perhaps for this reason the producers were very open with him about their views.
Stein immediately discovered that television people were invariably kind and generous folk who live quiet lives. (Riotous living, especially connected with the drug culture, is currently characteristic of the record business, not television, or even film.) While Stein’s perspective of reality differed radically from that of television producers, he described them in general as “some of the finest people alive.” There is no reason to doubt this.
But is it possible to speak of a “producers’ mindset”? Or are television studios bastions of individuality? Since there are comparatively few people who produce television programs, it should not be thought strange that their individual opinions are remarkably similar. Stein discovered that, with few exceptions, “the homogeneity of the view of television’s creative people is almost uncanny.” The programs themselves bear this out.
Since a rule (perhaps the rule) of television is imitation, programs are in fact difficult to tell apart. Certainly they cannot be distinguished by style as films and novels can. Situation comedies are all three-camera setups. The musical scores of adventure shows are all the same sort of television Muzak. Characters are uniformly shallow. One can walk around in their deepest thoughts and never get his ankles wet. In most shows, except the “realistic,” nondidactic “Hill Street Blues” and “St. Elsewhere,” everything turns out fine; people are always kind, generous, happy, and most often good looking. Only people who think alike could produce such uniform programs. The television mindset is quite different from that of the American rank and file.
How different? Equating producers’ idiosyncratic perspectives on life with “the dreams of a nation,” Stein wrote, “was like thinking that a taste for snuff movies and Beluga caviar was the general taste of a nation.”
Although most television producers had been to college, Stein found that few were highly educated. This too carries over to the screen. It cannot be maintained that American television programs reflect a high view of scholarship or learning. In fact, with few exceptions, on television people with libraries often turn out to be villains. Even people who work on programs like “Fame,” which features young people eager to get on with show-biz careers, perceive it as anti-education. School, as they often put it, is only so much “book junk.” Not for nothing is the television set referred to as an “idiot box” or “boob tube.”
Though a successful television producer is certain to be at least as wealthy as executives in other major industries, most producers Stein worked with saw themselves as having a lot in common with the man in the street and the poor—people with whom they have no social contact. It is accurate to say that television represents the offerings of a wealthy and powerful elite that perceives itself as somehow “anti-establishment.” One characteristic of the truly powerful is that they deny they have power.
Stein describes as a myth the idea that certain television producers and writers are doctrinaire Marxists. Some told him that they were proud of their socialist orientation—though none wanted their own fat residual checks redistributed or their Beverly Hills mansions used as low-income housing. That a great many producers are actively liberal-left cannot be doubted. This too shows up in programs.
David Marc, a professor at Brown University, writes about television for the Atlantic. “M*A*S*H,” he comments in the November 1984 issue, “gave the lie to the old wisdom that left-wing politics won’t play in Peoria.” In Inside Prime Time, Todd Gitlin displays the sociologist’s love for labels and divides shows into “left wing” (“Lou Grant”) and “right wing” (“The FBI”).
In a recent episode of “Fame,” a student meeting to benefit the nuclear freeze movement is cancelled by the faculty. The standoff is resolved in the best Deus ex machina style by Joan Baez showing up to lead the troops in sixties’ protest songs.
Though “All in the Family” was indeed funny and broke some television taboos that needed breaking, it was blatantly didactic along liberal lines. It was done like volleyball: Archie would set up an “establishment” attitude on, say, a subject like welfare, and Meat-head would spike it.
The picture that emerges of television producers, then, is a small group of very wealthy, powerful, white, liberal males whose shows consistently reflect their orthodoxy. On no question is this more apparent than religion.
The Separation Of Church And Screen
Studies show that nine out of ten Americans believe in God and seven out of ten belong to a church or synagogue. Church services are in fact more popular than sporting events. De Tocqueville’s dictum that America was a nation with the soul of a church is still true. But the situation in the conciousness industry is quite different.
A 1982 survey in Public Opinion magazine revealed that only 7 percent of 104 successful television professionals attended religious services. In addition, 45 percent stated that they had “no religion.” Stein’s findings confirm these statistics. Since religion plays very little, if any, role in the lives of most producers, it is no surprise that the very existence of religion is barely acknowledged on television other than during Christmas and Easter. In an article in TV Guide, Martin Marty pointed out that these constitute a sort of “Be Kind to God Week.” But things quickly revert to normal.
Like Ben Stein, I cannot remember any episode of any show in which a character was religiously motivated to do or not do some important act. Few characters ever question whether the unexamined life is the only one worth living. In the unwritten constitution of television, the separation of church and screen is strictly adhered to, even in family programs such as “The Cosby Show.” God is effectively written out of existence (except in repeated ejaculations like “Oh my God!”) and Judeo-Christian values on such things as adultery and divorce are disregarded. But religious people do have a standard role.
In the largely secular world view of the television producer, religion—particularly evangelical Christianity—forms a convenient demonology. This translates to the screen in the common practice of making the religious person the villain. Examples are many. In a “T. J. Hooker” episode, William Shatner hunts down a vicious, Scripture-spouting felon who leaves Bibles at the scene of his crimes. In television police shows, many an evangelist has been the front for a dope or prostitution ring. The message is that religion is institutionalized hypocrisy.
Comedy shows reflect this prejudice as well. On “All in the Family,” when Michael and Gloria’s child is born, it is the bigoted Archie Bunker who suddenly becomes a religious character, lobbying in his usual mumbling style to have the baby baptized. What do some television producers think religious people talk and act like? Watch reruns of Archie Bunker.
On “Sanford and Son,” Aunt Esther and her husband adopt a teenage boy. When he balks at going to church, Esther shrieks “heathen!” and “pagan!” at him, as she was in the habit of doing with just about everybody. The easy-going Fred Sanford then lectures Esther on the true meaning of love. In other words, religion is not necessary for values, and church people are all holier-than-thou types. It should be added that on this show, much of the humor revolved around Fred’s insults of Esther—insults often having to do with her religion. She and the ladies in her Bible class are stick-figure killjoys and hypocrites.
What this all means is that producers know that Christians are among the last people who can be regularly vilified with impunity. (Businessmen are another group.) This fact has been publicly acknowledged by such groups as the B’nai Brith Anti-Defamation League. Imagine their reaction if a popular show portrayed a crazed rabbi shouting “heathen!” at his son for not attending synagogue.
“A frequently identified Hollywood attitude,” says Stein, “is that the United States Army is the same as the Ku Klux Klan is the same as Protestant fundamentalism.” Remember that a sober Wall Street Journal writer, himself Jewish, is making this observation.
Complaints about this sort of thing are greeted with cries of “censorship,” even though perhaps the clearest example of television censorship is the banning of “Amos and Andy.” Television producers do go out of their way not to offend most people—but not Christians. Todd Gitlin relates a story about a television movie featuring a married woman who got involved in a lesbian affair only to return to her husband at the end, telling him, “It’s good to be home.” The in-house censors commented, “Don’t you realize that this will offend every lesbian in America?”
Earnest Kinoy, who wrote the screenplay for Roots, told Gitlin, “You can handle homosexuality—as long as you handle it in a lovely, tolerant fashion that will not upset the gay-liberation lobby.”
The same general absence of religion (and caricature of it when it does appear) is also true of television news, which is really a form of morbid entertainment, very often a snuff film. (How many times have you seen Kennedy and Oswald shot? Footage of gory accidents? Terrorist attacks?) News “anchormen” are really highly paid actors, hired for their looks, their voices, their ability to project seriousness and inspire trust.
Television news people do share the profession’s general orthodoxy as outlined by Prof. Robert Bellah of the University of California, Berkeley:
“Many journalists are simply blind to religion. They think it’s somehow slightly embarrassing, a holdover from the Dark Ages, something only ignorant and backward people believe in. This is not necessarily a conscious judgment on their part. It’s just part of their general world view in which religion is seen as an aberrant phenomenon.”
In Muggeridge’s The Fourth Temptation, Jesus is offered free prime-time television coverage by the Devil, but turns it down. He knew that through the miracle of editing, the network illusionists could make him appear however they chose, something they frequently do with his more outspoken followers.
But beyond the secular and liberal pieties of television lies another religion perhaps best described by the hackneyed phrase, “the almighty dollar.” If a show does not generate good ratings, and hence attract advertising revenues, it is dropped. Arnold Becker of CBS told Todd Gitlin: “I’m not interested in culture. I’m not interested in pro-social values. I have only one interest. That’s whether people watch the program. That’s my definition of good, that’s my definition of bad.”
Almost all television shows are done in a style that one might call Capitalist Realism. Characters wear the latest fashions, sport the latest hairstyles and makeup, use the latest gadgets, and drive the most expensive cars. Like the commercials, this all says with one voice, “buy this in remembrance of me.” There are many takers.
Capitalist Realism involves a merging of advertising and artistic (or editorial) content. As always, eroticism is the easiest attention getter. Nowhere is this merging of art and advertising more evident than on Music Television (MTV), which is little more than a nonstop parade of record commercials that make ample use of blatant sadomasochism, graphic violence, and even occultism, not to mention performers who sing as if being tortured with pliers. It is not far off the mark to see MTV as an ongoing advertising jingle for materialist paganism. But not only Christians feel this way. A secular satirical magazine (Mad) quipped that when American moms caught a glimpse of MTV, they knew television had worse things to offer their children than sex, drugs, and violence.
Since the general content of television is not going to change (in spite of cable) and may in fact get worse, what do we do about it? Is there any hope at all that things will improve?
Religion In The Sitcoms?
Martin Marty, church historian at the University of Chicago and a friend of Norman Lear, has lobbied for the inclusion of religion in sitcoms. In the TV Guide article alluded to earlier (Dec. 24, 1983), Marty wrote that Lear had a series “on the drawing boards” that would feature a sympathetic Christian. It was about a local news program and bore the rather bizarre title of “Good Evening, He Lied.” It was to feature someone who “can love Jesus without gabbing about it and be a complete and funny human being … who acts out of love for Jesus, but isn’t always nice or wishy-washy.” He or she was to be a “God’s-at-the-same-time-serious-and-merry-person.” Marty’s article bursts with optimism not only about Lear’s chances of success, but of the prospect of widespread industry imitation of the show. But the program apparently went the way of a hundred other stillborn projects.
Lear also attempted to strike a deal with Madeleine L’Engle for a show based on A Wrinkle in Time. Negotiations were dropped when L’Engle insisted on complete creative control. Had she relinquished this and made the deal, it is doubtful if she or anyone else would have recognized her work in televised form.
A major Hollywood studio is currently negotiating with the Committee for Creative Nonviolence for a show based on the life of high-profile religious social activist and poverty protester Mitch Snyder. Mike Farrell of “M*A*S*H” has been suggested for the lead role. This project is likely to be completed, since Snyder is a religious person who also shares the liberal-left social and political orthodoxy of the television elite.
Christians should recognize that, like the creative process, religious experience is for the most part internal and inherently undramatic. Simone Weil wrote: “Nothing is so beautiful and sweet as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil. But fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied, intriguing and full of charm.”
The makers of television understand this. Crime, not goodness, has always been the most-treated subject on television. Even most evangelistic films concentrate on the preconversion antics of the central character. After the altar call, the excitement and drama are over. This is not to say that facets of Christian experience cannot be the subject of compelling drama, but the task is difficult. In drama, you must show, not tell. Hence, to expect overtly religious shows on television is unrealistic. One can sympathize with producers when they raise the question of which religion they would adopt if they did decide to try a pilot like the one outlined by Martin Marty in TV Guide.
A more reasonable expectation would be the simple, honest portrayal of the Christian character, however minor, in just about any format. In other words, a lack of distortion of Christianity and Christians—or even religion in general—would do. This is what Martin Marty and the rest of us would like to see, but we may wait a while.
In the meantime, producers are free to make television the way they see fit. Those who don’t like it—from the gay rights task force to the National Coalition on Television Violence to the Reverend Donald Wildmon—are free to proest or change the channel or turn it off. But Martin Marty’s experiences show that there can be a serious church/producer dialogue, and this can only help. As Churchill put it, jaw-jaw is better than war-war.
Since this is a free country, there is nothing to stop Christians from becoming network television producers, directors, and writers. Stein wrote that though the door is not exactly wide open, it is slightly ajar. But Christians have largely opted to form their own networks, effectively keeping the salt in their own shakers.
Some who have no hope for positive change may want to take the route of Muggeridge, who watches no television at all, not even the highly touted BBC. Others will want to cultivate the habit of watching, as James Sire puts it, “worldviewishly,” and subject programs to hard questions: What is this program saying? Is that the way things are? This is particularly helpful with children.
One can also learn to laugh at television, even when it purports to be serious. This can open the way for a wealth of unintentional comedy. One of the few legacies of the often stupid and sophomoric but sometimes incisive “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” is that after watching its spoofs of television, one can never again soberly view the genuine item. To this day, watching any newscaster, I always suspect that he or she is really being played by some professional clown like Steve Martin or Gilda Radner.
As much fun as this is, there can be no doubt of the negative effects of poor programming. The numerous sociological and psychological studies seem almost redundant. If well-written and flawlessly performed scenes of great power and beauty exalt us in spirit, as everyone admits, then it follows that poorly written, poorly acted scenes of squalor and stupidity degrade us. How can it be otherwise?
New technology such as video recorders can be a trap, helping to turn us into voyeurs; but used properly, they can also allow parents to tape and screen programs, and thus better judge their suitability for the family. The recorder can also free us to watch things when it is convenient, and make our own schedule. It goes without saying that one should opt for those rare, good offerings of television—like PBS’s “Masterpiece Theatre.”
On the question of priorities, Christians are word people before they are image people. In the beginning was the Word—not celluloid or video tape. John Fowles writes in his novel Daniel Martin: “… television was atrophying a vital function: the ability to imagine for oneself.” A perfect example of this is MTV. When we hear a song that was popular in our youth, there are certain scenes we associate with it. Music videos allow no such thing; they force a set of prefabricated images on us. Fowles’s character concludes about television that there is “something ominously stereotyping, if not positively totalitarian, in the machine and its servants.”
Television’S Mold
Entertainment is a legitimate human need. Only a killjoy would deprive the denizens of the pressure-packed twentieth-century world of occasional escapism, be it “Masterpiece Theatre,” “Mork and Mindy,” or Super Bowl XIX. But if, in J. B. Phillips’s phrase, we let television “squeeze us into its mold,” we are accepting the highly idiosyncratic and rigidly secular world view of a powerful elite to whom the passing away of Christianity would not be cause for alarm.
There is something to be said for the counsel of Howard Beal, Network’s mad prophet. Let him be an unofficial, off-the-record spokesman for television: “If you want truth,” he says, “don’t come to us. We’ll tell you anything but the truth. Go to God. Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves. But don’t come to us.” Beal reminds the television generation that “your lives are real, we are the illusion.” Too many people have it the other way around.
However true it is that television is on rare occasions a good servant, it remains certain that it is a much poorer master.
TV Guides
Thursday night. I sit mesmerized in front of “Hill Street Blues”—again. This time a man who has raped a nun gets away with it for lack of evidence. But one of the cops who knows the man is guilty decides to even the score. He refuses to protect the rapist from an angry mob outside the courthouse. (The cop and I think alike.)
Enter the cop’s wife. I’m afraid for this country if we start bypassing due process of law, she says. You can’t take justice into your own hands. (I feel rebuked.) The show ends, but I’m still pondering what justice means.
Whether we tune in once or seven times a week, TV helps shape what we think about and how we think about it. And because most of it is produced by non-Christians for non-Christians, some believers think we should pull the plug. But is TV all bad?
Ed McNulty, author of TV: A Guide for Christians (Abingdon) and When TV Is a Member of the Family (Abbey), doesn’t think so. “About 90 percent of what is on TV isn’t worthwhile,” he admits. “But there is enough good stuff on to justify keeping your set.” Peter Crescenti, the founder of RALPH, a national organization of “The Honeymooners” fans, agrees. “It’s as much a mistake for Christians to watch everything on TV as not to watch anything at all,” he says. Adds Kevin Perrotta, author of Taming the TV Habit (Servant): “There’s wheat out there with the chaff. But often Christians aren’t discriminating watchers, deliberately and clearly making use of TV as they should be.”
Quality
Most Christians who work in or have studied TV agree that there are some quality shows—without necessarily agreeing on the precise definition of quality.
“You can’t discuss TV solely on the basis of content,” says Crescenti. “TV will always handle morally degenerate topics because people are fascinated by evil. The evangelical community has gone wrong in ignoring the way something is produced when they speak of good TV and bad TV. Content is only half of a TV show—or anything. God is more pleased with a good Christian musician who writes a great song about backpacking than a poor Christian musician who writes a half-baked song about the Holy Spirit.”
One of Crescenti’s current favorites is “Murder, She Wrote,” starring Angela Lansbury. “While no one endorses murder, we can enjoy a program about how a murder is solved—and there’s nothing wrong with that.” So, what is right about the show? “Good scripts, suspenseful plots, excellent acting.” For Crescenti, that’s enough.
Possibilities
But others, like screenwriter David Evans, are looking for more. Evans, who has written scripts for “The Monkees,” “Love American Style,” a Marcel Marceau special, and a number of pilots, made a personal commitment to Christ several years ago—and now can’t find places to do what he wants. A handful of shows keep him from throwing out his set. “ ‘The Bill Cosby Show’ is wonderful,” he says. “The idea of casting a black in the important role of a doctor is astonishing. I keep thinking how it must enlarge possibilities for the little black kids watching. Beyond that, the family portrayed has good, though not expressly Christian, values. They’re involved in the hassles of everyday life, they talk through their problems, they love each other and even say so. As a Christian, I feel great about the show.”
Truth
Faye Thompson, who manages TV development at Ray Star Productions, agrees that good TV portrays a realism from which Christians can learn: “There are always talented people working on projects that bring truth to light.”
Says McNulty, who leads workshops on how to make connections between biblical truths and what hit TV shows, films, and songs are saying: “Because our culture is permeated with Christian values, an honest writer can’t help touching on biblical truths. As Christians, we should be able to connect the theological points made in church on Sunday with the real-life issues brought up on TV.”
Watch “Hill Street Blues” and learn something about commitment from how the characters approach their jobs, says McNulty. Or tune in “Cagney and Lacey” and learn something about relationships. Or listen to a father and daughter sensitively discuss death and the existence of God in an episode of “Family Ties.” McNulty’s list goes on.
“Christians should be in TV, but not of it,” says McNulty. “If we say no to TV too often, if we say no to the good shows out there, we end up supporting the garbage that comes back year after year.”
By Robert M. Kachur, assistant editor of HIS, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s magazine for college students.
