Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture. - book reviews

National Review, Feb 6, 1995 by James Bowman

IN THE MOVIE Speechless, which claimed unconvincingly to be about two rival political speechwriters who fall in love, one of the two explains to the other how a speech arrives at its payoff: "What is the yaseetimmie?"

"The what?" You know how, at the end of an episode of Lassie, some adult would always explain what it all meant? Timmie's mom, or uncle, or just a friend would sit him down and say: 'You see, Timmie . . . '" What followed would be the moral of the story. The speechwriter's theory is that, for a political audience, the yaseetimmie has to be as strongly marked as it was in the old TV shows.

Not often are the connections between American television and American politics pointed out so usefully. Both are characterized by a simple

moralism which may or may not have anything to do with the way that those who preach it actually live their lives but whose canons are treated with a reverence once reserved for Scripture. The "working people" of this country and their "families" who "play by the rules' in striving for "the American dream" know already that they are enrolled in the Book of Life along with the patriarchs, but for forty years network television has been adapting the techniques of popular preaching, inherited from our Puritan forebears, for new constituencies.

That is the picture which emerges from this excellent new book. It is, among other things, a walk down memory lane for baby-boomers and others who remember the peculiar charms of television in the good old vast wasteland" days. Return with us to yesteryear, the authors seem to say, and relive the glories of The Bob Cummings Show, Father Knows Best, and Sergeant Bilko, plus such forgotten but influential shows as Navy Log or I Remember Mama.

This conservative Paradise Lost

was dominated by the private lives of traditional

families and the protection of society

by high-minded law-enforcers. It

was a world in which social institutions

worked, and political concerns rarely intruded

into the private lives of the populace.

The military assured our national

security, and the churches looked after

our spiritual values. Moral codes were

clear cut and transgressors were punished.

It was not to last. Beginning with an exhaustive study of the opening of the 1992-93 prime-time season, the authors proceed at length and in detail through a television history of several major themes--sex, families, work, race, crime and the law, and the portrayal of women, businessmen, professionals, and the military.

It will come as no surprise to conservatives that the authors' polling supports their intuitive sense that 'the social values expressed on prime time reflect the personal perspectives of television's creators" and that today those perspectives are politically and socially much more liberal than the attitudes commonly found among the population at large. The authors also helpfully confirm, with respect to television producers, Michael Medved's insight, in his book Hollywood vs. America, about movie producers: that even the most crassly commercial of them want to be thought of not as rich and clever showmen with a nose for what will please the suckers but as hommes serieux--artists who grapple meaningfully with the great issues of the day.

Yet the Lichters and Rothman are themselves involved in a similar sort of intellectual gentrification when they eschew the Grub Street label of critic in favor of a pretense of "scientific" measurement with the technique known as "content analysis." What the science comes down to is an assertion that a select bunch of critics and interpreters who sliced up TV programs into small enough pieces managed to agree 80 per cent of the time on what the pieces were intended to convey. We are not told on what principle, if any, the critics were selected, or even how many of them there were, let alone their breakdown by age, sex, race, or literary training. And in the end what do they have to tell us that we do not know already? Every honest viewer has recognized for years that the culture of the TV sitcom is essentially feminist, anti business, anti establishment, anti tradition, and pro, above all else, "diversity."

Moreover, any critic knows how easy it would be to argue the case that it is none of these things. The authors do not recognize that even 80 per cent agreement about a contextual tendency does not amount to scientific demonstration. Eighty per cent of readers must once have thought that Moby Dick was about whaling. Criticism is an art, not a science and an art at which the authors, when they put aside their putatively scientific apparatus, turn out to be rather good.

Their sensible and judicious discussion of the tricky business of plots and themes is for the most part wholly convincing, but the book would have been improved by addressing more unashamedly some of the knottier critical issues it raises. Might the irreverent and anti-establishment predisposition of TV, for example, have to do less with liberal producers than with their medium's reduction of the mighty of the earth to the size of puppets in an electronic Punch-and-Judy show? Why do writers and directors insist that violence and sordidness is more representative of "the real world" than the sort of boring but indisputably familiar stuff that Ozzie and Harriet used to get up to?