The news of Don Knott's death released Terry Teachout's inner curmudgeon. I like Terry's inner curmudgeon. He's so much more gentlemanly and more cultured than my inner curmudgeon. But like my inner curmudgeon and everybody else's curmudgeon, inner and outer, the inner Teachout curmudgeon has a bad memory. He remembers a world that never existed. He's also myopic and the world as it is comes to him all fuzzy. He can only see a thing clearly when he has his nose pressed right up against it, a vantage point that makes it impossible to see very much of anything else. Which is a way of saying curmudgeons are good at not being able to see the forest for the trees.
Terry writes nostalgically about The Andy Griffith Show:
When I was young, everybody I knew watched The Andy Griffith Show. Today there are no TV shows that “everybody” watches, and no movies that everyone has seen. Indeed, the American film industry is about to devote its annual prime-time infomercial to celebrating five movies that most Americans haven’t seen, don’t plan to see, and couldn’t even if they wanted to (at least not until they come out on DVD).
You know your inner curmudgeon's on the loose when you start using the words "everybody I knew/know" interchangeably with "everybody."
I do it all the time.
Back when Terry was young everybody he knew might have watched Andy Griffith, but everybody didn't because there was no cable, no satellite, no VCRs, no Netflix, and no good television reception in many parts of the country, especially in a lot of towns very much like Mayberry. Everybody back then meant everybody with a TV set who happened to have it turned on on whatever night the Andy Griffith Show was on, which of course was not everybody, just more people with TV sets than people with TV sets who watched something else on that night. That everybody just happened to include everybody Terry knew, which, since he grew up in a small town, and was a little kid at the time, was not very many people.
The curmudgeon's at work again, making the case that the world in its golden age, and the world as it will be when Arthur returns from Avalon, comprises only people who think and act like the curmudgeon.
The national audience, of which Terry and his family and friends were a minute part, was not everybody in America It was tens of millions of Americans.
Which was the audience for Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family, and MASH a decade later.
The audience for Cheers and The Cosby Show a decade after that.
The audience for Seinfeld and Friends in the 90s.
The audience for American Idol now. Terry is disdainful of American Idol in his post, and I'm with him there, but the fact is that it is this generation's Ed Sullivan Show. Nobody in Terry's inner curmudgeon's definition of "everybody" may watch it, but an awful lot of people who together make up a statistically more realistic approximation of everybody do and that audience includes lots and lots of little kids who will no doubt grow up to be curmudgeonly in their turn and lament the passing of a time when everybody they knew watched shows like American Idol.
Terry's curmudgeon says something else Terry himself probably knows doesn't hold water because it doesn't take into account how Hollywood and the television industry work:
...no network would now think of giving the green light to a low-keyed sitcom about life in a more or less idyllic southern town.
Sure they would, if the network execs could somehow be convinced that it would be a hit.
You could say something similar about every hit TV show of the last 60 years.
No network now would think of green lighting a comedy set in field hospital in Korea during the war.
No network would think of green lighting a sitcom about a bunch of beerswilling losers who sit around a Boston bar all day...and did I tell you that there's this know it all mailman...?
No network would think of greenlighting a sitcom about four shallow, abrasive, selfish New York City Jews who talk endlessly about nothing.
The truth in these assertions is that it's a wonder any show made it on the air. Network execs are cautious to the point of cowardice when making decisions because so much money is at stake. They aren't inclined to green light anything they don't think will be an immediate hit and the way they decide a show's going to be a hit is if it features a bankable star or if it comes from a producer with an excellent track record.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Andy Griffith and Danny Thomas.
Besides this, if there doesn't happen to be anything like Mayberry on TV at the moment, there have been at least two shows in the last couple of decades that owed a lot to the Andy Griffith Show directly, Northern Exposure and Evening Shade.
And there have been shows since those two that, inspired by them, owe a lot indirectly to Andy Griffith, including Ed and several of the current crop of WB hits like Everwood. I'm not kidding, but I'll have to make the case in another post.
It's easy to pick on someone's inner curmudgeon. Shooting ducks in a barrel and I'm generally against the exercise because it's like sticking a big "Kick Me" sign on my own back. But there's something at work in Terry's post I can't let pass.
Like I said, I have my own inner curmudgeon---he edits this webpage and writes most of the posts---so I am sympathetic to Terry's. There's a difference between the two curmudgeon's though. Mine is a disgruntled Liberal, and Terry's is a grumpy conservative---lower case c conservative---who writes for the Wall Street Journal, which gives him a large readership of capital C Conservatives. Most capital C Conservatives these days aren't conservatives at all, they're Right Wing Reactionaries, and a couple things Terry wrote play into the prejudices and self-incited outrage of Right Wing culture critics.
The first is in his assertion that the networks would pass on a contemporary version of The Andy Griffith Show, "a low-keyed sitcom about life in a more or less idyllic southern town..." I don't think Terry intended it but it's not hard to read into that the idea that the reason those Hollywood types wouldn't greenlight such a show is that they are contemptuous of the South, small towns, and the values the people who live in the South and small towns stand for.
Hollywood types hate America, you know. (See Wolcott.)
The other thing Terry says that the Right Wing kulturkampfers have been pushing is that the current crop of Oscar nominees are unpopular, by which the Right Wingers (not Terry) mean out of the mainstream---anti-American and anti-virtue.
They mean Brokeback Mountain more than any of the others.
It is kind of a fluke year. Crash, Capote, and Good Night, and Good Luck are not atypical Oscar nominees. Small, independent, quirky, talky, journalistic movies have been nominated for Oscars in the past. What's fluky is that three small, independent, quirky, talky, journalistic movies have been nominated at the same time.
But Brokeback Mountain isn't as Terry suggests a movie that most Americans haven't seen or won't see, not compared to other hit movies (and accepting the idea that all of America sees every hit movie, which isn't even true of the highest grossing movies of all time, but it's one of those lazy generalizations that make conversation easier). Brokeback Mountain is a definite box office hit. It's already grossed over 75 million dollars. That's not in the ballpark with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (around 289 million) or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (288 million), but how many of the people who saw those two movies were grownups and how many who've seen Brokeback are kids? Estimate, conservatively, that for every adult who saw Potter and Narnia there were two kids, and then count only the tickets sold to adults for each movie and Brokeback is in the running.
It is a popular movie as movies go then.
Munich has grossed 46 million. Modest. I suspect, though, that it hasn't benefited from the phenomenon that makes modest hits mega-hits---repeat customers. Good as it may be, I doubt very many people come out of the theater saying to each other, Let's see that one again!
Being an intelligent, cultured, and honest critic, Terry isn't inclined to make too much out of his own nostalgia. He recognizes the temptation to overly idealize the past and tries to hedge:
None of this is good or bad, merely different, but for a person born in 1956—even one who has kept a fairly close eye on postmodern culture—it’s definitely disorienting.
But Terry's a conservative, not a Conservative---that is, not a Right Winger---and nostalgia for an overly-idealized past is a touchstone for Right Wing cultural criticism. For Right Wing politics, generally.
Overly-idealized?
Invented.
Mayberry is a fantasy of Southern small town life in the 1950s, and "everybody" watching in the 1960s knew it. Life in the real Mayberrys was not so idyllic.
That was in 1964, back when the public schools in my hometown were still segregated, two decades after a black man was dragged from our city jail, hauled through the streets at the end of a rope and set afire.
That's Terry again, writing about the small town he grew up in, in a year when The Andy Griffith Show was on the air and "everybody" was watching it.
You know, maybe the reason the networks wouldn't greenlight a new version of Mayberry is that they couldn't bring themselves to produce a show that denied reality to such an extent, they'd gag on the idea of a show that presented, as Tom Watson describes, "the fake perfection of small-time Southern life in the 60s, devoid of civil rights battles and racial tension..."
There was no racial tension in Mayberry because there were no black people.
There is no homophobia in the Right Wingers' idyllic Wild West because there are no gay people.
What they hate about Brokeback Mountain, and Crash, and Capote, and Good Night, and Good Luck is that none of them are set in Mayberry.
They're set in America.
Hollywood idealizes everything, even when it insists it doesn't. The Dirty Dozen was unrealistic in that there was no chance on earth there'd be a black man in the group; the Army didn't desegregate until after WW 2.
This may be the most dreadful sentence you've ever written (in terms of content): "a time when everybody they knew watched shows like American Idol."
Aieeeee!
Posted by: Linkmeister | Saturday, March 04, 2006 at 12:48 PM
Purely from anecdotal and personal experience, I'd suggest that with the keenest nostalgia for certain wholesome shows honestly believe, at least on some level, that the shows depicted a reality that they themselves had been deprived of.
Those who come from unbroken, traditional homes tend to sneer more at The Waltons and Andy Griffith than those who didn't -- just as, I suspect, the Dilberts of the world, suffering from miserable coworkers and unexciting paperwork, are most apt to sigh wistfully over Mary Tyler Moore and Murphy Brown. So do suburban-trapped stay-at-homes, I suspect. And so on.
There's something about books and television shows with no edges that beckon to people, kids especially, who in their larger lives have to keep a constant sharp eye out for sharp edges.
When I was a kid I inhaled the Bobbsey Twins. What symmetry! Two parents, two "kindly Negro" servants, two sets of twins yielding two boys and two girls. Each of the kids had exactly one cousin their own age and gender, and exactly one best friend of the same and the same. And everyone was really nice to one another. Perfect circles turning within perfect circles, no edges in sight.
Spend a few adult years looking around for the real Roslyn, the perfect newsroom, the longed-for siblings and cardiganed parents around the campfire, and where are you? Curmudgeonville, that's where.
Posted by: velvet goldmine | Saturday, March 04, 2006 at 01:06 PM
Boy the way Glen Miller played
Songs that made the hit parade.
Guys like us we had it made,
Those were the days.
And you knew who you were then,
Girls were girls and men were men,
Mister we could use a man
Like Herbert Hoover again.
Didn't need no welfare state,
Everybody pulled his weight.
Gee our old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days.
***
Boy, they don't write 'em like that anymore.
Posted by: blue girl | Saturday, March 04, 2006 at 01:51 PM
Blue Girl, it's especially great to think about the "girls were girls and men were men" lyric preceding the Hoover reference now that we know that the G-man wore a G-string.
Posted by: velvet goldmine | Saturday, March 04, 2006 at 02:46 PM
Blue Girl, I also meant to say:
Boy, the Waglan Miller played
Songs that hit the hay parade
Guys like us we had a maid
Those were the days
Amanam anam anam
Girls were girls and men were men
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover Roger
Didn't need no wealth those days
Everybody pulled away
G.R.L.P. sour grapes
Those were the days.
-- from http://www.amiright.com/misheard/artist/carrolloconnorjeanstapleton.shtml
I have to admit that for years I puzzled over why Archie and Edith were singing "Gee our old salad plate."
Posted by: velvet goldmine | Saturday, March 04, 2006 at 02:58 PM
VG:
Herbert Hoover, who was named in the song, was a president of the U.S.
J. Edgar Hoover, the G-Man you refer to, was the director of the FBI.
Posted by: Justin | Saturday, March 04, 2006 at 04:51 PM
Was Andy Griffith about a southern family? I remember it as being about an alien planet on the far side of the galaxy which found wandering about space some picture postcards and a single issue of an old weekly newspaper, and on the slim evidence of those artifacts built a set upon which they hoped to trick space explorer homo sapiens sapiens into believing they had circled round and landed home, though why I don't recollect because as it turned out aliens were inclined to this sort of tomfoolery and repeated the shenanigans elsewhere, their desire to hide their true appearance being sometimes for good and other times for ill. But there was always someone who'd not partaken of the lotus and pulled the curtain to reveal the old sideshow wizard manipulating the fantasy, but he was fake too and didn't know how to operate the dirigible, which crashed at the North Pole. There were no red shoes, but there was a red tent. Sean Connery died in a rescue attempt. A very sad episode, as I remember it.
Posted by: Idyllopus | Saturday, March 04, 2006 at 07:24 PM
I hated the "Andy Griffith Show" as a child in the 1960s. It struck me as condescending and phony even then. And if you've ever seen Andy Griffith in the great Elia Kazan/Budd Schulberg film, "A Face in The Crowd," it's almost impossible to watch him being the wise, kind sheriff in Mayberry without referencing the wild hypocrite he played in that movie.
Velvet Goldmine's insight has a lot going for it: "I'd suggest that those with the keenest nostalgia for certain wholesome shows honestly believe, at least on some level, that the shows depicted a reality that they themselves had been deprived of." That explains a lot.
Posted by: sfmike | Saturday, March 04, 2006 at 07:43 PM
We had this big mutha of a couch delivered last summer. Seven feet long or so, with low arms just made for resting the head. Two men of Middle Eastern origin delivered it, bringing it in three large pieces, and then assembling it by bolting the end sections to the body. I tipped them, and lay down on it, putting my head in the proper place. From there I could hear the sound of two other curmudgeons: my father, and his father, a man who died before I ever met him. Dad's dad was a carpenter, a builder of doll houses. My dad could swing a hammer with the best of them, but he called that instrument an American screwdriver. Now I shall always be the man in my family who bought the pre-assembled couch, with metal plates holding it together. Curmudgeons are hell.
Posted by: Exiled in New Jersey | Sunday, March 05, 2006 at 07:42 AM
Whatever criticisms one might level at "The Andy Griffith Show", one must admit that Don Knotts's Barney Fife was a truly sublime comic creation. They don't make comic actors like Don Knotts, or Howard McNear, for that matter, anymore.
Posted by: Donna Dallas | Sunday, March 05, 2006 at 07:44 AM
Justin -- no, no, it's "like jedgarhoover again." I'm just sure of it. Good thing no one's looking, right? ;-)
Posted by: velvet goldmine | Sunday, March 05, 2006 at 10:55 AM
sfmike: Thanks for the tip o' the hat. I didn't like the Andy Griffith Show much as a kid either, but I think in that case it had to do with the fact that it was a single-parent show, and I was already bein' there, doin' that. Same with the "Patridge Family" and "My Three Sons."
(It's interesting, though, to to realize that all of those TV parents, unless I'm mistaken -- after the Hoover blunder I've lost all confidence -- became single because their spouses died. These days there are plenty of single parent "role models" on television, but now death, not divorce, has become the great unmentionable.)
Posted by: velvet goldmine | Sunday, March 05, 2006 at 05:01 PM
lance, you forgot to mention sheldon leonard.
he was the producer behind andy griffin, make room for daddy, and the the dick van dyke show. when you see them, especially andy griffin, you realize that they may be sitcoms, but they aren't lousy, like my mother the car or the baileys of balboa or even gilligan's island.
Posted by: harry near indy | Monday, March 06, 2006 at 04:39 AM
Peripheral realization: Watching the local tv news covering the Oscars, I had a sudden flash that George Clooney may be the modern Andy Griffith. Kentucky born, handsome in a very masculine yet non-threatening way, affable persona, and a much better actor than most of the roles he's played for money have required. Even in our jaded culture, he's a "confirmed bachelor" without setting off the gaydar, and a "playboy" who doesn't come off as a sex-addicted narcissist forever hunting novelty as compensation for his own failures of imagination. He can do comedy, he can do swashbuckling, he can do serious -- he directs, he produces, he gets the money as well as the professional respect. This may explain some of the wingnuts' otherwise inexplicable fury about Clooney's not-especially-shocking liberal worldviews: the Republithugs and Fauxmedivas are convinced that Clooney was born to be one of them, his actual history be damned. Therefore Clooney is not just another left-coast liberal but a turncoat, a traitor to his class, a fifth columnist among innocent redstate icons like Reese Witherspoon and Dolly Parton! After all, when their revolution comes and Mayberry RFD is restored to its rightful supremacy on prime-time tv, what other current male stars can you see replacing Andy? Brad Pitt? Vince Vaughn? Bruce Willis?...
Posted by: Anne Laurie | Monday, March 06, 2006 at 08:47 PM
anne,THAT is a very interesting point.wow.
Posted by: daveminnj | Monday, March 06, 2006 at 09:04 PM
The line from the "All in the Family" theme does indeed go, "Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover" again. Believe me when I say that I take no pride in knowing this, but having grown up with that show blaring in my ears, boy, do I know it. Incidentally, when "All in the Family" premiered in January of 1971, J. Edgar was still both alive and in office, and would be for almost another year and a half.
Posted by: Phil Nugent | Tuesday, March 07, 2006 at 09:34 AM